§ 10. THE LATEK AVIGNON POPES. 99
and his children to exclusion from their abode. It invoked upon him the curse of beholding with his own eyes the destruction of his children by their enemies. ^
During Clement!s^ontificate» 1348-1349^_the Black Death swept over Europe from Hungary to Scotland and from Spain to SwedeUj one of the most awful and mysterious scourges that has ever visited mankind. It was reported by all the chroniclers of the time, and described by Boccaccio in the introduction to his novels. According to Villani, the disease appeared as carbuncles under the armpits or in the groin, sometimes as big as an egg, and was accompanied with devouring fever and vomiting of blood. It also involved a gangrenous inflammation of the lungs and throat and a fetid odor of the breath. In describing the virulence of the infection, a contemporary said that one sick person was sufficient to infect the whole world. ^ The patients lingered at most a day or two. Boccaccio witnessed the progress of the jjlague as it spread its ravages in Florence.^ Such measures of sanitation as were then known were resorted to, such as keeping the streets of the city clean and posting up elaborate rules of health. Public religious services and processions were appointed to stay death's progress. Boccaccio tells how he saw the hogs dying from the deadly contagion which they caught in rooting amongst cast-off clothing. In England all sorts of cattle were affected, and Knighton speaks of 5000 sheep dying in a single district.* The mortality was appalling. The figures, though they differ in different accounts, show a vast loss of life.
1 This awful denunciation runs : Veniat ei laqueus quern ignorat, et cadat in ipsum. Sit maledictus ingrediens, sit maledictus egrediens. Percutiat eum dominus amentia et coecitate ac mentis furore. Caelum super eum fulgura mittat. Omnipotentis dei ira et heatorum Petri etPauli . . . m hoc et futuro seculo exardescat in ipsum. Orhis terr arum pug net contra eum, aperiatur terra et ipsum absorbeat vivum. Mirbt: Quellen, p. 153. See MnWev : Kamj-)/ Liidtoigs, etc., II. 214.
2 Quoted by Gasquet, Black Death, p. 46.
2 Whitcomb, Source Book of the Renaissance, pp. 15-18, gives a translation.
* Knighton's account, Chronicon, Rolls Series II. 68-65.
100 THE MIDDLE AGES. A.D. 1294-1517.
AJarge.4ieji_cjent-af the popula.tk)Ji cf Western Europe ^ell before the pestilence. In Siena, 80,0^0 were carried off ; in Venice, 100,000^ in Bologna, t\vo-thi_rds of the population ; and in Florence, three-fifths. In Marseilles the number \Yho died in a single month is rei)orted as 57^000. Nor was the papal city on the Rhone exempt, ^i^^^ cardina,ls, 70 prelate^, and 17,000 males succumbed. Another writer, a canon writing from the city to a friend in Flanders, reports that up to the date of his writing one-half of the population had died. The very cats, dogs, and chickens took the disease.^ At the prescription of his physician, Guy of Chauliac, Clement VI. stayed within doors and kei)t large fires lighted, as Nicolag IV. before him had done in time of plague.
No class was immune except in England, where the higher classes seem to have been exempt. The clergy yielded in great numbers, bishops, priests, and monks. At least one archbishop of Canterbury, Bradwardine, was carried away by it. The brothers of the king of Sweden, Hacon and Knut, were among the victims. The unburied dead strewed the streets of Stockholm. Vessels freighted with cargoes were reported floating on the high seas with the last sailor dead.^ Convents were swept clear of all their inmates. The cemeteries were not large enough to hold the bodies, which were thrown into hastily dug pits.^ The danger of infection and the odors emitted by the corpses were so great that often there was no one to give sepulture to the dead. Bishops found cause in this neglect to enjoin their priests to preach on the resurrection of the body as one of the tenets of the Catholic Church, as did the bishop of Winchester.* In spite of the vast mortality, many of the people gave themselves up without restraint to revelling and drinking from tavern to tavern and to other excesses, as Boccaccio reports of Florence.
In England, ji is estimated that jone-half of_the population,
1 Quoted by Gasquet, p. 46 s(iq. ^ Gasquet, p. 40.
^ Thorold Rogers saw tlie remains of a number of skeletons at the digging for the new divinity school at Cambridge, and pronounced the spot the plaguepit of this awful time. Six Centuries of Work and Wages, I. 157.
* Gasquet, p. 128.