The Great Mortality Quotes

“Additionally, many widows took over family shops or businesses- and, not uncommonly, ran them better than their dead husbands. Y.pestis [black death germ] turns out to have been something of a feminist.”
― John Kelly, The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time

“And I, Agnolo di Tura, called the fat, buried my wife and five children with my own hands.”   The”
― John Kelly, The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time

“[According to 1348 theorists, poisoning of Christian water by Jews was the cause of Black Death.]

Even the poison used to contaminate the Christian water supply was described in meticulous detail. It was "about the size of an egg," except when it was the "size of a nut" or a "large nut," "a fist" or "two fists"- and it came packaged in "a leather pouch," except when it was packaged in "linen cloth," "a rag," or a "paper coronet"; and the poison was variously made from lizards, frogs, and spiders- when it was not made from the hearts of Christians and from Holy Communion wafers.”
― John Kelly, The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time

“The fear of contagion makes the psychology of plague different from the psychology of war. In plague, fear acts as a solvent on human relationships; it makes everyone an enemy and everyone an isolate. In plague every man becomes an island—a small, haunted island of suspicion, fear, and despair.”
― John Kelly, The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time

“A rats’ maze of thoroughfares, the ville-bas was where medieval Marseille lived and worked and played. Inside the quarter’s shops, drapers, fishmongers, and box and barrel makers bent over workbenches, cutting, tearing, and banging, while outside on sinewy streets illuminated by a sliver of blue sky, money changers shouted out the latest exchange rates, drunken mariners ogled broad-hipped women in dresses cut so low the necklines were called “windows of hell,” and tanners poured vats of steaming hot chemicals into piles of mud and human waste. With ventilation limited to a breeze from the harbor, on most days the ville-bas had the pungent odor of a mermaid with loose bowels. In”
― John Kelly, The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time

“King Alfonso of Castile, who was besieging the Muslim stronghold, was urged to flee to safety. However, the king, who had lost a future daughter-in-law to the plague two years earlier—Princess Joan of England—insisted on remaining with his army. On March 26, 1350, a Good Friday, Alfonso became the only reigning European monarch to die of the pestilence.”
― John Kelly, The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time

“On reading a translated copy of the covenant, Philip V was horrified. The Muslim ruler of Jerusalem, through his emissary, the viceroy of Islamic Granada, was extending to the Jewish people the hand of eternal peace and friendship. The gesture was occasioned by the recent discovery of the lost ark of the Old Testament and the stone tablets upon which God had etched the Law with His finger. Both were found in perfect condition in a ditch in the Sinai Desert and had awoken in the Muslims, who discovered them, a desire to be circumcised, convert to Judaism, and return the Holy Land to the Jews. However, since this would leave millions of Palestinian Muslims homeless, the King of Jerusalem wanted the Jews to give him France in return. The guilty homeowner Bananias told French authorities that after the Muslim offer, the Jews of France concocted the well-poisoning plot and hired the lepers to carry it out. After reading the translation and several corroborating documents, including a highly incriminating letter from the Muslim King of Tunisia, Philip ordered all Jews in France arrested for “complicity . . . to bring about the death of the people and the subjects of the kingdom.” Two years later, any Jewish survivors of the royal terror were exiled from the country.   The”
― John Kelly, The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time

“The French Crown was brought into the pogroms later in the summer by the alarming “discovery” of a secret covenant between the Jews, the Muslims, and the lepers. The compact first came to light at the end of June, during a solar eclipse in Anjou and Touraine. For a period of four hours on the twenty-sixth, the afternoon sun appeared swollen and horribly engorged, as if bursting with blood; then, during the night, hideous black spots dimpled the moon, as if the craters on its acned face had turned inside out. Certain that the world was coming to end, the next morning the populace attacked the Jews. During the rampage, a copy of the secret covenant was discovered inside a casket in the home of a Jew named Bananias. Written in Hebrew and adorned with a gold seal weighing the equivalent of nineteen florins, the document was decorated with a carving of a Jew—though the figure could have been a Muslim—defecating into the face of the crucified Christ. On”
― John Kelly, The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time

“Medieval Europeans knew that whenever bad things happened to Christians, the Jews were to blame.”
― John Kelly, The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time

“An account by a Dominican Inquisitor, Bernard Gui, is more forthcoming. The exterminations were provoked by the discovery of a lepers’ plot to overthrow the French Crown. “You see how the healthy Christians despise us sick people,” a coup leader is alleged to have said when the plotters met secretly in Toulon to elect a new king of France and appoint a new set of barons and counts. It is not entirely clear how the plot first came to light, but by Holy Week 1321 nearly everywhere in southern France one heard the same story; the lepers, “diseased in mind and body,” were poisoning local wells and springs. Alarmed, Philip V, “the Long One,” ordered mass arrests. Lepers who confessed complicity in the plot were to be burned at the stake immediately; those who professed innocence, tortured until they confessed, then burned at the stake. Pregnant lepers were allowed to come to term before being burned, but no such stays were offered to lepers with children. In Limoges a chronicler saw leprous women tearing newborns from their cribs and marching into a fire, infants in arm. Almost immediately, the populace concluded that the Jews were also involved in the plot. This popular verdict was based on guilt by association. Like the lepers, who wore a gray or black cloak and carried a wooden rattle, Jews were required to dress distinctively. Additionally, both groups were considered deceitful.”
― John Kelly, The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time

“A few months later, it was announced that Clement had purchased Avignon from the queen, who, as countess of Provence, held title to the city. The selling price, eighty thousand gold florins, was deemed very reasonable by most observers—indeed, perhaps even a bit low for what was, after all, the capital of Christendom.”
― John Kelly, The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time

“The fertile minds at the curia had managed to create an indulgence for every imaginable situation and every imaginable sin. For a price, an illegitimate child could be made legitimate, as could the right to trade with the infidel, or marry a first cousin, or buy stolen goods. Dispensations were also created for special niche markets such as nuns who wished to keep maids, converted Jews who wished to visit unconverted parents, and people who wanted to be buried in two places (a wish that required cutting the deceased in half).”
― John Kelly, The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time

“Unlike viral infections, which often left behind a large core of immune survivors to care for the ill and harvest the food the next time an epidemic struck, plague spared no one. Despite the findings about CCR5-D32, the best available current evidence is that Y. pestis does not produce permanent immunity in victims. During the Black Death, this biological quirk may have produced an enormous secondary mortality. As both Boccaccio and Stefani suggest, many people seem to have died not because they had particularly virulent cases of plague, but because the individuals who normally cared for them were either dead or ill themselves.”
― John Kelly, The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time

“In the Black Death, mortalities of 30 and 40 percent were common, and in the urban centers of eastern England and central Italy, death rates reached an almost unimaginable 50 to 60 percent. Historian Samuel K. Cohn claims that in the worst years of the Third Pandemic, death tolls never exceeded 3 percent. While that estimate is open to question, no one challenges Cohn’s contention that, overall, the mortality rates of the Third Pandemic were dramatically lower than those of the Black Death. In”
― John Kelly, The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time

“The Black Death’s visit to Florence is unusually well documented. We know that the mortality claimed roughly fifty thousand lives, a death rate of 50 percent in a city of about a hundred thousand. We also know that while public order held, anarchy and disorder were common. Major riots were avoided, but flight was general and greed ubiquitous. During 1348, municipal officials stole 375,000 gold florins from the inheritances and estates of the dead. We know, too, that in Florence victims often developed two buboes instead of the one characteristic of modern plague. We know as well that many animals died; along with Boccaccio’s pigs, there are reports of dogs and cats and apparently even chickens being stricken by the gavoccioli, or plague boil. What”
― John Kelly, The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time

“The pogroms in Mainz, Worms, and Trier were an early expression of a new, more militant Christianity. The Civitas Dei—or God State—grew out of the wave of intense pietism that swept through Europe in the Central Middle Ages. The new state’s controlling metaphor was the body: just as its various limbs fit together into an organic whole, so, too, does—or should—Christian society. Inspired by this corporatist vision, the angry sword of orthodoxy struck out at dissident minorities, such as the Albigensian heretics of southern France and the Jews. Many aspects of modern anti-Semitism date from the period of the Civitas Dei. For”
― John Kelly, The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time

“In May 1349 an English wool ship brought the plague to Bergen, in Norway. Within days of arriving the passengers and crew were all dead.”
― John Kelly, The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time

“By the early fourteenth century so much filth had collected inside urban Europe that French and Italian cities were naming streets after human waste. In medieval Paris, several street names were inspired by merde, the French word for “shit.” There were rue Merdeux, rue Merdelet, rue Merdusson, rue des Merdons, and rue Merdiere—as well as a rue du Pipi.”
― John Kelly, The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time

“The chronicler of Westminster saw an even more pernicious threat—medieval Spice Girls everywhere! Englishwomen, complained the chronicler, “dress in clothes that are so tight, . . . they [have to wear] a fox tail hanging down inside of their skirts to hide their arses.”
― John Kelly, The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time

“We are a spectacle”
― John Kelly, The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time

“We are a spectacle to the world. Let the great and humble, by our example, see to what state they shall be inexorably reduced, whatever their condition, age, or sex. Why then, miserable person, are you puffed up with pride? Dust you are, unto dust you return, rotten corpse, morsel and meal to worms.”
― John Kelly, The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time

“Kutluk and Magnu-Kelka were almost certainly not the first victims of the Black Death, but their remote little lakeside cottage is where the most terrible natural disaster in history begins to enter the human record.”
― John Kelly, The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time

“In early spring, as the pestilence was taking hold in Florence, Villani completed his history. After following Y. pestis from its origins to the present moment, the chronicler wrote, “And the plague lasted until . . .”—then put down his pen, apparently expecting to pick it up again after the disease had burned itself out. It was an uncharacteristic act of optimism on the old pessimist’s part, and, as it turned out, an unwarranted one.

Seven hundred years later, Villani’s last sentence still awaits completion.”
― John Kelly, The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time

“There are beatings, murders, summary executions, mutinies; only the progress of the pestilence prevents complete anarchy. Men become too ill to kill, then too ill to work. A helmsman with a neck bubo is strapped to the helm; a ship’s carpenter with a bloody cough, to his bench. A rigger shaking with fever is lashed to the mast. Gradually each escaping vessel becomes a menagerie of grotesques. Everywhere there are delirious men who talk to the wind and stain their pants with bloody anal leakages; and weeping men who cry out for absent mothers and wives and children; and cursing men who blaspheme God, wave their fists at an indifferent sky, and burble blood when they cough. There are men who ooze pus from facial and body sores and stink to high heaven; lethargic men who stare listlessly into the cruel, gray sea; mad men who laugh hysterically and dig filthy fingernails into purple, mottled flesh; and dead men, whose bloated bodies roll back and forth across pitching decks until they hit a rail or mast and burst open like piñatas.”
― John Kelly, The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time