The long shadow of the Black Death

Introduction to Insurance

0:00Insurance isn't one-size-fits-all, and shopping for it shouldn't feel like squeezing into something that just doesn't fit. That's why drivers have enjoyed Progressive's Name Your Price tool for years. With the Name Your Price tool, you tell them what you want to pay, and they show you options that fit your budget. Enough hunting for discounts, trying to calculate rates, and tinkering with coverages. Maybe you're picking out your very first policy. Or maybe you're just looking for something that works better for you and your family. Either way, they make it simple to see your options.

0:32No guesswork, no surprises. Ready to see how easy and fun shopping for car insurance can be? Visit Progressive.com and give the Name Your Price tool a try. Take the stress out of shopping, and find coverage that fits your life. On your terms. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law.

Black Death Series Introduction

0:58Welcome to the History Extra podcast. It's the third and final instalment today of our Sunday series on the Black Death, as Emily Briffitt is joined once again by historian Thomas Asbridge, whose latest book is The Black Death, A Global History, to discuss this devastating pandemic and its consequences. When the first wave of the Black Death finally subsided, just how different was the world it left behind? How did societies adapt in the decades that followed? And what lessons did this medieval catastrophe hold for the centuries that followed?

Discussing the Black Death

1:34I'm Emily Briffitt, and I'm joined by historian Thomas Asbridge. In this third and final episode, we'll be covering the long shadow of the Black Death, examining how it transformed economies, beliefs and everyday life, and how its legacy continues to shape our understanding of the past. Hi Thomas, welcome back to this, the final episode of our three-part series. Thanks for having me on. So in our last two episodes, we've spoken about the sense of unknown. How is this disease being transmitted?

2:06How would have contemporaries dealt with it? That kind of fear and trepidation that it's caused. But I think we should take a little bit of a step back here.

What is the Black Death

2:15What actually was the Black Death? What were contemporaries dealing with? Yeah, it's an excellent question. And I think it raises one of the most exciting aspects of studying this subject, which is that it's not, even for medieval historians, it's not just about the written record or even the archaeological record. Because relatively uniquely, this subject, the study of the Black Death, has an interplay with modern science. Because this is a disease that actually is still with us to this day and is still being studied very actively. So there have been some major breakthroughs, even in the last 15 years,

2:50our understanding of what the disease is, how it functioned, where it first appeared. All of these things have really been either overturned or confirmed. So we can now say, since the year 2011, categorically, I would argue, that we know what the disease was. That it was caused by a germ, a bacteria called Yersinia pestis. And this is the germ that causes what we generally think of as plague, which can affect people primarily in three different forms, bubonic, septicemic, or pneumonic,

3:21though there may be some other forms that could be possible. Now this, when we were able to confirm this in 2011, this came at the end of at least 20 years of quite heated, sometimes somewhat impolite argument amongst historians and scientists and scholars about what had caused the disease. For a long time, people had had this belief that the Black Death was plague. And by 1950, there was a pretty settled understanding of exactly what the disease had been, supposedly where it had appeared, how it was transmitted.

3:53But then in the 1980s, people started to ask questions, particularly because plague had re-emerged in what we now call the third plague pandemic, starting in the 19th century. And although it followed some of the similar patterns to what was described in the Black Death, some of the same symptoms that we looked at in an earlier episode, including the famous buboes, the appearance of these swellings, either in the groin, under the arm, or in the neck. In other ways, it was different. It seemed to move much more slowly, and it did not kill nearly as many people.

4:26So some things didn't seem to add up. It also seemed to, modern plagues seemed to be more tied to specific seasons. There were major question marks about how the form of transmission that seemed to be happening in the modern world, how that could have functioned in different parts of the medieval world. So some scholars came forward and literally said, I can say categorically that the Black Death could have been many things, but one thing it definitely was not was plague. That turned out to be somewhat unwise decision to say something so categorical.

4:59And in the end, the answer for us now came from science, and came in particular from the study of ancient DNA. So in an earlier episode, we talked about the very important and significant emergency burial ground in London called East Smithfield. What researchers were able to do in 2011 is to look at the skeletal remains from the bodies that were buried there. And crucially, at the level where they were recovered, we know that that level was only used in the year 1349 for people who died during the Black Death.

5:32So there's no possibility that we're talking about a different outbreak or contamination from a different period. We had very good provenance for those skeletal remains. They were able to look at the teeth of those individuals, because in the dental pulp, the remains of signatures both of the ancient DNA of this bacterium Yersinia pestis could be found, and also the antigen, the body's response to it could also be detected. And in 2011, they were able to publish a paper, a really groundbreaking paper,

6:03which demonstrated that they had found evidence of Yersinia pestis. And this really answered the question, what had caused the Black Death? So that's the answer to what is the Black Death.

Origins of the Black Death

6:13But what about the origins behind it? So that's also been changed pretty radically in the last, that's even more recent. This is the last two or three years. So for a long time, all the way back to the Middle Ages, if you looked at chronicle and narrative accounts, time and again, people will write, if they're writing in the near and Middle East, if they're writing in different parts of Europe, even in parts of England, they'll say it came from the East. But they'll tend to be somewhat unspecific. And for a long time, we thought that it came from the Tibetan Plateau,

6:43so quite far to the East. But very recently, the same process of looking for DNA signatures in skeletal remains and in dental pulp helped to show that it actually, as far as we now know, appeared in around 1338 to 1339 in a small community of Eastern Christians, Nestorian Christians, living in what's now Kyrgyzstan, near a place called Lake Issyk Kul. This community appears to have been a training community, probably on what we now think of as the Silk Road.

7:16And we know from a cemetery, a grave site, which had a whole succession of inscribed stones, that there was a major burst of mortality there at the end of the 1330s. We've known about that for quite a long time, but all we have are the inscriptions. Now a team went back and actually found that the skeletons that had been uncovered there in the 19th century had been packed away in a museum in St. Petersburg. They were able to unpack them, examine them. And again, a team effort was able to demonstrate that this was, not only was it Yersinia pestis,

7:47but crucially, its form of Yersinia pestis seems to have been the one that then directly led to the outbreak of what we now call the Black Death. So while we're talking about the origins of the Black Death, I suppose we should talk a little bit about when the term Black Death itself was first used. Do we know about that at all? We do. I think it's very important to understand that in some ways, as modern scholars and modern commentators, we've given solidity to this event in a way that wasn't necessarily apparent to contemporaries.

8:17So they never used the term, the Black Death, to describe this outbreak, this pandemic. We have a couple of 14th century writers who use it mentioning that there's a Black Death, as in this was a terrible event, but they're not describing it in a definitive sense. So they tended to call it either the great mortality or the great dying in the 14th century. And it's only once we get to 17th and 18th century that we start to see, again, the term a Black Death or Black Death occurring in Scandinavian sources,

8:51in historians looking back in Germany in the 18th century. And the first appearance in England comes in History of England, written by Elizabeth Penrose at the start of the 19th century. And then a few years later, we have the first really definitive identification of both the disease and the period, what we would now chronologically establish as 1347 to 1353, as the Black Death in a book written by a German scholar called Justus Hecker, entitled Die Schwarze Tod, the Black Death in the 14th century.

9:22That's the really inception point of more collectively people thinking about this as the Black Death. We've been talking about this as if it's one specific instance of outbreak,

Subsequent Outbreaks

9:33one specific instance of plague. Now, that's not quite the case. There are subsequent outbreaks over the next few centuries of plague and disease, aren't there? Yeah. In many ways, I think it's the most important thing to understand about the Black Death, in that that first outbreak, 1347 to 53, is still incredibly important. And it does, in many ways, transform the medieval world. But if it had been a one and done, then in many respects, I think that its overall long-lasting effect

10:07would have been relatively and perhaps even surprisingly muted. But the unfortunate reality, it wasn't the end. So I've tried to think about what it must have been like to live in the 1350s. And you can well imagine that if you'd been lucky enough to survive, you would have faced terrible loss and probably terrible hardship as well. But you might well have been thinking to yourself, I made it. I made it through that terrible apocalyptic event. And we can see this illustrated in pretty tragic, but also, I think, revealing terms by what happened in a really tiny hamlet in the Alps.

10:41It's a collection of just 11 families in a place called Grenier, a small hamlet perched on the valley side, right deep in the mountains. And this hamlet was affected by the first outbreak, by the Black Death. And a number of people died. And if we look at a particular family, the Costa family, there was Jacobus, Costa, and his wife, Isabelona. And they had two children, at least two children at this stage. Now, they were hit. Jacobus died. But in many ways, they were quite fortunate because both Isabelona and her two children

11:14made it through. Unfortunately, in the 1360s, in most places from around 1361 to 1363, the plague came back. And in this instance, both of Isabelona's children, her son and her daughter, died in the outbreak. And it seems, not surprisingly, to have absolutely struck her to the core because we know from judicial records that she then committed suicide, I guess, because she couldn't face a world in which this reality, this plague, was going to be a more constant touchstone.

11:46I think that story, heart-rending as it is, should remind us of what it was going to be like to live through this era. And if there are, there are a number of things that we can look at with regards to the Black Death and its subsequent outbreaks of what we now call the second plague pandemic. There are lots of lessons we could draw from it. But one is that very often these kind of diseases can lead to long-term changes in human history. That it's not just a single point. It's a much more protracted experience.

12:17And that's certainly the case for people living in the Middle Ages. They didn't know it. But in reality, this disease was going to come back every 10 to 15 years for at least the next 150 to 200 years, in some places for much more than that. The period after the Black Death, that first outbreak, has often been thought of as a time of relative prosperity for those lucky enough to survive. But with that in mind, would you say that's quite the case? Is that a fair judgment? So it's often been described as the silver lining thesis that, of course, this is a terrible

12:49event in terms of mass mortality. But as you say, for those surviving, perhaps the world became an easier, a better place. In some respects, that's true. So there are some fundamentals that it's worth recognizing. This is a world in which their form of money, coinage, has an inherent value. It's not just paper money. It's gold or silver or copper. If you think about the fact that 50% of the population in most affected areas is suddenly disappearing, you suddenly have a doubling of the amount of currency that's around per

13:22capita. That's also true for land. Suddenly, in lots of areas, there'd been a paucity of good land. Now, much more land is available. So I think there is a degree of new prosperity and certainly new social mobility for survivors, sometimes what we call the survivor's dividend. But we've got to balance that against the continued predations of plague when it returns, and also the instability that's being caused by two other critical factors, increasingly frequent and destructive outbreaks of warfare across the medieval world.

13:56And perhaps most importantly of all, the continued effects of naturally occurring climate change, what we talked about in the very first episode, the Little Ice Age. So this period, which is going to last for 400 years, where the world is going to become just a little bit cooler, 0.4 to 0.8 degrees centigrade cooler per year. But it's also going to cause more extreme weather events. And those are going to be destabilizing factors that make living in the world, what I call the age of plague, the period from 1350 and what I particularly studied up to 1500, a pretty

14:29precarious pace to be. Thinking back to our last episodes, we spoke about how the authorities reacted during the Black Death and before. So I suppose we should also consider after. How did they react in the aftermath of the Black Death? So one of the things we can certainly see is that they are concerned by the new opportunities presented to a wider range of strata in society, and particularly this idea of social mobility and rising prices. I'm constantly appalled by the fact that King Edward III of England decided in the autumn

15:04of 1349 to basically send a message. He wrote a statement that was supposed to be read in all churches to the populace, basically saying, yes, you survived. You were lucky to survive. And I can't believe that you're being so ungrateful that you're actually demanding higher wages and stop misbehaving, basically. It didn't show a great degree of understanding. But the English response is pretty representative of what's happening in many parts of the medieval world. So ruling elites trying to issue what are sometimes called ordinances or statutes, where they're

15:34trying to limit prices very forcefully to try and prevent too much inflation, but also prevent people from moving from one social class to another or trying to appear as if they are richer than they are. We see the emergence in the late 14th century of more frequent issuing of what we call sumptuary laws, which is just a fancy way of saying laws to govern what you wear in terms of clothing. And they're very prescriptive. They'll say, you know, if you're a farmer's wife, you're not allowed to wear this type of fur, you're not allowed to ask for this type of food.

16:05It's really trying to encode the pre-existing social boundaries that suggest to us that those are clearly being broken in the aftermath of the Black Death. Springtime is my catalyst to switch out the major players in my closet and take stock of what I have and haven't been wearing over the last year. It's a great time to get a bit more intentional about what you're wearing day to day. And if I'm getting rid of anything, I want to make sure that I'm replacing it with quality pieces. And I've been turning to Quince for that so often recently.

16:36Their clothes are made really well and priced even better, so it makes shopping for and wearing their pieces simple. Quince uses premium materials like organic cotton and ultra soft denim, and their lightweight linen pants, dresses, and tops start at just $30. I have a few pairs of their 100% European linen pants. They come in a variety of colors and patterns. It has an elastic waist and a pretty wide leg, so they're really, really comfortable, but they also look super nice, so I think they're the perfect, versatile pair of pants for spring and summer.

17:07Everything at Quince is priced 50% to 80% less than similar brands because they work directly with ethical factories and cut out the middlemen. So you're paying for the quality and craftsmanship of the products, but not a brand markup. Refresh your everyday with luxury you'll actually use. Head to quince.com slash history extra for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada, too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash history extra for free shipping and 365 day returns.

17:38Quince dot com slash history extra. Starting or growing your own business can be intimidating and lonely at times. Your to-do list may feel endless with new tasks, and lists can easily begin to overrun your life. So finding the right tool that not only helps you out, but simplifies everything as a built-in business partner can be a game changer. For millions of businesses, that tool is Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all

18:09e-commerce in the U.S. from household names like Gymshark, Rare Beauty, and Heinz, to brands just getting started. Shopify has hundreds of ready-to-use templates that can help you build a beautiful online store that matches your brand's style. And you can tackle all the important tasks in one place, from inventory to payments to analytics and more. No need to save multiple websites or try to figure out what platform is hosting the tool that you need. And if people haven't heard about your brand, you can get the word out like you have a marketing team behind you, with easy-to-run email and social media campaigns, to reach

18:44customers wherever they're scrolling or strolling. Start your business today with the industry's best business partner, Shopify, and start hearing sign up for your $1 per month trial today at shopify.com slash realm. Go to shopify.com slash realm. That's shopify.com slash realm.

Adaptations in the West

19:04Can you say more about the adaptations the West carried out? So in the period following the first outbreak, the Black Death, so in the second half of the 14th century and into the start of the 15th century, we start to see instances where localized communities, particular cities, particular regions, start to introduce measures that they're employing to try to limit the effects of the Black Death. Perhaps the most famous of these comes in Venice in the latter decades of the 14th century, where

19:39they start to introduce forms of quarantine. So we actually get the word quarantine from the fact that they imposed a 40-day period when people were arriving or traders were arriving in the Venetian lagoon. They would be isolated for those 40 days, 40 giorni, so they would be 40 days set aside, and if they went through that, then they were able to trade. That's where we get the word quarantine in our modern parlance. Those kind of measures in northern Italy turned out to be quite effective in limiting the spread of the

20:13disease when it would reoccur. And similar approaches start to be adopted across the West over time. It's a slow process, but it's a significant one. And we see within this a strong sense that one of the things you need to be careful about with the plague and you need to be attuned to is the idea that you may have to flee. You may have to escape from a region if you can when an outbreak eventually arrives. This is perhaps most powerfully illustrated by the career of a remarkable Tuscan merchant called

20:46Francesco da Tini. In a way, what makes da Tini so interesting to us is he's quite normal. He's not a guy who's going to change history. He's not going to rule any city or nation. He's a very successful merchant, but he's not the greatest, most successful merchant in the world. So Francesco's life had been profoundly affected by the Black Death. He lost both of his parents and a number of his siblings during the first outbreak. And he went on to forge a career as a merchant, first basically as an arms dealer in Avignon.

21:16He was selling weapons and armor in Avignon and then eventually moved back to northern Italy and spread his interests across much of the European world and beyond. But at the end of his life in 1410, in his will, he stated that he wanted all of his papers, all of his account books, all of the many letters he'd exchanged with his wife, Margarita, in the course of his life to be kept. And it just so happened, largely through Fortune, that over time, those documents were preserved. Ultimately, they were quite literally put into sacks and thrown onto a disused staircase and left there for many, many years.

21:52Those were then rediscovered and more than 150,000 documents survived from his career, including thousands of letters, which give us incredible insights into what was happening during his life. And most crucially, how he had to adapt to these reoccurrences of plague. They show us that plague was constantly on his mind as a trader. He was always thinking about whether an outbreak would affect business that he was carrying out in one part of the world or another. But they also show, for example, during the outbreak of 1399 to 1400, that he ultimately had to make the decision to flee from Prato.

22:29He went to Bologna for 18 months. He gives us an insight into how you had to adapt in the West if you wanted to try to survive during this age of plague. And in that way, I think he's a perfect example. As we've said, this is not a uniquely European phenomenon. How different were reactions in Europe as opposed to elsewhere? Yeah, that's one of the questions I've been most fascinated by. While there's quite a lot of shared experience of the Black Death between 1347 and 1353, as I mentioned in an earlier episode, there's a very significant distinction in the Muslim world in terms of Islamic theology, rejecting the idea that the disease is contagious and banning people from fleeing plague-affected sites.

23:13And in the long term, I think what we see is a very significant fracture between the way in which the Western European world, the Christian European world, eventually and very painfully adapts to the age of plague. They learn how to reshape their approaches to things like agriculture and trade, and they learn how to eventually start to delimit the significance of outbreaks and the levels of mortality. We still get recurrent outbreaks.

23:43They can still be terrible, but they're often more localized, and they might be killing 10 or 20% of the population, but they're not as shockingly appalling as the Black Death. Whereas in the Muslim world, and particularly in the Mamluk Empire, which is the empire covering what we think of today as Egypt and much of the Near East, so Syria, Palestine, Jordan, parts of Turkey, they've got this vast wave of territory, but they do not make those same adaptations. And we can see outbreaks of plague that hit particularly in the 15th century that are just as destructive.

24:18Perhaps the most famous of these is recorded by one of the most important historians of the Black Death in the Muslim world, a man who lived in the Mamluk Empire in the 14th and 15th century called Taki al-Din al-Makrizi. And he wrote very detailed accounts of what was happening in front of him as he lived through these recurrent outbreaks, most shocking of which came in 1429 to 30. He called it the Great Extinction, and it seems to have been just as destructive in Cairo in terms of the percentage of population affected as the Black Death.

24:50This failure to adapt, to learn how to mitigate the effects of the Black Death, the disease, the plague, and to protect what is basically the backbone of their economy, the agricultural exploitation of the Nile Delta, I would argue eventually leads to the decline and ultimate fall of the Mamluk Empire in 1517. So does this then reshape the balance of power in the world then? I would argue it does. I think there are, so monocausal explanations are really the most appropriate or accurate answer.

25:26I think there are at least three factors at work, what we call macro factors, really big, broad, global events that are shaping the shift in the balance of power. I think the age of plague is a very significant one of those. I think endemic violence is another. I would actually concede that probably the most important, the most dominant factor is climate change. But certainly the Mamluk world's inability to make adaptations, I think, and then the erosion of their ability to control farming in the Nile Delta,

25:58because that's based on a very, very delicate and very expensive and manpower intensive system of irrigation that falters as described by Al-Makrisi in the course of the 15th century. And once that starts to break down, then the Mamluk world is in some ways an empire built on sand. In a similar way, would it be too neat a narrative to suggest that this ushered in broader transformations that saw the end of the Middle Ages, that brought in a sort of renaissance? Yeah, again, I don't think it's the sole factor.

26:31Of course, I'd love to be the person who can say, oh, yeah, it's the only thing, the most important thing. Don't think about anything else. Look nowhere else. I don't think that's the case. I think it is contributory. I think it plays some role in what we might describe as the road to the Reformation. In many ways, I think that's to do with a deepening obsession and fascination with people's spiritual life. If you live in the Middle Ages, as I said in a previous episode, whether you're a Jew, a Christian or a Muslim, you are living in a world in which you recognize that your behavior in life might affect your opportunities in the afterlife.

27:09And I think, particularly in the Christian world, what we start to see is an interest in ensuring that the people who are dealing with you as priests, who are giving you some of the essential sacraments of life, and perhaps most importantly, the last rites at the moment of your death, that they are pure, that they are people who are actually going to enable you to make it to heaven, as opposed to they are priests who might be of questionable moral virtue.

27:39And that deepens the kind of exploration of what a good Christian life might be in the years that follow the Black Death and during this age of plague, this period we call the second plague pandemic. So I think it helps to germinate questioning. I don't think it's the sole factor. Good clarification. I was going to ask you about why the Black Death has loomed so large in cultural memory. I feel that might be a bit of a silly question, given all the things you've just said.

28:10Yes, it's interesting to think about where it sits. And I'm not sure I'm the best person to ask. I spent the last eight years of my life thinking about pretty much nothing else than the Black Death. So much to the chagrin of my family sometimes. I think it has its place and has had its place because we are, in the modern world, a society that is fascinated, perhaps sometimes obsessed with catastrophe and apocalypse. In many ways, I think it deserves its place because I do regard it as the greatest natural disaster in human history.

28:43It is an event unparalleled in terms of the scale of its immediate impact and I think the significance of the subsequent tremors or repercussions that we can see in the decades that follow. So I think it should be remembered, but maybe I'm not the right person to ask how prominent it is in people's minds. Obviously, we've also spoken about a lot of changing interpretations, changing understandings. Would you say that there's one big myth that we could point to, that we could bust right now?

29:15Correct for our listeners, as it were. Yeah, sure. I'll try. Can I have a few? Of course, you can have more than one. So one traditional one is the notion that the Black Death wasn't primarily an urban phenomenon. That if you lived in a city, you were much more likely to catch the disease, that it was much more prominent and prevalent in its destructive force in a setting like London or Florence or indeed Cairo. I actually think the written record doesn't necessarily support that. When you start to look at records from smaller towns or even tiny villages and hamlets, we tend to see very similar rates of mortality.

29:51And there are very few exceptions. There were a few extremely isolated villages in northwestern Spain, for example, where we can say it appears that they escaped more likely. So maybe a 15 to 20 percent mortality rate rather than 50 or 60 percent. So that idea of it being an urban phenomenon, an urban disease, I think should be and largely has been overturned. But to me, actually, I think the biggest myth is that we now understand everything about the Black Death, that it's done, that we can say this is exactly what happened.

30:27This is why it happened. And that's never really true for any period of history. But it's particularly not true for the Black Death because of its interplay with science. There are so many new opportunities for discovery, whether it's related to studying archaeological remains or the fact that the disease, Yersinia Pestis, is still being studied because it's still active. There was a major outbreak on the island of Madagascar in 2017. What happened during that outbreak, the fact that the disease seemed primarily to occur in its pneumonic form, so its aerosol form, and was transmitted from human to human.

31:01And that changed the way we think about transmission of the disease, its potential, looking back to the Middle Ages. So there's lots of work that's still to be done on how the disease may have passed through the mid-14th century. What I tend to call the classic model, which is often repeated, it's exactly what's taught to school kids, which is the idea that a particular type of flea is responsible for carrying disease. That flea is carried around on black rats. When those rats die, the flea jumps onto a new host. If that's a human, they might infect a human.

31:33That classic model, it can't really explain the speed at which the disease spread in the mid-14th century. So we're now looking at much more complex models of how the disease may have spread. Lots of different types of vectors or carriers of the disease, human-to-human transmission. And that reminds us that we don't know everything. There are lots of new questions to still be answered and lots of new ways of thinking about this subject. And that's one of its great beauties, I think. Lots of people drew comparisons between the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Death.

32:06As a historian, would you say that there were that many commonalities? I think there were some. I think the first fundamental thing we have to face up to is in terms of scale of destruction and mortality, the Black Death was on a different level. So at most, I think, when we're able to get more and more data about mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic, terrible as it was and impactful as it was for many people living in the world, I think the overall mortality rate is going to be significantly less than 1%.

32:42In the Middle Ages, for the Black Death, our best guess is around a 50% average mortality rate. I think that something like 100 million people died during this first outbreak between 1347 and 1353. Because we have subsequent outbreaks, it's also worth recognizing that in demographic terms, in population terms, the world doesn't recover quickly at all. If we look at England, and we've got to remember, of course, these are guesses, these are estimates of overall population.

33:13We think about 4.8 million people were living in England before the Black Death hit. That drops by 1350 to around 2.6 million, we think. But actually, the lowest point of 1.9 million is not reached until 1450, because it's a constant erosion of the population through subsequent outbreaks and all the other effects of climate change and war that I described. So, in terms of scale, I think there's a very marked difference.

33:43That said, there were similarities. So, I was really surprised when I was working on researching and writing a book on the Black Death as COVID hit. It was a very strange experience to be reading about the Black Death first arriving in Italy, and then discover that, you know, where do we first get COVID arriving in the European world in Italy. I looked at instances and examples of what we call abandonment, the phenomenon we discussed in a previous episode where families break apart. Then there's a report of elderly patients being abandoned in care homes in Spain, hitting the news in April 2020.

34:18And similarly, moves in New York to institute emergency mass burial sites. So, all of these points had resonance. But I think one of the things I was watching for and was really afraid of was that we might see a similar move to persecution of minorities, to try and find scapegoats. We didn't see mass outbreaks of the kind of persecution or even close to the persecution that we saw of the Jews in the Black Death. And that's something I was very happy about. As a final question to you then, why do you think the study of the Black Death matters?

Lessons from the Black Death

34:51And with what you've said in mind, what lessons can we learn from it? I think it matters because I would argue the Black Death is the case study that we need to turn to if we want to understand how humanity reacts to mass catastrophe. I think it's unparalleled in that regard. I think we live in a troubled era and what is likely to be a deeply troubled century. So, I don't want to be too depressing at the end of a podcast, but I think we're all conscious of the fact that the world is facing very, very significant challenges,

35:25whether it be man-made climate change, the spread of war, the possibility of the return of another more deadly form of pandemic, or even just the issues of mass migration. I strongly suspect that by the middle of this century, we will face mass migration on a level absolutely unparalleled in human history. So, that means that I think, whether consciously or unconsciously, we're all aware that even if we're not on the precipice of something, that change is coming, challenge is coming, perhaps even crisis is on the horizon.

35:56So, I think it behooves us to think about similar moments in history, what they might reveal, what they might tell us about humanity, humanity's capacity both for dark deeds, like the persecution of the Jews, but also its capacity for resilience. And in the end, having spent years studying the Black Death, perhaps somewhat counterintuitively, I've come away from it with a much stronger, more powerful impression of humanity's resilience,

36:26of our ability to continue to hold on to bonds that hold together communities and families and societies, and also humanity's capacity to demonstrate unbelievable, almost unimaginable levels of endurance and resilience and bravery in the face of suffering. And to me, that's left me thinking that no matter what we face in the years to come, I think there's a strong possibility and a strong hope that we will survive as a species.

36:58And that's a thought I like to hold on to. That's an immensely positive note to take from such a dark chapter. Thank you very much, Thomas. My pleasure. That was Dr. Thomas Alsbridge, a historian of the Middle Ages, specialising in the study of the Crusades, knighthood and chivalry. He is also reader in medieval history at Queen Mary, University of London, and the author of the new book, The Black Death, A Global History, published by Alan Lane. If you'd like to find out more about the Black Death and its surrounding context,

37:32or how humanity has dealt with disease through the centuries, I've put together some essential reading, listening and viewing from the History Extra archive to help deepen your understanding. You can find a link to that in the description of this episode.