The Black Death and The Dancing Mania | Page 8

for an hour at sunrise over the pope's palace
in Avignon; a fireball, which in August of the same year was seen at
sunset over Paris, and was distinguished from similar phenomena by its
longer duration, not to mention other instances mixed up with
wonderful prophecies and omens, are recorded in the chronicles of that
age.
The order of the seasons seemed to be inverted; rains, flood, and
failures in crops were so general that few places were exempt from
them; and though an historian of this century assure us that there was
an abundance in the granaries and storehouses, all his contemporaries,
with one voice, contradict him. The consequences of failure in the
crops were soon felt, especially in Italy and the surrounding countries,
where, in this year, a rain, which continued for four months, had
destroyed the seed. In the larger cities they were compelled, in the
spring of 1347, to have recourse to a distribution of bread among the
poor, particularly at Florence, where they erected large bakehouses,
from which, in April, ninety-four thousand loaves of bread, each of
twelve ounces in weight, were daily dispensed. It is plain, however,
that humanity could only partially mitigate the general distress, not
altogether obviate it.
Diseases, the invariable consequence of famine, broke out in the
country as well as in cities; children died of hunger in their mother's
arms--want, misery, and despair were general throughout Christendom.
Such are the events which took place before the eruption of the Black

Plague in Europe. Contemporaries have explained them after their own
manner, and have thus, like their posterity, under similar circumstances,
given a proof that mortals possess neither senses nor intellectual
powers sufficiently acute to comprehend the phenomena produced by
the earth's organism, much less scientifically to understand their effects.
Superstition, selfishness in a thousand forms, the presumption of the
schools, laid hold of unconnected facts. They vainly thought to
comprehend the whole in the individual, and perceived not the
universal spirit which, in intimate union with the mighty powers of
nature, animates the movements of all existence, and permits not any
phenomenon to originate from isolated causes. To attempt, five
centuries after that age of desolation, to point out the causes of a
cosmical commotion, which has never recurred to an equal extent, to
indicate scientifically the influences, which called forth so terrific a
poison in the bodies of men and animals, exceeds the limits of human
understanding. If we are even now unable, with all the varied resources
of an extended knowledge of nature, to define that condition of the
atmosphere by which pestilences are generated, still less can we
pretend to reason retrospectively from the nineteenth to the fourteenth
century; but if we take a general view of the occurrences, that century
will give us copious information, and, as applicable to all succeeding
times, of high importance.
In the progress of connected natural phenomena from east to west, that
great law of nature is plainly revealed which has so often and evidently
manifested itself in the earth's organism, as well as in the state of
nations dependent upon it. In the inmost depths of the globe that
impulse was given in the year 1333, which in uninterrupted succession
for six and twenty years shook the surface of the earth, even to the
western shores of Europe. From the very beginning the air partook of
the terrestrial concussion, atmospherical waters overflowed the land, or
its plants and animals perished under the scorching heat. The insect
tribe was wonderfully called into life, as if animated beings were
destined to complete the destruction which astral and telluric powers
had begun. Thus did this dreadful work of nature advance from year to
year; it was a progressive infection of the zones, which exerted a
powerful influence both above and beneath the surface of the earth; and

after having been perceptible in slighter indications, at the
commencement of the terrestrial commotions in China, convulsed the
whole earth.
The nature of the first plague in China is unknown. We have no certain
intelligence of the disease until it entered the western countries of Asia.
Here it showed itself as the Oriental plague, with inflammation of the
lungs; in which form it probably also may have begun in China, that is
to say, as a malady which spreads, more than any other, by
contagion--a contagion that, in ordinary pestilences, requires immediate
contact, and only under favourable circumstances of rare occurrence is
communicated by the mere approach to the sick. The share which this
cause had in the spreading of the plague over the whole earth was
certainly very great; and the opinion that the Black Death might have
been excluded from Western Europe by good regulations, similar to
those which are now in use, would have all