In The Great Mortality, author John Kelly lends an air of immediacy and intimacy to his telling of the journey of the plague as it traveled from the steppes of Russia, across Europe, and into England, killing 75 million people-one third of the known population-before it vanished. Or to live in a society where the bonds of blood and sentiment and law have lost all meaning, where anyone can murder or rape or plunder anyone else without fear of consequence. Or to have to chose between your own life and your duty to a mortally ill child or spouse.
But statistics can’t convey what it was like to sit in Siena or Avignon and hear that a thousand people a day are dying two towns away. Many books on the plague rely on statistics to tell the story: how many people died how farm output and trade declined. The plague that devastated Asia and Europe in the 14th century has been of never-ending interest to both scholarly and general readers. The Great Mortality is the extraordinary epic account of the worst natural disaster in European history-a drama of courage, cowardice, misery, madness, and sacrifice that brilliantly illuminates humankinds darkest days when an old world ended and a new world was born.
But in parts of urban Italy, eastern England, and rural France, the loss of human life was far greater, ranging from 40 to 60 percent.“Powerful, rich with details, moving, humane, and full of important lessons for an age when weapons of mass destruction are loose among us.” - Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb The Great Plague is one of the most compelling events in human history-even more so now, when the notion of plague has never loomed larger as a contemporary public concern. The scale of its casualties is staggering:īetween 1347, when the plague arrived in Sicily, and 1352, when it appeared in the plains in front of Moscow, the continent lost twenty-five million of its seventy-five million inhabitants. Seven hundred years after the fact, what we call the Black Death remains the greatest natural disaster in human history.Īccording to the Disaster and Recovery, a Cold War-era study of thermonuclear conflict, of all recorded human events, the Black Death comes closest to mimicking “nuclear war in its geographical extent, abruptness of onset and scale of casualties.” Kelly puts the historical moment in perspective: Some chapters fall into a pattern: “look what these crazy Medievals got up to! Then the plague came.” But the through-line you’re looking for, the story of what the plague did and of what people did when it came, is there. The book is half study of the plague, half tour of Medieval Europe.
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