Plague Bacteria Wiped Out Nuns

Nuns and priests risked their lives to care for plague victims in Renaissance France, says a new study that associates contact with infectious plague victims to the demise of many religious order constituents.

The study is one of the first to discover that the plague, a fatal bacterial disease called “the Black Death,” can be swiftly and precisely found in ancient human remains.

A few women who perished after aiding plague victims were Benedictine nuns that lived in the Sainte-Croix Abbey’s chapter house near Poitiers, France.

“The Abbess of Sainte-Croix was known to be an extremely generous person who spent all of her life looking after the poor,” lead researcher Raffaella Bianucci told Discovery News.

Bianucci, an anthropologist in the Department of Animal and Human Biology at the University of Turin, says that the abbess was the Countess Charlotte Flandrina of Nassau, fourth daughter of Prince William I of Orange.

When the countess took her religious vows, she gave the majority of her valuables to help pay for food and medical attention for the region’s unfortunates, several of whom got the plague from soldiers combating in the Thirty Years War.

“There is evidence of food distribution to the people, and it seems that laymen had free access to the convent’s infirmary,” Bianucci said.

Historical records imply that the nuns helping the plague victims got the disease between 1628 and 1632. During this time, General Vicar Jean Filleau demanded that the surviving nuns depart the cloister and house themselves in a seaside abode.

Bianucci and her research team examined the skeletons of Saint-Croix Abbey nuns whose remains were discovered lying on disinfectant calcium oxide, or lime.

The researchers put an “RDT dipstick test” on the bones and the teeth. Comparable to a home pregnancy test, the “dipstick” colors if it finds the occurrence of markers for Yersinia pestis, the plague bacteria.

The nuns tested positive for the plague, says the study, soon to be in print in the March issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science.

The scientists also executed the plague test on priests lain to rest at the altar of Saint-Nicolas’ Church in La Chaize-le-Vicomte, in the central area France. They tested positive for the disease as well.

Even though historical records are vague about the priests’ involvement with the plague victims, Bianucci thinks that the men surely were in contact with “the parishioners, as their ministry required, and certainly assisted people who were dying,” like giving the dying the last rights.

“It will be most interesting to see it (the plague dipstick test) applied to a wide array of tissues of varying ages in the future,” stated Arthur Aufderheide, director of the Paleobiology Laboratory at the University of Minnesota’s Medical School.

Image 1: Countess Charlotte Flandrina of Nassau

Image 2: Scanning electron micrograph depicting a mass of Yersinia pestis bacteria (the cause of bubonic plague) in the foregut of the flea vector. Credit: Rocky Mountain Laboratories, NIAID, NIH

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