The Black Death полностью

But by the time that the Genoese authorities reacted, it was too late. The infection was ashore and nothing was to stop it. By the spring of 1348 the Black Death had taken a firm grasp in Sicily and on the mainland.

At this point, with the plague poised to strike into the heart of Europe, it seems appropriate to pause and consider what the epidemic really was and how far it was something entirely new. Today there is little mystery left about the origins and nature of the Black Death; a few points remain to be clarified but all the essential facts are known. But in the Middle Ages the plague was not only all-destroying, it was totally incomprehensible. Medieval man was equipped with no form of defence – social, medical or psychological – against a violent epidemic of this magnitude. His baffled and terrified helplessness in the face of disaster will be above all the theme of this book.

One of the minor mysteries which does still persist over the Black Death is the genesis of its name. The traditional belief is that it was so called because the putrefying flesh of the victims blackened in the final hours before death supervened. The trouble about this otherwise plausible theory is that no such phenomenon occurred. It is true that, in cases of septicaemic plague, small black or purple blotches formed on the bodies of the sick and this symptom must have made a vivid impression on beholders. But if the name of the epidemic had been derived primarily from the appearance of its victims, one would have expected it to have been used at the time. Of this there is no evidence. Indeed, it seems that such a title was not generally heard until the eighteenth century, though similar expressions had often been applied to other epidemics in the past.^{14} The first recorded use of the term for the epidemic of 1348 is in a reference to the swarta döden in Sweden in 1555. About fifty years later it emerged in Denmark as the sorte død.^{15} Cardinal Gasquet believed that, in England at least, the name began to be used some time after 1665 to distinguish the fourteenth-century epidemic from the ‘Great Plague’ which ravaged Carolean London.^{16}

The fact that the title ‘Black Death’ was not used by contemporaries similarly makes it hard to credit those other explanations which attributed the name to a black comet seen before the arrival of the epidemic, to the number of people who were thrown into mourning as a result of the high mortality^{17} or to the popular images of the plague as a man on a black horse or as a black giant striding across the countryside.^{18}

The most likely explanation seems to be that it originally stemmed from an over-literal translation into the Scandinavian or the English of the Latin pestis atra or atra mors. Even in the fourteenth century the word ‘atra’ could connote ‘dreadful’ or ‘terrible’ as well as ‘black’. But once the mistranslation had been established then all the other reasons for associating ‘Black’ with ‘Death’ must have contributed to give it general currency. In France it was once called the morte bleue. The superior dreadfulness of the accepted phrase is obvious and today no other style would be acceptable.

Contemporary records are remarkably consistent in their descriptions of the physical appearance of the disease. The most commonly noted symptom is, of course, also the most dramatic; the buboes or boils, sometimes also described as knobs, kernels, biles, blaines, blisters, pimples or wheals which are the invariable concomitants of bubonic plague. Boccaccio’s description will do for all the rest: