The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time

by John Kelly

  Descending from the Alpine passes into Austria in the fall of 1348,

  Y. pestis killed with such fetid abundance, one observer reports that the wolves who preyed on local sheep “turned and fled back into the wilderness . . . as if alarmed by some infallible warning.” Arriving in Central Europe, the pestilence ignited an unparalleled burst of anti-Semitism. In September 1348, in Chillon, a town near Lake Geneva, a Jewish surgeon and a Jewish mother were accused of fomenting plague, forcing the surgeon to choose between himself and his community, and the mother between herself and her son.

  In January 1349 Basel burned its Jews on an island in the Rhine, while hygiene-conscious Speyer, fearing pollution, put its dead Jews in wine barrels and rolled them into the river. In February, as a prophylactic measure, Strasbourg marched its Jews to a local cemetery and burned them. Entering the cemetery, several beautiful young Jewesses refused salvation at Christian hands and insisted on going to the stake. The plague struck Strasbourg anyway. In Worms the local Jewish community, faced with death at the hands of Christian neighbors, locked themselves in their homes and set themselves ablaze. In Constance, under a gray March sky, a group of Jews marched into a fire, singing and laughing.

  As the plague made its way through the primeval forests of Germany, another demon bubbled up from the medieval Teutonic psyche: the Flagellants, who believed the curse of the mortality could be lifted through self-abuse of the flesh and slaying Jews. Twenty years later one spectator could still recall the hysteria the Flagellants aroused. The men, he wrote, “lashed themselves viciously on their naked bodies until the blood flowed, while crowds, now weeping now singing, shouted, ‘Save us!’”

  In May 1349 an English wool ship brought the plague to Bergen, in Norway. Within days of arriving the passengers and crew were all dead. By the end of the short Scandinavian summer, the pestilence was moving in an easterly arc toward Sweden, where King Magnus II, believing the mortality to be the work of an angry God, ordered foodless Fridays and shoeless Sundays to appease His divine wrath. Approaching the east coast of Greenland,

  Y. pestis encountered towering ice cliffs rising out of a frigid, white-capped sea like the parapets of an Arctic Xanadu; undaunted, it persevered. Later an observer would write that, from that moment on, “no mortal has ever seen that [eastern] shore or its inhabitants.”

  In the three and a half years it took

  Y. pestis to complete its circle of death, plague touched the life of every individual European: killing a third of them, leaving the other two-thirds grieving and weeping.

  Here is the story of that epic tragedy.

  Chapter Two

  “They Are Monsters, Not Men”

  ON A MAP, THE EURASIAN STEPPE LOOKS LIKE A TRAVELER’S PARADISE, but the steppe of the cartographers, the broad green crayon slash that sweeps effortlessly across the belly of the continent from Byelorussia to China, is a polite semifiction available only in spring, when the air is warm, the grass not yet knee-high, and the wind still fragrant with the smell of wildflowers. As Napoleon learned and Hitler after him, in winter waist-high snowfields transform the western steppe into an immense featureless sea that billows and swirls when the Arctic wind whips down from the Siberian tundra. The cartographer’s map also ignores the summer sun, which hangs so low over the treeless August plains, a traveler can almost reach up and touch it, and the incessant buzz of the mosquitoes, which grow almost as big as a man’s thumb on parts of the steppe and can leave a bite the size of a small tumor.

  Farther east, on the Mongolian Plateau, where the steppe skirts the Gobi desert as it sweeps into China, cartographers often take note of the change in terrain with another polite semifiction—a splash of sandy color. Parts of the eastern steppe resemble a seabed baked dry by a billion years of sun. Between canyons of rust-colored cliff and sandy elevations more hill than mountain, low undulations of rocky ground flow to a limitless horizon like ocean swells, while overhead, above noisy flocks of circling carrion, the enormous sky oppresses with an infiniteness that crushes the soul. Even in high spring, the only two crops that grow in this part of the steppe are tufts of hard, spiky grass and the bones of the men and animals who failed to survive the winter snows.

  In

  La Practica della Mercata, Francesco Balducci Pegolotti attempted to ease the burdens of the medieval steppe traveler with reassurances—“the road you take from Tana to Peking is perfectly safe”; with sex tips—“the merchant who wishes to take a woman with him from Tana can do so”—and dos and don’ts—“do not try to save money on [a translator] . . . by taking a bad one.”* But

  La Practica was a polite fiction, too. Upon leaving Caffa, a traveler could expect to spend eight to twelve months on the back of a Mongol pony or a jostling cart, to see nothing but horizon and prairie in every direction, and to feel no warmth at night except the body warmth of a traveling companion. As alien as the terrain were the fearsome Mongols who inhabited the Asian plains. “They [are] like beasts,” wrote one Westerner. “They live on wild roots and on meat pounded tender under the saddle . . . are ignorant of the use of the plow and of fixed habitation. . . . If you inquire . . . whence they come and where they were born, they cannot tell you.” William of Rubruck, a Flemish cleric who visited thirteenth-century Mongolia, described the Tartar women as “astonishingly fat,” with “hideously painted faces,” and the men as grotesques, with short, stocky bodies and “monstrously oversized heads.” Both sexes were also incredibly filthy; the Mongols refused to wash, believing it made God angry.

  The French historian René Grousset has called the “discovery of Asia . . . as important to men of the Middle Ages as the discovery of America was to men of the Renaissance.” But it might be more accurate to describe the medieval discovery of Asia as a rediscovery. During Antiquity, news from the Orient would occasionally drift westward along the Silk Road, which wound through the necklace of desert between China and Arabia, or across the snowy passes of the Pamir Mountains in Central Asia, where representatives of Rome and China would meet to exchange goods. But from the seventh century onward, Europe became isolated on the western edge of Eurasia, a prisoner of its own disorder and collapse. To the extent that the reawakening West of the eleventh and twelfth centuries had a knowledge of the East, it was of the Middle East, and, more particularly, a thin strip of the coastal Middle East where Genoese and Venetian merchants were allowed to buy Asian goods from Arab middlemen at exorbitant markups. Beyond Arabia, everything faded into a myth wrapped in a fable. There were stories about strange Asian races like the Dog Men, who were said to have human bodies and canine faces, and the Headless Men, who were thought to have no heads at all; about Gog and Magog, who were believed to be related to the lost tribes of Israel; Prester John, a mysterious Christian King of the Orient; and the Garden of Eden, which was thought to be somewhere in India. But until the mid-thirteenth century, when the Mongols unified the steppe from Kiev to China, no one in the West was able to investigate any of these Eastern wonders firsthand.

  The first Europeans to travel to Asia were clerics like John de Marignolli, a papal emissary, who pronounced the Tartar Great Khan “delighted, yea exceedingly delighted,” by the pope’s gifts, and John of Monte Corvino, who translated the New Testament into Mongol script, and whose long years in China aged him beyond his years. “I myself am grown old and grey, more with toil and trouble than with years,” John wrote after eleven years in the East. The group also included the rambunctious William, a Franciscan friar who endured every hardship of steppe travel, including the hardest of all, an alcoholic translator. From William, medieval Europe received its first description of Chinese script, of a potent Mongol liquor called

  koumiss, and of the Tebets, a Tibetan tribe whose members formerly ate their parents when they died but had given up the practice. William also was the first European to correctly identify the Caspian as a land-locked sea, not an ocean inlet, and—his proudest achievement—to participate in what may have been the first theologic
al Super Bowl. On a May evening in 1254, in the Mongol capital of Karakorum on the edge of the Gobi desert, William strode into a crowded tent, and, in the presence of the Grand Khan himself, defended the Western concept of monotheism against a

  tunis, a Buddhist priest.

  “It is fools who say that there is only one God,” declared the wily Buddhist. “Are there not many great rulers on earth? . . . The same is true with God. . . . [T]here are ten Gods in Heaven and none is all-powerful.”

  “So then,” replied William, “not one of your Gods is capable of rescuing you, inasmuch as [if you encounter a predicament] . . . the God has no power over, he will be unable to help you.”

  On the basis of that exchange alone, William felt he had won the day, but, alas, the three Mongol judges who scored the debate disagreed and declared the Buddhist priest victor.

  The second wave of European visitors were merchants, most Genoese or Venetian, enticed to the East by the opportunity to buy Asian goods at the source. No one knows for sure how many of these trader-travelers followed in the footsteps of Marco Polo, the daring young merchant’s son from Venice who crossed the steppe in the early 1270s; but by the early fourteenth century there were bustling Italian colonies in several Chinese cities, including Peking, and the two east-west trade routes open to Europeans buzzed with activity. Asia by sea could take up to two years—but oh! what sights the traveler saw along the way. The sea route could be picked up in Trebizond, a Greek colony in the Black Sea, or Tabriz, an Iranian city of thrusting minarets, so fabulously wealthy, a European visitor declared it “worth more to the Great Khan than his whole kingdom to the King of France.” From the Crimea and Iran, the route led down to the Port of Ormuz on the tip of the Persian Gulf, thence across the Indian Ocean to Quilon, an Indian kingdom where all the wonders of the seven seas seemed to have gathered under swaying palm trees. Quilon had lumbering elephants and chattering monkeys, local markets that smelled of pepper and cinnamon in the sultry heat, and a port crowded with huge, oceangoing Chinese ships whose sailors sang “la la la” as they rowed. The final stop on the journey was Hangchow, Venice of the East and one of the great wonders of the medieval world. A hundred miles around and guarded by twelve great gates, the city had blue-water canals, fire brigades, hospitals, and fine broad streets lined with houses upon whose doors were listed the names of every occupant. Along Hangchow’s canals, spanned by twelve thousand bridges and sailed by gaily colored boats, strolled the greatest wonder of all. This city has “the most beautiful women in the world,” declared a breathless Western visitor. In a nearby palace a Tartar khan was served his daily meals by five singing virgins.

  However, because sea travel took so long, many Western merchants preferred the quicker overland route. In the Middle Ages there were several variations available, including the fabled Silk Road. But around 1300 a new route across the northern steppe began to gain favor. Travelers found the broad, flat terrain in the north easier on men, animals, and carts, but the new route had a significant disadvantage, though none of the newcomers realized it. It skirted the tarabagan colonies of Siberia, Mongolia, and northwest China.

  Prized for its fur, the limpid-eyed, squirrellike tarabagan was—and still is—greatly feared on the steppe for its powers of contagion. In

  Memories of a Hunter in Siberia, A. K. Tasherkasoff, a nineteenth-century Russian writer, described how generations of nomad steppe hunters were weaned on stories of a mysterious tarabagan illness that could jump to humans foolish enough to trap sick animals (identifiable by a wobbly, staggering gait). According to steppe legend, the mysterious, highly contagious tarabagan illness was supposed to be caused by “small worms, invisible to the naked eye,” but in 1905, when the first infected animals were autopsied, the invisible worms turned out to be the plague bacillus

  Yersina pestis, leading one scientist to compare the “tarabagan gardens” of the Asian plains to “a heap of embers where plague smolders continuously and from which sparks of infection may dart out . . . to set up conflagrations.”

  More recent research on the tarabagan also has relevance for the Black Death. The tarabagan is a member of the marmot family, and, according to the Russian scientists who have studied the animals, the strain of

  Y. pestis that circulates among marmots is the most virulent in the world. Besides extreme lethality, marmot plague, as the Russians call it, has another Black Death–like feature. It is the only form of the plague in rodents that is pneumotropic—that is, in tarabagan and other marmots, and only in them, plague has a tendency to spread to the lungs and become pneumonic. On the steppe, dead tarabagans are often found with a bloody froth around the nose and mouth—telltale signs of pneumonic infection.

  American microbiologists tend to be skeptical about the Russian claims for marmot plague, but the Russians are so convinced of its virulence and lightning contagion that during the Cold War they bet their national defense on it. According to Wendy Orent, who has worked closely with many Russian scientists, whenever the Soviet Union drew up plans for a new plague weapon, Major General Nikolai Urakov, a leader of the USSR’s biological weapons program, would shout to his staff, “I only want one strain”—marmot plague.

  Reconstructing any pathogen’s genetic history is necessarily an exercise in guesswork, but like the Black Death,

  Y. pestis seems to have originated on the steppe of Central Asia. Microbiologist Robert Brubaker thinks the big bang in

  Y. pestis’s life may have been the end of the last Ice Age. As the ice sheet retreated, the rodent population on the freshly thawed steppe would have exploded, creating an urgent need for a Malthusian pruning mechanism. The development of agriculture, another demographic landmark in rodent history, would have further heightened the need for such an agent.

  Y. pestis is only fifteen hundred to twenty thousand years old, young enough to fit Dr. Brubaker’s scenario, and its ragged genetic structure certainly suggests an agent slapped together in a hurry to meet an evolutionary emergency.

  Y. pestis’s genome has a great many nonfunctioning genes and three ungainly plasmids. However, in pathogens as in people, appearances can be deceiving.

  Y. pestis has all the properties an infectious agent needs to be a world beater, including biological oomph. One reason many infectious agents fail to rise to the level of lethality is that their bacilli cluster together at an infection site (like a flea bite), instead of spreading to vital body organs. Consequently, nothing more serious than some local swelling and redness develops.

  Y. pestis has solved the cluster problem by evolving special enzymes that deliver plague bacilli to the liver and spleen, from whence the bacilli can be quickly recycled to the rest of the body. Equally important, the bacillus has also learned how to elude almost everything sent to kill it, including flea antigens and human antigens. In the case of flea antigens, the elusiveness gives

  Y. pestis time to multiply in the flea gut, which is a key step in the transmission of plague. In the case of the human antigens, the elusiveness buys the pathogen time to jump from the lymph nodes to the liver and spleen. Like HIV,

  Y. pestis is extremely adept at confusing the human immune system. Often by the time the body can mount a defense, the pathogen has become uncontainable.

  Y. pestis can also kill nearly anything put in front of it, including humans, rats, tarabagans, gerbils, squirrels, prairie dogs, camels, chickens, pigs, dogs, cats, and, according to one chronicler, lions. Like other major pathogens,

  Y. pestis has become a successful killer by learning how to be an adaptable killer. It can be transmitted by thirty-one different flea species, including

  X. cheopis, the most efficient vector in human plague, and

  Pulex irritans, the most controversial. Some researchers believe the bite of the ubiquitous

  P. irritans, the human—and pig—flea, contains too few bacilli to transmit plague effectively; but other investigators* suspect that the human flea plays an important, if unappreciated, role in the
spread of the disease. The pro–

  P. irritans school is supported by the work of General Shiro Ishii, commander of the Japanese army’s biological warfare unit during World War II.*

  Assessing the Japanese deployment of a plague weapon against the Chinese city of Changteh early in the war, an admiring U.S. Army report notes that “one of Ishii’s greatest achievements . . . was his use of the human flea,

  P. irritans. . . . This flea is resistant to air drag, naturally targets humans, and could also infect the local rat population to prolong the epidemic. . . . Within two weeks [of the attack] individuals in Changteh started dying of plague.”

  Y. pestis does have limitations. It cannot survive very long on surfaces like chairs, tables, and floors, and it operates optimally only within a fairly narrow climatic range—air temperatures between 50 and 80 degrees Fahrenheit and humidity above 60 percent and, ideally, 80 percent. A number of animals are also resistant to the plague bacillus, including the Siberian polecat, black bear, skunk, and coyote. Man may also enjoy a degree of immunity to

  Y. pestis, though that is another question fraught with controversy. Despite a recent finding suggesting that CCR5-∆32, the allele that protects against HIV, may also protect against plague, many scientists remain skeptical of humanity’s ability to resist

  Y. pestis, except for a temporary resistance acquired after exposure to the disease.