Chapter 6: The round God is coming (Part 1)
February 1348, the Mediterranean coast of southern France, the city of Marseille
This famous seaport, originally established by ancient Greek immigrants and born long before the Roman Empire, has been bustling for nearly twenty centuries. At this time, it seems to be covered with a gray veil, like a mummy. shroud.
Since those disease-tainted "death ships" from the Crimean Peninsula were put into the port last month due to the kindness of the citizens of Marseille, the horrific Black Death has been like a tsunami. Flooded the city, flooding into every street and alley in Marseille.
——First came high fever, vomiting, coughing and abscesses, then silence and death, and the lingering horrible putrid stench!
Obviously, those medieval European quacks who mostly only knew how to inject blood and bloodletting were unable to treat such an unheard of severe plague. Just after the New Year, the death knell of every church in Marseille began to ring all day long and never stopped. From morning to night, the cemetery is always filled with the cries of the bereaved family members wearing black veils. A priest often has to perform funerals for six or seven corpses at the same time - and this is a treatment only available to the upper class and powerful!
As for the urban lower class and even most of the middle class, the situation is even worse. Most of them stay at home because they have no money, or maybe because they are taking chances. As a result, thousands of them fall ill every day. And because they lacked proper medical treatment and had no one to care for them, almost all of them died. No matter day or night, there are always many people lying dead on the road. Many citizens and their families died silently in their houses, and the neighbors did not know they were dead until the bodies rotted and emitted a stench. In short, in less than a month, the city has become littered with corpses. If the living people nearby can find a porter, they will ask the porter to help carry the corpse out and place it at the gate; if they cannot find the porter, they will They held their noses and lifted them themselves. They did this not out of compassion, but because they were afraid that the rotting corpse would threaten their survival.
At dawn every day, I saw corpses piled at the door of every house. These corpses were put on corpse racks by the gravediggers and carried out. If the corpse racks could not be obtained, wooden boards were used to carry them. A single corpse often contained two or three corpses. It has become a very common thing for a couple, a father and a son, or two or three brothers to be placed on the same corpse - the sudden outbreak of death has made people cry out their tears and almost become numb.
Every day, or even every hour, a large number of corpses are transported to churches across the city. The church cemeteries can no longer accommodate them, especially those from powerful and wealthy families who are buried in their family ancestral graves according to custom. The situation is even more serious. When the cemetery was full, they had no choice but to dig some long and wide deep pits around them and bury hundreds of the remaining corpses. Like cargo piled in a ship's hold, the bodies were all stacked one on top of another in the pit. It was only covered with a thin layer of soil until the entire pit was filled, and then it was sealed with soil.
But in fact, the death knells in churches are still being tolled, and corpses are still being collected in the city. This can be called happiness in this sad era. At the very least, the municipal organs of Marseille are still functioning, and the priests and nobles are still trying their best to maintain order. According to the news from Sicily, the streets are full of rotting corpses with no one to bury them, and the city is being eaten up. Occupied by wild dogs and crows, the whole country seems to have been ruled by death. Even the regent of Sicily fled to the mountains to become a savage - because all his guards, attendants, ministers and knights were all dead!
However, as the plague continued to spread, no one knew whether Marseille would follow in the footsteps of Sicily and be completely conquered by death.
One month after the introduction of the Black Death, not only did the densely populated urban area of Marseille turn into a hell on earth, but as infected citizens fled one after another, leading to the spread of the plague, the countryside of Provence in the suburbs also became filled with disasters (the city of Marseille is the city of Marseille). The capital of the Provence region in France).
Those poor French peasants and their families, if they fall ill in the villages or fields, often end up worse than the citizens - they just fall dead on the road or in the fields without a doctor or anyone to look after them. , or die in front of the home, and then be eaten by wild dogs, without a coffin or even a grave for burial. They died not as if they were a person, but as if they had died of an animal.
In such a desperate world, not to mention surviving, even being able to die with dignity has become a luxury!
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At this moment, on the outskirts of Marseille Port, a funeral was being held in a manor hanging with the red eight-pointed white cross flag of the Knights Hospitaller.
“…our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be your name,
May your kingdom come, may your will come to earth as it is in heaven.
Give us today our daily bread.
Forgive us our sins as we forgive our enemies.
May we stay away from temptation and deliver us from evil.
Because the kingdom, the power, and the glory all belong to you.
Until forever, Amen! ”
Accompanied by the melodious hymns of the church choir, a tired and haggard priest in black presided over the funeral ceremony with a dull expression. Perhaps because he had witnessed too many deaths in recent days, his mental state seemed to be very bad, and he mispronounced sentences several times without realizing it. However, the relatives of the deceased who attended the funeral did not care - at this moment, it is very, very good to have a decent funeral and have a group of people come to watch the ceremony at the risk of getting sick. Really couldn't ask for more.
You know, many of the deceased people who were once famous were often not even present at the moment they died. Because the living people had to avoid the infection of the plague, family ties and friendships were torn apart by death. So in the end, everyone avoided me and I avoided you; no one in the neighborhood cared about anyone else's business. Once someone is sick, or even just rumored to be sick, relatives and friends immediately cut off contact with each other, and even if they rarely talk to each other, they stay far away. It is common for older brothers to abandon their younger brothers, uncles to abandon their nephews, sisters to abandon their brothers, and even wives to abandon their husbands. The most unbelievable thing is that some parents refuse to take care of their children, as if the children were not born by themselves.
Closer to home, in front of the haggard priest, Diderot lay in a rough-looking oak coffin. Bacon Knight's body.
Just last week, the Knights Hospitaller's resident agent in the port of Marseille was as strong as a bull, able to drink heavily and tell jokes loudly. But since he unfortunately fell ill five days ago, poor Master Diderot immediately became swollen and bruised, and lost weight at a speed that could be seen with the naked eye. When he died, almost only a set of bones remained, except for Except for the people he knew the most, he was unrecognizable.
As heir to the deceased, Livy. Bacon's mood was undoubtedly very sad: a genuine sadness, not a pretentious cry.
——Although he has an identity arranged by the Lord God's system, Uncle Diderot has nothing to say about his cheap nephew. He treats him completely as his own child, giving away all his assets, experience, experience, knowledge and connections. Granted by Nang Xiang... For Li Wei, who has left his hometown forever For the wanderers, this kind of love and care from family is simply beyond the measure of money, and there is no way to repay it too much: To be honest, as a good comrade with integrity, Li Wei really never expected I hope that my uncle will die soon so that he can inherit this family property as soon as possible.
On the contrary, as early as the moment he was alarmed by the Black Death, he began racking his brains to plan countermeasures so that his family could avoid this catastrophe.
However, even as a time traveler, Levi is not omniscient, let alone omnipotent. Facing the Black Death that was coming like a tsunami, and Uncle Diderot lying dying in bed, he was actually as powerless as the medieval aborigines of his time.
Indeed, as a traveler who only knew a little about the history of medieval Europe, Knight Levi had heard the name of the Black Death and knew that it was actually a kind of plague. He also knew that Europe died from the Black Death. I’ve heard a lot of people, but they didn’t remember clearly the specific year when the Black Death broke out, and they didn’t have a deep understanding of how terrifying this plague was. They thought it was probably just like the 21st century. The "SARS" flu was almost the same, so that when the incident came, they were caught off guard - according to the original plot arrangement, they would automatically return to the main god space after fighting the Battle of Crecy, so those who were better prepared The senior people did not pay attention to what happened in French history after 1346...
More importantly, even if Livy knew about the threat of the Black Death long in advance, what would he do? There was certainly no cure for this disease in medieval Europe, and there was also no way to avoid it. Even Norway, the northernmost country, did not escape the invasion of the Black Death. Could he still persuade his uncle to give up the manor and wealth in Marseille Port, as well as his position in the Knights Hospitaller, and hide in the wild mountains and become a savage for a few years?
In fact, as soon as the twelve "ships of death" arrived in Marseille, combined with the rumors of the epidemic that he had heard from the Italians, Knight Levi suddenly realized what he had just woken up from a dream, and immediately started to think. Discuss how to fight the plague with my wife who is also a time traveler.
But soon, the time traveler and his wife discovered in despair that they had no way to deal with the menacing Black Death - the sanitary conditions in this place were so poor that it was normal for plagues to break out every now and then. , it is a miracle that I have never been sick or suffered any disaster!
There is no way, the sanitary conditions in most European cities these days are quite poor. In Europe in 1348, pigs were running on the streets in London, Paris and Rome, and chickens and geese were walking and defecating, not to mention second-rate cities like Marseille.
In Marseille, only the busiest squares and commercial streets in the city are paved with cobblestones, while other roads are smelly mud. There is mud, garbage and feces everywhere, rotting animal carcasses can be seen everywhere, everyone defecates on the roadside, and residents dump urinals directly from the window into the street, as if the city has turned into an oversized hut. Relics from the ancient Roman Empire The road system has long been clogged, and sewage flows into the streets when it rains. Pedestrians have to walk on super high heels like stilts - such a dirty city is simply a paradise for rats, cockroaches and fleas, and of course it is also a breeding ground for all kinds of diseases. The perfect seedbed for a plague!
Moreover, the construction skills of Europeans these days are very poor, so the houses are quite small. The wooden houses in fairy tales can be called mansions. The average poor often can only live in thatched huts. Especially in densely populated cities, due to unscientific planning, most houses have poor ventilation and poor lighting. What's even worse is that the per capita living area is comparable to the "pigeon cage" of Hong Kong in later generations. Even in noble houses in the city, many people often live in one room. As for middle-class and poor families, seven or eight people might be crowded into one bed, and they don’t know what they should do at night to create offspring. Some families don’t even have beds, and the whole family can only sleep on piles of moldy straw...
What’s even more troublesome is that marble and other stone materials in the Middle Ages were very expensive, and the technology for making bricks and tiles has also degraded greatly. Therefore, unlike those Italian city-states with strong financial resources and popularized brick houses, in the relatively poor Port of Marseille, Most houses are made of wood, mud or even hay, so the brave and tenacious mice can easily Break into these fragile fortresses and bring the deadly disease to every household as quickly as possible: In such a miserable urban environment, even if the strictest isolation measures are promulgated, most of them will be ineffective - in the way that medieval Europe did The technical level is pathetic. Even if you can really isolate every patient, is there still a way to isolate every mouse?
Next, the environmental sanitation situation is already so bad, and the personal hygiene situation is equally terrible.
Well, although the real medieval Europeans did not "not bathe for thousands of years" like some disgusting legends. At least things like bathtubs have always existed in Europe in the Middle Ages, but the concept of hygiene at that time was too backward, and many people couldn't afford to take a bath or didn't like taking a bath.
Moreover, with the beginning of the Renaissance, by 1348, Europeans' hygiene concepts had improved compared to the early Middle Ages. Especially after the Crusades, the Arabs' bathing methods and large-scale bathroom construction technology also changed. With the returning Crusaders, it slowly spread to Europe. In addition, the raging Nordic Vikings, while burning, killing and looting, also spread the steam baths (saunas) of their hometown to all parts of Europe... So, starting from the 10th and 11th centuries, Europeans began to slowly A number of medium and large bathhouses were built. By 1292, there were 26 steam baths and ordinary bathhouses in Paris, and there were dedicated waiters who traveled through the streets of Paris to invite guests to take a bath. As the most prosperous port city in southern France and a frontier window for exchanges with Mediterranean countries, the number of bathrooms in Marseille is naturally not small.
But it is undeniable that in the dark European Middle Ages, due to the degradation of technology, there was no ability to build large and complex boilers and pipelines. Compared with the public baths in the ancient Roman Empire, which were so low-cost that even the poor could afford them, the Middle Ages The cost of bathing for Europeans has indeed increased significantly. Therefore, on the eve of the Black Death, the rich and middle-class people who were not short of money could leisurely enjoy showers, bubble baths, steam baths, and even hot spring baths. But most poor people still seldom bathe. From farmers to lower-class citizens, everyone was crawling with lice and fleas, so they often suffered from skin infections, dysentery, colds and other diseases, further reducing people's resistance to diseases.
——In such a filthy and disgusting living environment, there is no such thing as "health" and hygiene. If the delicate "little freshness" and "little fresh meat" of future generations are allowed to live in the alleys of medieval European cities, In a few days, they probably would have committed suicide in grief and anger without contracting the Black Death.
The most fatal problem is that in the face of such a long-lasting situation, even if the Levi Knight can try to push the ruling class of Marseille Port to make up their minds and start to improve the city appearance and strengthen environmental sanitation, not to mention where the necessary funds will be raised, they will encounter How to solve the resistance, it will take at least many years in terms of time... But now that the Black Death has broken out on a large scale, is it still too late to carry out such large-scale construction projects?
I'm afraid that even if the municipal authorities of Marseille Port issue a decree, in such a panic environment, they won't be able to find anyone to implement it!
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Now that it was too late to improve the city appearance and improve environmental sanitation, Knight Levi began to change his mind and wondered whether he could start by eliminating the host of the germs and conduct a pest control campaign to kill rats to stop this disease called the Black Death. The plague spread - this approach also has effective examples. For example, the New China of later generations successfully curbed the spread of schistosomiasis through large-scale eradication of snails. Then, Li Wei discovered with infinite despair that in this miserable medieval Europe, there was actually such a lack of means to eliminate rats!
"... Damn it! Rats have become overrun, but the Roman Church actually declares cats to be evil animals and companions of witches, and organizes a cat-killing campaign across Europe for hundreds of years? Tied the cat to the stake? Burn to death! Is this seeking death? ”