390 THE GLORY OF CHRISTENDOM

SHADOWAND LIGHTNING
391
enfeebled. To some extent new national loyalties took its place, but were far too limited ever to match it. The
cumulative effect of the forty-one years of papal residence at Avignon and the evidence of partiality for the
French by the series of French Popes there-most evident in the incumbent Pope Clement VI 3-had reduced respect
for the papal office to the lowest level since the great Hildebrandine reform of the eleventh century. Even the
Franciscans were widely believed to be living in luxury; though the charges against them were evidently
exaggerated and often fomented by "Spiritual Franciscans" who had openly rejected papal authority, there had to
be sufficient basis to make them so credible.'
The two principal kingdoms in Christendom, France and England, were locked in a bitter conflict with each
other, the Hundred Years War. Italy was a welter of small states often violently hostile to one another. There was a
potential for serious conflict-soon to be realized-among the four Christian kingdoms in the Iberian peninsula:
Castile (the largest and strongest), Aragon, Navarra, and Portugal, though at the moment Alfonso XI of Castile
was still focussed on the long crusade of the Reconquest from the Moors. The developing Christian peoples of
Eastern Europe were split between the Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox. The new Holy Roman
Emperor, Charles IV, was a profoundly believing Catholic, thoroughly loyal to the Pope (even the Popes in
Avignon) and a man of peace, the most moral and charitable ruler of his time; but he made little attempt to exert
influence beyond Germany and his native Bohemia.s The hammer of the great plague-the worst in history,
comparable in its impact to a nuclear war today-fell upon a society already debilitated, almost as lacking in
spiritual as in medical resources to meet the fearsome challenge.
Yet Christendom survived. In most places the normal pattern of life endured through even the worst
ravages of the pandemic, despite evil consequences that we shall review. Modern doomsayers to the contrary
notwithstanding, the human race is extraordinarily resilient in recovering from disasters like this. Eventually-
though not without periodic recurrences of severe mortality-the plague declined as the bodies of the people of
Europe developed better means to fight the killer bacteria known to science as Yersinia pestis 6 And the spiritual
darkness gave way to tongues of fire in the decade of
the 1370's when one of the most vivid and glorious saints in the Church's history, Catherine of Siena, appeared on
the scene scattering lightning.
The great plague, as we have seen, was brought to Sicily from southern Russia in October 1347 and from
there spread with appalling rapidity and mortality throughout almost all of Europe. By the end of December
it had appeared in the port cities of Genoa, Pisa and Venice and in Constantinople, and in February 1348 it
reached the busy southern French port of Marseilles.' Because of crowded and unsanitary conditions in the cities,
the mortality was always greater there than in the country. The primitive medicine of that age knew no cure or
treatment for the disease, which once the first symptom of its more common bubonic form appeared-a large black
boil-often killed within 48 hours. Usually at least one-third of the population of the afflicted city died-often more.
Since almost half of those who contracted bubonic plague survived (in contrast to pneumonic plague where the
mortality rate was 95 per cent) this meant that the majority of the population almost everywhere had it. Its
extraordinary contagion was its most terrible feature: when one member of a family or a confined religious
community caught it, very soon most of the other family or community members would suffer it as well."
In the prosperous Italian city of Siena more than half the population died in the spring and summer of
1348.1° The chronicler Agnolo di Tura unforgettably describes those ghastly days:
The mortality in Siena began in May. It was a cruel and horrible thing; and I do not know where
to begin to tell of the cruelty and the pitiless ways. And it is impossible for the human tongue to
recount the
awful truth. Indeed, one who did not see such horror can be called blessed. And the victims died almost
immediately. They would swell beneath the armpits and in their groins, and fall over while talking.
Father abandoned child, wife husband, one brother another; for this illness seemed to strike through
breath and sight. And so they died. And none could be found to bury the dead for money or friendship.
Members of a household brought their dead to a ditch as best they could, without priest, without divine
offices. Nor did the death bell sound. And in many places in Siena great pits were dug and piled deep
with the multitude of dead. And they died by the hundreds, both day and night, and all were thrown in
those ditches and covered with earth. And as soon as those ditches were filled, more were
Pope Clement VI had secretly loaned French King Philip VI 372,000 florins to help equip the French army
(see Chapter Nine, above).
4
Katherine Walsh, A Fourteenth-Century Scholar and Primate; Richard FitzRalph in Oxford, Avignon andArmagh
(Oxford, 1981), pp. 407-408.
 S
See Bede Jarrett, The Emperor Charles IV (London, 1935), passim, for Charles' character and policy-
particularly valuable in view of the remarkable amount of hostile, thoughtless or patently prejudiced criticism he
has received from anti-Catholic or antbpapal historians.
Robert S. Gottfried, The Black Death; Natural and Human Disaster in Medieval
Europe (New York, 1983), pp. 6-9.

7 For unknown reasons, Bohemia, much of Poland, part of Belgium, and the Pyrenees Mountains mostly
escaped the Black Death. All the rest of Europe was devastated by it (Ziegler, Black Death, p. 116).
g
Gottfried, Black Death, pp. 37-38, 42-43, 48; Ziegler, Black Death, pp. 63-64. 9Gottfried, Black Death, pp. 1, 8,
55, 109-117; Ziegler, Black Death, pp. 18-24, 227231.
lo
Ziegler, Black Death, pp. 58-59.