Recurring Plagues and Their Decline
The Black Death of 1347–1351 was the opening movement of a much longer pandemic. Over the next three and a half centuries, plague returned again and again to the towns and villages of Europe — the Pestis Secunda of 1361–1362 that carried off a generation of children born after the first wave, the outbreaks of 1369, 1375, 1400, 1407, 1438–1439, 1456, 1463–1465, 1481–1485, 1494–1495, the great Barcelona and Languedoc epidemics of the 1510s, the Italian outbreaks of 1575–1577 and 1629–1631, the London plague of 1665, and finally the great plague of Marseilles in 1720. Understanding the Black Death requires reading it as the first act of that longer catastrophe, and understanding the late medieval world requires reading it as a society permanently on the edge of the next visitation. The three articles in this section trace the rhythm of those recurrences, the religious and folk responses that grew up around them, and the slow, contested, and still imperfectly explained retreat of the disease from Western Europe.
The chronology of recurrence and its ending
The pattern of recurrence was neither random nor uniform. The Pestis Secunda of 1361–1362 was an outbreak of unusual demographic consequence, killing not the adults who had survived 1348 by partial immunity but the children born into the new demographic regime, who had never been exposed. Further waves followed at intervals of roughly five to twelve years, with regional variation: the outbreaks that hit the Hanseatic north did not always coincide with those in the Mediterranean, and the timing of plague in the Baltic was closely tied to grain shipments and fairs. Ole J. Benedictow, in The Black Death 1346–1353 (2004) and Plague, the World Health Organization, and the Reassessment of Plague History (2018), has argued for an epidemiological model in which Yersinia pestis survived in Rattus rattus reservoirs in town granaries, attics, and ship holds, periodically spilling over into human populations when the host rodent died off. The full chronology of these waves — the demographic regimes, the regional chronologies, and the medical theory that explained them — is the subject of Why did the plague return in waves?.
The retreat of the plague from Western Europe was no less a puzzle than its arrival. The last major English outbreak of any note was the Eyam parish quarantine of 1665–1666; the last major Italian outbreak was the Neapolitan plague of 1656–1657; the last great French outbreak was the plague of Marseilles in 1720–1722. The causes are still debated. Candidates include the slow displacement of the black rat (Rattus rattus) by the brown rat (Rattus norvegicus) after 1700, the separation of human sleeping quarters from grain storage following improvements in domestic architecture, the quarantines and lazarettos of the Mediterranean sanità system, the role of the Little Ice Age in suppressing the flea life-cycle, the dilution of the pathogen’s preferred host reservoir, and the slow acquisition of partial immunity by the surviving European population. Paul Slack, in The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (1985) and Plague: A Very Short Introduction (2012), has stressed the role of public-health institutions in the English case. The detailed account is How Europe finally escaped the cycle of plague.
Saints, relics, and the protective repertoire
In the absence of antibiotics, prophylaxis was inseparable from prayer. The late medieval cult of the plague saints expanded at speed after 1348: Saint Roch of Montpellier, whose cult was officially recognized at the Council of Constance in 1414 and whose relics were claimed by plague-stricken cities from Cologne to Cracow; Saint Sebastian, the Roman soldier whose arrows became the emblem of pestilential death; Saint Christopher, the Fourteen Holy Helpers, and a long list of local intercessors including Saints Rosalia of Palermo, Carlo Borromeo of Milan, and Geneviève of Paris. The cult worked through processions, votive altars, amulets, charms, the pestilence cross, the swearing of communal oaths, and the burning of juniper and rosemary at the city gates. Jean-Noël Biraben’s Les hommes et la peste en France et dans les pays européens et méditerranéens (1975–76) remains the indispensable reference for the regional and chronological detail of these practices. The catalogue of saints, the geography of the cults, and the boundary between orthodox devotion and folk magic is surveyed in Late medieval plague saints and folk beliefs.
Articles in this section
- Why did the plague return in waves?
- Late medieval plague saints and folk beliefs
- How Europe finally escaped the cycle of plague