Every night we see televised images of bodies being taken from hospitals and stacked in refrigeration trucks before going to overwhelmed funeral parlours. Often people have died without their families present, and even the opportunity to have a proper funeral has been taken away as the world comes to term with death in the ‘age of the coronavirus’.
One of the most disturbing and grim pictures has been the mass grave on Hart Island in New York where prisoners from the local Rikers Island gaol have been digging trenches for the surfeit of unclaimed bodies. Plain wooden coffins are stacked on top of each other by workers in their protective clothing.
This final resting place – known as ‘potter’s field’ – has been used by New York City for over 150 years and contains the remains of the homeless, stillborn babies, soldiers from the civil war and victims of previous epidemics for example the Spanish Flu and HIVAIDS. The name ‘potter’s field’ comes from the Gospel of Matthew in the New Testament (27:3-27:8) and refers to the silver coins that Judas received for betraying Christ but which he threw back at the high priests of Jerusalem before hanging himself. The priests used the money to purchase a field as a burying place for strangers, criminals and the poor. Called Halcedama (meaning field of blood), the site was originally a source of clay for potters from which the name was derived. Normally around 25 bodies a week are buried in the potter’s field on Hart Island but these days it is around 25 per day.
While extremely distressing, these present day images are not far removed from the disposal of the dead during the ‘Black Death’ in the 14th century. The posts this week will focus on how society, religion, art and culture responded to this pandemic – starting with dealing with the dead.
One of the most alarming and persuasive theories of how the bubonic plague spread in the 14th century looks at its ‘passage’ into Europe along the Mediterranean trade routes. In the mid 13th century, Genoese traders established port cities on the Crimean Peninsula (Caffa) and further inland on the Sea of Azov (Tana). These increasingly cosmopolitan outposts provided access from Asia and the Middle East to Europe and beyond. However, the area of these trade centres was under the control of the Tartars who at times supported and tolerated international trade, but at others were opposed to the foreign occupation. In 1343 a fight broke out between the Genoese population at Caffa and the Tartars resulting in a siege of the city by the Tartars. The siege lasted for two years and only ended when the Tartar forces were ravaged by plague which had come from the east. Many of the Tartar soldiers succumbed and, in what has been described as one of the ‘most spectacular incidents of biological warfare’, the plague-infected cadavers were loaded onto catapults and launched into the city. This description, from a contemporary account by Gabriele de’ Mussi (1280-1356) in his Historia de Morbo, is seen as the first contact between the European world and the bubonic plague. De’ Mussi describes the ‘mountains of dead’ and ‘thousands of corpses’ in rotting in the streets of Caffa requiring the digging of mass graves in colonnades and piazzas: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2732530/. Not surprisingly, the Genoese fled the city taking the plague with them and depositing it on their ‘ports of call’ as they returned home.
Within a short time, city after city was ravaged and the daily experience was one of dying, death and grief. Due to the sheer volume of corpses, well-established religious practices and rituals for dealing with dying, funerals and mourning were abandoned by necessity. Corpses were dealt with as speedily and efficiently as possible. Previously, people were able to be buried close to churches which symbolised the spiritual community that survived beyond death but this became increasingly untenable. Now bodies were burned, unceremoniously dumped in mass graves or otherwise disposed of.
(The Great Courses)
The most famous depiction of mass burials in the 14th century comes from the 1350 manuscript of Gilles le Muisis who was abbot at Tournai when the plague broke out. Gilles reports on proclamations made by the Tournai city officials including rules about the depth of graves and injunctions against piling bodies up on top of each other. The image shown above accompanies Gilles’ text and dates to the first wave of plague. It is an image of extraordinary activity. We see many coffins being borne by a range of villagers, including priests, to the pits which are still being excavated to receive more bodies.
In 1348 the Papal Court was located in Avignon. Within three months of the arrival of the plague, 11,000 people had been buried and there was no land immediately available for further graves. As a result, Pope Clement VI consecrated the Rhône River so that bodies could be disposed of there. This seemed a sensible idea as mass burial pits were often frequented by dogs and wild pigs which would disinter and scatter body parts. Unfortunately, the use of the river allowed the plague to immediately infect towns along its length.
In the religious world of the 14th century, it would have been horrifying to the medieval mind to think about being lost to eternity through the inability to die or be mourned appropriately. For those who could afford some form of post-death recognition, we see the development of elaborate burial structures – transi tombs – which will be the subject of a further post.