For those who lived through it, the era of the Black Death must have been a “living nightmare”, said Katherine Harvey in The Times. During its first wave, between 1347 and 1353, the disease typically halved the populations of the areas it affected – killing at least 100 million people in Europe, Asia and North Africa. “Subsequent outbreaks, which occurred every few years until the 18th century, took millions more lives.”
In this “learned but horribly compelling” study, the British historian Thomas Asbridge offers a “global narrative” of the plague, from rural Ireland to the cities of Italy and Egypt. Punctuating Asbridge’s account are many “examples of horrendous personal tragedy”: a Sienese shoemaker who wrote of burying his five children “with my own hands”; a Carthusian monk who “watched 34 of his brethren die”, burying each in turn, “until he was alone with his dog”.
Written with great sensitivity to the “considerable psychological burden that unimaginable loss and the constant threat of new outbreaks placed on survivors”, “The Black Death” is a “powerful portrait of a world that stared death in the face”.
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Most English-language histories of the medieval plague – a bacterial disease usually transmitted by fleas that had bitten infected rats – have been focused on western Europe, said Tony Barber in the Financial Times. Asbridge is “more ambitious”: he shows that the “Black Death was probably more devastating in cities such as Cairo and Damascus” – largely because orthodox Islam, which ruled that the plague was not contagious, prohibited flight from infected areas.
The most enjoyable sections of this book focus on those who “did well out of the pandemic”, said The Economist. “In Cairo, gravediggers raised their fees. There was a boom in religious art in Italy, because so many plague victims left money for paintings in their wills.” And in England, because so many clergymen died, laypeople – including, on occasions, “even” women – were allowed to hear final confessions.
The Black Death had a “long tail of consequences”, said Steven Poole in The Guardian. It probably encouraged Jewish migration eastwards – because Jews in western Europe, blamed for its spread, were massacred in their thousands. It produced labour shortages that “contributed to the end of serfdom”, and Asbridge claims it may “even have inspired the Protestant revolution”, by focusing minds on the “imminency of death”.
A work of impressive scholarship that evokes the “terror and pity” of this bleak period, “The Black Death” is a “magisterial survey”.
