Until quite recently it was accepted tradition that the plague scarcely penetrated to Castile, Galicia and Portugal. This is clearly not true, though in general the Atlantic coast of Spain was less severely afflicted than the Mediterranean. The rich of Castile seem to have been peculiarly affected by the urge to give their lands and possessions to the Church in the hope that they might thereby earn themselves freedom from the plague or, at the worst, the guarantee of a comfortable niche in paradise. So far, indeed, did this process go that, when the panic abated, it was found that the economic structure of the country had been dislocated and an altogether undesirable amount of wealth accumulated in the hands of the Church. To redress the balance King Pedro I in 1351 ordered that, where the donors themselves or their heirs could be traced, then the Church must disgorge its gains.
Though Portugal as a whole does not seem to have suffered particularly seriously, the city of Coimbra was devastated. It is said that ninety per cent of the population died – a statistic which need not be believed. But it seems certain that the prior and all the prebendaries of the great collegiate monastery of St Peter of Coimbra perished within a few days, an impressively clean sweep suggesting that the popular tradition may not have been totally devoid of substance.
Dr Carpentier has prepared a map of Europe at the time of the Black Death (reproduced here) showing the movements and incidence of the plague. Virtually nowhere was left inviolate. Certain areas escaped lightly: Bohemia; large areas of Poland; a mysterious pocket between France, Germany and the Low Countries; tracts of the Pyrenees. Certain others were afflicted with especial violence: cities mainly – Florence, Vienna, Avignon – but also whole areas such as Tuscany. A host of factors, some of them still unidentified, played their part in deciding whether any given area should suffer lightly or severely. The inclinations of the rats must have been the most important: a shortage of food in one place driving them on, the resistance of the indigenous rats holding them at bay in another. Climate was certainly significant; it seems that the bacillus of pulmonary plague finds it hard to survive in cold weather. The chance movement of an infected human could sometimes save or condemn a village. Did some people also enjoy a built-in resistance to bubonic plague? Even today the science of epidemiology cannot provide a fully conclusive answer – the problem of where and when a disease will strike next is still unsolved.
But such gradations in horror were anyway of minor significance. Though the density of corpses might vary, the smell of death was over the whole of Europe. Scarcely a village was untouched, scarcely a family did not mourn the loss of one at least of its members. As the shadow of the Black Death passed away it must have seemed to those who survived that recovery could never be a possibility.
THE England of 1348, politically and economically, was not in so frail a state as some of the countries on the mainland of Europe. Indeed, viewed from France, it must have seemed depressingly prosperous and stable. Since Edward III had routed Queen Isabella and the Mortimers at the end of 1330 he had bestridden the narrow world of England, if not like a Colossus, then at least as a figure considerably larger than life. He managed to combine the charismatic appeal of a
