Duration of Urban Mortality for the 14th-Century Black Death Epidemic

Duration of Urban Mortality for the 14th-Century Black Death Epidemic

Olea, Ricardo A

Abstract

The Black Death epidemic of 1347-1351 was one of the most serious catastrophes in human history, yet it continues to be imperfectly described because of the small and often uncertain amount of information recorded and preserved. Analysis of data from 53 cities, with 200 to 120,000 residents, shows a relationship between urban population at the beginning of the epidemic and duration of the epidemic, thus throwing some light on the characteristics of the pestilence. A further relevance of the finding is its utility for estimating and resolving contradictory information. On a first application, we show that the population and fatalities of London in all likelihood were higher than the most widely accepted estimates and that those of Florence and Paris must have been smaller.

KEY WORDS: BLACK DEATH, EPIDEMIOLOGX MEDIEVAL DEMOGRAPHY, REGRESSION.

The alarming appearance of new diseases, the possibility that old diseases may be dormant, and the threat of bioterrorism in today’s world have increased interest in previous large-scale epidemics. The Black Death remains the worst natural disaster in Europe and was one of the most severe catastrophes of any kind in any place (Cantor 2001, p. 6). The Black Death afflicted Western Europe between 1347 and. 1351. It is estimated that, when it was over, the epidemic had killed at least 25 million people, or approximately one-fourth of the population of Europe at the time (Kohn 1995, p. 25; Scott and Duncan 2001, p. 87). By comparison, European fatalities from World War II amounted to 8% of the population (Bardet and Dupâquier 1999, p. 13).

Despite a significance that has led some historians to claim that the Black Death contributed to ending the Middle Ages (Gasquet 1908, p. 232; Ziegler 1969, p. 251; Cohn 1997, p. 1; Cantor 2001, p. 99), the epidemic remains imperfectly described because of the scarcity of chronicles and contemporary records. Although the world in general was a far less bureaucratic society then, other factors contributed to the poor documentation of the epidemic. First, there are accounts of destruction of records. Also, the population was predominantly illiterate; the ecclesiastic clergy and nobility were for the most part the only individuals capable of writing. Moreover, chroniclers devoted most of their efforts to glorifying never-ending wars. The tendency not to talk or write about the Black Death perhaps relates to the fact that, in general, pests were considered a divine punishment. In such a context, detailing the misery of the pestilence must have been regarded as equivalent to documenting the sins the community must have committed to trigger God’s wrath. Finally, the mere chaos produced at all levels by the epidemic was enough to prevent contemporaries from starting or continuing to write about the great mortality.

Learning more about the Black Death has been a slow and difficult task involving research into ecclesiastic records, notaries, royal records, hospitals, tax collections, court records, and municipal archives. Given the multidisciplinary nature of Black Death studies, relevant publications stay highly dispersed and have been written in several languages, including Latin, the official language of the Roman Catholic Church during the pre-Reformation period.

The local duration of the Black Death is one of the many aspects of the epidemic that remains poorly known more than six and a half centuries later. At the simplest level, some investigators consider a fixed time for the duration of the epidemic, such as a little more than 2 months (Guilleré 1984, p. 111), 2-3 months (Chédeville 1983, p. 131), 3 months (Ubieto Arteta 1975, p. 53), or about 8 months (Scott and Duncan 2004, p. 28). Tuchman (1978, p. 93) claimed that, except for the larger cities, the pestilence lasted 4 to 6 months. The objective of our study was to derive a more refined assessment of the duration of the Black Death in terms of urban population. The study was based entirely on a bibliographic search of published literature, an endeavor that is becoming easier with search engines and the Internet. We did not have the time or the financial resources to research the original documents.

Basic Information

The present study is an integral component of a larger effort aimed at the spatiotemporal assessment of the Black Death (Christakos et al. 2005). As part of such a primary effort, we conducted a bibliographic search of printed and electronic sources. We consequently found information about the raging of the Black Death in 531 places. Familiarization with the data led us to suspect that there was a connection between the duration of the epidemic and the size of the populated place. The cities having information for both population size and duration of the epidemic ended up being close to 10% of the original data set. These data are given in Table 1.

Systematic and comprehensive censuses were not part of the bureaucracy of the Middle Ages. The more prevailing practice was to count heads of households, ignoring women and children. Therefore, in addition to the problem of the infrequent counting and the perennial problems of misses and double counts present in any population data collection, there is the problem of converting household counts into total population. Fortunately for us, demographers have been using a few medieval surveys that show the number of people per household to estimate total population counts (Russell 1948; Baratier 1961). Not surprisingly, those conversion factors vary through space and time, which adds to the uncertainty behind medieval demography. The data in Table 1 are atypical in the sense that, except for Florence, London, and Paris, they lack the serious uncertainties of other records. Other than tax records, the information comes primarily from reliable chroniclers, and for England, the data come mainly from ecclesiastic records and court rolls, which on average are the most reliable sources.

Linking the study of the 1347-1351 epidemic to city size has not been an integral part of Black Death research; consequently, information about urban population is commonly missing in the Black Death literature. We looked into; other sources and found some valuable information (Chandler 1987; Bardet and Dupâquier 1997). For our period of interest, Chandler (1987) listed the population of the 100 largest cities of Europe at the turn of each century. Considering that the Black Death epidemic was in the middle of the 14th century, both the 1300 and the 1400 data are about 50 years apart from the beginning of the plague. The 14th century in Europe was a difficult period from the beginning (Tuchman 1978, p. xiv). Famine and war resulted in abnormal population losses that approximately canceled out the increase in population from new births before the Black Death outbreak (Herlihy 1997, p. 39). Hence, in the absence of information closer to the beginning of the Black Death, estimates based on the population in 1300 usually are not as unreliable as they may appear, especially considering how volatile medieval population numbers are.

Relating Population and Duration

An increase in the complexity of the regression line does not lead to a significant reduction in the dispersion. A second-degree polynomial explains 94.01% of the variation. Parsimony dictates that the one-hundredth percentage point increase does not justify using the more complex equation. The remaining variability is a combination of measurement error and variation resulting from secondary effects, most likely geography, social practices, and climate. Note the good mixing of points above and below the regression line for the different countries, suggesting that none of the secondary factors acted systematically at the national level to justify postulating different regression lines for different countries.

Another measure of the linear association between two variables is the correlation coefficient that is related to the degree of dispersion of the points around the line. When data for two variables have a perfect alignment in a cross-plot, there is no dispersion and the correlation coefficient is 1; when the dispersion is at a maximum, the coefficient is 0. Equation (1) fits the data with a correlation coefficient of 0.97, confirming the goodness of the finding.

The regression stayed essentially unchanged with the subtraction and addition of points, a sign of stability. An initial version of Eq. (1) was derived using only 38 cities, in which case the equation coefficients were 2.959 and 0.132 with the same correlation coefficient of 0.97. Elimination of the three largest cities changed the equation coefficients to 3.099 and 0.128 with a correlation of 0.89. As one can see from Table 1, scholars disagree about the populations of Florence, London, and Venice. The equation coefficients obtained using the remaining 50 cities are 3.015 and 0.134 with a correlation of 0.94.

A significant increase in the number of residents certainly implies that more susceptible individuals were in danger of being infected. Yet the duration of the epidemic has been proved in practice and through the help of models (Scott and Duncan 2001) to depend on the number of contacts. Therefore, although our results are not counterintuitive, an etiologic explanation for the epidemic duration for small communities and the rate of duration increase with population size is far from obvious.

In general, duration of the epidemic in regions composed of several villages should be longer than the duration of the epidemic in a city with the same population as the region. Having the population dispersed in several populated places requires extra time for the disease to move from place to place. Actual ground speed for the Black Death ranged from 0.66 km/day to 5 km/day (Biraben 1975, p. 90; Andenmatten and Morerod 1987, p. 31). In addition, for a given ground speed, duration of the Black Death in a large region depended on the urban mixture, topography, and the size, shape, and orientation of the region relative to the direction of propagation of the plague. This was the case in Saint Maurice, in the Valais canton of Switzerland. On the eve of the plague the parish had an estimated population of 1,300 residents. If that population had been concentrated in the village, the Black Death would have lasted no more than 5 months. But only 40% of the people lived in the larger village of Saint Maurice. The remainder of the population was dispersed throughout other smaller villages: 37% in the mountains and 8% in the valley (there is no information for the balance of 15%). Pasche (1998, pp. 127-129) carefully documented a ravaging in the parish lasting 8 months, with the second month of the epidemic, February 1349, being the worst month, accounting for 27% of all fatalities. The case of Saint Maurice agrees with observations by Wood et al. (2003, p. 437) about aggregation in the English archdiocese of Coventry and Lichfield.

Some Applications of the New Regression

Several reasons can explain why recording the end of the epidemic in urban centers was even more infrequent than reporting its arrival (Biraben 1975, p. 103). Equation (1) should help to compensate for such a lack of information in several situations. If the population of a given town is known and either the start or the end of the epidemic is not recorded, then the missing date can be obtained, with a small margin of error, by using the regression. This was primarily the use of the regression in connection with our Black Death study (Christakos et al. 2005). We know, for example, that Genoa was one of the largest cities in Europe, with a population of about 70,000 (Epstein 1996, p. 213) by the time the Black Death started in December 1347 (Vasold 1991, p. 41). Based on that information and in light of Eq. (1), we can now conclude that the epidemic should have lasted for 1 year, until the end of 1348.

If reliable information about the duration of the epidemic is available, the regression can be used to try to resolve some town population issues. Let us examine the case of three of the largest European cities on the eve of the Black Death: Paris, London, and Florence. Medievalists have never been able to come to terms with the population size of Paris right before the Black Death. Estimates range from 80,000 to 200,000 residents (Bardet and Dupâquier 1997, p. 176). Nonetheless, the duration of the epidemic is generally agreed to be close to a year and a half (Deaux 1969, p. 105; Mollat 1977, p. 505). Under those circumstances, our Eq. (1) predicts that the population of Paris should have been closer to 80,000 than to 200,000.

Florence is another interesting case. There is not much disagreement about the duration of the epidemic, which is set to 8 months at most (Biraben 1975, pp. 77 and 103; Cohn 2002, pp. 167-168; http://idcs0100.lib.iup.edu). This duration was typical of cities with 40,000 to 50,000 residents, such as neighboring Bologna and Pisa. This city size, though, is in contradiction to estimates of at least 90,000 residents coming from none other than the reputed Giovanni Villani. In the opinion of Ziegler (1969, pp. 51-52), Villani was misled by his sources, which were primarily based on the number of bread tickets issued during the famine of April 1347. Apparently, corruption was rampant during the distribution, leading posterity to believe that Florence was a larger city than it actually was-an opinion that is reinforced by the 100,000 casualties reported by Boccaccio (Deaux 1969, p. 85). Equation (1) gives Florence a preplague population of about 45,000 residents, a finding that is in agreement with the opinion that Florence reached a maximum population of 60,000 in 1300 (Chandler 1987, pp. 16-18); the population decreased over the next 47 years by 25-50% (Gottfried 1983, p. 46).

In an effort to have an independent assessment of the population of Florence, we compared its city wall with that of Bologna. In 1333 the city of Florence completed construction of its sixth and last city wall, which had a perimeter of 8.5 km enclosing an area of 430 hectares (data from http://www.aboutflor ence.com). On the other hand, the third and most recent wall of the city of Bologna had a perimeter of 7.8 km and an enclosed area of 410 hectares (data from http://urp.comune.bologna.it). It was started and completed at about the same time as the Florence wall. We regard it as highly unlikely that two cities with similar characteristics, in the same part of the country, with the same duration of the Black Death epidemic and almost identical urban areas would have had greatly different populations. In our opinion the value of the population for Florence derived from the scaling law of Eq. (1) is correct: On the verge of the plague, Florence had about the same population as Bologna (i.e., 40,000 residents or 10% more at most).

Finally, we have the opposite case for London. The Black Death is repeatedly and fairly consistently reported to have lasted there at least as long as in Venice-the numbers for which are solid (Gottfried 1983, p. 48; Naphy and Spicer 2000, p. 25)-and Paris (Ziegler 1969, pp. 156-157; Cohn 2002, p. 142). Yet the dominant view is that the population of London was 50,000 residents (Gottfried 1983, p. 64) and that the same number of fatalities was a gross exaggeration by the chroniclers (Britnell 1994, p. 199). Our results tend to support the dissenting view of London historian Derek Keene, who has reached the conclusion that the population of London in 1300 was 100,000 or more residents (Keene 1984, p. 20), making the 50,000 casualties likely. Keene based his opinion on his discovery of irregularities in subleasing and occupancy that created a ghost population.

Equation (1) is a convenient and rigorous way to bring consistency to reported values for population sizes and durations of the epidemic. Note that in all three cases (Florence, Paris, and London) we are just siding with existing opinions of other scholars; our findings did not produce unheard-of new figures.

Conclusions

Despite uncertainty in the scarce data, we have produced a novel relationship between urban population and Black Death duration using a reliable subset of the complete data set, finding that the relationship has a correlation coefficient of 0.97. This simple relationship will allow future estimations of the end of the epidemic for those numerous cases for which only the date for the start is known.

We have used the regression in an inverse way to express the opinion that the populations of Paris and London in 1347 must have been about 100,000 residents each, which for Paris is in the lower part of the range of accepted values and in the higher part of the range for London. Florence was another large medieval city for which the prevailing view of its population is close to 90,000, a population that is about twice as large as the one that is consistent with the duration of the Black Death.

For a large geographic area encompassing several towns, the duration of the Black Death must have been larger than the duration in the largest town because of the travel time required for reaching each populated place at a pace not faster than 5 km/day.

Acknowledgments This work has been partly supported by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) through grants P42 ES05948 and P30-ES10126.

Received 21 June 2004; revision received 11 January 2005.

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RICARDO A. OLEA1 AND GEORGE CHRISTAKOS1

1 Center for the Integrated Study of the Environment (CISE), School of Public Health, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-7431.

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