816 pandemics and epidemics: Europe The seal of the Hospital of Saint Mary Magdalene, one of five houses for leprosy patients in London; ca 1500 (© Museum of London) that as many as 10,000 people a day died in Constantinople at the height of the outbreak, and modern scholars estimate that as many as 20 million may have died in Mediterranean Europe as a whole during the Justinian Plague The disease recurred several times over the next 60 years, with millions more fatalities The Black Death may also have reached Europe via Constantinople, although information is scarce According to one story, three galleys with traders returning from the Crimea arrived in Genoa in January 1347 When the Genoese discovered that sailors aboard had the plague, they drove the ships out of port, but it was too late to stop the rats from coming ashore The galleys then sailed for France, carrying the plague with them to their new ports of call In December 1347 half the cardinals in the papal city of Avignon died The disease then spread throughout Europe, with England’s first reported case occurring in the Dorset port of Melcombe Regis in September 1348 Irrational reactions to the Black Death began with the church’s insistence that the plague had been sent as pun- ishment for evil The superstitious and gullible, making up much of the populace, unable to see any other explanation, easily accepted their sins as the reason for the horrors The cult known as Flagellants turned their religious fervor into action against themselves in an effort to be cleansed from sin and plague Groups traveled the roads for 33 days at a time, scourging themselves and loudly praying for forgiveness Although the Flagellants were a small movement, Pope Clement VI became concerned about their fervor and their apparent independence from the church’s authority In October 1349 he ordered prelates to suppress any Flagellant demonstrations, and the movement waned In their hysteria people began to fix blame on others Women were accused of witchcraft and inflicting the plague on innocent victims In Spain, Arabs were blamed for spreading the disease No group, however, suffered more than the Jews In the south of France in 1348, Jews were accused of poisoning the water, and many were killed Later that year Jews in Neustadt, Germany, were tortured until they confessed to contaminating wells In October and November, Jews were burnt at the stake, shut into buildings that were then set afire, and massacred by other means throughout Germany Pope Clement VI tried to halt the persecution through several decrees and by threatening excommunication of participants in the killings He rationally pointed out that Jews were dying of the plague in equal proportion to gentiles, but his pleas were not effective One of the worst of the massacres occurred in July 1349 when Flagellants entered the city of Frankfurt and incited the killing of 600 Jews With little aid from the church or science, the medieval populace reacted to the unexplainable catastrophe of the Black Death with fear and hysteria As they watched their family members and neighbors die, their irrationality grew The general population did understand something of a connection between the plague and large concentrations of people in towns and ports, ships arriving from other lands, and rats coming off the ships They also seemed to understand that infection could spread through contact with a victim or with the victim’s belongings One medieval tale tells of four men who robbed a warehouse and stole, among other things, a fleece under which they slept that night All four died the next day Another story relates how a walled town in the Crimea was besieged by enemies during an outbreak of the plague The soldiers catapulted corpses of plague victims over the walls into the town, hoping to kill their enemies by infecting them as well Many individuals abandoned their own families as soon as they learned of the plague Others tried measures such as secluding themselves and their loved ones in their homes and trying to block the harmful atmosphere from entering They