Chapter 6: The Round God Is Coming (I)

February 1348, Marseille, on the Mediterranean coast of southern France

Originally founded by Greek immigrants long before the Roman Empire, this famous seaport has been bustling for nearly 20 centuries, but now it seems to be covered with a gray veil, like a mummy shroud.

From the moment the disease-stained "ships of death" from the Crimean peninsula were released into port last month because of the kindness of the citizens of Marseille, the terrible Black Death flooded the city like a tsunami and poured into every street of Marseille.

- First high fever, vomiting, cough and abscesses, then silence and death, and a lingering stench of horrible rancidity

Clearly, medieval European quacks, who mostly knew only enemas and bloodletting, were incapable of curing this unheard-of plague. Just after the New Year, the death knell of every church in Marseille begins to ring all day long. From morning to night, the cemetery always echoes the weepings of the bereaved families in black veils. A priest often had to give funerals to six or seven bodies at the same time – and that was the treatment of the elite of the upper classes

As for the lower classes in the city, and indeed most of the middle class, the situation is even worse. They also stayed at home because they had no money, perhaps because they were lucky, and as a result, thousands fell ill every day. And because they lacked proper healing, they were left unattended, and almost all of them died. Whether it's day or night, there are always many people dying on the road. Many citizens and their families died silently in their houses, so that the neighbors did not know that they were dead until the bodies were decomposing and smelling. In short, within a month, the city was already full of corpses, and if the porters could be found nearby, they called the porters to help carry the corpses out and place them at the gate; When they couldn't find a porter, they pinched their noses and lifted them themselves, not out of compassion, but for fear that the rotting corpses would threaten their survival.

Every day at dawn, I saw that the doors of every house were full of corpses. The bodies were then put on a stand by the gravediggers and carried out, and if they could not get it, they were carried with wooden planks. A corpse frame often carries two or three corpses. Husband and wife, or father and son, or two or three brothers put together on a corpse frame, has become a very common thing - the sudden explosion of death has made people cry in tears, and they are almost numb.

Every day, even every hour, a large number of corpses are transported to churches in the city, and the cemetery of the church can no longer accommodate it, especially those of the powerful and wealthy families, who are required to be buried in the ancestral grave of the family according to custom, and the situation is even more severe. When the cemetery was full, they had to dig some long, wide deep pits around it, and bury hundreds of corpses later. Like cargo piled up in the hold of a ship, the corpses were all placed in layers of pit pits. It was covered with only a thin layer of earth, and it was not sealed with earth until the whole pit was full.

But in fact, the death knell is still ringing in the church, and the corpses in the city are still buried, which is already called happiness in this sad era. At the very least, the municipal offices of Marseille were still functioning, the priests and nobles were still trying to maintain order, and according to the news from Sicily, the streets were already full of rotting corpses, the city was overrun by wild dogs and crows that gnawed on the corpses, and the whole kingdom seemed to have been ruled by death, and even the regent of Sicily had fled to the mountains to become savages, for all his guards, attendants, courtiers, and knights were dead

However, as the plague continued to spread, no one knew if the city of Marseille would follow in Sicily's footsteps and eventually be completely conquered by death.

A month after the arrival of the Black Death, not only did the densely populated city of Marseille become a living purgatory, but the countryside of Provence (Marseille was the capital of Provence, France) had become mournful due to the exodus of infected citizens and the spread of the plague.

The poor French peasants and their families, who fell ill in the villages and in the fields, often fell worse than the townspeople—with neither a doctor nor anyone to take care of them, and died on the road, in the fields, or in front of their homes, and then were eaten by wild dogs, without a coffin, or even a grave to be buried. They died not as if they were a human being, but as if they were a dead 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 the port of Marseille, a funeral is being held in a manor house with the flag of the Knights Hospitaller's red and white cross.

“…… Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name,

Let thy kingdom come, and thy will come to earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread.

Forgive us our sins as we forgive our enemies.

May we turn away from temptation and deliver us from evil.

For the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, are all yours.

Forever, Amen"

Accompanied by the melodious chant of the church choir, the tired and haggard priest in black presided over the funeral ceremony with a blank expression. Perhaps because he had witnessed so many deaths in recent days, he seemed to be in a terrible state of mind, and he couldn't realize that he had mispronounced the sentence several times. However, the relatives of the deceased who attended the funeral did not care - it was very, very good to have a slightly decent funeral at this time, to be able to have a group of people come at the risk of contracting the disease at the time of the burial. I couldn't have asked for more.

You must know that many of the once famous dead often did not even have a single person present for the moment of death, because the living had to escape the infection of the plague, so family and friendship were torn apart by death. So that in the end, you avoided me, and I avoided you; Neighbors, no one cares about anyone's business. As soon as someone is sick, or even just rumored to be sick, relatives and friends immediately cut off contact, and even if it is rare to say a word, they are far away. It is not uncommon for an older brother to abandon his younger brother, an uncle to abandon his nephew, a sister to abandon his brother, and even a wife to abandon her husband. The most unbelievable thing is that even some parents refuse to take care of their children, as if they were not born of their own.

To get back to the point, in front of the haggard priest, in a rough-looking oak coffin, Diderot lay out. The body of the Bacon Knight.

Just last week, the Knights Hospitaller's permanent agent in the port of Marseille was as strong as a bull, able to drink and joke loudly. But since he had fallen ill five days earlier, poor old man Diderot was immediately swollen and bruised and emaciated to the extent that he could see with the naked eye, and by the time he was dying, he was almost a skeleton remaining, and he was no longer recognizable except for the most acquainted men.

As the heir of the deceased, Levi. Bacon's mood was undoubtedly very sad: sincere grief, not a pretentious cry.

- Although he was the status arranged by the main god system, Uncle Diderot really had nothing to say about his cheap nephew, and treated him as his own child, and taught him all his assets, experience, experience, knowledge, and connections...... For Levi, a wanderer who has left his hometown forever, this love and care of his family is simply beyond the measure of money, and it is really impossible to repay: to be honest, as a good comrade with discipline, Levi really never expected his uncle to die as soon as possible, so that he could inherit this family property.

On the contrary, as early as the moment he realized that the Black Death was coming, he began to rack his brains to plan countermeasures so that his family could avoid the catastrophe.

However, even as a traverser, Levi is not omniscient, let alone omnipotent. Faced with the tsunami of the Black Death, and Uncle Diderot, who was sick and dying in bed, he was as powerless as his medieval natives of the same era.

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, knew that it was actually a plague, and knew that many people died in Europe in the Black Death, but he didn't remember the specific year of the Black Death, let alone deeply understand how terrible this plague was, and thought it was about the same as the "**" (aR flu in the 21st century, so that when it came to the end, he was caught off guard for a while - according to the original plot arrangement, They would automatically return to the main god space after the Battle of Cressie, so those who were more prepared did not pay attention to the events in French history that were born after 1346......

What's more, even if Levi knew about the threat of the Black Death long in advance? This disease must have been incurable in medieval Europe, and there was no way to avoid it. Even Norway, the far north, did not escape the invasion of the Black Death. Could he still persuade his uncle to abandon the estate and wealth of the port of Marseille, as well as the position of the Knights Hospitaller, and hide in the barren mountains and mountains to 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, the knight of Levi, who had just woken up from a dream, immediately realized that he immediately began to turn his brain and discuss how to fight the plague with his wife, who was also a traverser.

But soon, Mr. Traveler and his wife were in despair, and they had no way to do anything about the menacing Black Death—the sanitary conditions in this place were so poor that it was normal for plagues to break out every three or five times, and it was a miracle that they had not been sick or plagued

No way, the sanitation situation in most European cities has been quite poor these days. In Europe in 1348, pigs roamed the streets of London, Paris, and Rome, and chickens and geese were walking and pulling dung, not to mention second-rate cities like Marseille.

In Marseille, only the city's busiest squares and shopping streets are paved with cobblestones, and the rest of the roads are stinking muddy. Sludge, garbage and excrement everywhere, rotting animal carcasses everywhere, everyone defecating on the roadside, residents dumping urinals directly from their windows into the street, as if turning the city into a king-sized thatched hut, the sewer system of the ancient Roman Empire has long been silted, and when it rains, the streets are full of sewage and pedestrians have to walk on stilts - such a filthy city is a paradise for rats, cockroaches and fleas, and of course an excellent seedbed for all kinds of plagues

Moreover, the construction skills of Europeans were very poor in those days, so the houses were quite small, and the wooden houses in the fairy tales could be called mansions, and the average poor people could often only live in straw huts. Especially in densely populated cities, due to unscientific planning, most of the houses are poorly ventilated, with poor lighting, and even worse, the per capita living area is comparable to that of the Hong Kong "pigeon cage" of later generations. Even in the aristocratic houses of the city, there are often many people living in the same room. As for the middle-class and poor families, seven or eight people were crammed into one bed, and they didn't know what they were supposed to do at night to make offspring. Some families don't even have beds, and the whole family has to sleep on moldy straw piles......

To add insult to injury, in the Middle Ages, marble and other stones were very expensive, and the technology of firing bricks and tiles was also very degraded, so unlike those Italian city-states with deep pockets and the popularization of brick houses, in the relatively poor port of Marseille, most houses were made of wood, mud and even grass, and the heroic and tenacious rats could 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 quarantine measures were enacted, Most of them are also ineffective - with the level of technology in the Middle Ages, even if you could isolate every patient, would there be a way to isolate every mouse?

Then, the situation of sanitation is already so bad, and the situation of personal hygiene is also terrible.

Well, although the real medieval Europeans were not actually "unbathed for a thousand years" as some disgusting legends suggest. At least things like bathtubs have always existed in medieval Europe, but the concept of hygiene was too backward in those days, and many people couldn't afford to take a bath or didn't like to take a bath.

Moreover, with the beginning of the Renaissance, by 1348, the European concept of hygiene was also more advanced than in the early Middle Ages, especially after the Crusades, the Arab bathing methods and large bath construction techniques were slowly introduced to Europe with the returning Crusaders. In addition, the Viking pirates who were rampant in Northern Europe not only burned and plundered, but also spread the steam baths (saunas) of their homeland to all parts of Europe, so from the 1o century and the 11th century, Europeans began to slowly build some medium and large bathhouses. By the past 2 years, there have been 2 steam rooms and ordinary baths in Paris, and there are special guys who walk around the streets of Paris to greet guests to take a bath. As the most prosperous port city in the south of France, as well as a frontier window for exchanges, the number of bathrooms in the city of Marseille is naturally not small.

But it is undeniable that in the dark European Middle Ages, due to the degradation of the level of technology, there was no ability to build large and complex boilers and pipes, compared with the public baths in the ancient Roman Empire, which were so cheap that the poor could afford them, the bathing cost of medieval Europeans was indeed greatly increased. So on the eve of the Black Death, the rich and middle class, although not poor in money, could leisurely enjoy showers, bubble baths, steam baths, and even hot spring baths. But most of the poor still rarely bathe. Everyone from the farmer to the lower class of citizens was littered with lice and fleas, so they often suffered from diseases such as skin infections, dysentery and colds, which further reduced people's resistance to the disease.

-- In such a filthy and disgusting living environment, there is no such thing as "health" and hygiene, and if the delicate "little fresh" and "little fresh meat" of later generations were allowed to live in the alleys of medieval European cities for a few days, it is estimated that they would not be infected with the Black Death, they should commit suicide in grief and indignation.

The most important problem is that in the face of such a difficult situation, even if the Knight of Levi manages to get the ruling class of the port of Marseille to make up their minds to start improving the city's appearance and sanitation, not to mention where the necessary funds will be raised, how to deal with the resistance encountered, it will take at least many years in terms of time...... But now that the Black Death has exploded on a large scale, is it too late to build such a large-scale civil engineering project?

Even if the municipality of Marseille issued a decree, there would be no one to enforce it in such a panicked environment

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Since it was too late to do the work of improving the city's appearance and strengthening environmental sanitation, Knight Levi began to change his thinking, wondering whether he could start with the elimination of the host of the germ and carry out a rat-fighting campaign to stop the epidemic of plague called the Black Death -- this practice also has good examples, for example, the later New China used the method of large-scale eradication of snails, and relatively successfully curbed the epidemic of schistosomiasis.

Then, in despair, Levi realized that in this miserable medieval Europe, there was such a lack of means to get rid of rats

“…… His meow rats have been flooded, and the Church of Rome still wants to declare cats as evil animals and witches' companions, and organize a national cat slaughter campaign in Europe for hundreds of years? Is it death to tie a cat to the stake and burn it to death? What about death? Or will he die? ”

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