The Black Death arrives
The plague kills a third of Europe
In October 1347, twelve Genoese trading ships dock at the Sicilian port of Messina. Most of the sailors aboard are dead. Those still alive are covered in black swellings that ooze blood and pus. The port authorities order the ships out of harbor immediately.
It is too late.
The Black Death — bubonic, pneumonic, and septicemic plague — spreads from Sicily across the Italian peninsula and then north and west across the whole of Europe with a speed and lethality that has no precedent in recorded history. It kills somewhere between a third and half of Europe's entire population in three years. In some regions — Tuscany, the Low Countries, parts of France — the mortality reaches sixty or seventy percent.
The dying takes days. The swellings appear. Fever follows. Black patches spread across the skin. Death comes within a week, often less.
The scale of the dying is so extreme that normal social structures collapse. There are not enough priests to give last rites. There are not enough gravediggers to bury the dead. Bodies pile in the streets. Families abandon their dying members. Entire villages are wiped out.
The church is devastated. The clergy die faster than the general population because they are in closest contact with the sick — administering last rites, hearing confession, visiting the dying. Thousands of parishes are left without priests. The institutional church enters the plague already weakened by the Avignon papacy and the political humiliations of the fourteenth century.
It will not recover its medieval authority.
“So many died that all believed it was the end of the world.”
— Agnolo di Tura, Cronica Senese, c. 1348 AD
“God is our refuge and strength, A very present help in trouble. Therefore will we not be afraid, though the earth changes, Though the mountains are shaken into the heart of the seas;”
The Black Death killed between a third and half of everyone alive in Europe. The scale of it is almost impossible to hold in the mind.
The church that had been the center of European civilization for a millennium — the institution that baptized kings and built cathedrals and ran the universities and cared for the poor — lost most of its clergy in three years. It entered the plague at the height of its medieval power and emerged from it permanently diminished.
And yet the faith survived. The individual Christians who stayed to care for the dying — who gave last rites when the priests were gone, who buried the bodies when the gravediggers were dead, who held the hands of the abandoned — they carried the faith through in the same way it has always been carried: by the willingness of ordinary people to stay when everything ran.
The plague revealed what held and what did not. It is still doing that. Every catastrophe is doing that — dismantling what was only apparently permanent and leaving what is actually so.
You are in the middle of finding out what holds. Pay attention to what is still standing.