Volume 49, Number 9 · May 23, 2002
On the Brink of Oblivion
By Eamon Duffy
From the Brink of the Apocalypse: Confronting Famine, War, Plague, and Death in the Later Middle Ages
by John Aberth
Routledge, 304 pp., $26.00
In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made
by Norman F. Cantor
HarperPerennial, 272 pp., $13.95 (paper)
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Religion, War, Famine and Death in Reformation Europe
by Andrew Cunningham and Ole Peter Grell
Cambridge University Press, 360 pp., $64.95; $22.95 (paper)
Late in the year 1347 a new and terrible disease arrived in Europe from the Tartar regions north of Constantinople, carried first by Genoese merchants vainly fleeing from a pestilence that raced faster than war horses. It was said to have been introduced into the Genoese trading community at Caffa in the Crimea by a besieging Tartar army, who deliberately catapulted the infected corpses of their own dead across the city walls. Originating ten years or more before in the steppes of Asia, the plague had already decimated the populations of China, India, Transoxiana, Persia, and southern Rus- sia. By the spring of 1348 it had galloped through Italy and had reached the papal court in exile in the south of France at Avignon (where it was thought that as many as 62,000 died, and where Pope Clement VI ordered huge new graveyards to be conse- crated to hold the mounting piles of dead). By June it was in Paris, by November in southern Austria. That autumn the plague entered England simultaneously though the West Country seaports and through London. From there it spread at once to Ireland, by November it had reached Bergen, and so on to the rest of northwest Europe, Scandinavia, even remote Iceland.
Review, 4251 words
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