The Historical Context of the Longsword, Part II: The Black Death

"O happy posterity, who will not experience such abysmal woe and will look upon our testimony as a fable."  

                                                                                                   

                                                                                               -- Petrarch.

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Today we will continue discussing the historical context in which the overall art of Longsword fighting was developed by taking a long look at The Black Death. If you'd like to read the first part of this three-part series, "The Historical Context of the Longsword, Part I: The Hundred Years' War," you can find that here. 

Plague victims, though not necessarily of The Great Plague

As a reminder, my goal in discussing the historical context of the Longsword isn’t to do a detailed historical analysis of how specific techniques developed over time, but rather to nestle the art in its own proper time-space. I deliberately want to paint in broad strokes the historical background in which the art developed to provide context for those skills and techniques we now know. The goal in this is to connect the background with the art to perhaps clarify why things are a certain way. One thing I definitely will do, however, is to provide a psychological analysis to help understand the history, and in that way help us understand the art all the better. 

The Black Death -- or, as people would have called it then, The Great Plague or The Great Pestilence -- was, for the people living through it during the 1300s, a cataclysmic event unparalleled in history. It was of such traumatic power that it literally upended their entire social, economic, and even religious environment, the anchors that had grounded their existence and through which they had previously understood everything.

The Plague utterly destroyed the previously predictable world in which these people lived. Though the mid-1300s were certainly neither as stable nor as safe as our modern world, there was still a certain level of reassuring constancy to their lives. The Plague left in its wake an entire continent and several subsequent generations of Europeans unsettled and questioning their entire paradigm. Those questions created a collective internal agitation for something different that would in time lead to the early modern era. (Though I am intentionally not going to discuss the major after-effects of the plague on late-Medieval European society, it is a fascinating subject and one I’d encourage you to investigate more.)

Though the course of the Plague is fairly well known, the process whereby it spread deserves a brief discussion here.  It reached Messina, Italy, in the spring of 1347, brought by twelve Genoese merchant ships sailing back home from the east. Though it was obvious as soon as the ship crews disembarked that they were not well, the true horror of what they’d brought to central Europe with them would not be obvious for several weeks.

Course of the Black Death across Europe

Writing sometime later, Friar Michael da Piazza unknowingly documented what would be the beginning of the Plague throughout Europe:

"At the beginning of October, in the year of the incarnation of the Son of God 1347, twelve Genoese galleys were fleeing from the vengeance which our Lord was taking on account of their nefarious deeds and entered the harbor of Messina. In their bones they bore so virulent a disease that anyone who only spoke to them was seized by a mortal illness and in no manner could evade death."

This virulent disease could present in one of three forms, all of which ravaged Europe at this time in various places. The bubonic variant derives its name from the swellings or “buboes” that appeared on a victim's neck, armpits, or groin. These tumors – which in time would turn from red to dark purple to black – could be the size of an egg to an apple. Although some very few survived this, the average life expectancy after developing the buboes was a week. The second variation, the pneumonic variant, attacked the respiratory system and was spread by merely breathing the exhaled air of a victim. A far more virulent form than its bubonic cousin, life expectancy was in these cases measured in mere days, sometimes as short as two. Finally, the septicemic version of the disease attacked the blood system and was typically fatal in approximately 24 hours.

As is well known, the Plague was carried by fleas who lived on the black rats that thrived everywhere humans lived in this time period. Rats were on the Genoese ships that first brought it from Asia Minor to Italy, they lived in the city streets all across Europe and in the villages, barns, stables, and castles of the countryside. The black rat at this time was ubiquitous, as was the all but invisible flea riding along with it. It was from the bite of these small bloodsuckers that the Plague spread so quickly but also in such a mysterious, all but incomprehensible way to our Medieval forbearers.

We have the luxury of knowing these facts with a cool intellectual distance, one created by time and by the horror of a mass pandemic being entirely beyond our experience. We can understand the vast numbers of deaths, we can recognize these life expectancies after infection are not at all long, but we can’t truly understand this nightmarish horror. However, try to imagine for a moment being a person in an Italian port city, and feeling…

...the slowly dawning terror, the horror, when you realize the deaths occurring in your city aren’t just the natural progress of life, but something else, something entirely new and unknown to you. Perhaps you’d heard that people in some other quarter of the city were dying in droves, but you figured that was over there, on the other side of the avenue, so what did that have to do with you? But then you heard with dread that a family not two streets away had sat down for breakfast together, and by that night they were all dead, having first become ill by vomiting, high fever, pain, and by bleeding from their mouths, noses, and even their rectums.

Fear would now stalk your heart, a fear like none other you have ever felt before. This fear is due in part to the horrors all around you but also because your mind races to understand this tragedy and you are clueless, but also because you feel so trapped. You want to run but you have nowhere to run to, and even if you did you hear tales of entire villages in the countryside being wiped out in a week, the dead left unburied, feasted on now by wolves and crows. Nowhere to run, nowhere to escape your swiftly approaching doom, your mind races and panics.

Then, finally, you notice it. Your spouse and children all now show those dreaded buboes, and you know their time has come. You sit and watch, helpless to do anything at all, as first your beloved children die one by one, gasping for breath and begging you to do something, anything, and then your spouse dies vomiting blood, leaving you all alone in a house full of corpses in a city that has slid into anarchy as all civil order and control begin to crumble.

Then, in your mind-crushing grief, you notice buboes on your neck and groin, and despite your terror, you can’t help but breathe a sigh of relief and sweet release...

Though a purely fictionalized account of the nightmare the Plague was, it captures only a thread of what it was actually like to be in Europe at this time feeling that the world, quite literally and with no hyperbole, was coming to an end. One of the main points I want readers to take away from this blog essay, one thing I think vital to understanding part of why the early Longsword arts developed as they did, was this sense of absolute and utter dread, loathing, despondency, and despair. This was the main psychological effect of the massive death count, together with a world that was now suddenly lawless, while in other places it was a desolate and abandoned wasteland.

There is no better way to capture the hopelessness of the time than to hear from the people who actually lived through it. Perhaps best known of all is the Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio, who lived through the plague as it ravaged the city of Florence in 1348. He wrote The Decameron, a story of seven men and three women who escape the disease by fleeing to a villa outside the city. Though a fictional book, in the introduction Boccaccio gives a graphic description of the Plague's effects on his city.

"The symptoms were not the same as in the East, where a gush of blood from the nose was the plain sign of inevitable death; but it began both in men and women with certain swellings in the groin or under the armpit. They grew to the size of a small apple or an egg...In a short space of time these tumors spread from the two parts named all over the body. Soon after this the symptoms changed and black or purple spots appeared on the arms or thighs or any other part of the body, sometimes a few large ones, sometimes many little ones. These spots were a certain sign of death..."

Boccaccio then goes on to describe how swiftly the disease could spread from person to person, and how quickly entire communities could go from health to death.

"The violence of this disease was such that the sick communicated it to the healthy who came near them, just as a fire catches anything dry or oily near it. And it even went further. To speak to or go near the sick brought infection and a common death to the living; and moreover, to touch the clothes or anything else the sick had touched or worn gave the disease to the person touching..."

A plague soon-to-be plague victim discovers a bubuoe on his leg, presaging his death

Nor was Boccaccio the only one to document these dreadful deaths. Henry Knighton, an Augustinian canon at the abbey of Saint Mary of the Meadows, wrote a history of England from the Norman Conquest to his own time in the late 1300s, and he noted in detail the death toll surrounding him.

"Then the grievous plague penetrated the seacoasts from Southampton, and came to Bristol, and there almost the whole strength of the town died, struck as it were by sudden death. There died at Leicester in the small parish of St. Leonard more than 380, in the parish of Holy Cross more than 400; in the parish of S. Margaret of Leicester more than 700; and so in each parish a great number."

Clearly, there is no way such a massive amount of the sick and of corpses could be managed easily, especially as many people fled at the first signs of pestilence or refused to carry the dead. According to Boccaccio:

"Such fear and fanciful notions took possession of the living that almost all of them adopted the same cruel policy, which was entirely to avoid the sick and everything belonging to them. By so doing, each one thought he would secure his own safety...Men and women, convinced of this and caring about nothing but themselves, abandoned their own city, their own houses, their dwellings, their relatives, their property, and went abroad or at least to the country round Florence, as if God's wrath in punishing men's wickedness with this plague would not follow them but strike only those who remained within the walls of the city, or as if they thought nobody in the city would remain alive and that its last hour had come...One citizen avoided another, hardly any neighbor troubled about others, relatives never or hardly ever visited each other. Moreover, such terror was struck into the hearts of men and women by this calamity, that brother abandoned brother, and the uncle his nephew, and the sister her brother, and very often the wife her husband. What is even worse and nearly incredible is that fathers and mothers refused to see and tend their children, as if they had not been theirs."

People were very often left to the mercy of neighbors or, sometimes, even strangers for care as they died. Sadly, mercy at this time was a scarce commodity. Boccaccio says:

"Thus, a multitude of sick men and women were left without any care, except from the charity of friends (but these were few), or the greed, of servants, though not many of these could be had even for high wages, Moreover, most of them were coarse-minded men and women, who did little more than bring the sick what they asked for or watch over them when they were dying. And very often these servants lost their lives and their earnings...The plight of the lower and most of the middle classes was even more pitiful to behold. Most of them remained in their houses, either through poverty or in hopes of safety, and fell sick by thousands. Since they received no care and attention, almost all of them died. Many ended their lives in the streets both at night and during the day; and many others who died in their houses were only known to be dead because the neighbours smelled their decaying bodies. Dead bodies filled every corner. Most of them were treated in the same manner by the survivors, who were more concerned to get rid of their rotting bodies than moved by charity towards the dead. With the aid of porters, if they could get them, they carried the bodies out of the houses and laid them at the door; where every morning quantities of the dead might be seen. They then were laid on biers or, as these were often lacking, on tables." 

As a result of this avoidant behavior, the dead began to literally pile up, making disposal efforts all the more difficult. All of the chroniclers agree on this vital point.  In the words of a Florentine chronicler:

"(People) did little else except to carry dead bodies to be buried...At every church they dug deep pits down to the water-table; and thus those who were poor who died during the night were bundled up quickly and thrown into the pit. In the morning when a large number of bodies were found in the pit, they took some earth and shoveled it down on top of them; and later others were placed on top of them and then another layer of earth, just as one makes lasagna with layers of pasta and cheese."

Meanwhile, the chronicler Agnolo di Tura "the Fat" writes that in his Tuscan hometown:

"...many places in Siena great pits were dug and piled deep with the multitude of dead...And there were also those who were so sparsely covered with earth that the dogs dragged them forth and devoured many bodies throughout the city."

Poignantly, elsewhere di Tura wrote, "I...buried my five children with my own hands."

Finally, Boccaccio has this to add about the nightmarish disposal of the dead:

"Such was the multitude of corpses brought to the churches every day and almost every hour that there was not enough consecrated ground to give them burial, especially since they wanted to bury each person in the family grave, according to the old custom. Although the cemeteries were full they were forced to dig huge trenches, where they buried the bodies by hundreds. Here they stowed them away like bales in the hold of a ship and covered them with a little earth, until the whole trench was full."

Life for the survivors plunged them into a strange new world, one that challenged everything they had previously assumed to be absolutes. According to Knighton:

"In the same year there was a great plague of sheep everywhere in the realm so that in one place there died in one pasturage more than 5,000 sheep, and so rotted that neither beast nor bird would touch them. And there were small prices for everything on account of the fear of death. For there were very few who cared about riches or anything else...Sheep and cattle went wandering over fields and through crops, and there was no one to go and drive or gather them for there was such a lack of servants that no one knew what he ought to do. Wherefore many crops perished in the fields for want of someone to gather them." 

He then went on to say:

"After the pestilence, many buildings, great and small, fell into ruins in every city for lack of inhabitants, likewise many villages and hamlets became desolate, not a house being left in them, all having died who dwelt there; and it was probable that many such villages would never be inhabited. In the winter following there was such a want of servants in work of all kinds, that one would scarcely believe that in times past there had been such a lack. And so all necessities became so much dearer."

The world had changed irrevocably for the survivors. Everything that had once been secure, once been predictable and reliable, was now gone. They literally looked around and saw a devastated landscape, devoid of the human life and vitality it once had.

Boccaccio writes:

"In this suffering and misery of our city, the authority of human and divine laws almost disappeared, for, like other men, the ministers and the executors of the laws were all dead or sick or shut up with their families, so that no duties were carried out. Every man was therefore able to do as he pleased...They thought the sure cure for the plague was to drink and be merry, to go about singing and amusing themselves, satisfying every appetite they could, laughing and jesting at what happened. They put their words into practice, spent day and night going from tavern to tavern, drinking immoderately, or went into other people's houses, doing only those things which pleased them. This they could easily do because everyone felt doomed and had abandoned his property, so that most houses became common property and any stranger who went in made use of them as if he had owned them. And with all this bestial behavior, they avoided the sick as much as possible." 

The suffering of the survivors cannot be stressed too much. In fact, the quote above by Petrarch's suggests the degree was so great that he assumed no one would believe the histories because something so horrible beggared understanding.

The survivors saw their loved ones, friends, families, neighbors, literally everyone they knew, die in most horrible ways all around them, no doubt wondering when their turn would come. They watched as the civil structure upon which they counted for some semblance of security fell apart around them, leaving them exposed to the ravages of nature but also -- and far worse -- to the rapacious natures of some of their fellow survivors. They survived to find a world in which villages were abandoned and given over to nature, where dangerous bands of well-armed ravagers roamed the countryside, where the civil and religious authority upon which they depended for daily constancy was now dead, and where everything they thought seemed to be scythed down, just like the millions who died in the Plague. 

Ole J. Benedictow, Emeritus Professor of HIstory at the University of Oslo, has calculated that the long-standing assumptions of a death toll of 20% to 30% of the European continent is entirely too low. Based upon his recalculations, the numbers are much higher, and in fact are closer to more than half of the entire population. In his words:

"Detailed study of the mortality data available points to two conspicuous features in relation to the mortality caused by the Black Death: namely the extreme level of mortality caused by the Black Death, and the remarkable similarity or consistency of the level of mortality, from Spain in southern Europe to England in north-western Europe. The data is sufficiently widespread and numerous to make it likely that the Black Death swept away around 60 per cent of Europe’s population. It is generally assumed that the size of Europe’s population at the time was around 80 million. This implies that that around 50 million people died in the Black Death. This is a truly mind-boggling statistic. It overshadows the horrors of the Second World War, and is twice the number murdered by Stalin’s regime in the Soviet Union. As a proportion of the population that lost their lives, the Black Death caused unrivalled mortality...A historical turning point, as well as a vast human tragedy, the Black Death of 1346-53 is unparalleled in human history."

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I have endeavored in this entry to really stress the unimaginable, indeed almost indescribable horror, that the Plague was for people. It is a terror utterly beyond our understanding and one that had long-lasting effects not just on the people who survived the Plague itself, but indeed on several subsequent generations of Europeans. 

Like I said earlier, these historical context essays are not designed to deconstruct the entirety of the collective Longsword arts and precisely trace how they developed; that was never my intention with these. However, in regards to the Plague, I believe we can see at least one very important thread related to how the early Longsword fighting art developed.

First of all, remember that, according to Wiktenauer, the Longsword was "used...approximately 1350 to 1550," meaning the average early time frame in which it was commonly in use was in the midst of the Plague. Also, note that the same article on the Longsword states "with early...use reaching into the 13th" century. This means that, to a lesser extent, the Longsword was available and a somewhat likely weapon to encounter even before the Plague. Therefore, we can comfortably assert that its use was inherently affected by the Plague given the fact that it existed prior to the first illness and that it became more common during the midst of The Black Death. 

So it evolved as a weapon due to the radically new environment the Plague created. But how?

To answer the "how?" question more fully, we first need to recall the horror I stressed in regards to the survivors, together with the terribly uncertain and unsafe world these survivors suddenly found themselves scrounging to exist in. Also recall that once the Plague ended it wasn't like people just dusted themselves off, said "Well, that was a bother!" and carried on as if nothing had happened. No, as I've said several times now the Plague effected numerous subsequent generations of Europeans in the decades after the Plague. (This is complicated by the fact that the Plague was never the only plague to ravage medieval Europe, with several more following in the succeeding years, though it was by far the worst; for the sake of simplicity, however, we will just focus on this as if it is a single-event phenomenon.)

Historical events have resonance. When we look at history we make this terrible mistake of assuming that just because something happened X-number of years before something else it had no effect on the people of that era. This is ridiculous foolishness because we can verify this is not the case in our own modern experience. 

I find it somewhat ironic that I started to write this on September 11, a date that also "lives in infamy" here in America. Certainly the events of that dreadful day, though 17 years past, has a powerful resonance with us now. The trails and tribulations of the 1960s, though some 50 years ago, resonate with us still. As of this writing, it is a whole 73 years since the end of World War II. Does that event not still have resonance in this modern era? In recent years we could even say its resonance has been felt more than ever given an apparent resurgence in appalling political mindsets not unlike that of the Nazis. Indeed, the Civil War, now more than 150 year past, still resonates with us on an almost daily basis.

For more clarification, here is an excellent example of how one event fairly far distant in time from another, events that seem unrelated, actually are: The Franco-Prussian War was fought from July 1870 to January 1871. It was a swift and humiliating defeat for France, one that led to an intense hatred and lust for revenge, called Revanchism, directed towards the new unified, strong state of Germany. So, when France then found itself on the winning side during World War I, it saw to it the 1919 Treaty of Versailles was as punitive and humbling as possible for the Germans. However, it was in part due to those harsh conditions that radical parties, such as the National Socialists, became so popular in the 1920s, and therefore helped lead to World War II. It was 48 years from 1871 to 1919, then an additional 20 years before the second outbreak of war in 1939, yet through all this time the history resonated unerringly from one event along a clear line to the other. 

So, based upon our own experiences and the lessons from the recent past, we can safely assume that an event as devastating, horrifying, and calamitous as the Plague, had a massively resonating after-effect. Even as the years moved on past those of the Plague, even once it appeared that death no longer stalked the land with impunity, the intergenerational psychological trauma caused by the Plague entered the deepest niches of people's psyches. The world was looked at suspiciously, as a vastly less predictable and secure place (even by 14th century standards), and random people were seen as threats.

Given that the Longsword was a commonly used civilian weapon during the mid- and late-1300s, it can safely be assumed that as people went about suspiciously into their dangerous new world to confront people whom they naturally assumed would be hostile, they would want to use that sword in as quick and forceful a way as possible. They would need moves to be simple and direct, they would want attacks to be decisive and effective, and, of paramount importance, they would want to kill or incapacitate one combatant as effectively as possible because there might be others rushing from behind or the sides.

This is the precise overarching tactical mindset that we see in extant early texts. The fear, dread, and loathing caused by the Plague resonate still in the hyper-violent and aggressive style we are able to practice to this very day. We are taught to seize the Vor and to attack the first opening available. Why? Because we might be fighting for our lives and quickly outnumbered if we tarry. We are told to ignore the opponent's sword and instead strike without fear, because our sword will displace theirs and strike home to the head. Why? Again, for the same reason.

The trauma of the years after the Plague resonate still in our art, and whispers to us gently through these texts.

Clearly, there were other applications of the Longsword than as a civilian weapon. This was a knightly weapon that could be used in judicial combat, as well as a battlefield weapon should one's poleaxe get displaced. Yet it is in the aggressive, direct, and swift dispatching of one's opponents in the civilian context that we see the shadowy after-effects of the Plague. It's effect became folded into the use of the Longsword, almost like layers of steel folded into the blade itself. 

And please keep in mind that these historical developments and the early post-Plague fighting techniques are not in direct reference to either Leichtenauer or dei Liberi, or any other Master, for that matter. Because these first years after the Plague predate those systems, but not the Longsword itself, we can look at certain aspects of those systems as shadows of the historical context in which the early, pre-treatise Longsword styles developed. 

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OK, folks. I hope you've found this second installment in this three-part series interesting and enlightening. One of the things that has always drawn me to history has been that resonance part I mentioned, and it is so interesting to engage in an activity that holds a bit of resonance with it still, even after nearly 700 years. It makes the intellectual understanding of historical resonance something that comes alive and real in our art, making me love it all the more. I hope you do too.

Stay loose and train hard!

-- Scott

Danse Macabre