Gone Medieval - The Black Death: A Global Apocalypse?

Episode Date: June 5, 2026

A plague of terrifying speed, mysterious symptoms and global reach, the Black Death transformed more than Europe alone.Matt Lewis is joined by Thomas Asbridge to chart the medieval spread, from Caffa���s siege lines to Cairo’s crowded streets, from brutal medical experiments to self-flagellating penitents and a medieval world shaken to its core.MOREHow To Survive Plague and War in the Middle AgesListen on AppleListen on SpotifyLeprosy in the Middle AgesListen on AppleListen on SpotifyGone Medieval is presented by Matt Lewis. Audio editor is Amy Haddow, the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds.Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week, early access and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world,

to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, I'm Matt Lewis. Welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We've got the most intriguing mysteries, the gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the printing press, from kings to popes to the crusades. We cross centuries and continents to delve into rebellions, plots and murders to find the stories big and small that tell us how we got here. Find out who we really were. We've gone medieval. Imagine the terror gripping your stomach. The moment you feared, the moment everyone has feared,

has come. You've heard stories of the pestilence and how fast it spreads. You'd hoped, beyond all hope, that it would pass your community by. Now you can look upon it. It's vicious and fatal ravaging of the people you know. The inky black swellings bulge beneath clothes, blood-stained lips and linen shirts. The fear and pain etched on the faces of each body awaiting burial. And who will bury them? Who would touch someone taken by a disease so hungrily seeking its next home? Yet who would deny family and friends the final rights that will save their souls?

Can you balance this life with the next when fear seeks to strangle faith, which will prevail? What if your faith demanded that you stand still in harm's way, insisting this isn't a punishment from God but a test of faith? All you have now are questions and no one has the answers. Boccaccio, living in Florence during the terror and immense losses of the Black Death in the 14th century, lamented how many valiant men, how many fair ladies, breakfast with their kinfolk and the same night supped with their ancestors in the next world. The Black Death is often viewed through a European lens as it travels west. Today's guest is suggesting that a much broader view is required to understand what really happened across the medieval world, to measure the global impact and legacy

of devastation that cared nothing for the borders people imagined around their kingdoms or their homes. The Black Death, A Global History, is the latest book by Thomas Asperidge, who's a reader in medieval history at Queen Mary's at the University of London. It seeks to zoom out from regional reactions to consider a more global impact.

Welcome to God Medieval, Thomas. It's great to have you with us. Thanks for having me on. You're bringing with you the Black Death, which is probably never a good thing to bring with you to a party, is it? Yeah, I'm promising not to try to infect you down the line. We often talk about the Black Death as one of those really defining moments in all of history,

you know, not just medieval history. And I think we're often guilty, and I know I'm guilty of this, of viewing it through a very Eurocentric lens. So we're very concerned about the effect that it has on Europe, and particularly as a British medievalist on England and Britain. Why are we so wrong, do you think, to confine its course and its effect to just thinking about the impact on Europe? Yeah, I think it's an excellent question. I guess one of the most important things that I set out to try to do in the book was to expand the lens.

I think I met plenty of people who were surprised even that there was Black Death outside of England, let alone beyond Europe. And I think that's not a surprise necessarily from our educational system. That's the way we tend to teach the subjects. That's the way people consume it. But in real terms, it was a global phenomenon in medieval global terms. So it's not something that we can track or identify in what we now think of as the new world, so the Americas or Australasia. But across the rest of the known world, really, it was a significant factor.

And I would argue that it is one of the defining features of humanity's history. It is an epochal moment. So in the book, I try to take as broad as possible of you as I can. And the fundamental reason for that is I don't think there's one experience of the Black Death. What happened in England is not the same thing that happened in Egypt, for example, or has happened in Central Asia. And so if we really want to understand this pandemic and its significance and its impact upon the medieval world, then I think we have to look at it in this broadest way.

And as you try to expand that view, what kind of sources, what kind of voices are you able to draw upon to talk about the experiences of the Black Death in different parts of the world? Yeah, so at one level, like many medievalists, undrawn to what we think of generally as chronicles or narratives, so people who've written about their experiences or recorded history, either from the position of an eyewitness or perhaps some years or even decades, later. And those are very important sources, and they're the bread and butter of much of our understanding, at least from a narrative sense, of what's going on in the Middle Ages. And the same is true for the Black Death. If we didn't have those, then we would be missing very significant parts of our current understanding. But the problem with chronicles and narratives is always, there are things that they don't cover. They tend to be very localized in their interests.

and also they're often prone to significant exaggeration or at least rounding up. So medieval sources are notoriously poor when it comes to numbers. If you're talking about a battle, it's always 5,000 or 10,000 or 20,000. And the same is true when it comes to mortality rates. And one of the things that I think it's important to try to understand, though I don't fixate on this in the book, is to try to get a sense of how many people died, at least in a broad sense, within the Black Death. And if we only had Chronicles and narratives, then we'd be very poorly served. We'd be very inaccurate. I suppose one of the issues that you would have with dealing with

just Chronicles is also that they, I find they tend to extrapolate what's happening on their doorstep across the world. So you would kind of get them believing that the Black Death was the same everywhere as it is in their local town or village. Yeah, absolutely. And to be honest, quite a lot of secondary historians writing in the last hundred years have also fallen into that trap. They'll look at one particular source. Perhaps the most frequently repeated is not actually a chronicle. It's an introduction to a literary work. It's the introduction to Bacacaccio's De Cameron. He was someone, we're pretty certain, was in Florence when the Black Death struck in 1348, and he went on to describe the horrors of the pandemic in the introduction

to this work. But many historians have used that as their template. They'll quote a passage from and I'll say, oh, what a terrible disaster this was, and this is what it happened across the whole of medieval Europe, whereas, of course, really, he's only talking about Florence. So we're very fortunate that we have a pretty significant range of other sources to draw upon. And I think one of the peculiarities for me coming to this subject area, so the truth is, I've spent most of my life living in either the 11th or the 12th century with a few sort of brief forres into the 13th. So 14th century history for me is almost the equivalent of modernity. It's futuristic.

It's futuristic. And it's one of the great pleasures of working on this project has been the extent of the surviving written sources alongside archaeological material and scientific studies in the modern era. It's made it very, very rich in terms of its source base. And because we have things like parish registers, manorial court records, surviving letters, and perhaps most importantly of all, surviving caches of wills that people drew up at the time of the Black Death, then we're able to go.

into much more precise detail in our estimates, both of how many people died, but for me, even more importantly, what it was like to actually live and die through this process, what the human experience was. Yeah, it's interesting. I think people coming backwards from the 16th and 17th century would probably feel like there was almost no source material to work with in the 14th century, but it's interesting that you coming forward from the 11th and 12th feel like you're tripping over evidence. It's a staggering difference for me as being someone who's worked in the the earlier Middle Ages, particularly because so much of my earlier work has, of necessity, had to focus on what we might now think of as either the top 10% or even the top 1%,

so on people who are of a royal background or of a noble background, people operating at the top echelons of society. And one of the brilliant features of this project is being able to, yeah, you can look at princes and princesses and kings who were affected by this process, but you can also go all the way down through different strata of society, all the way down to peasant farmers. And that, for me, was very refreshing because I wanted to tell as fuller story as possible. Yeah, yeah. If we start at the beginning of the Black Death, what do we know about where it begins and what causes it? So there's two ways of answering that question, I guess. One is from the written records. So we

could start there, but very excitingly, at least from my perspective, since 2022, we've been able to go beyond the written records because of archaeology and science. According to the written records, the first appearance is at the siege of Kaffa. So Kaffa is an outpost in Crimea, a Genoese trading outpost. It's very close to the frontier of a polity run by the Mongols called the Golden Horde. And in around 1346, 1347, the Mongol Khan at the time called Janubeg decides to lay siege to Khafer. And this siege is underway. The Genoese within the fortress of Kaffa are pretty beleaguered. They reach out for help from the West, even call for another crusade to be launched, but really no help is coming. So it looks pretty certain that they're going to fall. This

outpost is going to collapse. But then something unusual happens. News starts to circulate that a disease is circulating and appearing in the Mongol forces and spreading like wildfire and people are starting to die. Some are supposedly spitting up blood. Others have strange swellings on their body. But the losses in Janubeg's forces start to be pretty severe. And I think at this stage, the Genoese perhaps, if they're learning of this news, they're probably. perhaps thinking, oh, yeah, we're going to make it. We're going to endure this siege. But it so happens that Janibegh has a pretty gruesome ace up his sleeve, at least according to our sources, in that he decides to not give up on the investment, but instead to start using stone-throwing

devices, treboshaes, to start flinging the bodies of people who've died from this mysterious disease into the fortress of Kaffa. So basically germ warfare. Yeah, so it's been argued that this might be regarded as the first attempt at biological warfare. It's based really, our account is really based on the work of one particular writer, Gabriel de Musis, who's an Italian notary in Piacenza. It used to be thought that he was an eyewitness to these events. We now don't think that. So how much of this is an embroidered tale is more difficult to tell.

We certainly know that the Kaffa is a real outpost. We certainly know that it was besieged, and there's a very, very strong likelihood that the Black Death emerged from the Black Sea region from Crimea. So lots of things add up, but exactly whether Janibeg went to this extent of flinging bodies into the fortress of Kaffa is less certain. Perhaps even more doubt needs to be raised about the coda to this story, which is that the disease then started to spread within the stronghold. but a single group of Genoese sailors decided that they'd try to make good their escape.

And according to Gabriel de Mousis, this chronicler, this one ship made it away from Kaffa, and he suggests, you know, they thought they'd made a clean getaway, little realizing that they were actually carrying the disease in their midst. So the traditional tale of how the Black Death emerges is that there's this siege, and from this inception point, then the disease starts first to spread. through the Black Sea and then into the Mediterranean basin and from there beyond, it's spreading throughout the medieval world. And I guess a critical element in this is understanding the extent to which, at least in

medieval terms, the world has now become somewhat globalized. So there's a surprising degree of communication between these different parts of the world. I was just saying so even just from our written source there, we're getting this idea there are Genoese, Italian merchants up in the Crimea, engaged in a conflict with Mongols from the Eastern Step. So that gives us our first kind of alarm bell about just what an international situation we're in that helps us to understand perhaps why the Black Death is able to spread so far and so quickly. Yeah. I mean, essentially, what are the Genoese doing in Kaffa? They're not just there to twiddle their thumbs. They're there because they're traders, they're merchants.

they want to move commodities from the Black Sea into the Mediterranean and sell them as far afield as they possibly can. One of the key commodities that they're interested in is grain, because just as it is today, Ukraine, that region, is a major grain-producing area. And cities like Genoa and Florence and other Italian cities and many cities beyond aren't able to produce enough grain to feed themselves, feed the populace of their cities.

So they're importing grain from far afield. The other major commodity that they're selling tragically is human slaves. So there's a major trade in slaves coming from the Black Sea into the Mediterranean. And many of those in particular are heading to the Mamluk Empire, so to Egypt and the Near East. So the frequent transportation of those commodities gives us a sign of how this disease is going to start to spread once it makes its outbreak in. either the summer or autumn of 1347. Yeah. And how has the science moved on our understanding of how and where the plague began?

So we still think that an outbreak is initially taking place in CAFA, but because of new developments, we're now able to push the timeline a bit backwards. So the siege of CAFA and the events I just described, that's somewhere in the second half of 1347 as our best guess. But if we go back to 1338 to 9, then we can actually go further east. We can go to Central Asia and what we now think of as Kyrgyzstan, near this a huge lake at the foot of the Tianshan Mountains, known as Isik Kool. And it just so happened that in the mid-14th century, there was a community of Nestorian Christians living in this region.

Probably our best guess is that they were living within the equivalent of a caravan calling site, a place where a truery of a country. trade caravans would stop, would be provided for, and then move on along what we broadly call one of the forms of the Silk Road. We've known for a long time, we've known for more than a century, that there was a significant outbreak of some mysterious disease in these communities, because right at the end of the 19th century, archaeologists started uncovering an historian Christian cemeteries and gravestones that contained inscriptions. And some of those were dated, so we could date this outbreak,

this sudden spur to burials to 1338 to 9. And some of those descriptions used a term Mortner, which roughly translates as plague. So for a long time, there's been this theory that this might be one of the origin points for the Black Death, but it was never any kind of precision to it. But fantastically, in 2022, a brilliant article was published with many people involved in the research.

The critical element into this was that the skeletal remains they'd found when they are, and they uncovered that cemetery in the 19th century, those remains were not discarded. They were packed away in a museum in St. Petersburg. So they were able, these modern researchers were able to go to those remains and test them in the way that we now can for evidence of what disease had caused these people to die or what disease was present within these remains. And they found the evidence of what we now think of was the causative agent that led to the black death, Yersinia Pestis. And not only that, they were able to look at the genome of that form of Yersinia Pestis and show it's the same one that then went on to infect the rest of Europe.

So our earliest confirmed point at present puts it in around 1338 to 9 somewhere in Central Asia. and our theory is that the disease then spreads along tribal routes to the Black Sea and then from there the story picks up in 1347. And I mean you point out in your book that it's kind of the first impact is focused on lots of coastal communities. They seem to be hit hardest and hit first. Is that because this disease is now moving along fairly well-established, well-trodden trade networks that involve using ships to move stuff around? So when they make port somewhere, that's where they're going to land the disease?

Yeah, absolutely. And it's not just coastal ports. It's also cities or communities that are on rivers. One of the slightly bizarre and unsettling things about studying the process by which the disease spreads, you can tell when communities are successful. If they're thriving, active and commercially successful communities, they're the ones that are going to get the black there first. and fast, because that's very clear when we look at the chronology, even in the British Isles,

when it seems to arrive at various coastal ports, including Bristol, then it's into places along the Seven River pretty quickly because those are well connected. The same is true of Avignon, the River Rhone. It's inland, but because it's positioned along this major waterway, then it also gets the Black Death relatively quickly. Whereas when you have isolated communities, it can take months for them to be affected. Yeah. So we've kind of got a situation where the commercial connectedness of the medieval world that I think is, the medieval world is much more connected than people usually allow. And things like the Silk Road and all of that flow of goods and the mercantile success

that's been going on has kind of created this network that allows the black death to thrive. Yes, absolutely. And over the course then of kind of 1348, it moves into, cities, it begins to move inland, it manages to get away from the sea. Do we get a sense of what kinds of cities, you know, where in the world is hardest hit by the 1348 Black Death? I guess I'd make two points on that. So one is another common misconception about the Black Death that I wanted to try to explode in the book is to show that it's not a purely urban phenomenon. So when we look at the records that give us insight to rural communities alongside major cities,

we actually see relatively similar mortality rates. And our best guess, as an overall average, is I would suggest somewhere in the region of around 50% of the population in affected areas. And that holds true whether you were in a city like London or whether you're in a small village somewhere in Suffolk. That's the sort of general realm of mortality rate. That said, I do think there are differences

in terms of both the experience of the black death, it's destructive effects and also the mortality rate. And perhaps the critical way of describing that or defining that would be, let's say, start with somewhere like London. So a guess about its population when the black death hits at the end of 1348 is perhaps somewhere in the region of 60 to 65,000. And we think that somewhere around 30 to 33,000 people died in the next. 12 months or so from the black death and from associated diseases with the pandemic.

Because just as we cannot now tell precisely in any sense how many people died from COVID, that's an incredibly difficult question to answer globally or even regionally. We can't also rule out the fact that things like associated famine, breakdown of food supply systems, things like that also led to increasing mortality rates during this disaster. But let's say we've got London losing around half of its population, and that puts it in a region of around 30,000. If we were to move across the Mediterranean, though, into the Muslim-ruled world, into the Mamluk Empire, and look at their capital city, Cairo, first of all, we need to recognize a huge difference in terms of scale. So we're going from 60,000 in London to around 500,000 as an estimated population in Cairo when the Black Death hits. And there's a particularly important difference in attitude towards plague in the Muslim world

that I try to explore within the book at some length. And that is that across the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim world, one thing is shared, and that is the notion that this disaster, this disease, has been brought by God. And in the West, in the Christian world, it's very much seen as a punishment from God, a punishment for sin, which is a pretty common phenomenon. a pretty common notion across many aspects of medieval history. But the differentiation in the Muslim world and in the Mameluk Empire is that Islamic doctrine, Islamic orthodoxy, argues that, yes, the disease plague is from God.

It's ordained by God. But actually, for Muslims, it's not a punishment. It's a form of martyrdom. So to die from plague is actually a gift from God. It's a guaranteeing you a place in heaven. And in subsequent years, people were right about it, equating it with martyrdom in battle. It's the same equivalent. Crucially, Islamic doctrine also suggests that people are not supposed to flee from an outbreak of plague, and that the disease is not contagious.

You don't catch it from another person. If you get it, you're getting it because it's God's will. And I argue in the book that this very likely had an impact both on social behavior, but also upon mortality rate. So even if we're only looking at 50%, then the scale in Cairo is pretty overwhelming. We're looking at perhaps at 250,000 dead versus 30,000 dead in London, which is obviously going to be much more difficult to cope with. But I think death rates may well have been significantly higher than that, both across Egypt, in Palestine, in Syria, across the Mammlic Empire, where we're able to trace them.

And that's one of the things I'm trying to get out in the book, that kind of regional difference. Yeah, yeah, no, it's a really fascinating, different interpretation of kind of why it's happening. Do we get a sense from the sources of what people thought the disease was, you know, beyond the spiritual causes that people could see? Did they try to understand what was physically, medically going on and were they trying to find ways to counter it? And did those vary around the world too? So they certainly tried. One of the things that I attempt to do in the book, and I won't really know whether it's worked or not until I start to get feedback from readers, which I'm very interested to hear, is to try in the book to do something which other historians haven't attempted. And that is to convey as clear a sense as I can of the experience of this disease.

almost all studies of the black death in historical works start by telling you what the disease was and telling you how, as far as we now understand it, from a biological and epidemiological level, how it functioned. What I'm trying to do in the early sections of the book, so the book is broken up into four parts, the first two parts, I'm not telling readers what the disease was. And there are a number of reasons why I adopt that position. But the most important of those is because medieval people didn't know what it was.

So this was an unknown disease. Crucially, it was a disease that engendered enormous amounts of fear and doubt, particularly around how it was transmitted. So one of the most terrifying things we can imagine is not understanding how a disease might spread. I think that was something that we can all perhaps remember from the very early days of COVID and the kind of rumors that went around, could you catch COVID? literally just touching a surface or if something was delivered through your postbox, did you clean it immediately?

Well, if you take that and you take a disease actually that's not killing 1% of the population, but killing 50% of the population. And then you add in the idea, which is certainly circulating in some parts of medieval Europe, particularly propounded by specialists studying in Montpellier in southern France, the idea that the disease could be spread through sight alone. So literally all you have to do was look. someone in the eye and you could catch this fatal disease. That's, all of that is ramping up the fear.

The other thing that's causing doubt is that the disease seems to manifest in different ways and we know from various accounts, not just narrative accounts, but also from letters and inscriptions. Some people thought this was multiple diseases because it could appear. Some people started very quickly to just start spitting up blood and would die perhaps within 24 hours. Others, it was more protracted. They'd get a fever. They would develop swellings, either in their groin under their armor and their neck. Subsequently, they might start spitting up blood, but then they also might die, though more of those people would survive.

So that also caused confusion. What are we actually dealing with? Are we dealing with a multiplicity of threats here? And the final thing that I tried to convey is they had no idea when this thing was going to stop. So we know we have the enormous benefit of hindsight to say, well, here's the Black Death, 3047 to 53. We see an end to it. For many of the people living through this, and we can glean this in particular from looking at letter evidence, I think it's pretty evident that they thought this was perhaps the end of the world and that they were probably going to die themselves.

So I try to convey all of that sense of being in the moment in the book. But to answer your other questions, so were people trying to combat it? Absolutely. So there's a range of, pretty broad range of evidence that we have showing particularly either what we might think of now as theoretical physicians. So people working at universities in a region like France, particularly the authorities in the University of Paris who draw up the equivalent of what we might think of now is the World Health Organization's statement on what this disease is in 1348 on the instructions of the French King. it's a pretty confused text. It's a very influential text, nonetheless, but it's written by people, almost none of whom had any practical experience of treating patients in the Black Death. So that text doesn't really give us any insight

to what practical measures were undertaken. But if we look elsewhere, one of the people I write about at some length in the book is, and one of, I think, of the heroes of the time of the Black Death, is an elderly Italian physician called Gentile da Foligno, who was working in particular in the Umbrian city of Perugia. He was certainly in his late 60s, may have been as old as 70, and he was one of the frontline physicians

treating people with the Black Death, but also taking time to write a number of treatises on the disease, offering advice on how it should be treated. Pretty much everything he suggests is not really effective, unfortunately. the one thing that he was a particular proponent of was this almost a miracle cure of the Middle Ages. It's called Theriac. It's a treacle-like substance compound, which has many, many ingredients, certainly up to 60 and perhaps even more than that, different ingredients put into it to supposedly give it this incredible ability to cure. Having looked at recipes of these, though, historians have shown conclusively that pretty much the only thing that it was

affected to any degree was opium. So it contained opium. And on those grounds, if you gave it to someone with the black death, with plague, then it might ease their breathing somewhat if they were struggling in that way. It would certainly help them with pain, but it wouldn't in any way enable them to be cured or survive the black death to a greater extent. So Gentile is one, who's in the front line. The other one I'd really want to mention another remarkable individual, but this person living under Muslim rule is a man called, Ibn Katama, who lived in the southern Iberian port of Al-Maria in the last vestige of Muslim presence in Iberia, so in the kingdom of Granada. And Ibn Katama wrote what I think is the most important text from a medical perspective

on the black death very, very carefully and in a very sophisticated level describing symptoms. He's someone who accurately describes three different manifestations of the disease, and it's various symptoms. He also attempts various forms of treatment, including bloodletting and doesn't have a great deal of success in that regard. But he's a key source for us in terms of showing that that people living in the 14th century were trying to grapple with this disease. Yeah. So I guess even if they weren't clear what it was and the ways that they were trying to treat it and deal with it weren't successful, those writers have left behind their process for you to look at. So you can see what they were trying to do, the ways that they were trying to

work through this problem. Yeah, and they were building on an extant body of material. So much of medical knowledge and understanding was based on authority, not necessarily on observation, as is the case for so much of intellectual activity in the Middle Ages. One of the things I often talk to my students about is the idea that we're so inured to the concept of science, the idea of observation and experiment that it seems like second nature to us. Whereas in the Middle Ages, wanted to know why something happened, certainly in the 10th, 11th, 12th century, and perhaps into parts of the 13th, for most people, it wouldn't occur to you to think about looking at the world outside you. You'd go to a text to find the answer, whether that was a scriptural text,

a patristic text, or a text from the ancient world. And that's still very much the case with medieval medicine. Very much of it is grounded in the idea of the full humors. Much of it is grounded in texts either written in the Greco-Roman world or added to by major individuals like Ibn Sinha in the Muslim world and then recirculating back into the West. So that's the body of ideas and evidence and practice that they're basing their activity on. We do get a sense that there are some steps being taken forward. We know that somewhat surprisingly, the Pope in Avignon actually argued and ordered for autopsies to be carried out on some of the bodies of the dead.

And we know that from another writer in southern Italy, that he also carried out an autopsy. And it's quite possible, if not probable, that Gentile da filigna did so as well. So they're looking at victims. They're trying to understand how to cope with the disease, but they're not really able to do much in terms of treatment. And we shouldn't really be that surprised by that

because the honest truth is this disease, it was and is pretty horrific. and we only came up with an efficacious treatment for it in the 1950s. So this is not a simple matter to cope with this disease. Yeah, yeah. And by the time that it begins to subside, or at least the first wave of it, begins to subside around 1353, how far and wide in the medieval world had the Black Death spread?

So we can trace it in the far west to Ireland. We can see its progress across Scandinavia through, to Russia has a major impact in Moscow where it kills the ruling prince of what will be one of the foundational blocks of what will become more understandable as Russia. To the south, we can certainly see it through all across Europe, mainland Europe, and across the Mediterranean into the eastern Mediterranean and North Africa. We're less able to properly chart its progress in most of Asia, and there's a big question mark over the degree to which it has an effect.

effect in China. So there's very fragmentary evidence. It's little studied and I'm not convinced that we're really going to get a definitive answer. I argue in the book that it's probable that it had an effect and perhaps caused significant mortality in China, but that we can't answer that precisely. And the same is true for sub-Saharan Africa. So here we have no textual evidence. We're working really only off archaeological excavations that have taken place in the last 10 years. And they've shown the sudden disappearance or diminishment of certain communities in sub-Saharan Africa that seem to date from the second half of the 14th century. And so it's been suggested, I think, quite reasonably, that that might have a connection

either to the black death, as you described, by the first wave or to subsequent waves of this same disease. And do we get a sense of some kingdoms, some realms, being harder-hit, by the plague than others. Does pre-existing kind of instability, political or social instability cause the plague to be worse in some areas? Yeah, I think the prime example of that is actually the kingdom of Aragon. So I would put a caveat into all of this. There's a potential optical illusion taking place with the black death. Because as is the case for all historians, and particularly for medieval historians, we're at the mercy of our sources. So we can only write about, we can only answer questions when we have some evidence to draw upon. And the unfortunate fact is,

in spite of what I said about there being a plethora of material for the 14th century, which there is, there are still big, blank spots on the map where we know very little, particularly parts of Eastern Europe, but also parts of Iberia, parts of France, parts of England. That leaves us with a question. So does that tell us that, are these are places that aren't affected by the black death at all? Or actually, does it tell us the opposite? Does this tell us that these are places where record keeping collapsed because this is an area that was the worst affected? We just don't know anything about it because nothing survives from it. There's a black hole. So everything I say about the Kingdom of Adagon now is going to be

under the banner of caution to say there could well have been much worse affected areas. But it just so happens we have a range of material for the Kingdom of Aragon in northeastern Liberia that shows us continuation, so survival of humanity and the extant regime under King Pedro IV, but also pretty significant signs of administration, governance, creaking, if not collapsing in certain areas. And I think a lot of that is down to not just the predations of the disease, but the fact that it arrives just as Aragon is in the midst of a civil war. So rural authority is diminished. And we start to see much more significant evidence of lawlessness, of particular areas falling into decline in terms of ability to seek intervention by rural authorities.

And perhaps one of the examples I give in the book is a community called Prades in the mountains to the west of Barcelona. And we learn from royal records in the 1350s that basically this town has become a lawless no man's land where most people are trying to. to leave the town because they're being murder is rife, theft is rife. And this has been the case not just for a year, not just for two years, but for the best part of five years. So that gives us a sense that Aragon has gone through a pretty tumultuous experience of the Black Death. And it's one of the regions I argue was worst affected by the pandemic.

Yeah. Are there equally places that seem to fare better? And is there an extent to which, you know, in danger of going back to being Anglo-centric, We often think about medieval England as being a good example of a kingdom with powerful institutions of government that are less reliant on personality and that the machinery of government is capable of keeping working. Do we see evidence of some places faring better perhaps because they have that structure? But I guess even in those situations, you're still losing an awful lot of people who know how to work those levers. Yeah, I certainly think that England shows remarkable levels of continuity, resilience, endurance. We can look at that at a more of a macro level and recognise, I think, that a lot of this continuity is not down to royal direction.

So Edward III largely takes, if I was being polite, I would say, takes a backseat. If I was being more direct, I would say that he was a little bit neglected. and basically left it to municipal authorities, local authorities and the local ecclesiastical powers to navigate their way through this crisis. Pretty shockingly, I mean, Edward III's government, their big involvement in the black death seems to be the kind of ordinance of labourers and things like that to try and repress wage growth rather than actually tackling the problem of the black death. Yeah, I have to be honest, I was a bit appalled by the language that Edward uses.

towards the end of the pandemic, at least in the south of England, he issues a communique, a letter that he once read by all churchmen. And it basically says to people, how can you be so ungrateful as to not want to do your jobs and demand more pay? It's appalling what you're doing. I'm disgusted. And there's no attempt to say to people, well done, for making it through this utterly appalling disaster.

I now want you to just do exactly what I'd say. you. And he and most of his family has survived because they basically fled, hold themselves up. And at the worst point of the disaster, certainly in London, in April of 1349, Edward is busy setting up the order of the garter. So he is, and then holding chivalric pageants. So I think there is a way of arguing that he's not focused as much as he might be on managing this pandemic. But if we were to look at London, if we were to look at other communities, we have very good records from what we call the 100 of Farnham, so the area around Farnham in Hampshire, we have excellent records from a small village in Suffolk, a small community in Suffolk called Walsh on the Willows. All of those show pretty remarkable levels of continuity of administration, as you describe. But crucially, that does not mean that they're not suffering appalling levels.

of mortality. So Walsham, just as I mentioned before, has a mortality rate of around 50%, so 50% of the population dying in this instance, probably in less than six months. The same is true for the 100 of Farnham, but they're managing to find a way to continue onwards. That experience of terrible levels of death, but also continuity, is shared by a number of different localities across the medieval world. The other one I would point to, which I was really struck by was the Republic of Venice. So the Venetian authorities, in comparison to something like Edward III's administration is much more attentive to taking action,

to being very, very determined to mitigate the worst effects of the pandemic. Though the city and the Republic are still very, very severely affected, you can see from their surviving records that they really take this pandemic seriously, and they go into action very quickly. And alongside those kind of political, and human effects of the black death. Is it fair to see it? I mean, I guess the question is,

if you see it as a visitation from God, a punishment from God, that can either drive you away from the church and away from religion, or it can cause you to double down on it. Do we get a sense of which direction people are going in? Yeah, we do, very powerfully. And I have to be honest,

I came to the project, wondering, am I going to find evidence, either in the Christian, Jewish or Muslim spheres of people turning a world, away from their faiths. Because from a modern perspective, you'd think if you, if you, in your heart, believe this is the work of God, you might for a second think, well, should I still be believing in this God? And you're in a situation as well, I guess, where the church, sorry, the church and your religious leaders aren't able to solve this problem. You know, the church has

told you if you, if you live free from sin and you pray and you attend church all the time, everything will be fine. And this is something the church isn't finding it can can pray its way out of. Yeah, so that's the difference, I think. What we see. particularly within the Latin or Catholic Christian world of the West, is not a turning away from religion in essence in itself, but a questioning instead of the apparatus of the church, of the apparatus of religion. And that certainly is present. And we start to see, I think, from the early part of the 1350s onwards, the germinating of questioning

about the role of the church, which has of course been present for the early. decades and centuries, we could trace significant questions about the performance of the church, certainly all the way back to the 11th century, if not beyond, and the reform movement. But what I argue in the book is this is a catalyst, the black death, is a catalyst that accelerates that process, deepens that level of questioning. But interestingly, we don't see that same level of doubt and questioning within the Muslim world. And there's no similar phenomenon to the Reformation that ultimately takes place in the Muslim world and certainly not in the Mamluk Empire as a result of either the first wave of the

Black Death or its subsequent outbreaks. And that in many ways is because it doesn't have a central authority in the form of the Pope. It doesn't have that same singular level of attempted rule and direction. And I think that's an interesting difference in the way in which these two worlds interact with a phenomenon of plague. Do we see the Black Death driving anti-Semitism? Is that on the rise in the aftermath of it? Yeah, tragically, not even just in the aftermath. So one of the most disturbing elements of working on this project and thinking about the Black Death is facing up to the fact that humanity has one of its darkest inclinations, I think, which is at times of crisis to look, to blame, to persecute minorities. And that's very much the case in the course

of the Black Death. We see this very prominently in southern France, in parts of Iberia, and then into the Alps and into Germany. And you might notice immediately, I'm not saying anything about France. I'm not saying anything about England. And we might think, oh, that means those were nice, tolerant areas. Of course, that's not the case. The only reason we're not seeing persecution of Jews in those two kingdoms is because they've already been expelled, either at the end of the 13th century of the start of the 14th. But from very early stages of 1348, already by Easter 1348, we start to see attacks on Jews, the first one taking place in Toulon, the port near Marseille and southern, what we now think of as southern France. And initially, those don't seem to have

necessarily a direct connection to the Black Death in terms of the Jewish population being blamed, They're more an outpouring of anger. But over time, very disturbingly, and particularly initially in the alpine regions, we start to see the theory propounded that the Jews are somehow responsible for the mass mortality that's taking place, that they're involved in what comes to be known as a poisoning conspiracy, that they're supposedly collectively working to poison water sources. and it's that poisoned water that then is causing thousands of people to die. And tragically, we go from what has already been horrific,

so instances of mob violence, which, for example, we can see in Barcelona and a nearby community known as Taraga, which are appalling, but their singular incidence of mob activity. We move from that to what we then start to see in later 1348 and into 1349. and in Germany are much more institutionalized desire to identify the Jews as being guilty and then to eradicate them. And this is absolutely not mob violence. This is much more calculated and in many ways more disturbing. And I guess this idea of punishing also reaches a pinnacle when people, you get a group of people, the flageants who are interested in punishing themselves,

who believe that they can kind of scourge themselves to rid themselves of sin. Yes, this is another of the unusual but not unique. manifestations of the black death. So this, we talked about the fact that particularly in the West, people are seeing the black death as the work of God. They're being told that this disease is raining down upon them because of their sin. But they're also deciding, well, the church doesn't seem to have an answer to how to stop this. So a popular religious movement emerges. It's not unique. It's not absolutely groundbreaking. We've seen similar-ish types of movements appear back in the 13th century, and we've seen many popular penitential movements have enormous attraction

and bring in thousands of participants in previous decades and centuries, and I would include the crusading movement in that equation. But in this instance, we start to see probably emerging from the eastern parts of Germany and then spreading westwards, the idea that participants should leave their homes, as far as we know, they then would spend perhaps 33 days or so on the road, visiting different communities along the way in groups, and that they would carry out penitential rituals at their various stopping points. And the penitential rituals would involve stripping themselves to the waste and then using whips or, multi-thonged whips to flagellate themselves until blood was pouring from their bodies.

And through these elaborate rituals, the argument was that they were attempting to invite God to bring this disease to an end. And these become remarkably popular. We see hundreds of bands with thousands of participants roaming across the medieval world, carrying out this kind of ritualistic behavior. Sadly, of course, just as we mentioned, the physicians not being able to necessarily halt the disease in its tracks. These rituals do nothing to stop the disease. And ultimately, that's, I think, the most important reason why the flagellate movement dies out. Again, it offers an answer that doesn't kind of come to fruition. I wonder if we could just end by thinking about some of the longer term impacts. We've seen that this is hellish for people to have lived through and that there

are voices that tell us about what was happening during the disease. But in terms of the aftermath, I mean, you cite the Black Death as part of the cause of the downfall of the Mamluk, Empire, you know, do we see it having that kind of seismic political effect? I think we do, but I think there are two critical considerations that we need to bear in mind when we're trying to consider the longer term macro historical impacts. The first and perhaps the most important thing I could say about the Black Death in any one moment is to say it's not one and done. It is not a singular event.

So I talked about its dates across the medieval world in this outbreak. being 1347 to 53. If it had been a singular outbreak in that period and it never reappeared, I still think it would have had a profound effect. You cannot take away 50% of the population in affected areas without changing the course of history. But perhaps it would not have been as significant as it ultimately became, not least because medieval communities showed themselves to be incredibly adaptable, resilient in terms of recovering

from that first outbreak. But the tragic reality is that it wasn't a singular occurrence. By the time we get to 1361 to 2, somewhere in the region of the early 1360s, the disease reappears. And in most places, it kills another 20% of the population. And then it starts coming back every 10 to 15 years for centuries. So in most parts of the known world, we need to think of this as the age of plague, in a period where the disease becomes a reality of life.

So its ability to affect change is critically dependent on that reoccurrence. And crucially, when we're thinking about the Mammeluk Empire, we also need to recognize that because of the Islamic doctrinal notions that I mentioned earlier on, the rejection of contagion, the banning of flight, those stay in place through the rest of the 14th century into the 15th. And I think that's one of the significant reasons why the Mamluk Empire suffers so terribly during recurrent outbreaks in the 15th century. The worst of which seems to have been 1429 to 30 in Cairo, which becomes known as the Great Extinction, where another 50% of the population is killed. So that's one consideration, the fact that this becomes a cyclical fact of life.

The other, though, I think is a bit more complicating because I wouldn't be. be a good historian if I didn't question the idea of a monocausal explanation for something. And the reality is that plague is not operating on its own at a macro level. And perhaps even more importantly, something else is going on in the background that probably played a significant role in the very first emergence of plague, and that is naturally occurring climate change. Because since the mid to latter part of the 13th century, the medieval world has started to experience what we now call the Little Ice Age, so a gradual cooling of the world, probably caused by changes in solar activity, though perhaps also influenced by volcanic activity

in the mid part of the 13th century. And over the course of three to four centuries, this is going to lead to an average cooling of around 0.4 to 0.8 of a degree centigrade. It's also going to lead to a significant increase in the unpredictability of weather patterns and much more frequent occurrence of freakish weather events, which all of which I know sounds very familiar, just that we're going in the opposite direction in terms of heating. But that fact of climate change alongside plague, and connected to that, what I call the sort of the third point of the triangle, an increasing pulse of military conflict of military activity, warfare becoming increasingly endemic, all three of those factors, I think, contribute to destabilising the world. They lead to enormous change across the

medieval Christian European world. Ultimately, I do think that they play a very significant factor and a role in the collapse, ultimate collapse of the Mamluk Empire in 1517 as well. And so if we then view the plague as rather than a direct cause of anything, a catalyst that is playing into things, perhaps accelerating things, can we consider it having an impact being an accelerant towards the Reformation? Does the disaffection with the church that results from the Black Death move the Reformation closer? I do think it plays a role.

I don't think we can draw a direct line between the Black Death and Luther's Theses in the 16th century because I think that would be too reductionist to suggest, you know, one without the other is impossible. In all likelihood, we're going to, we would, eventually have seen this move because of the doubts that have been raised around the church for centuries. But I think this is perhaps the most important area where the Black Death is acting as a catalyst because I think it is causing, particularly in the Christian world, a sense

that death is more immediate as a threat. It's more, the idea that mortality has always been present within the medieval world is something we need to accept. Their familiarity with the possibility of death, an early death and sudden death, is in a different. league from what we experienced now in the 21st century. But even in that context, the advent of the age of plague, I think, makes mortality a more immediate presence. It makes a necessity, really, within people's lives to be ready for the fact that another wave of plague could reemerge, that death could come knocking on your door very, very suddenly. And I think this raises these doubts, makes them deeper, these doubts about the way in which

the established church has been behaving, the ways in which the system of indulgences function, the concept of how people might escape the trap of sin, all of these things become more immediate concerns. So I think it accelerates that sense of questioning, but it's part of a much, much more complex and detailed pattern of events that ultimately leads to what we see in the 16th century. Yeah. And can we consider it having a similar function or role in the Renaissance? You know, does the desire to look in different places for answers? Is that a driver towards the Renaissance? I think to some extent, one of the things that I explore in the final chapter of the book,

which I have to admit has a rather uncheery title of the culture of death. But I want to encourage you, if you are brave enough to read the book, please don't ignore the book, the chapter on the culture of death, because I think to me it's one of the most important explorations of how cultural activity, and especially artistic and literary activities affected by the advent of the Black Death and the Age of Plague. One of the strangest phenomenon, I think,

is that we do, of course, see the germination of what we now think of was the Renaissance in the early stages of the 15th century and on through that period of years. But we also see very direct engagement with the notion of what death is, what it represents, and how humans should interact with it. So we see, for example, the development of what we now call the dance of death or the dance macabre

described both in literary form but also in artistic form. This often shows people engaged in almost a joyful dance, sometimes a fearful dance, but surrounded by skeletal figures usually. The question always is, is what are those skeletal figures meant to represent? Are they the people themselves who have now died? Are they kind of mirrors? Are they representations of death as a singular figure or just of the dead, almost like revenants? But this becomes an incredibly popular form of artistic expression.

And we know that when printing comes around also people, many, many people own copies, printed copies, of the depiction of the dance of death and would look on a routine basis. Some people have suggested this means that by the time we're in the 15th century, early 16th century, were into an era of macabre and unhealthy fascination with mortality. I think I would argue against that. I think that we see a late medieval world trying to engage on a more realistic level with the phenomenon of death and trying to come to an accommodation with it. This has been so interesting, Thomas.

It's been fascinating to learn the extent of the Black Death to hear some of those individual voices that have helped you to recreate the stories and the path of the Black Death and to hear some of its immediate impact and its longer term impacts too. And I hope people do make it to the final chapter of the book. I encourage everybody to read the whole book all the way to the end. So thank you very, very much for joining us, Thomas.

Absolutely pleasure. Thanks for having me off. I hope you've enjoyed this episode. Thomas's book, The Black Death, A Global History, is out now if you'd like to explore the wider impact of this pandemic in more detail. You can also find a great episode. on the traumas of the 14th century with Helen Carr in our back catalogue. There are new installments of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please come back to join Eleanor and I for more from the greatest millennium in human history.

Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. You can also sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week at HistoryHit.com forward slash. subscribe. Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with history hit.