The Reaper turned slowly to face him. Death’s once-vacant eye sockets were now filled with hundreds of fluttering eyes. The curved olive green blade of his scythe dripped fresh blood.
Shep’s throat constricted in a vise. His muscles locked up.
A gust of foul wind cooled the soggy earth. A crack of purple lightning rippled across the spinning heavens.
Darkness reached for Patrick Shepherd, pulling him toward Hell…
Lost Diary: Guy de Chauliac
The following entry has been excerpted from a recently discovered unpublished memoir, written by surgeon Guy de Chauliac during the Great Plague: 1346–1348.(translated from its original French)
The Angel of Death walks among the living, sent by God to destroy us. That these are the End of Days, I have no doubt, for I have borne witness to the very evil that has summoned the Reaper to oversee our demise.
To what evil do I speak? The murder of innocent children. The burning of thousands of victims at the stake. The inhuman slaughter of an entire sect of people.
The blasphemy of our actions is as audacious as our denial of the sin.
That I am recording these thoughts to paper endangers my being as much as my daily exposure to the pestilence itself, yet I am compelled to render the words, if only to save my own soul from the Hell that awaits.
History has not been kind to the Jew — a resilient yet despised people who have been abused and slaughtered since the time of the Pharaohs and through the subsequent rise and fall of the Roman Empire. During the seven centuries that followed, hatred demonized itself into a new kind of persecution — the pogrom. In what can only be described as an almost erotic form of massacre, Christian crusaders would raid Jewish communities in the middle of the night, dragging innocent men, women, and children from their homes by the hundreds. Family members were forced to watch the mutilation and burning of parents and siblings — acts so horrendous that some Jewish men chose to kill their own wives and children rather than see them face the horrors that awaited them outside.
Unable to travel freely or acquire land, Jews turned to the profession of money-lending, an act restricted by canon law to Christians. High interest rates brought more hatred upon the Jews, who were forced into alliances with kings, bishops, and governing councils for protection. In France, this hatred was manifested by the Parisians’ infamous “Trial of the Talmud” in 1240, the mass expulsion of Jews in 1306, and the pogroms that followed the Great Famine, an era that preceded the plague we now face.
It was around the time of the Great Famine, in the spring of 1320, that a band of shepherds, the Pastoureaux, assembled in southwest France along the banks of the Garonne River. Desperation breeds fear, fear manifests into hatred, and the Jews were easy targets. Recruiting more pagans and peasants, the shepherds marched to Toulouse, killing every Jew they could find. When the movement’s leaders were captured, they were set free by the monks, who pronounced their escape “divine intervention.”
The killing spree continued, the evil spreading like plague. When it was finally over, the Pastoureaux had wiped out over one-hundred Jewish communities in the south of France, Spain, and Catalonia, brutally murdering more than ten thousand innocent people.
Though the Pastoureaux were eventually arrested, the crops continued to fail and the populace to starve, bringing more hatred upon those who had acquired the financial means to survive. In 1321, a rumor spread about an alleged plot involving the use of lepers to poison the wells in southern France, an attempt to overthrow the crown. When word reached Philip V, the king ordered mass arrests. Lepers who confessed were burned at the stake, those who pleaded their innocence were tortured until they confessed, then they, too, were burned at the stake.
Naturally, the lepers’ wealth was confiscated by the crown.
If the vast treasures accumulated by the lepers made them enticing targets, then so, too, did the wealth of the Jews. By Holy Week, conspiracy rumors had expanded to include the Jews as coplotters, and eventually the Muslims.
The killing began anew. In Toulon, one-hundred-and-sixty Jews were marched into a bonfire. In Vitry-le-Francois, another forty Jews slit their own throats before their Christian torturers could reach them.
On April 26, a cosmic event took place in France that sealed the Jews’ fate. Over a four-hour period, the afternoon sun was blotted from the sky as if engorged in blood. (Editor’s note: solar eclipse) Convinced the day of doom was upon them and that the Jews were to blame, another series of pogroms was unleashed, with every Jewish soul living in France either exterminated or imprisoned.
I was but a young man during the Great Famine, my early years spent on my parent’s farm in Languendoc, pushing a plow. The violence that spread through southern France was appalling, still I turned a blind eye to it, for what else could I do, other than thank the Almighty that I wasn’t born a Jew.
Then one day, as fate would have it, I witnessed a young noblewoman tossed from her horse. The wounds were severe, her left leg broken. I was able to stop the bleeding and set the bone so that it healed properly. Months later I was paid a visit by her father — a moneylender and Jew. In gratitude for saving his daughter’s leg and perhaps her life, her father agreed to pay for my medical education. I immediately enrolled in Bologna, where I studied anatomy and surgery… my course in life having been significantly altered by an act of kindness, my indifference to the plight of the Jews — and any oppressed people changed forever.
All of which brings us back to the plague.
It came as no surprise when blame for the Black Death was eventually assigned to the Jews. In point of fact, one of the reasons I have worked so feverishly to find the cause of the mortality was to forestall this inevitability.
Though expected, the ferocity of the attacks on the Jewish community has left me sickened and stunned.
Like the pogroms of the past, the first massacre occurred during Holy Week. On the night of Palm Sunday, April 13 past, the Christian locals in Toulon raided the Jewish quarter, dragging family members from their beds. Homes were torched, money and valuables stolen, the Jews butchered in the streets, their naked bodies dragged through the village.
From Toulon, the pogrom spread as fast as the plague. Massive bonfires exterminated entire Semitic villages. In some cases, Christians offered to spare Jewish infants by baptizing them, but their mothers refused to turn against their faith and leapt into the fire, clutching their children in their arms.
By Easter, a new “fear” was spread throughout France, this one stating that Jews had caused the plague by poisoning the wells and springs. Though similar to the stories of 1321, the rumor was given further validity when it was reported that authorities in Chillon, Switzerland, had tortured confessions from a few of their Jewish villagers, linking a local Jewish surgeon and his mother with creating the plague poison.
As I pen this entry, a terrible cycle of evil runs rampant throughout Europe. By blaming the outbreak of plague on the Jew, the populace has acquired a Satanic sense of empowerment. Instead of feeling helpless, they feel proactive, believing their village might be spared if every Jew in the region is butchered. That Jews are also dying of plague makes no difference to these angry mobs, for even if innocent, the death of a moneylender carries with it the added benefit of erasing the killers’ debt.