One place the plague stopped on its travels from China to the West was the tiny trading oasis of Issyk Kul, located on the borders of modern China and Kyrgyzstan. Travelers went from this outpost east to China or west to Caffa, Baghdad, or Tabriz. Records show that in 1338, a man in Issyk Kul was struck down by a mysterious disease. His wife tried all the folk remedies available, to no avail. Within a few days her husband was gone, and so was she. One hundred six more residents of Issyk Kul would fall ill and die suddenly within the next year, 102 more than in an average year, and according to headstones in the village graveyard, the cause of death for all 106 villagers was the same.
Plague, the Black Death that would peak from 1348 to 1350 and decimate between one-third and half of the West’s population of 90 million, sailed into Europe through the Italian port of Messina in 1347 on a fleet of twelve Genovese trading ships. Most of their crew was dead or dying from a plague so virulent that if anyone so much as spoke to one of them, he, too, became infected.
After reaching Messina, the plague spread to Genoa and Pisa within months. By year’s end, the disease had raged through Italy and then spread north on merchant ships to Paris, the Low Countries, and England. In 1349, the epidemic spread into Germany, Austria, and Scandinavia. In 1350, it crossed the North Atlantic to Iceland and Greenland, where it wiped out the failing Viking settlement. It reached Russia two years later.
Europe’s success in reconnecting with the world on the other side of the Mediterranean created the conditions that led to the spread of the Black Death through Europe. Under the Mongolian Peace, trade caravans traveled with greater frequency from east to west. After 1291, when a Genovese admiral defeated the Moroccan fleets that had previously prevented free passage through the Straits of Gibraltar, ship traffic between the Mediterranean to the ports of northern Europe increased.
The disease destroyed its victims with such speed that Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio, who lived through the Black Death in Florence, claimed that some “ate lunch with their friends and dined with their ancestors.” Most suffered from the bubonic plague, in which a sudden high fever was followed within days by painful black swellings (buboes) the size of apples in the armpits and groin as the lymph nodes were overwhelmed by the bacteria. The buboes sometimes burst, letting out a mixture of blood and noxious pus. The black blotches for which the plague was named would spread over the victim’s arms and legs. Convulsions, vomiting of blood, and delirium followed. The victim was usually dead within five days; the lucky ones died in less than one. A few survived. A second form, the pneumatic plague, was less common but deadlier, and much more contagious. This disease attacked the lungs instead of the lymph nodes, causing the victim to drown in bloody foam. The deadliest of all was the rare septicemic plague, in which the bacteria attacked the bloodstream directly, bringing death before any visible symptoms appeared.
The speed at which the epidemic swept through Europe and the number of its victims were terrifying. Densely populated towns and religious communities were hit harder than rural regions. Some communities, like Milan, seem to have escaped the disease entirely. But many small towns and villages were wiped out. North Africa and Asia suffered similar losses.
Those who could fled the cities. Others practiced a reverse quarantine, shutting themselves up in their houses. Some abandoned stricken family members, fearful of catching the disease themselves. Boccaccio reported that parents deserted their own children. Some saw the plague as a sign of God’s wrath against a sinful people. Groups of flagellants roamed the cities, whipping their own backs with spike-tipped thongs in an attempt to purge themselves of sin.
Even though people did not understand the causes of the disease, they did recognize the relationship between the disease and the trade routes. Some cities tried to close their gates against outsiders. Frightened citizens blamed foreigners and then turned on local Jewish populations, who were often involved in the eastern trade. Rumors spread that the Jews had caused the plague by poisoning wells. Some Jews were burned in their houses by fearful mobs. Others were tortured until they confessed to crimes they hadn’t committed. In July 1348, Pope Clement VI issued a papal bull placing the Jews of Europe under his protection and ordering Christians to stop the violence against them, with no effect. The persecution continued to escalate, reaching its most extreme point in Strasbourg.
Europe’s success in reconnecting with the world … created the conditions that led to the spread of the Black Death.
Eyewitnesses later described this day, when paranoid Strasbourg Christians marched their captives to the city’s Jewish cemetery. There, in an ad hoc legal proceeding, the Jews were accused and tried for poisoning the city’s wells and spreading the plague. After being tortured, some of those prisoners confessed to the charges against them. As a result, thousands of other Jews were killed or expelled from this and other German cities. Some were given a choice between converting to Christianity or burning. A few of those captured in Strasbourg renounced Judaism and converted. Some two thousand others, including Rabbi Meier and his family, did not and were then burned to death.
A FIRSTHAND ACCOUNT OF THE PLAGUE
The plague began in Siena in May, a horrible and cruel event. I do not know where to begin describing its relentless cruelty; almost everyone who witnessed it seemed stupefied by grief. It is not possible for the human tongue to recount such a horrible thing, and those who did not see such horrors can well be called blessed. They died almost immediately; they would swell up under the armpits and in the groin and drop dead while talking. Fathers abandoned their children, wives left their husbands, brothers forsook each other; all fled from each other because it seemed that the disease could be passed on by breath and sight. And so they died, and one could not find people to carry out burials for money or friendship. People brought members of their own household to the ditches as best they could, without priest or holy office or ringing of bells, and in many parts of Siena large deep ditches were dug for the great number of dead; hundreds died day and night, and all were thrown into these pits and covered with layers of earth, so much that the pits were filled and more were dug.
And I, Agnolo di Tura, known as the Fat, buried five of my children with my own hands. And there were those who had been so poorly covered with earth that dogs dragged them from there and through the city and fed on corpses. Nobody wept for the dead, since each was awaiting death and so many died that everyone thought that the end of the world had come.
—Agnolo di Tura del Grasso
The Massacre of Jews at Strasbourg by Eugene Beyer depicts a scene horribly familiar to modern readers.
Buchenwald Concentration Camp, 1945
ANTI-SEMITISM AND MOB RULE
The massacre of Jews in fourteenth century Strasbourg is a reminder of one of humanity’s recurring failures: our tendency to seek scapegoats in times of trouble.
Failed crops, pandemics, and failed economies all make it is easy for a charismatic leader to fan the flames of mass hysteria, inciting fearful people to violence against a persecuted or despised minority. We see variations of the pattern over and over throughout history. Christians persecuted in ancient Rome. Witches burned in sixteenth century Europe. Pogroms against Jews in Russia and Poland in the nineteenth century. The massacre of Armenians in Turkey in the early twentieth century. Nazi Germany’s murder of six million Jews in World War II.
Ethnic hatred, superstition, prejudice, and ignorance are powerful forces, that have divided communities and nations and have caused enormous suffering throughout time.
BLAMING THE JEWS
STRASBOURG, GERMANY, FEBRUARY 14, 1349. Outside the city’s Jewish quarter, Rabbi Meier walks alone, on his way home with a bundle of fresh food. He is one block from the Jewish ghetto gates when, from the street behind him, he hears commotion. Turning to look, he sees an agitated crowd of people advancing quickly. They’re waving sticks and shouting threateningly in his direction. Why, he doesn’t know—but he knows enough to run the rest of
the way to safety.
With his wife and children assembled at the dinner table, Rabbi Meier is leading the family in prayer. Suddenly, the sounds of footsteps and yelling from outside prompt him to stop and listen. A flaming object comes through the window, and lands on the floor. The fire begins to spread, causing the Meier children to scream and run to the front door—just as it is kicked in. A group of angry men grab the children, the rabbi, and his wife and drag them out of the house onto the street. Turning to look one last time at his burning house, Rabbi Meier sees a man and a woman running through the flames and out the front door, carrying pieces of the family’s silver.
From one witness to the day’s events came this report: “The Jews of Strasbourg were stripped almost naked by the crowd as they were marched to their own cemetery and into a house prepared for burning. At the cemetery gates, the youth and beauty of several females excited some commiseration; and they were snatched from death against their will. But the young and beautiful and the converts were the only ones to see sun set in Strasbourg that Valentine’s Day. Marchers who tried to escape were chased down the street and murdered.”
The plague did not disappear after the first wave of deaths. Subsequent epidemics hit Europe at irregular intervals in the 1360s and 1370s and continued to flare up as late as the Great Plague of London of 1665. Communities that had escaped the first epidemic were hit badly in later epidemics. Yet none of these later epidemics was as devastating as the first. Those communities that had suffered before experienced lower death rates, since survivors of earlier attacks became immune.
IT TAKES A CITY
TO MAKE AN EPIDEMIC
Epidemic diseases are described as “crowd diseases” for a reason. They are the companion of permanent settlement and the growth of cities.
From the plague to swine flu, all epidemic diseases share several characteristics:
• The disease spreads quickly and easily from an infected person to the healthy people around him or her.
• Victims either die or recover completely in a short period of time. (The fact that we describe those who catch epidemic disease as victims says a lot. In a very real sense, microbes mug their human hosts.)
• Those who recover develop antibodies that leave them immune to the disease.
It would be almost two hundred years before Europe’s population grew back to the levels it had enjoyed before the plague.
Within four years the plague killed two hundred million people, nearly half the population of Europe. Europe suffered a substantial depopulation of rural areas and a labor shortage in both town and countryside. Villages lay empty and abandoned. Fields went unworked. The Roman Catholic Church, which lost a disproportionately high number of clergy, found itself with a list of open appointments and had difficulty training enough new priests to fill them. Governments found it equally difficult to recruit soldiers and were forced to increase wages.
JUNE 1763. FORT PITT WAS surrounded. Chief Pontiac of the Ottawa had organized the Indian nations of the Great Lakes region into a confederation to drive the English back to their settlements along the sea. Eight of the ten British forts west of Niagara had already fallen to Pontiac’s forces.
Fort Pitt’s commander, Captain Simeon Ecuyer, had received prior notice of the uprising. The stockade was well supplied with food and ammunition. Ecuyer assured his superiors that he would be able to hold out until reinforcements relieved the siege. In the meantime, he was willing to try to break the siege another way. Smallpox had broken out in the fort. Everyone knew the Indians had no stamina where disease was concerned. When two of Pontiac’s chiefs came to the fort to urge the English to surrender, Ecuyer gave them two blankets and a handkerchief that had belonged to smallpox victims. He hoped it would have the desired effect.
Three weeks later, Lord Jeffrey Amherst, commanding general of British forces in North America, had the same idea. He wrote to Colonel Henry Bouquet, who had relieved the siege at Fort Pitt, “Could it not be contrived to send the Smallpox among those disaffected tribes of Indians? We must on this occasion use every stratagem in our power to reduce them.” Bouquet, like Ecuyer, thought smallpox blankets would do the trick.
The Americas were blessedly free of the terrifying epidemic diseases that repeatedly swept through Europe and Asia. Smallpox, measles, influenza, plague, tuberculosis, typhus, cholera, and malaria traveled from Asia to Europe, leaving the dead and the immune in their wake. Even when they did not rage in epidemic proportions, these diseases lingered in endemic form in the cities of Eurasia, kept alive by the poor sanitation and crowded streets of early (and not-so-early) cities. Exposed to endemic variations of the most dangerous diseases, large portions of the Eurasia population developed immunities. The peoples of the Americas did not suffer from the ravages of epidemics, but neither did they benefit from the creation of an immune population.
Eurasian crowd diseases evolved from Eurasian herd animals. Unlike the peoples of Eurasia, the populations of the Americas had few domestic animals: the turkey in Mexico and the American Southwest; the llama, alpaca, and guinea pig in the Andes; the Muscovy duck in tropical South America; and the dog throughout both continents.
Smallpox killed an estimated sixty million Europeans, including five reigning European monarchs, in the eighteenth century alone.
Even if one of the pre-Columbian civilizations had developed an epidemic disease, it had no way to spread across the continent. Alexander the Great, the Romans, and Genghis Khan created huge empires that linked otherwise separate regions of the Eurasian world. Even when Central Asia was divided into smaller, feuding kingdoms, the East-West trade of the Silk Roads continued, carrying germs as well as silks, spices, and precious gems. By contrast, vast distances separated the three civilizations of the Americas: the Andes, Mesoamerica, and the American Southeast. Maize cultivation spread across both continents from Mesoamerica, but the cultures that grew up around maize in all its forms were never connected by regular trade. Andean cultures traded with Mesoamerica for the feathers of brilliantly colored tropical birds. Seashells from the Yucatán Peninsula made their way to the Mississippi. But nothing like the East-West trade of the Silk Routes existed to connect the Andes to the Mississippi.
WORST EPIDEMICS IN HISTORY
SMALLPOX 300+ million 10,000 BCE to 1979
MEASLES 200 million 7th century BCE to 1963
SPANISH FLU 50–100 million 1918–1919
PLAGUE 75 million 1340–1400
PLAGUE OF
JUSTINIAN 25 million 541–750 BCE
HIV/AIDS 25+ million 1981–present
BACTERIA, DNA,
SURVIVAL
Humans evolved from single-cell bacteria, yet microscopic bacteria cause diseases that continue to kill human beings.
Furthermore, bacteria are everywhere. Our bodies are covered with them; 600,000 on one square inch of skin. We depend on bacteria to live. Only when a new strain arises and comes after us can they threaten our health and lives.
Scientists did not discover the germs that cause diseases until 500 years after the plague ravaged Europe and Asia. It would take another century for human beings to work out how to kill bacteria in our bodies without also killing our bodies’ “good” cells.
Much later still, when scientists completed the epic work of cracking the human genome, reasons for the survival of some from the plague and other pandemics became clear. Some descendants of people who lived through the plague and survived had a gene that would protect them from HIV, Ebola, and other infectious diseases. What doesn’t kill man makes him stronger.
Today we can cure the plague, and promising new medicines are in development to prevent and slow the advance of HIV/AIDS. Less reassuring is the fact that bacterial “superbugs” such as E. coli, staphylococcus, and streptococcus are mutating to resist some of our best medicines, including old standbys, such as penicillin. The human race continues to fight an evolutionary struggle with deadly bacteria as their resistance to synthetic antibiotics
allows these germs to evade our best efforts to kill or contain them.
At the same time the Eurasia population was being ravaged by the plague, the civilized populations of the Americas were growing. On the eve of the Spanish conquest, that number was roughly 100 million, much of it centralized around the three central cultural areas.
Like early Mesopotamia, Mesoamerica was home to a series of cultures with shared characteristics, each building on the earlier cultures it replaced, beginning with the Olmecs in 1200 BCE. In the Yucatan, the process of urbanization and state building culminated in the Mayan civilization, a loose confederation of about five dozen city-states and kingdoms held together by a shared culture and extensive trade routes that linked the larger Mesoamerican world.
In Mexico, the militarized states of the Mixtec, the Zapotec, and the Toltec grew, conquered, fell, and were conquered in turn. Each of the American states was tapped into the same trade routes that supplied the Maya. Their cities were supported by a network of villages and towns that grew crops using irrigation and the raised-field farming known as the chinapa system.
When the Aztecs’ ancestors moved into the Valley of Mexico from the north, they were foragers and small farmers who settled into the marginal farmlands between the region’s major city-states. Like the barbarian tribes who infiltrated Rome in the fourth century, Aztecs aspired to the comforts of the more developed cultures. In the fourteenth century, also like the Germanic tribes, Aztecs began to hire themselves out as mercenaries to the armies of the existing powers. In 1428, they overthrew their masters and created a dynasty of their own, the most aggressive imperial power seen in Mesoamerica prior to the arrival of the Spaniards. In less than a century, their capital city, Tenochtitlán had a population of roughly two million.
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