Plagues and Peoples
Page 35
13. Suitably populous burrowing rodent communities exist only in semi-arid grasslands, and cultivation, by destroying their burrows, tends to push such communities back from lands where enough rain falls to support a grain crop. Hence the exact geographical limit of plague endemicity among the rodents of the steppe has undoubtedly shifted across the centuries, and may in the fourteenth century have extended westward from twentieth-century boundaries throughout much or all of the Ukraine. Cf. N. P. Mironov, “The Past Existence of Foci of Plague in the Steppes of Southern Europe,” Journal of Microbiology, Epidemiology and Immunology, 29 (1958), 1193–98.
14. Cf. Appendix.
15. Ping-ti Ho, Studies on the Population of China, 1368–1953 (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1959), p. 10. For a useful graphic summation of recent scholarly opinion about China’s fluctuating population, see John D. Durand, “The Population Statistics of China, A.D. 2–1953,” Population Studies, 13 (1960), 247. Durand’s graph is also reproduced in R. Reinhard et André Armengaud, Histoire Générale de la Population Mondiale (Paris, 1961), p. 107.
16. Cf. A. von Kremer, “Uber die grossen Seuchen des Orients nach arabischen Quellen,” Oesterreich, Kaiserlichen Akademie, Sitzungsberichtey Phil-Hist. Klasse, 96 (1880), 136. Von Kremer transliterates the author in question as Ibn Wardy, referring, presumably, to Abu Hafs Umar ibn al-Wardi, who died in 1349 of plague.
17. Sticker, Abhandlungen, I, 43.
18. I owe recognition of the role of rat-flea concentrations at caravanserais and gristmills in the propagation of the plague to correspondence with Barbara Dodwell of Reading University. She found it necessary to hypothesize concentrations of rats around European gristmills to explain the propagation of the disease inland away from cities and ships; the same clustering of susceptibles (whether of rats or humans) is required to explain a rapid propagation across Eurasia through thinly populated landscapes.
19. Cf. Pollitzer, Plague, p. 14.
20. D. H. S. Davis, “Plague in Africa from 1935 to 1949,” World Health Organization, Bulletin, 9 (1953), 665–700.
21. For details of this key event in European history see Roberto Lopez, Genova Marinara nel Duecento: Benedetto Zaccaria, ammiraglio e mercanti (Messina-Milan, 1933).
22. David Herlihy, “Population, Plague and Social Change in Rural Pistoia, 1201–1430,” Economic History Review, 18 (1965), 225–44.
23. In Europe, a “Little Ice Age” starting about 1300 climaxed between 1550 and 1850 and has been succeeded by warmer temperatures in the twentieth century. Cf. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Times of Feast, Times of Famine: A History of Climate Since the Tear 1000 (New York, 1971), and the speculative explanation of long-term fluctuations offered by H. H. Lamb, The Changing Climate (London, 1966), pp. 170–94. Roughly parallel alterations in climate can be inferred also from Chinese records. See the graph of fluctuating temperatures in Chu K’o-chen, “Chung kuo chin wu ch’ien nien lai ch’i hou pien ch’ien te ch’u pu yen chiù” [Initial researches into changes in the Chinese climate during the past five thousand years], ICao ku hsüehpao (1972), p. 37. Hush Scogin brought this chart to my attention and translated the Chinese headings for me. The principal basis for Chu K’o-chen’s graph is local records of years when the Yangtze lakes froze over in wintertime.
24. Conditions under which this “pneumonic” form of plague occur remain obscure. There are experts who deny the importance of pneumonic plague in Europe in the fourteenth century. Cf. J. F. D. Shrewsbury, A History of Bubonic Plague on the British Isles (Cambridge, 1970), p. 6 and passim and the rebuttal by C. Morris, “The Plague in Britain,” Historical Journal, 14 (1971), 205–15. Barbara Dodwell’s explanation for the propagation of the infection via rat concentrations at gristmills is probably a satisfactory reconciliation of Shrewsbury’s epidemiology and the historical facts. She developed the hypothesis to explain how the plague could penetrate thinly populated regions as records attested but which Shrewsbury had declared impossible on epidemiological grounds. Being a meticulous scholar, Miss Dodwell has not yet published anything to resolve the problem, but generously shared her ideas with me in correspondence.
25. Shrewsbury, op. cit., p. 406. As a bacteriologist, Shrewsbury is an expert guide to the medical aspects of plague, even if his historical judgments remain controversial. The last outbreak of plague that ran its course without benefit of penicillin and related antibiotics (which destroy the infection rapidly) occurred in Burma in 1947, where 1,192 reported deaths from a total of 1,518 cases made a lethal percentage of 78. Pollitzer, Plague (Geneva, 1954), p. 22.
26. August Hirsch, Handbook of Geographical and Historical Pathology, I, 498.
27. Josiah C. Russell, “Late Ancient and Medieval Population,” American Philosophical Society Transactions, 48 (1958), 40–45; Philip Ziegler, The Black Death (New York, 1969), pp. 224–31. Shrewsbury, op. cit., p. 123, vehemently argues for a mere 5 per cent die-off in Great Britain from bubonic plague—on the assumption that pneumonic plague did not manifest itself; but he allows an undiagnosed typhus, following in the rear of the plague, to raise mortality toward the 40–50 per cent die-off recorded among English clergy for the years 1346–49. Whether the well-attested and extraordinarily high death rates among English clergy can be projected upon the population at large has been the focus of considerable debate from the time F. A. Gasquet, The Black Death of 1348 and 1349, 2nd ed. (London, 1908), first discovered them by perusing monastic and diocesan records.
28. Italian records are potentially very rich but have only begun to be carefully studied. Cf. William M. Bowsky, “The Impact of the Black Death upon Siene se Government and Society,” Speculum, 39 (1964), 1–34; David Herlihy, “Population, Plague and Social Change in Rural Pistoia, 1201–1430,” Economic History Review, 18 (1966), 225–44; Elisabeth Carpentier, Une Ville Devant la Peste: Orvieto et la Peste Noire de 1348 (Paris, 1962). Some French towns also have abundant notarial records that can yield data on plague losses. Cf. Richard W. Emery, “The Black Death of 1348 in Perpignan,” Speculum, 42 (1967), 611–3, who estimated a die-off of 58–68 per cent among the notaries of Perpignan from the plague.
29. The plague was, however, serious in Russia. Cf. the discussion of plague losses in Russia and their socio-political effects in Gustave Alef, “The Crisis of the Muscovite Aristocracy: A Factor in the Growth of Monarchical Power,” Forschungen zur osteuropaischen Geschichte, 15 (1970), 36–39; Lawrence Langer, “The Black Death in Russia: Its Effects upon Urban Labor,” Russian History, II (1975), 53–67.
30. A useful sampling of recent scholarly opinions about the effects of the plague on European history may be found in William M. Bowsky, ed., The Black Death: A Turning Point in History? (New York, 1971), pp. 65–121.
31. John Saltmarsh, “Plague and Economic Decline in the Later Middle Ages,” Cambridge Historical Journal, 7 (1941), 23–41; J. M. W. Bean, “Plague, Population and Economic Decline in England in the Late Middle Ages,” Economic History Review, 15 (1963), 423–36; J. C. Russell, “Effects of Pestilence and Plague, 1315–1385,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 8 (1966), 464–73; Sylvia Thrupp, “Plague Effects in Medieval Europe,” idem., 474ff; A. R. Bridbury, “The Black Death,” Economic History Review, 26 (1973), 577–92.
32. Cf. Roger Mols, Introduction d la Démographie Historique des Villes d’Europe du XIV au XVIII Siècle (Louvain, 1956), II, 426–59.
33. Cf. J. C. Russell, Late Ancient and Medieval Population, pp. 113- 31. Russell summarizes his often flimsy data as follows: “The effects of the plague were very much the same everywhere they can be tested. Upon the basis of evidence of an earlier chapter we assume a 40 per cent decline of the 1346 population, except for the drier areas, by the end of the fourteenth century. The numbers reached then were generally static until well into the fifteenth century although some places declined further and others improved their position.… The population of the whole area [Europe and North Africa] about 1500 was still markedly smaller than it had been just before the Black Death. By 15
50 it had risen to about the pre-plague figure.” Ibid., p. 131.
34. For Australian rabbits, cf. above, Chapter II; for Amerindians, cf. below, Ch. V; for Pacific island populations, cf. Macfarlane Burnet, “A Biologist’s Parable for the Modern World,” Intellectual Digest (March 1972), p. 88.
35. George Rosen, A History of Public Health (New York 1958), p. 67.
36. For Ragusa cf. Miodrag B. Petrovich, A Mediterranean City State: A Study of Dubrovnik Elites, 1592–1667 (Unpublished Ph.D dissertation, University of Chicago, 1974); for Venice, Frederic C. Lane, Venice: A Maritime Republic (Baltimore, 1973), p. 18.
37. Daniel Panzac, “La Peste à Smyrne au XVIIIe Siècle,” Annales: Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations, 28 (1973), 1071–93, is fundamental. Paul Cassar, Medical History of Malta (London, 1964), pp. 175–90, documents plague visitations to that Mediterranean port until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and describes the traditional quarantine methods in full detail.
38. Cf. Erwin R. Ackerknecht, “Anticontagionism between 1821 and 1867,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 22 (1948), 562–93.
39. Georg Sticker, Abhandlungen aus der Seuchengeschichte, I, 222–6, calculates deaths at 87, 666, or 35 per cent of the population in affected localities of Provence. For details see Paul Gaffarel et Mis de Duranty, La Peste de 1720 à Marseille et en Prance (Paris, 1911); J. N. Biraben, “Certain Demographic Characteristics of the Plague Epidemic in France, 1720–22,” Daedalus (1968), pp. 536–45.
40. For an overview, see Roger Mols, Introduction à la démographie historique des villes d’Europe du XIVe au XVIIIe siècle, 3 volumes (Louvain, 1954–56).
41. Daniele Beltrami, Storia della Popolazione di Venezia (Padua, 1954). For details of public measures to meet the emergency of the plague of 1575–77, cf. Ernst Rodenwalt, Pest in Venedig, 1557–77: Ein Beitrag zur Frage der Infektkette bei den Pestepidemien West Europas (Heidelberg, 1953).
42. Cf. Bartolème Bennassar, Recherches sur les Grandes Epidémies dans le Nord de l’Espagne d la Fin du XVIe Siècle (Paris, 1969).
43. René Baehrel, “Épidémie et terreur: Histoire et Sociologie,” Annales Historiques de la Révolution, 23 (1951), 113–46, argues that the public manifestations in Paris and other cities of France during the Terror of 1793–94 derived from patterns for the expression of popular excitement that had become semi-ritualized as responses to plague and fear of plague in the seventeenth century, and which had been revivified throughout much of France in response to the plague outbreak in 1720–22. Similar problems of social control in time of plague alarmed Catherine II of Russia. Cf. John T. Alexander, “Catherine II, Bubonic Plague, and the Problem of Industry in Moscow,” American Historical Review,, 79 (1974), 637–71.
44. For details of this event, cf. Charles F. Mullet, The Bubonic Plague and England, pp. 105–222; Walter George Bell, The Great Plague in London in 1665 (rev. ed., London, 1951).
45. Cf. R. Pollitzer, Plague, pp. 282–85, 298–99.
46. Cf. Mirko D. Grmek, “Maladies et morts: Préliminaries d’une étude historique des maladies,” Annales: Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations, 24 (1969), 1473–83; R. Pollitzer, Plague, pp. 92, 448.
47. The canonical exposition may be found in Pollitzer, op. cit., pp. 11–16.
48. Wu Lien-teh, et al., Plague: A Manual for Public Health Workers (Shanghai, 1936), p. 14, claims that plague was also disappearing from China in the latter seventeenth century; but as an associate of Dr. Pollitzer and other public health experts, he simply assumed that the pandemic of the fourteenth century was fading out by the seventeenth century. Any search of Chinese literary records he may have made to support this assertion was minimal. There is no reason therefore to put much credence in Dr. Wu’s remark.
49. Vilhelm Moller-Christensen, “Evidence of Leprosy in Earlier Peoples,” in Brothwell and Sandison, Disease in Antiquity, pp. 295–306.
50. Hirsch, op. cit., 2, 7; Folke Henschen, The History and Geography of Diseases (English trans., New York, 1966), pp. 107–13.
51. Personal letter from Dr. Olaf Skinsnes, May 21, 1975.
52. Cf. T. Aidan Cockburn, The Evolution and Eradication of Infectious Diseases, pp. 219–23; Mirko D. Grmek, op. cit., p. 1478.
53. M. Pièry et J. Roshem, Histoire de la Tuberculose (Paris, 1931), pp. 5–9. Cf. also Vilhelm Moller-Christensen, “Evidence of Tuberculosis, Leprosy and Syphilis in Antiquity and the Middle Ages,” Proceedings of the XIX International Congress of the History of Medicine (Basel, 1966). The Chinese corpse from the second century B.C., referred to above in Chapter II, offers one of the few evidences for the existence of pulmonary tuberculosis from ancient times.
An amazing variety of animals suffer from one or another form of tuberculosis. Indeed, on chemical grounds it is commonly believed that the bacillus became parasitic when all life was still oceanic. This hypothesis is based on peculiar acidic properties of tuberculosis bacilli. Cf. Dan Morse, “Tuberculosis,” in Brothwell and Sandison, Disease in Antiquityy pp. 249–71.
54. René Dubos, The White Plague: Tuberculosis, Man and Society (Boston, 1952), pp. 197–207.
55. The principal advocate of this view is C. J. Hackett. Cf. C. J. Hackett, “On the Origin of the Human Treponematoses,” Bulletin of the World Health Organization, 29 (1963), 7–41; C. J. Hackett, “The Human Treponematoses,” in Brothwell and Sandison, Diseases in Antiquity, pp. 152–69. Others have accepted and elaborated upon the convertibility between pinta, yaws, and syphilis proposed by Hackett. Cf. E. H. Hudson, “Treponematosis and Man’s Social Evolution,” American Anthropologist, 67 (1965), 885–901; Theodor Rosebury, Microbes and Morals: The Strange Story of Venereal Disease (New York, 1971); Thomas Aidan Cockburn, “The Origin of the Treponematoses,” Bulletin of the World Health Organization, 24 (1961), 221–28; T. D. Stewart and Alexander Spoehr, “Evidence on the Paleopathology of Yaws,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 26 (1952), 538–53.
56. See below, p. 200.
57. The term was coined by Gloriamo Fracastoro who published a poem, Syphilis sive Morbus Gallicus, in 1530.
58. Cf. A. W. Crosby, Jr., “The Early History of Syphilis: A Reappraisal,” American Anthropologist, 71 (1969), 218–27.
59. Cf. Ziegler, The Black Death, pp. 84–100.
60. Raymond Crawford, Plague and Pestilence in Literature and Art (Oxford, 1914); A. M. Campbell, The Black Death and Men of Learning (New York, 1931); George Deaux, The Black Death, 1347 (London, 1969).
61. Millard Meiss, Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death (Princeton, 1951), pp. 89–93 and passim; Henri Mollaret et Jacqueline Brossolet, La Peste, Source Méconnue d’Inspiration Artisque (Antwerp, 1965).
62. Cf. James E. Thorold Rogers, Six Centuries of Work and Wages: the History of English Labour, 2nd ed. (London, 1886), pp. 239–42.
63. For a useful summary of current views, see Elizabeth Carpentier, “Autour de la Peste Noire: Famines et Epidémies dans l’Histoire du XIVe Siècle,” Annales: Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations, 17 (1962), 1062–92. Charles F. Mullett, The Bubonic Plague and England: An Essay in the History of Preventive Medicine (Lexington, Kentucky, 1956), pp. 17–41, offers a less iconoclastic digest of older opinions.
64. Cf. Yves Renouard, “Conséquences et Intérêt Démographique de la Peste Noire de 1348,” Population, 3 (1948), 459–66; William L. Langer, “The Next Assignment,” American Historical Review, 63 (1958), 292–301.
65. Cf. the remarks in J. F. D. Shrewsbury, The Plague of the Philistines (London, 1964), pp. 127ff. St. Sebastian was first invoked against pestilence in Rome in 680; but his cult remained insignificant until the sixteenth century. St. Roch was a Franciscan friar who died in 1327 after a career of caring for the sick.
66. The autonomy of French and English towns was also very broad, and in health matters remained almost total until the eighteenth century. The first time the French royal government intervened in plague prophylaxis was 1720–21, when the plague, having outrun the boundaries of Marseilles,
came to be treated as a national problem. Cf. Paul Delaunay, La Vie Médicale aux XVIe, XVIIe et XVIIIe Siècles (Paris, 1935), pp. 269–70.
67. Abraham L. Udovitch, “Egypt: Crisis in a Muslim Land,” reproduced in William L. Bowsky, The Black Death: A Turning Point in History? (New York, 1971), p. 124.
68. M. W. Dois, The Black Death in the Middle East (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton, 1971), pp. 56–64, tabulated no fewer than fifty-seven outbreaks of plague between 1349 and 1517; of these, thirty-one afflicted Egypt, twenty afflicted Syria, and only two afflicted Iraq. An earlier scholar derived the following chronologically more extensive results from perusal of Arabic sources:
EPIDEMIC OUTBREAKS IN EGYPT, SYRIA, AND IRAQ ACCORDING TO ARABIC SOURCES:
Number of episodes mentioned
Time span Syria Egypt Iraq
632–719 7 2 6
719–816 3 0 5
816–913 0 0 3
913–1010 0 0 3
1010–1107 2 2 5
1107–1204 2 2 2
1204–1301 1 5 0
1301–1398 3 5 1
1398–1495 5 17 0
Table derived from A. von Kremer, “Über die grossen Seuchen des Orients nach arabischen Quellen,” Oesterreich, Kaiserlichen Akademie, Sitzungsberichte, Phil-Hist. Klasse, 96 (1880), 110–42. Von Kremer does not indicate how broad his search of Arabic literature may have been; and clearly what he calls “Pest” covers diseases other than bubonic plague. Nevertheless, the sudden increase in the number of epidemics Egypt experienced in his last period, which corresponds to the first full century of rule by the Circassian Mamelukes, surely suggests a new vulnerability to infection.
The monumental scholarly record of literary mentions of plague, Georg Sticker, Abhandlungen aus der Seuchengeschichte I: Die Pest (Glessen, 1908), records only eighteen outbreaks of plague in Egypt between 1399 and 1706; but his data are entirely at the mercy of information available to him in European languages, and von Kremer’s compilation obviously escaped his attention. Generally, Sticker’s results are fragmentary and undependable, since most European scholars who had explored Chinese, Indian, Islamic, and other exotic literatures in the nineteenth century were completely uninterested in plague or other diseases. The result is whimsical and erratic: no plague in China until 1757, for example, or in East Africa until 1696. I conclude that it is useless to try to derive a valid world picture from the listings Sticker so energetically (and sometimes uncritically) collected. Only for Europe is he reasonably reliable and complete.