In the Wake of the Plague

by Norman F. Cantor

  Once introduced, a vertically transmitted disease can establish reservoirs of contagion, which can sustain it for a period, potentially even for centuries, without further intervention by nonterrestrial sources. Tuberculosis is seen as such an ever-present disease. Other diseases establish reservoirs but diminish in potency until boosted by a further fall of extraterrestrial pathogens. Smallpox is an example of such an illness.

  According to this theory, bubonic plague is a prime example of a disease chiefly attributed to vertical transmission, because it “has appeared in sudden bursts separated by many centuries and it is difficult to understand where the plague bacillus, Y. Pestis, went into hiding during the long intermissions.” They concluded that after weakening over time, the bacterial reservoir disappeared. But the bacterium pasturelle pestis, bubonic plague, persists as an irregular visitor to our planet.

  According to Hoyle and his associate, after A.D. 600, “Bubonic plague seems to have disappeared from our planet for eight centuries, until it reappeared with shattering personal and social consequences in the Black Death of 1348–50.” After smoldering with minor outbreaks until the mid–seventeenth century, it disappeared again for two centuries before recurring in China in 1894 and spreading to India.

  Hoyle and Wickramasinghe support their case by shrewdly pointing up some inconsistencies in the conventional explanation of the spread of the plague. Although they accept that plague involves a rat disease, they are scathing about the view that the disease could have been spread across Europe exclusively by migratory rats.

  “To argue that stricken rats set out on a safari that took them in six months not merely from southern to northern France but even across the Alpine massif, borders on the ridiculous. What remarkable rats they were! To have crossed the sea and to have marched into remote English villages, and yet to have effectively bypassed the cities of Milan, Liege and Nuremberg,” where the incidence of plague was very low. (Milan, it may be noted, enforced a quarantine that may have saved its citizens from the plague.)

  The absence of plague in Bohemia (today the Czech Republic) and Poland is commonly explained by the rats’ avoidance of these areas due to the unavailability of food the rodents found palatable. Instead of the alleged finicky diet of Central European rats, Hoyle and his associate point to a climate that was not propitious for the sprouting of disease pathogens from outer space.

  In conclusion they argue that this generalized spread of the Black Death with exceptional gaps is entirely consistent with a fall of pathogens from space. “There was no marching army of plague stricken rats. The rats died in the places where they were.”

  In spite of Hoyle’s and Wickramasinghe’s impeccable scientific credentials, their thesis that the Black Death originated in cosmic dust has been totally ignored in the standard historical works on the subject. But the Hoyle thesis has gained some surprising sympathy in scientific circles. In the 1980s Sir Francis Crick, the molecular biologist and Nobel laureate, who was codiscoverer of the structure of DNA, mounted arguments similar to Hoyle’s, causing a momentary press sensation. In 1999 Paul Davies, a theoretical physicist and winner in 1995 of the prestigious Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, published The Fifth Miracle: The Search for the Origin and Meaning of Human Life, which again inclined to Hoyle’s belief in interplanetary transfer of organisms, which was again on this point ignored.

  Any close scrutiny of the Black Death arouses concern that the conventional theory of diffusion by black rats is only part of the story. Even the addition of cattle-transmitted anthrax may not explain everything.

  The medieval view that the origin of the plague involves floods and serpents arouses skepticism but cannot be ruled out. So how can we casually dismiss the periodic vertical transmission of plague and other infectious disease from outer space to earth?

  It has been the fashion for academic medievalists, when they notice medieval writers placing the origin of the Black Death in rationally improbable events, wild, cataclysmic, and remotely violent happenings to insert such reports within a tradition of Christian apocalyptic literature. They argue that the vision of last things, especially in the Book of Revelation, overdetermined these imaginative scenarios of earthquakes that liberated huge serpents that swam up rivers and spread disease.

  But we cannot be sure that these hotblooded medieval explanations are simply derivative of artfully constructed biblical terror. They could have happened, just as the stories about King Arthur, Queen Guenevere, and Lancelot told around Welsh campfires in the early Middle Ages could have happened and then been dispersed to the far margins of literacy by the rationalizing state and church of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. When an obscure administrator at the University of London, John Morris, took this line in The Age of Arthur (1973), the academics laughed at him—too readily. It is just possible that medieval writers who placed the origins of the Black Death in serpents dispensing plague as they swam up rivers were on to something.

  Vertical transmission of disease from outer space in the tails of comets is our era’s version of the extreme history of the Black Death. Although expressed in the context of astrophysics and endorsed by a handful of respectable scientists and science writers, the cosmic dust thesis strikes us very much like the medieval fixation on water serpents.

  At a certain point, however—one we have not yet reached—extreme history begins to impinge on conventional historiography, and common consciousness has to acknowledge that things unique, horrendous, and otherwise inexplicable have in fact occurred.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Heritage of the African Rifts

  IN THE 1960S AND EARLY 1970s paleontologists made immensely important discoveries in the rift (deep) valleys of East Africa, near the border of modern Kenya and Tanzania.

  First, Mary Leakey discovered the footprints of earliest man leading a small horse, the footprints embedded in hardened clay. Then Grant Johannsen found part of the skeleton of this earliest known human being, 2.5 million years old. The humanoid was a four-foot-tall woman, probably black, who was given the name Lucy because the tape recorder in Johannsen’s archeological campsite was playing the Beatles’ song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” when this identifiably bipedal (erect) human being was discovered.

  It used to be debated whether earliest man appeared separately in various places on earth—Peking, Java, even Europe—or in one single place and spread out from there during millions of years. The discovery of Lucy seemed to settle the argument in favor of the diffusionist theory. Various tests in the 1970s and 1980s proved she lived before any other known human.

  Over millions of years, impelled by environmental changes and the gathering and hunting of food, the human species spread out from Africa over the rest of the world. Humanity reached Western Europe one hundred thousand years ago. A prime avenue of diffusion was the topographical funnel up the Nile from Kenya through the Sudan to the Nile delta and the Mediterranean. This is the great diffusionary chute of prehistory in the earliest times, a very long period before written records began in the fourth millennium B.C.

  The Nile also remained the avenue in later times for the spread of antihumanoid epidemics, from medieval plague to modern AIDS, which also originated in East Africa. Lucy’s homeland is the starting point of human society. It is also the starting point of diseases that have threatened the existence of humanity and in some cases still do so. Even the newest infectious disease, the West Nile virus that threatened New York City and Long Island in the summers of 1999 and 2000, originated in East Africa—in the West Nile district of Uganda.

  Humanoids are cognates of the primate family, although we do not know exactly how this connecting evolution occurred. Lucy can be regarded as the black mother of us all and East Africa as the birthplace of the human race. The same area, however, was the incubus of infectious microbes that have threatened the existence of the human race over a long time. These diseases too came up the geographical chute from East Africa through the Sudan into the Nile de
lta and the Mediterranean. We know that for sure about medieval bubonic plague and modern AIDS, and we can speculate that was also the source and route of other biomedical scourges, particularly smallpox.

  Why East Africa? Only in East Africa was there millions of years ago that necessary combination of climate, topography, and primates to start human evolution. The diseases that struck there—whatever their origins—were most effective there because elsewhere there was little or no life to attack.

  There were pandemics far back in antiquity. The Hebrew Bible mentions them. They were Yawheh’s instrument against the oppressors of the Chosen People, the Jews. God visited ten plagues on pharaoh and the Egyptians (still commemorated at Passover Seder by the spilling of ten drops of red Manischewitz wine) until bad pharaoh let Moses and his people go across the Red Sea toward the Promised Land.

  The fearsome Philistines were also at one point struck down with an epidemic. The Assyrians had to give up their siege of Jerusalem because an epidemic broke out in their army as it lay encamped under the walls of the city. The latter biomedical event (if not the earlier ones), in the sixth century B.C., and recognized in the Bible, has some degree of historical plausibility.

  Certainly there was a great plague in fourth-century B.C. Athens. It struck down the Athenian leader Pericles, and the deathly havoc it played on the Athenians contributed to their unexpected defeat in the Peloponnesian War with Sparta. Nobody knows what this pandemic was. Most historians guess it was smallpox, though it could have been bubonic plague. In any case it probably came up the mortality chute from East Africa into the Mediterranean and was brought along the trade route from Egypt, which the Athenians loved to visit.

  There are plenty of learned people today who think that it was historically important that intellectually advanced and quasidemocratic Athens should have been defeated and demoralized by autocratic, militaristic, unintellectual Sparta. In his twelve-volume A Study of History, completed in the 1950s, Arnold J. Toynbee identified the Peloponnesian War as one of the great catastrophes of history, dooming western civilization almost as soon as it got started. But then Toynbee was a classical scholar and given to exaggeration on subjects like this. To the extent there is weight in Toynbee’s view, disease played an important part by so weakening the Athenians that they lost the war.

  Pandemics unquestionably shaped the course of world history with the biomedical waves of disaster that afflicted the Roman Empire and lay it open to attack and invasion from Germans and Mongolians in the late fourth and fifth centuries A.D. and Muslim Arabs in the seventh century.

  The Roman Empire constituted the coalescence of the Mediterranean civilizations of antiquity under the political aegis of the Roman aristocracy and upper middle class. It stretched from Lebanon to Scotland, from Vienna to five hundred miles beyond Tunis into the North African Maghreb, from Paris to the southern border of Egypt and the Sudan. It was a highly literate and artistic and productive civilization, inventive in religion and law, urban-centered and peaceful among its ethnically diverse population, which had reached a level of fifty million by A.D. 250.

  Then a series of plagues and pandemics assaulted the Roman world, and by the mid–seventh century A.D. the empire as a political and cultural unit was gone in Western Europe, replaced by violent, unstable, and predominantly illiterate barbarian kingdoms. All of the eastern and southern shores of the Mediterranean were by A.D. 700 ruled by Arab-speaking Muslim lords and even Anatolia (Asian Turkey) now was mostly under Arab rule. The Roman Empire had shrunk to Constantinople and a piece of the Balkans.

  Since Edward Gibbon published the first volume of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in 1776, historians have contemplated the causes of this great transformation in the Mediterranean and Western Europe. Gibbon thought it was due to overcommitment to otherworldly Christianity plus an excessive gigantism, the empire outgrowing its communications and transportation network. The Yale historian of the 1930s Michael Rostovtzeff attributed the downfall of the Roman Empire to class polarization and the takeover of power by illiterate masses, anticipating the fate of czarist Russia, from which Rostovtzeff had fled after the Bolsheviks took over.

  Research since the 1950s has dramatically contributed to the conclusion that Rome’s main problem was biomedical. From about A.D. 250 to A.D. 650 the Mediterranean world was assaulted by successive waves of pandemics that reduced the population by at least one-quarter, causing a manpower shortage in a society whose productivity was based on very little in the way of machinery and almost entirely on immediate plentiful human labor.

  The result was far-reaching: a decline in food supplies and drastic reduction in industrial production and with it enfeeblement in exchange of goods through international trade. This caused shrinking of an already inadequate tax base, decreasing funds for bureaucracy and defense. A severe shortage of soldiers to defend the empire’s immensely long frontiers occurred.

  Gibbon was right. The conversion of the Mediterranean peoples to Christianity by A.D. 400 did engender a new and distracting otherworldly consciousness. The empire was too large and unwieldy and suffered as Gibbon said from “immoderate greatness.” Class struggle and social and cultural polarization hurt the stability of imperial rule, as Rostovtzeff insisted. And there were some bad emperors along the way, who made countless political and military errors.

  But it was the shrinkage of the population and the devastation and fear brought about by succeeding waves of epidemics that sank Rome and thus changed the course of history. Rome’s greatest enemy came not from within but from biomedical plagues that the Romans could not possibly understand or combat.

  The three pandemics were smallpox and gonorrhea from A.D. 250 to A.D. 450 and bubonic plague from 540 to 600. Where smallpox and gonorrhea came from is unknown. Some historians have guessed from the black hole in Central Asia. They may have just as well have come up the great mortality chute from East Africa. Certainly that is where the bubonic plague came from after A.D. 500.

  Smallpox as a disease was officially declared extinct in 1978. It exists today only in the test tubes of a few research laboratories. But for fifteen hundred years it was one of the great menaces to human life. Because of the effectiveness of almost universal infant inoculation it has seemed of little importance, at least in the Western world, since the 1930s. But as late as 1800 smallpox was a terrible threat.

  Before artificial immunization, populations that were not naturally immunized by surviving a previous outbreak of the disease were prey to almost incredible levels of mortality. Smallpox wiped out 9 million Native Americans in Mexico in the sixteenth century, the disease having been imported there by the naturally immunized Spanish conquerors. It had a terrible impact on the Roman world in the period 250 to 450, opening the way for the barbarian invasions.

  Gonorrhea was the first sexually transmitted disease to emerge in the Mediterranean and Roman world. It too may have drifted in from Central Asia or from East Africa. It may have been spontaneously generated in the Roman Empire itself, which tolerated every kind of sexual intercourse known to man, including copulation with animals.

  The appearance of gonorrhea had a cautionary impact on morals. Its prevalence in the fourth century allowed the Church fathers Ambrose and Augustine to condemn Roman promiscuity and prescribe puritan ethics. Only virgins were safe from sexual diseases, so they were elevated to saintly status in the church.

  The epidemic waves caused terror and pessimism in a society with little true scientific knowledge. The ancient world had always relied heavily on faith healing, whether pagan or Christian. Now faith healing became the main recourse against omnivorous diseases devastating whole populations in the hitherto stable and comfortable Mediterranean world.

  Like the first two pandemics that devastated the Roman world, smallpox and gonorrhea, the third wave, bubonic plague, had a terrible impact on the peoples it visited. The emperor of the mid–sixth century, Justinian I, the ruler in Constantinople who expended vast treasure building
armies and fleets to invade and rescue North Africa and Italy from the German invaders, saw his military and political enterprise threatened by the devastating outbreak of bubonic plague in Constantinople and other great cities of the Mediterranean.

  Justinian’s successors were not able to hold back the Muslim armies from Saudi Arabia in the mid–seventh century. Roman defense that had held back the Arabs for millennia gave way in an empire impoverished and diminished by disease. While under frequent siege, Constantinople with its Church of the Holy Wisdom that Justinian had built held out until 1453, until it too was taken by the Ottoman Turks on their way to Bosnia.

  The rise of political entities, legal systems, learning, urban living, and commercial productivity in medieval Europe from 800 to 1300 was made possible by a warming climate and absence of pandemics. There were some moments of effective leadership in state and church that helped the maximization of European growth in economy and learning. But it was the benign climatic and biomedical environment that was most responsible for the rise of European power and wealth, the clearing of land, the revival of cities, and above all the expansion of the population base fourfold from 900 to 1300. Europe was lucky, but in the long run it was also made more vulnerable by the long absence of pandemics. There was no capacity of natural immunization in these benign circumstances.

  Thirteenth-century Western Europe extended from Iceland to Warsaw, from Oslo to Palermo. It was synonymous with Latin Christendom, with the area of devotion to the Roman Catholic Church, although within this spiritual umbrella there were plenty of critics of the papacy and clergy and at any given time at least 5 percent of the population had separated themselves from the Latin Church and set up their own religious (“heretical”) communities.

  The heartland, the richest and culturally most advanced parts of European civilization, lay in southern England, in northern France in the Seine-Loire valleys and the city of Paris, in southern France along the Rhone River, and in the Rhine Valley of Germany and the Low Countries at the great river’s mouth, and in northern Italy from the Po Valley to Rome. This European heartland was much more thickly populated than the rest of Europe and was also the location of its great cities.