The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

Since the west, unlike the east, had largely escaped the scourge of the Mongols, there might seem to be every reason for optimism about the future of Europe. In fact, to the average peasant, things had never looked worse. All the trade and commerce that had been stimulated by the crusades had brought prosperity, and prosperity brought a steep rise in the population. It is now a drearily familiar story, although no one gave it much serious thought until the Reverend Thomas Malthus turned his mind to the problem in the last years of the eighteenth century. Prosperity means that more children come into the world, and that of those, more survive into adulthood. New land has to be cultivated to feed them. By the time the Polos set out for Cathay, Europe was already becoming uncomfortably overcrowded. Methods of agriculture had improved, but not enough to produce anything like abundance. In most years, everybody got by. But as soon as there was a bad harvest, people starved and died. In 1315, the year after the death of Philip the Fair, there was a disastrous harvest all over Europe. The lack of sun not only meant that corn stayed unripe; it also meant a lack of salt – which was produced by evaporation of sea water – and this in turn meant that meat could not be stored for the winter. (This particular problem eventually led the Portuguese to sail around the world in search of spices, and pepper and nutmeg became the most valuable commodities in the world; but that time had not yet arrived.) There was mass starvation; people ate dogs, cats, rats, bird dung, even other human beings. It was a problem that no one seemed to be able to understand; the world was full of new prosperity, and people were dying by the thousand.

The earth itself seemed to be going through a period of convulsions. In 1281, a typhoon had wrecked Kubla Khan’s fleet off Japan. In 1293, thirty thousand Japanese were killed when a seismic wave hit the coast. In 1302 Vesuvius erupted, and in 1329, Etna. And England, in the midst of its starvation, experienced a violent earthquake in 1318, killing hundreds of people already scarcely alive from undernourishment. (Scots were eaten at the siege of Carrickfergus in 1316.) In 1304, the Holy Land itself was subjected to floods, and Damascus was inundated – as if nature itself had gone mad. In 1359, a hailstorm with lightning devastated the army of Edward III in France and killed six thousand horses.

But a disaster that was greater than all of these put together began in China in 1333, when drought on the plains between the Kiang and Hoai rivers brought famine, and then nature went to the opposite extreme and poured down non-stop rain in such torrents that a mountain called Tsincheou collapsed and left a vast hole in the earth; the floods killed four thousand. Another immense convulsion in the earth in the Ki-Ming-Chan Mountains created a lake a hundred miles across; the dead in the surrounding area were estimated at five millions. And the enormous heaps of dead began to incubate the bubonic plague.

Plague is, in fact, a disease that is carried by fleas, which are in turn carried by rats. The disease has always existed in certain areas, so it is still not clear why it should break out at specific times, or why rotting corpses should encourage it. But by 1340 it had spread over much of China; then it went on to India and Mongolia, Persia and Asia Minor. In 1346, it killed eighty-five thousand in the Crimea. When it reached the shores of the Black Sea, the Tartars seem to have decided to look for scapegoats – the old human tendency to ‘magical thinking’ – and settled upon the local Christian traders. The Genoese merchants in the city of Tana were attacked and driven to their trading base, the town of Caffa (now Feodosia), which was fortified for just such an emergency as this. The Tartars prepared to starve them out. And at this point, the plague struck; half the Tartar besiegers were thrown into convulsive agonies of misery and thirst, with the typical large swellings of the groin and armpits and the black spots on the skin that led to the disease being called the Black Death. They decided to abandon the siege; but first of all they used some of their huge catapults – the ones that had been brought from China by Genghis Khan – to toss some of their corpses into the fortress. The defenders immediately carried them to the sea; but the plague took a hold. They scrambled into their ships and sailed back for the Mediterranean. The ships put in at Messina – on Sicily – and Genoa; and within days, people in both places were dying by the thousand. The plague reached Messina in October 1347; by the following year, it had reached England, and quickly killed nearly half the population.

Again there was a search for scapegoats. In Germany, it was rumoured that Jews had been poisoning the wells, and fleeing Jews were seized at Chillon and tortured. Under torture, they confessed to the charge. They were executed, and there were massacres of Jews in Provence, at Narbonne and Carcassone, then all over Germany: Strasbourg, Frankfurt, Mainz and the trading towns of the north belonging to the Hanseatic League. Here Jews were walled in their houses and left to starve; others were burnt alive.

Another scapegoat was the leper. In the Middle Ages, lepers were usually regarded with considerable tolerance and allowed to form grimly picturesque processions; now they were stoned to death, or simply refused entry into the walled towns.

One of the stranger phenomena that flourished under the Black Death was the movement known as Flagellants. These had originated about a century earlier in Italy, when various plagues and famines convinced the Italians that God wanted them to show repentance, and took the form of pilgrimages in which people walked naked to the waist, beating themselves with whips or scourges tipped with metal studs. On that occasion it had seemed to work, and had been tried periodically since then. Now the Black Death convinced increasing numbers of people that desperate remedies were necessary. A letter, supposed to have fallen down from heaven, declaring that only Flagellants would be saved, was first published around 1260, but reappeared in 1343 in the Holy Land – it was supposed to have been delivered by an angel to the Church of St Peter in Jerusalem. Now waves of flagellation swept across Europe with all the hysteria of religious revivals. The Flagellants – mostly fairly respectable ‘pilgrims’ of both sexes – would arrive in a town and hold their ceremony in the main square: they would strip to the waist, then flog themselves into an increasing state of hysteria until blood ran down to their feet, staining the white linen which was the traditional dress on the lower half of the body. The pilgrimage would last for thirty-three days, and each flagellant would have taken a vow to flog himself, or herself, three times a day for the whole of that time. A Master also moved among them, thrashing those who had failed in their vows.

As Flagellants themselves carried the plague from city to city, public opinion suddenly turned against them. The magistrates of Erfurt refused them entry, and no one objected. It was best not to wait until the Flagellants were within a town to raise objections, for their own frenzy made them violent, and they were likely to attack the objectors – one Dominican friar in Tournai was stoned to death. Human beings seem to be glad of an excuse to change their opinions, and only a year after they had been generally regarded with respect and admiration, the Flagellants were suddenly attacked as outcasts and cranks. The pope issued a bull against them, and the hysteria vanished as abruptly as it had begun.

The horrors of the plague did as much as the crusades or the spread of commerce to end the state of mind known as the Middle Ages. It created a desperate sense that something important had to happen, that the world must be changed. Monks ran away from their cloisters; serfs ran away from their estates. Oddly enough, the Black Death did nothing to increase the prestige of the Church; the fact that so many priests died seemed to prove that they were no holier than anyone else. In England, the priest John Wycliffe translated the Bible into English – the Church had always tried to keep it from the common people because it liked to play the role of interpreter – and denied that the Church had some absolute right to rule man’s conscience. The pope issued bulls condemning Wycliffe and ordered his arrest; but since the clash with Boniface, the pope was not much liked or respected in England – it was a matter of national pride. So even when the Archbishop of Canterbury was persuaded to prosecute Wycliffe for heresy in 1377, he came to no harm. His followers were later forced to recant. But it was a turning point in European intellectual history when an Englishman could describe the pope as a ‘limb of the devil’ and the clergy as ‘ravening wolves’ and still remain at liberty.