394 THE GLORY OF CHRISTENDOM

SHADOWAND LIGHTNING 395

Perhaps none of the many stories from these nightmare years so memorably
captures the quality of their horror as that of the London ship with a cargo of
wool which arrived in the harbor of Bergen in Norway in May 1349, when the great
plague had not yet reached Scandinavia. The ship entered the harbor, but it did
not tie up at any dock nor come ashore on any beach. It was drifting. City
authorities ordered it boarded. The boarders found every man aboard the ship
dead, and brought the deadly bacteria ashore in their own bodies. By the end of
1350 King Magnus II of Sweden would say: "God for the sins of men has struck the
world with this great punishment of sudden death. By it most of our countrymen
are dead." It was only a slight exaggeration; the death percentage seems to have
been higher in the Scandinavian countries than in any others, with a majority of
all their people perishing. 21
In March 1350 the plague claimed its most illustrious victim: the King of
Castile, Alfonso XI "the Avenger," in camp before the Rock of Gibraltar, the great
Muslim fortress on the site of their first landing in Spain 639 years before. He had
defied the danger of a camp in such times to be with his soldiers, struggling to
take the next step in their immemorial task of liberating their land from the
infidel. The black boils ravaged his body like that of any common soldier; he died
on Good Friday, when his Lord too had suffered. The terrified army raised the
siege, and Alfonso was succeeded by his 16-year-old son Pedro, who was to bring
misery and disaster to his country which would divert it from the completion of
the Reconquest for nearly a century and a half.Z2
In 1351 Pope Clement VI reported that, according to his investigators,
23,840,000 people had died of the plague in Catholic Europe-about 31 per cent of
the total population. In 1353 the plague reached the most remote city in Europe,
Moscow, where it killed Grand Duke Symeon and Archbishop Theognost. After
that, its first visitation was over; but it would return in 1361 to attack those
whom it had missed in its first coming, killing an estimated 20 per cent of the
population in England and Normandy, and in Florence and other Italian cities. It
came again in 1369, killing 10 to 15 per cent, and then periodically every four to
twelve years until the end of the fourteenth century and on through the fifteenth,
with each attack averaging 10 per cent mortality, though not so widespread as
the first plague of 1347-50.z3
All this Christendom survived-and survived without apparent major
wrote in his chronicle: "Many lands and cities were made desolate. And the plague
lasted till -. . . ." He intended to fill in the blank when the plague ended; but
before that happened, he himself was dead of it (ibid., p. 53).
2i
lbid., pp. 57-58.

22
0'Callaghan, Medieval Spain, p. 414; Derek W. Lomax, The Reconquest of Spain
(London, 1978), p. 168; Ziegler, Black Death, p. 114.
23
Gottfried, Black Death, pp. 77, 129-133; Georege Vernadsky, The Mongols and Russia (Volume
III ofA History of Russia) (New Haven CT, 1953), pp. 205-207.
political, social, cultural, or religious change. There were significant economic
changes, though these have often been exaggerated. Self-evidently, the
enormous mortality of the first coming of the plague produced a great shortage of
laborers, and recovery of their pre-plague numbers was long delayed because of
the recurrences of the pestilence. This affected the country more than the city,
because in any case there was a fairly steady flow of population from country to
city, and seems to have led to decline and change in the manorial system in
western and central Europe, so that many more farm laborers worked for wages
or were able to acquire their own land rather than being tied as in the past to the
manors under the complete control of the nobility. But this process had already
begun with the prosperity and urbanization of the thirteenth century, and was no
more than accelerated by the effects of the Black Death. Similarly, social and
political instability clearly increased after the plague, but its sources were
already apparent in the conditions in Christendom before it struck. The plague fed
the instability but did not create it.2°
More significant was the decline in numbers and quality of clergy and
religious, who suffered a higher mortality than the laity in the plague, often
approaching or exceeding 50 per cent. The best of the clergy, who continued to
try to serve their dying fellow Christians despite the danger of contagion, were
most often plague victims. They could not be quickly replaced, and attempts to
speed the process resulted in a sharp decline in the quality of priests. The
episcopacy was affected as well; in 1348 alone, 25 archbishops and 207 bishops
died, most of them undoubtedly plague victims. The Church ceased to supply the
majority of government officials. The universities, which the Church sponsored
and staffed, were hard hit; of the 30 universities in Europe when the plague
struck, only ten remained by 1400. It has been claimed that the disaster
weakened faith because people could not understand how God could have allowed
such a calamity to happen. But this seems to be mostly an argument of skeptical
or agnostic modern historians who think Christian people of the fourteenth
century must have reacted that way because that is how the historians
themselves would have reacted had they lived then; there is little concrete
evidence of this kind of modern fashionable disillusionment after the plague, and
much evidence of a passionate piety that endured and was actually strengthened
by the increased awareness of human contingency aroused by the prevalence of
pestilential death. There were many other causes of the weakening of the Church
during this period-notably the "Avignon captivity" of the papacy before the Black
Death and the Great Western Schism that followed it-but the loss of quality in the
priesthood resulting directly from the

Gottfried, Black Death, pp. 134-145; Ziegler, Black Death, pp. 232-251. Ziegler's discussion in
particular emphasizes the arguments against making the Black Death primarily
responsible for these changes.