Black Death (the Great Plague of 1348–1349)

The Black Death (the Great Plague of 1348–1349) swept through a France already battered by war and social upheaval, killing a third of Europe and adding epidemic loss to a wider crisis. Its recurrence, and the images used to represent it, made plague a defining presence in the book’s portrait of a country under sustained pressure.

Outbreak Amid a Wider Crisis

The plague struck in 1348–49, after France had suffered military defeat and the capture of King Jean in the Hundred Years’ War. The country then faced civil war, rebellion among nobles, peasant uprisings, factional violence in Paris, chronic drought, and crop failures. The plague compounded these hardships: corpses lay unburied in fields and accumulated in the streets, a public landscape of loss that accompanied the disruption of political and social order.

Recurrence and Representation

The epidemic did not end with its first devastating passage. It returned roughly every decade, bringing renewed mortality. Artists of the time pictured Death as a shrouded skeleton wielding a great scythe; in plague-stricken villages, black warning flags flew from belfries. These images gave visible form to the threat and to the sense that catastrophe had become recurrent rather than exceptional.

Historical Significance

In the book’s account, plague belongs to a sequence of crises that made France’s insecurity seem nearly inescapable: war, internal violence, failed harvests, and repeated waves of disease. The suggestion that God had abandoned the country captures the religious despair associated with this accumulation of suffering. The Black Death thus figures not only as a devastating epidemic of 1348–49 but also as the beginning of a recurring ordeal woven into the history of a destabilized kingdom.