The Deadliest Sin

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The English say that April is the best month to make a pilgrimage. Once winter is over, the roads and tracks become passable again. The skies lift and the days draw out. People begin to grow restless.

But this particular spring, in the year of Our Lord 1348, was different from other springs. True, the days were growing lighter and longer as they always do, yet the people of England were not so much restless as terrified.

For a time at the end of the previous year it had been possible to ignore the rumours as mere invention, stories created to frighten children. Extraordinary tales were coming out of the east, tales of poisonous clouds that overwhelmed whole cities and even countries, with scarcely a human being left alive to tell the horrors he had witnessed. But because there were often reports of fantastical things out of the east it was not so hard to dismiss these new alarms.

Then the accounts of mass dying began to arrive from nearer at hand. The cloud of pestilence reached out of the Levant and crept round the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, from Greece to Sicily to Genoa. According to some, it had already taken hold of the port of Marseilles and the city of Aix and even Avignon, the seat of the Pope. His Holiness commanded penitential processions and prayers, to no avail. The citizens of that holy site fell as rapidly as the inhabitants of the most pagan places beyond Christendom.

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