That the Black Death, in its original form, was bubonic plague has been commonly accepted for many years. Bubonic plague is endemic to certain remote areas of the world; those which have been identified with reasonable certainty are Uganda, Western Arabia, Kurdistan, Northern India and the Gobi Desert. From time to time it erupts there in the form of minor, localized epidemics. Far more rarely it breaks its bounds and surges forth as one of the great pandemics. Unlike influenza, bubonic plague in such a mood moves slowly, taking ten years or more to run its course across the world. When it comes, it comes to stay. The high mortality of its initial impact is followed by a long period in which it lies endemic, a period interspersed with occasional epidemics which gradually die away in frequency and violence. Finally, perhaps several hundred years after the original outbreak, the plague vanishes.
Three such pandemics have been recorded. The first, beginning in Arabia, reached Egypt in the year 542. It ravaged and perhaps even fatally weakened the Roman Empire of Justinian and moved on across Europe to England, where it was known as the Plague of Cadwalader’s Time, and Ireland, which it laid waste in 664. The second pandemic was that of the Black Death. One of its parting flourishes was the Great Plague of London in 1665; it seems to have died out in the seventeenth century. Finally came the pandemic which started in 1892 in Yunnan and reached Bombay in 1896. In India alone it is believed to have killed some six million people. It made a brief and mercifully unsuccessful foray into Suffolk in 1910, finding only a handful of victims. Quite recently it has made itself felt in the Azores and parts of South America. In many parts of the world it has still to run its course.
Though on present evidence it is impossible to be categoric about the origins of the medieval pandemic, recent investigations by the Russian archaeologist Chwolson near Lake Issyk-Koul in the district of Semiriechinsk in Central Asia show that there was an abnormally high death rate in 1338 and 1339. Nestorian memorial stones attribute the deaths to plague.{34} Given the later course of the disease and the fact that this area is in the heart of one of the zones in which bubonic plague lies endemic, Dr Pollitzer, probably the leading authority on the subject, has concluded that this was almost certainly the cradle of the Black Death.{35} From thence it spread out, eastwards into China, south to India and west to reach the Crimea some eight years later.
In this remote fastness, since recorded history, the bacillus Pasteurella pestis has lingered on, finding its home either in the bloodstream of an animal or the stomach of a flea. The flea normally favoured is Xenopsylla cheopsis, familiarly X. cheopsis, an insect which, in its turn, chooses ideally to reside in the hair of some rodent. One can only guess which rodent was most readily to be found near Lake Issyk-Koul in 1338 but the experience of later epidemics points to the tarbagan or Manchurian marmot, a beguiling squirrel-like creature much hunted for its skin. The jerboa and the suslik probably also played their part and, of course, the rat too, though the latter’s main role was not to come till the disease was on the move.
To disturb the tranquil and largely harmless existence of Pasteurella pestis something had to happen to make the rodents leave their homes. With them, inevitably, would travel their attendant fleas and, within the fleas, a cargo of deadly parasites. We are unlikely ever to know exactly what it was which caused this particular rodent migration. Such evidence as survives suggests that they were driven away by floods but, on other occasions, prolonged droughts have provided the necessary incentive or it could simply have been that an increase in the rodent population put too great a strain on the available supplies of food. At all events a massive exodus took place and it was above all Rattus rattus, the tough, nimble, by nature vagabond, black rat which made the move.
Without disputing the importance of the rat as a carrier of plague, Professor Jorge has suggested that its role, except in the earliest stages of an epidemic, is inessential, and that the lack of references to it in contemporary accounts of the Black Death indicates that the infection was mainly dependent on other means of transport.{36} He believed that Pulex irritans, the flea which preys above all on human beings, was perfectly capable of carrying the plague direct from man to man without the intervention of an infected rat. Medically this is doubtful. There is no need to eliminate Pulex irritans altogether as an extra factor but its capacity to drink in sufficient plague bacilli from one person so as to be able to implant a fatal dose in the next has been much questioned. Colonel MacArthur has recorded that, in blood cultures made from fatal cases of bubonic plague, he found ‘bacilli so sparse that theoretically one could have fed twenty thousand fleas on such a case and yet have infected none.’{37}
There is certainly no doubt that the rapid spread of bubonic plague was greatly helped by the presence of infected rats. Nor was there any shortage of rats. By the middle of the fourteenth century they abounded in Europe, probably having been imported originally in the boats of the returning Crusaders. Their role was unobtrusive and, since there is no particular reason why contemporaries should have commented on their activities, their absence from the chronicle casts no doubt on their existence. Dead rats no doubt littered the streets and houses but this would hardly have seemed worthy of attention at a time when dead human beings were so much more conspicuous.
But though the rat helps greatly in the spread of bubonic plague, Professor Jorge is right in his contention that it is not essential. The Plague Research Commission of 1910 commented ‘…the transference of infected rats and fleas in merchandise, or in the case of fleas, on the body of a human being, must be considered.’{38} It has been, and Dr Hirst has shown that the adage ‘No ship rats, no plague’ is palpably untrue.{39} X. cheopsis, in ideal conditions, can live for a month away from its host. Travelling with a cargo of grain or in a bale of cloth it could easily journey hundreds of miles without a rat. There is one substantiated case of a flea surviving unfed for six months in a rat burrow. The absence of rats, therefore, was far from a guarantee that bubonic plague could never strike.
The symptoms of bubonic plague as known today coincide precisely with those described by the medieval chroniclers. The ‘swollen and dropsical mass of inflamed lymphatic glands’ known as the bubo is the classic sign. Sometimes this is the size of an almond, sometimes of an orange; usually it is found in the groin but it may also grow in the armpit or, occasionally, on the neck. Equally familiar are the dusky stains or blotches caused by subcutaneous haemorrhages and the intoxication of the nervous system: ‘In Provence a man climbed on to the roof of his house and threw down the tiles into the street. Another executed a mad, grotesque dance on the roof…’{40} Modern medical experience suggests that, if the bubo breaks down and suppurates within a week, the victim will probably survive; few medieval doctors would have expected their patient to endure more than four or five days of the agonizing pain which accompanies the boil. But otherwise the cases observed by Boccaccio or Simon of Covino could be found in half a dozen plague centres today.
But though bubonic plague was the first and most conspicuous form taken by the Black Death, a variant known as primary pneumonic or pulmonary plague was more lethal. In the epidemics of the late nineteenth century, when methods of treatment were remarkably little more sophisticated than in the Middle Ages, between sixty and ninety per cent of those who caught bubonic plague could expect to die. In the case of pneumonic plague recovery was virtually unknown. Bubonic plague would generally take between four days and a week to kill; in the Manchurian epidemic of 1921 the expectation of life of the victims of pneumonic plague was a mere 1.8 days. Finally, bubonic plague is one of the less infectious epidemic diseases; the breath is not affected and the patient usually died or recovered before enough bacilli have accumulated in the blood to make it a source of infective material for the flea.{41} Pneumonic plague is perhaps the most infectious; it attacks the lungs so that there is coughing of blood and the plague bacilli are sprayed out into the air every time that the patient exhales.
Hirst has remarked{42} that, if it were n
ot known that they had a common origin and were linked by intermediate types, true pneumonic and uncomplicated bubonic plague would seem to be different diseases. The link between the two is to be found in an attack of bubonic plague during which the victim also develops pneumonia. This compound, though extremely dangerous to the victim, is not usually infectious. Yet, in certain cases, it may become so. The main outstanding problem of the Black Death, or indeed of the plague in any era, is what the factors are which make this happen, what it is which provokes an epidemic of the air-borne pneumonic variant of the disease.
‘Where the fourteenth-century plague is said to differ from later experience is that in its quite slow extension across Europe it seemed to change as the season of the year changed from pneumonic to bubonic, and then from bubonic to pneumonic without discontinuity’{43} The medieval doctor can hardly be blamed for finding the process incomprehensible. But if he had understood it he would even then not have mastered the full story. For there would still have remained unexplained those cases, already mentioned, in which a man would die within a few hours or go to bed in the best of health and never wake in the morning.
There seems no doubt that a third element in the Black Death, septicaemic plague, was here at work. This, like bubonic plague, is insect borne. The distinction is that the brunt of the infection falls on the bloodstream which, within an hour or two, is swarming with plague bacilli. The victim is dead long before buboes have had time to form. It is in this form of plague that Pulex irritans, the man-borne flea, has a chance to operate. So rich in bacilli is the blood of a sick man that the flea can easily infect itself and carry on the disease to a new prey without the need of a rat to provide fresh sources of infection. Septicaemic plague must have been the rarest of the three interwoven diseases which composed the Black Death but it was certainly as lethal as its pneumonic cousin and it introduced yet another means by which the plague could settle itself in a new area and spread hungrily among the inhabitants.
2. THE STATE OF EUROPE
IN a book of this scope it would be over-ambitious to attempt any serious analysis of the economic and social state of Europe in the middle of the fourteenth century. Something however must be said; for the circumstances of the continent and the physical and mental condition of its inhabitants are factors of the utmost importance when considering the impact of the Black Death. ‘The plague of the fourteenth century,’ wrote Michon,{44} ‘was no different to those which preceded or which followed it. It killed more people, not because of its nature, but because of the conditions of suffering and servitude in which it surprised its victims.’ No one who has studied the devastating blows which the Black Death struck against rich and poor, young and old, strong and weak, can accept that this was just another epidemic like any other. But Michon’s assertion is not, for this reason, to be dismissed as idle rhetoric.
During the eleventh, and even more the twelfth and first half of the thirteenth centuries Europe had enjoyed a period of massive and almost unbroken economic growth. Some historians have recently questioned whether, in England at least, the Golden Age of the ‘high’ Middle Ages was in fact so spectacularly prosperous as has been generally believed.{45} Of course, sectors of the economy can be identified which lagged behind the rest and certain areas fared less well than others. But on the whole what Professor Nabholz described as ‘the astonishing uniformity of medieval conditions throughout the whole region’{46} ensured that the boom was general and that no part of Europe was left out altogether.
In the two centuries preceding the middle of the thirteenth century the face of Europe was changed, and changed vastly for the better. The Crusades siphoned off much of the belligerent tendencies of the inhabitants and the period was one of comparative calm. The peasantry throve in unaccustomed security or, at least, survived – unsurprisingly it was the landowners who reaped most of the economic benefit. Land in the valleys of the Rhine and the Moselle was worth seventeen times as much at the end of the thirteenth century as it had been at the start of the tenth, yet the old customary rents remained substantially unchanged.{47} Colonization, that is to say the capture of virgin lands from hills, fens and forests, went on apace. By 1300, in Central and Western Europe, the amount of land under cultivation had reached a point not to be matched for another five hundred years.
The primary driving force behind the new colonization was, of course, the pressure of population on existing resources. By the middle of the thirteenth century Europe was becoming uncomfortably over-crowded. The density of population around Pistoia was thirty-eight per square kilometre – crowded by the standards of any rural area though by no means unusual in Medieval Tuscany. The province probably had a population of some 1.18 million, a total which was not to be reached again until well into the nineteenth century. The population had grown rapidly since the middle of the eleventh century; production of food had grown too but at nothing approaching the same rate. Nor did it seem that medieval techniques of agriculture were far enough advanced for the gap between demand and supply to do anything but widen. The Tuscan peasant, who had never lived far above the subsistence level, now found that he was near to falling below it.
Tuscany was in no way unique. In France ‘many districts supported as many, or very nearly as many, inhabitants as at the beginning of the twentieth century’.{48} In the region of Oisans, south-east of Grenoble, there were about 13,000 inhabitants in 1339; by 1911 the total had risen only to 13,805. Around Neufbourg in the Eure a population of some 3,000 in 1310 was 3,347 as late as 1954. Around Elloe in the Fenland, settlement was almost as dense in 1260 as in 1951. In certain areas, in particular Artois, Flanders, Champagne and parts of Western Germany, the surplus population sought a solution to its problems in a move towards industrialization. In the whole of Western Europe, villages grew into towns and cities with ten or twenty thousand inhabitants were no longer freakish rarities.{49} But the flow to the towns drew off only a small part of the rising population in the countryside.
So long as the growing population had unused land ready to hand which could easily be exploited to produce more food, then no unmanageable problems were posed. In certain areas – Basse-Provence, Catalonia, Sweden and Scotland – this was still the case until well on into the fourteenth century.{50} Europe, viewed as a whole, still had a fair amount of under-developed territory even as late as 1350. But in the great population centres, from which the peasantry could not or would not move, the end of the thirteenth century was a period of acute crisis. The forests that remained were jealously conserved, the mountains offered no hope to the would-be farmer. Productivity fell as erosion, lack of manure, failure to let fields lie fallow or to rotate crops on scientific principles, drained the goodness from the tired soil. The population soared, more and more mouths had to be filled, the gap between production and demand grew ever wider.
Taine’s aphorism about the Ancien Régime: ‘The people are like men walking through a pond with water up to their mouths; at the smallest depression of the ground or rise in the level of the water, they will lose their footing, sink and drown’ can be applied as well to the peasant of the later Middle Ages. And in Europe of the fourteenth century depressions of the ground seemed more the rule than the exception. The climate played a major part in the mischief seventy or eighty years before the Black Death. The intense cold led to a striking advance of the glaciers, polar as well as Alpine. High rainfall caused a rise in the level of the Caspian Sea. The cultivation of cereals in Iceland and of the vine in England was crippled and virtually extinguished; wheat growing areas were reduced in Denmark and the uplands of Provence.{51}
The most grave consequence was a series of disastrous harvests. There were famines in England in 1272, 1277, 1283, 1292 and 1311.{52} Between 1315 and 1319 came a crescendo of calamity. Almost every country in Europe lost virtually the whole of one harvest, often of two or three. The lack of sun hindered the production of salt by evaporation and thus made still more difficult the conservation of what meat there wa
s. Even if there had been food to store, facilities for storage did not exist. In England wheat more than doubled in price. Cannibalism was a commonplace; the poor ate dogs, wrote one chronicler, cats, the dung of doves, even their own children.{53} Ten per cent of the population of Ypres died of starvation.{54} Nor was this the end: 1332 was another disastrous year for the crops and the period between 1345 and 1348 would have seemed uniquely unfortunate in any other century.
Before the Black Death, therefore, much of Europe was in recession or, at the very least, had ceased to advance. Colonization stopped even where fresh fields lay open for the conquest. The Drang nach Osten petered out at the frontiers of Lithuania and Latvia. The cloth trade of Flanders and Brabant stagnated. The great fairs of the Champagne, indices of the economic health of a large and flourishing region, significantly declined.{55} The prices of agricultural produce were falling: agriculture was no longer the easy road to prosperity which it had been for the past two hundred years. Put in the simplest terms, Europe had outgrown its strength and was now suffering the physical and mental malaise which inevitably follows so intemperate a progress.
To what extent this recession was reflected in a drop in the population can only be guessed at. Famines on the scale which Europe had endured must at least have checked the hectic growth of the previous two centuries. The retreat from marginal lands which had already set in by 1320 or 1330 in Haute Provence, the Massif Central, Germany west of the Vistula and certain areas of England suggests that in these areas at least a decline must have begun long before the impact of the Black Death.{56} But there is little or no evidence of serious depopulation and no reason to doubt that the hungry mouths in almost every major population centre of Europe must still have been far too numerous for the exiguous supply of food. This disproportion was aggravated by the turmoil to which wars and civil disorders reduced great areas of France, Spain and Italy. The direct cost in human lives may not have been enormous but the destruction of crops and houses and the disruption of the life of the countryside seriously reduced production at a time when a larger food supply was as necessary as ever.
The Black Death Page 3
