The name of the Black Death

In the years 1346–1353, a terrible disease swept over Western Asia, the Middle East, northern Africa and Europe, causing catastrophic losses of population everywhere, both in the countryside and in towns and cities. In Florence, the great Renaissance author Francesco Petrarch wrote, dumfounded, to a friend: ‘O happy posterity, who will not experience such abysmal woe and will look upon our testimony as a fable.’ It wrought such havoc among the populations that it earned, it seems, eternal notoriety as the greatest-ever demographic disaster. Because it was far more mortal and terrible than anything people had heard or read about, the memory of the disaster entered folklore and the writings of the learned alike. Thus, Petrarch erred in his belief that posterity would shrug off the accounts of the havoc it wrought as tall stories.

Many centuries later, Europeans began to call it the Black Death, a name that since has become the usual frightening name of this epic epidemic. The reason for this is probably a misunderstanding, a mistranslation of the Latin expression atra mors, in which atra may mean both terrible and black. It has nothing to do with clinical symptoms or features, as persons seeking a rational explanation for this graphic term often believe.

However, Simon of Couvin (Simon de Covino), a contemporary Montpellier-trained physician and astrologer working in Paris, wrote an account in Latin classical verse of this disastrous epidemic, where he calls it ‘mors nigra’, literally the Black Death. He does not suggest that the diseased developed black colouring of any part of the body. He characterizes the disease clinically by stating that ‘burning pain is thence [from the intestines] often born in the groin’, evidently referring to the usual femoral–inguinal location of buboes and their extreme painfulness. However, no contemporary came up with a similar graphic name or was inspired by Simon of Couvin’s use, and it remained an isolated case in the late Middle Ages, and much later. It should be seen as an individual poetic inspiration of a metaphor to characterize a disastrous and gruesome disease. The name ‘Black Death’ emerged episodically in the seventeenth century and slowly gained more frequent usage; in English historiography it was used for the first time in 1823, in Spanish historiography in 1833.