Burial of victims of the Black Death at Tournai, 1349.
In 1347, death arrived in Constantinople.
Travelling along the great commercial networks of the Black Sea, the plague reached the Byzantine capital before spreading through the ports of the Mediterranean and into Europe. Constantinople, one of the largest and most cosmopolitan cities of the medieval world, became one of the early great cities struck by what would later be known as the Black Death.
John VI Kantakouzenos
The Byzantine emperor John VI Kantakouzenos left an account of the catastrophe. Disease seemed indifferent to wealth, age or status. His own young son, Andronikos, died during the epidemic. Medicine offered little protection. Death entered palaces as easily as ordinary homes.
Kantakouzenos describes a city overwhelmed not only by disease but by fear. The sick died with terrifying speed, while those who remained alive struggled to understand an illness for which neither physicians nor traditional remedies had an answer. To contemporaries, the catastrophe could appear almost apocalyptic, as though the familiar order of the world itself were collapsing. Most hauntingly, the plague erased the distinctions on which society depended: wealth could not purchase safety, rank offered no protection, and youth was no defence. In Constantinople, emperor and subject suddenly inhabited the same fragile human body.
It was precisely this terrifying equality before death that would become one of the great themes of late medieval European imagination.
Decades later, skeletons began to dance.
The Danse Macabre, or Dance of Death, emerged as a powerful artistic motif in late medieval Europe. Death was depicted leading a procession of humanity: pope and emperor, nobleman and merchant, young woman and child, rich and poor. Rank disappeared. Beauty disappeared. Wealth disappeared.
Everyone joined the same dance.
The Black Death did not simply “create” the Danse Macabre. Its origins are more complex, shaped also by medieval religious traditions, war, famine and an already profound consciousness of mortality. Yet the extraordinary epidemics that repeatedly swept Europe after 1347 undoubtedly belonged to the world in which this imagery flourished.
And the idea had a musical life too.
Around 1399, only half a century after the great plague, the remarkable Llibre Vermell de Montserrat contained a song whose refrain seems almost to give music to this new intimacy with mortality: Ad mortem festinamus. We hasten toward death.
Centuries later, Franz Liszt would compose his Totentanz. Mussorgsky would write his haunting Songs and Dances of Death. And in 1874, Camille Saint-Saëns would transform the medieval fantasy into his celebrated Danse Macabre: at midnight, Death tunes his violin, skeletons rise from their graves and dance until the cock announces dawn.
But long before Saint-Saëns made Death dance to the violin, the real dance had passed through Constantinople. In 1347, one of history’s most devastating epidemics reached the Byzantine capital before sweeping across the Mediterranean and much of Europe.
Depiction of Dance Macabre in The Church of the Holy Trinity of Hrastovlje, Slovenia made in 1490.
And behind it came a new and haunting reminder: Kings, emperors, merchants and beggars may live differently. but when Death asks us to dance, we are all equals.
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