April – May 1348
Mallorca and Catalonia, April – May 1348
In spring 1348 the plague reaches the lands of King Peter IV of Aragon. It comes south from Perpignan along the coast road, and by sea to the islands and the harbours. Palma on Mallorca has it in the spring, and Barcelona and Valencia by May. At Valencia the nobles of the Union, who are in revolt, hold the king, and when the plague breaks out he uses the confusion to get away.
The Mediterranean on the Catalan Atlas, drawn at Palma by Cresques Abraham about 1375Wikimedia Commons, Cresques Abraham, Public domain (1375 Atlas Catalan, Europe 02.jpg)
That spring brings the first killings of Jews. At Toulon in Provence, on the night of Palm Sunday, 12 to 13 April 1348, townsmen break into the Jewish street, plunder the houses and kill 40 people. On 17 May a crowd in Barcelona attacks the Call, the Jewish quarter, and kills about 20 people. King Peter orders the attackers arrested a few days later. In July the killing spreads inland to Tàrrega, where about 300 Jews die. Archaeologists found their mass graves outside the town in 2007.
Jews leaving a synagogue in the Sarajevo Haggadah, made in Catalonia about 1350Wikimedia Commons, unknown illuminator, Public domain (Sarajevo Haggadah.png)
At Lleida, in April 1348, Jacme d’Agramont, a master of medicine at the town’s university, writes a short guide for the town councillors before the plague arrives. His Regiment de preservació, a rule for protection against epidemics and pestilence, is the first known tract on the plague of 1348 and the first medical work written in Catalan. It explains the pestilence by corrupted air and the stars, and it urges the town to keep its streets clean. When the plague reaches Lleida, Agramont is among the first to die of it.
Sources
- Jacme d’Agramont, Regiment de preservació a epidèmia o pestilència e mortaldats (Lleida, 24 April 1348), edited by Joan Veny (1998).
- David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (1996).
- Anna Foa, The Jews of Europe after the Black Death (2000).
- Anna Colet and others, “The Black Death and its Consequences for the Jewish Community in Tàrrega: Lessons from History and Archeology”, The Medieval Globe 1 (2014).
- Ole J. Benedictow, The Complete History of the Black Death (2021).
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