The great pandemic

This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.

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The bells were silent. To stem the rising tide of fear, municipalities from Wismar to Venice, Pistoia to Tournai, passed laws to prohibit ringing the death knell at funerals or wearing mourning black. In Cairo, one doomed poet likened people’s response to funeral processions to the fear of a gazelle spotting a lion. In Moorish Almeria, a doctor forbade his patients to speak of sad subjects. What could strike such terror into the hearts of people across the known world?

In a majestic new book, Thomas Asbridge, whose earlier work focused on the Crusades, turns his hand to another epoch-defining phenomenon: the Black Death, which killed an estimated 100 million people in Europe, Africa and the Middle and Near East during its most intensive phase, from 1347 to 1353. The plague would return intermittently for centuries, killing significant numbers of people in Europe into the mid-18th century.

The masterful innovation of The Black Death is its focus on individual experiences, detailing not only the deeply distressing personal suffering of plague victims, but even more compellingly how survivors attempted to understand their ordeal and rebuild their lives after the disease receded. Princesses and peasants, obscure merchants and city officials speak (often in their own words) of the capacity of humankind to endure agony and terror and to make their suffering either an excuse for committing evil, or a motivation for acts of empathy and service — and, ultimately, a way towards hope.

Asbridge is especially strong on the plague’s effects on the Islamic world, which has received much less coverage than it warrants. He argues convincingly that the Black Death hastened the collapse of the mighty Mamluk Empire, paving the way for the Ottomans, whose conquests would redraw the world map. He also details the plague’s effect on Jewish communities, which were subjected to pogroms in some places, as desperate people looked for someone to scapegoat.

Although this breadth of geographical and social scope is an undoubted strength, the extensive cast of characters and the non-linear way in which Asbridge tells their stories across multiple chapters may catch the casual reader off guard. A list of dramatis personae is helpfully provided for those who have trouble telling their Djanibeg Khan from their Pignol Zucchello.

The author prudently withholds a discussion of the disease’s pathology and epidemiology until midway, when he chronicles ongoing scientific attempts to understand the plague-causing bacteria Yersinia pestis, its transmission and effects. A growing scientific consensus has nuanced the rat-flea-human transmission route commonly taught in schools, extrapolating from data on the modern plague outbreaks still regularly occurring in Madagascar, Peru and Congo. Asbridge is to be commended for handling the modern scientific material with the same aplomb as the medieval history.

Of course, it is not only our medieval forebears who suffered a pandemic that reduced large swathes of the known world into “febrile, dread-laden confusion”. Asbridge rightly resists making facile connections between the Black Death and the Covid-19 outbreak, choosing instead to focus briefly on his own experience of writing the book (begun in 2017) during the pandemic and his own subsequent recovery from Long Covid. This personal revelation is well handled, adding some additional resonance to the book’s accounts of people rebuilding their lives in the wake of the medieval pandemic.

Perhaps the book’s sole flaw comes in part four, which discusses the long-term effects of the plague. Substantiating its contention that the Black Death directly paved the way to the Reformation by causing survivors to reconsider their relationship to a corrupt and moribund institutional Church is a reach just a bit beyond the book’s grasp. Recent scholarship has done much to counter the all-pervasive myth of a decadent late-medieval Catholic Church declining inevitably towards confessional fragmentation — and indeed Asbridge acknowledges the widespread revitalisation of faith in both its individual and corporate expressions following the Black Death.

It is too bad to see an otherwise splendid book falling into the Reformation historiographical bear trap within hailing distance of its conclusion. Nevertheless, one such overgeneralisation does not dim the star of this otherwise brilliant example of historical writing. The Black Death is a gripping, lucid book which beautifully balances a compelling human narrative with a cutting-edge re-evaluation of everything we thought we knew about the plague. Read it before the next pandemic.