Plagues and Peoples

by William H. McNeill

  It is, of course, a well-known fact that western Europe expanded woolen textile production markedly between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. Export of high-quality cloth to Levantine and Asian markets figures more prominently in available records than does the local, shoddy manufacture of woolen cloth for peasant wear. Yet it would be very surprising if the increasing prevalence of sheep, especially in England and Spain, together with the onset of colder temperatures, had not combined to put more cloth on European backs than ever before. Insofar as wages rose, consequent upon manpower shortages arising from plague losses, a rise of real income allowed wage earners to buy better clothing; and even though a rise of real wages was not a uniform nor uninterrupted phenomenon, the basic fact of fewer human bodies in juxtaposition to an increased number of sheep fleeces in western Europe remains incontrovertible. It therefore seems probable that even the poor were able to cover their bodies more completely than before, and in so doing Europeans may very well have interrupted the older patterns of skin to skin dissemination used by Hansen’s disease and by yaws. If so, the emptying out of Europe’s leprosaria becomes readily understandable.

  Increasing supplies of woolen textiles, however, would have benefited lice and bedbugs, and thus facilitated the spread of such a disease as typhus, which seems first to have manifested itself as a notable destroyer of European armies in 1490.56 Still another by-product would be a new notion of decency, requiring everyone to cover most of the body most of the time. As is well known, puritanical drives in both Protestant and Catholic countries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries aimed at hiding sex, as well as other bodily functions. This in turn presupposed that enough cloth was available to cover human nakedness, even among the poor. The importance of these movements is indeed powerful, though indirect, evidence for the reality of my initial assumption that cloth did in fact become more abundant in Europe after 1346.

  Cold weather and increasing supplies of woolen textiles in Europe may therefore have confronted the bacillus of Hansen’s disease and the spirochete of yaws with a crisis of survival. The latter eventually hit upon a substitute method of passing from one host to another by infecting the mucous membranes of the sex organs. In doing so, symptomatic expressions of the disease altered and European doctors early in the sixteenth century gave it a new name—syphilis.57 Instead of being (as yaws may have previously been, at least among the poor) a widespread infection, common among children and normally incapable of developing crippling sores except when resistance was somehow reduced, the spirochetes now usually invaded only adult bodies. At least initially, they there provoked far more dramatic symptoms, just as our still familiar childhood diseases, e.g., measles, will provoke far more serious symptoms in a young adult than commonly occur among children.58

  The bacillus of Hansen’s disease, however, failed to find a new route of infection and remained prevalent only in Scandinavia, where intenser cold—and perhaps an absence of any increase in availability of wool—maintained older customs and thereby presumably allowed the bacillus to sustain its old pattern of propagation. Whether an increased exposure to pulmonary tuberculosis in other parts of western Europe also contributed to the decay of Hansen’s disease must be left open. It remains a possibility, if it was true that a brush with tuberculosis did, in fact, under medieval conditions, confer partial immunity against leprosy.

  The hypothetical character of these notions is obvious and needs no emphasis. Other factors in the situation—change of diet, change of temperature, change of the way public bathing was conducted—may have been more important than the increasing prevalence of clothing. Nonetheless, certain hard facts remain: the repeated appearance of plague, the diminution of European population, the increase of wool production and the emptying out of leprosaria.

  Regardless of how these and other factors may have interacted to achieve the result, by the last decades of the fifteenth century the shock to older microparasitic balances, registered so dramatically between 1346 and about 1420 had been successfully absorbed. A new era, in which European population again tended to increase, slowly asserted itself.

  In this development, changes in macroparasitic patterns must also have played a part, but the varied political and military experiences of Europe between 1346 and 1500 defy generalization. Perhaps there was a slow drift toward diminution of local violence. After the end of the Hundred Years’ War in 1453 this surely was true in France. If the phenomenon was more general, it must be attributed to creeping centralization of taxation, and corresponding monopolization of organized military force at fewer and fewer centers. But it is far from clear that this was happening everywhere. In Poland, for instance, development ran the other way. And even in France, England, and Spain, where monarchial centralization advanced most successfully, sporadic outbreaks of armed violence remained common and were sometimes locally destructive until after the middle of the seventeenth century.

  Rents took varying proportions of peasant resources, as did taxes. Productivity was a third critical variable in defining Europe’s macroparasitic balances, for peasants and artisans producing more could also part with more and still survive, or even improve their standards of living. Local variation in rents, taxes, and productivity do not seem to conform to any over-all pattern—at least none that I can discern. Only on the microparasitic side do changes clearly occur, and it seems reasonable, therefore, to think that these were the factors most active in reversing Europe’s population trends toward the end of the fifteenth century.

  To be sure, nothing resembling a lasting stabilization ensued. Not long after European peoples had effectually recovered from the shocks of the plague and its various epidemiological consequences and side effects, the spectacular opening of the oceans of the world by European explorers, 1492–521, administered a new series of disease shocks to humanity, this time with consequences that affected the entire globe.

  Before pursuing this theme, however, it seems worth venturing a few remarks about the psychological, economic, and cultural consequences of Europe’s encounter with the plague in the fourteenth and succeeding centuries; and then we must survey as best we can the disease consequences for Asia and Africa of the Mongol opening of the steppelands to regular transit.

  At the psychological and cultural level European reactions were obvious and varied. In face of intense and immediate crisis, when an outbreak of plague implanted fear of imminent death in an entire community, ordinary routines and customary restraints regularly broke down. In time, rituals arose to discharge anxiety in socially acceptable ways; but in the fourteenth century itself, local panic often provoked bizarre behavior. The first important effort at ritualizing responses to the plague took extreme and ugly forms. In Germany and some adjacent parts of Europe companies of Flagellants aimed at propitiating God’s wrath by beating each other bloody and attacking Jews, who were commonly accused of spreading the pestilence. The Flagellants disdained all established authorities of church and state and, if accounts are to be believed, their rituals were well-nigh suicidal for the participants.59

  Attacks on German-Jewish communities inspired by Flagellants and others probably accelerated an eastward shift of centers of Jewish population in Europe. Poland escaped the first round of plague almost entirely, and though popular rioting against Jews occurred there too, royal authorities welcomed German Jews for the urban skills they brought into the country. The subsequent development of east European Jewry was therefore significantly affected (and the rise in the Vistula and Nieman valleys of a market-oriented agriculture, largely under Jewish management, was probably accelerated) by the fourteenth-century pattern of popular reaction to plague.

  These and other violent episodes attest the initial impact of the plague on European consciousness. In time, the fear and horror of the first onset relaxed. Writers as diverse as Boccaccio, Chaucer, and William Langland all treated the plague as a routine crisis of human life—an act of God, like the weather. Perhaps the plague had other, more lasting,
consequences for literature: scholars have suggested, for instance, that the rise of vernacular tongues as a medium for serious writing and the decay of Latin as a lingua franca among the educated men of western Europe was hastened by the die-off of clerics and teachers who knew enough Latin to keep that ancient tongue alive.60 Painting also responded to the plague-darkened vision of the human condition provoked by repeated exposure to sudden, inexplicable death. Tuscan painters, for instance, reacted against Giotto’s serenity, preferring sterner, hieratic portrayals of religious scenes and figures. The “Dance of Death” became a common theme for art; and several other macabre motifs entered the European repertory.61 The buoyancy and self-confidence, so characteristic of the thirteenth century, when Europe’s great cathedrals were abuilding, gave way to a more troubled age. Acute social tensions between economic classes and intimate acquaintance with sudden death assumed far greater importance for almost everyone than had been true previously.

  The economic impact of the Black Death was enormous, though local differences were greater than an earlier generation of scholars assumed. In highly developed regions like northern Italy and Flanders, harsh collisions between social classes manifested themselves as the boom times of the thirteenth century faded into the past. The plague, by disrupting wage and price patterns sharply, exacerbated these conflicts, at least in the short run. Some ninety years ago Thorold Rogers argued that the Black Death had improved the lot of the lower classes and advanced freedom by destroying serfdom.62 His idea was that labor shortage caused by plague deaths allowed wage earners to bargain among rival would-be employers and thus improve their real wages. This view is no longer widely believed. Local circumstances differed widely. Employers died as well as laborers; and manpower shortages proved evanescent in those towns where a vigorous market economy did effect a short-term rise in real wages.63

  In time, of course, the initial perturbations created by the plague tended to diminish. All the same, two general displacements of European culture and society can be discerned in the latter fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that seem plausibly related to the terrifying, constantly renewed experience of plague.

  When the plague was raging, a person might be in full health one day and die miserably within twenty-four hours. This utterly discredited any merely human effort to explain the mysteries of the world. The confidence in rational theology, which characterized the age of Aquinas (d. 1274), could not survive such experiences. A world view allowing ample scope to arbitrary, inexplicable catastrophe alone was compatible with the grim reality of plague. Hedonism and revival of one or another form of fatalistic pagan philosophy were possible reactions, though confined always to a few. Far more popular and respectable was an upsurge of mysticism, aimed at achieving encounter with God in inexplicable, unpredictable, intense, and purely personal ways. Hesychasm among the Orthodox, and more variegated movements among Latin Christians—e.g., the practices of the so-called Rhineland mystics, of the Brethren of the Common Life, and of heretical groups like the Lollards of England—all gave expression to the need for a more personal, antinomian access to God than had been offered by Thomist theology and the previously recognized forms of piety.64 Recurrence of plague refreshed this psychological need until the mid-seventeenth century; hence it is no accident that all branches of organized Christianity—Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant—made more room for personal mysticism and other forms of communion with God, even though ecclesiastical authorities always remained uncomfortable when confronting too much private zeal.

  Secondly, the inadequacy of established ecclesiastical rituals and administrative measures to cope with the unexampled emergency of plague had pervasively unsettling effects. In the fourteenth century, many priests and monks died; often their successors were less well trained and faced more quizzical if not openly antagonistic flocks. God’s justice seemed far to seek in the way plague spared some, killed others; and the regular administration of God’s grace through the sacraments (even when consecrated priests remained available) was an entirely inadequate psychological counterpoise to the statistical vagaries of lethal infection and sudden death. Anticlericalism was of course not new in Christian Europe; after 1346, however, it became more open and widespread, and provided one of the elements contributing to Luther’s later success.

  Because sacred rituals remained vigorously conservative, it took centuries for the Roman Church to adjust to the recurrent crises created by outbreaks of plague. Hence it was mainly in the period of the Counter-Reformation that psychologically adequate ceremonies and symbols for coping with recurrent lethal epidemics defined themselves. Invocation of St. Sebastian, who in early Christian centuries had already attracted to himself many of the attributes once assigned to Apollo, became central in Catholic rituals of prophylaxis against the plague. The suffering saint, whose death by arrows was symbolic of deaths dealt by the unseen arrows of pestilential infection, began to figure largely in religious art as well. A second important figure was St. Roch. He had a different character, being an exemplar and patron of the acts of public charity and nursing that softened the impact of plague in those cities of Mediterranean Europe that were most exposed to the infection.65

  Protestant Europe never developed much in the way of special rituals for meeting epidemic emergencies. The Bible had little to say about how to cope with massive outbreaks of infectious disease, and since plague seldom affected the North (though when it came it was sometimes exceptionally severe), Protestants lacked sufficient stimulus to such a development.

  In contrast to the rigidities that beset the church, city governments, especially in Italy, responded rather quickly to the challenges presented by devastating disease. Magistrates learned how to cope at the practical level, organizing burials, safeguarding food deliveries, setting up quarantines, hiring doctors, and establishing other regulations for public and private behavior in time of plague. The ability of city authorities to react in these more or less effective ways was symptomatic of their general vigor—a vigor that made the centuries between 1350 and 1550 a sort of golden age for European city-states, especially Germany and Italy, where competition with any superior secular government was minimal.66

  Italian and German city governments and businessmen not only managed their own local affairs with general success, but also pioneered the development of a far more closely integrated inter-regional market economy that ran throughout all of Europe. Ere long these same cities also defined a more secularized style of life and thought that by 1500 attracted the liveliest attention throughout the continent. The shift from medieval to renaissance cultural values, needless to say, did not depend on the plague alone; yet the plague, and the generally successful way city authorities managed to react to its ravages, surely contributed something to the general transformation of European sensibility.

  When we turn attention from Europe and ask what the new plague pattern may have meant elsewhere in the Old World, a troublesome void presents itself. Scholarly discussion of the Black Death in Europe, its course and consequences, is more than a century old; nothing remotely comparable exists for other regions of the earth. Yet it is impossible to believe that the plague did not affect China, India, and the Middle East; and it is even more implausible to think that human life on the steppe was not also brought under new and unexampled stress by the establishment of a persistent reservoir of bubonic infection among the rodents of the Eurasian grasslands all the way from Manchuria to the Ukraine.

  To be sure, there is ample evidence that plague became and remained, as in Europe, a dreaded recurrent affliction throughout the Islamic world. Egypt and Syria shared the plague experience of other parts of the Mediterranean coastlands with which they remained always in close contact. About a third of Egypt’s population seems to have died in the first attack, 1347–49, and the plague returned to the Nile Valley at frequent intervals thereafter, appearing there most recently in the 1940s.67

  This is not surprising, for Egypt developed special ties with the
steppelands of eastern Europe. From 1382 until 1798 the Nile Valley was governed by a corporation of warriors, the so-called Mamelukes, who were recruited from the Caucasus region. They maintained constant communication with Black Sea ports, for only so could suitable reinforcement to their numbers be assured.

  The disease consequences for Egypt were probably severe. A simple count of epidemic disasters mentioned by Arabic writers shows a sudden and dramatic upsurge in the frequency with which Egypt suffered from pestilence in the fifteenth century as compared to other parts of the Mediterranean and Moslem worlds.68 Depopulation and impoverishment were a result, enhanced no doubt by Mameluke oppression and misgovernment. But since disease has always been a more efficient killer than human muscles, the decay of Egyptian wealth and numbers was probably due more to the microparasitic risks inherent in Egypt’s special link with the western steppelands than to anything the Mamelukes did deliberately. Certainly, as long as their rule endured, Egypt maintained a sinister reputation among Europeans, who could often trace a new outbreak of plague affecting the rest of the Mediterranean either to Alexandria or Cairo. Although Egypt’s ill repute among Christians was undoubtedly enhanced by religious xenophobia, it remains true that after Napoleon overthrew Mameluke rule in 1798, thus severing Egypt’s long-standing tie with the coastlands of the Black Sea, outbreaks of plague diminished and even disappeared for a number of decades after 1844.69