February – March 1348
Languedoc, February – March 1348
In the winter of 1347–1348 the plague spreads west from the Rhône into Languedoc. Louis Heyligen tells of a galley driven out of Marseille that leaves the sickness wherever it puts in along the coast. On land it travels the Via Domitia, the road that the Romans built from Italy to Spain, which still carries the traffic between Provence, Languedoc and Catalonia. Montpellier, Béziers and Narbonne have it in the first months of 1348. At Narbonne the roads divide. One leads south to Perpignan and Catalonia, the other west to Carcassonne, which has the plague by January 1348, and on to Toulouse, which has it by April.
The paving of the Via Domitia, uncovered in the centre of NarbonneWikimedia Commons, Didier Descouens, CC BY-SA 4.0 (Via Domitia (Narbonne).jpg)
Montpellier has one of the great medical schools of Europe, and its masters are among the first to write about the new sickness. One of them, who does not give his name, writes in 1349 that it passes through the air from the eyes of the sick to anyone who looks at them.
Perpignan is the chief town of Roussillon, which King Peter IV of Aragon took from the king of Mallorca in 1344. The historian Richard Emery has read the registers of its notaries, who wrote down the town’s loans, sales and wills. Moneylenders make 25 loans in February 1348 and more in March, but after mid-April they make almost none until August. Of about 125 notaries and scribes at work before the plague, only about 45 appear in the records after it. Most of the town’s physicians vanish from the records too.
The walls of the Cité of Carcassonne at the Aude Gate, restored in the 19th centuryWikimedia Commons, Lynx1211, CC BY-SA 4.0 (Cité de Carcassonne – Porte d’Aude.jpg)
Sources
- Richard W. Emery, “The Black Death of 1348 in Perpignan”, Speculum 42 (1967), 611–623.
- Treatise of a practitioner of Montpellier (1349), in Rosemary Horrox, The Black Death (1994).
- Ole J. Benedictow, The Complete History of the Black Death (2021).
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