The chapter on Germany examines the religious response (including the Flagellants, which I dealt with in an earlier post and persecution of the Jews). Since France was the forerunner in medical achievement at the time, the chapter on France is mainly about the way in which doctors dealt with the plague and tried to understand it. It’s too long to quote here, but worth looking at. Boccaccio’s Decameron is a collection of short stories supposedly told to one another by a group of people who escaped the plague in Florence by leaving for the countryside, but Boccaccio’s is one of the best descriptions of the signs and effects of the plague and portrays the horror of the Florentines as it took hold of their city. Italian literature has some poignant and eye-opening descriptions of the plague, which Ziegler quotes at length. Ziegler takes each major country in Europe (Italy where the Black Death was first encountered, France, Germany and England) in the order in which the plague reached them and looks at the impact of the plague on them. Although fairly outdated in terms of understanding the causes of the Black Death and how it spread, this is a good synthesis of research available at the end of the sixties. This graphic and harrowing image of the plague pits of Florence appears in Philip Ziegler’s book ‘The Black Death’. In the morning when a large number of bodies were found in the pit, they took some earth and shovelled it down on top of them and later others were placed on top of them and then another layer of earth, just as one makes lasagne with layers of pasta and cheese.

All the citizens did little else except to carry dead bodies to be buried… At every church they dug deep pits down to the water-table and thus those who were poor who died during the night were bundled up quickly and thrown into the pit.

The black death ziegler