Books: The Fourth Horseman

THE BLACK DEATH by Philip Ziegler. 31 9 pages. John Day. $6.95.

THE BLACK DEATH: 1347 by George Deaux. 229 pages. Weybright & Talley $7.50.

The horror was too great to catch and hold with words, but a Welsh poet named Jeuan Gethin set down some measure of it: “We see death coming into our midst like black smoke, a plague which cuts off the young, a rootless phantom which has no mercy for fair countenance . . . It is seething, terrible, wherever it may come, a head that gives pain and causes a loud cry, a burden carried under the arms, a painful angry knob . . . ” The phantom he described was bubonic plague, the Black Death that reached Sicily from the East in 1347 and within three years killed nearly half the population of Europe.

There were other steady-eyed observers who also described correctly the buboes, or underarm swellings, that told of death in five or six days, and the congested lungs of the even deadlier pneumonic form of the plague that killed within two or three days. Gethin’s lament is remarkable because it makes the pain and terror vivid 600 years later. The authors of these two books on the Black Death mention the consistently abstract, numb quality of most contemporary chronicles.

Not that details are lacking; there are too many details, piled like bodies. The Rhone River was consecrated by Pope Clement VI so that corpses could be thrown into it; the living abandoned virtue in one town and sin in another; doctors and clergymen fled and hid at their country estates, or they stayed courageously with the dying and died themselves. Columns of flagellants, convinced by the Death that God had found them guilty, marched through German towns whipping themselves. Jews were accused of causing the plague by poisoning wells and were burned in their ghettos. But the emotions—then as now—can only touch and feel a single death, or the death of an entire family. At the death of half an Italian village, or half a continent, emotion withdraws, and the mind is left mumbling numbers.

Partly for this reason, neither of these new histories is satisfactory. Each uses the same contemporary accounts, though each author clearly senses their inadequacy. Deaux, a sometime novelist who now teaches English at Temple University, is useful only for the material borrowed from the past between quotation marks (including Petrarch’s moving account of the death of his love, Laura, struck down by the plague). Author Zeigler a former British diplomat confronted with the numbness induced by the contemplation of too much death, simply dives into his papers and surfaces with another forty facts.

Still, a patient render can find what he needs to know from Ziegler. He tells the grisly stories—how the Tartars besieged a Crimean port, for instance, catapulating the corpses of their own plague-stricken comrades over the city walls to infect the defenders. But he also writes clearly of dry demography. A deadly series of floods and bad harvests had left much of Europe’s population ill nourished and more susceptible to plague. And he is able enough in suggesting some of the plague’s historic results. It permanently helped weaken the authority of the Catholic Church in a way important to the Reformation: priests had proved unable to protect themselves or their people from what was widely assumed to be God’s vengeance. By lowering the value of land —because there were few workers left to till it—and raising the price of labor, the death toll also helped bring to an end the old system of feudal villenage.