The Plague Cycle

by Charles Kenny

  In 1347, the plague struck a Mongol army besieging the Genoese trading outpost of Caffa, today the town of Feodosiya in Crimea. Twenty years later, Gabriele de Mussi, a notary in the town of Piacenza, Italy, told the story as he heard it. The Mongols (or Tartars, as he calls them)

  “besieged the trapped Christians there for almost three years.… But behold, the whole army was affected by a disease which overran the Tartars and killed thousands upon thousands every day. It was as though arrows were raining down from heaven to strike and crush the Tartars’ arrogance. All medical advice and attention was useless; the Tartars died as soon as the signs of disease appeared on their bodies; swellings on the armpit and groin caused by coagulating humours, followed by a putrid fever.41

  Despite the lifting of the siege because of the hideous death toll among the besiegers, occupants of the city did no better. Whether it was by way of fleas carried on rats from besieger to besieged or through direct contact with fleas from Mongol cadavers flung over the walls, the defenders were soon infected themselves. Those who could, fled the mystery illness by sea. As they traveled west, docking at Constantinople, Messina, Sardinia, Genoa, and Marseilles, they may have brought the pestilence with them—at least it followed on later ships from other Crimean ports.42

  The poet Petrarch’s friend, the writer Boccaccio, lived through the plague in Florence and describes early symptoms that match Procopius’s description from eight hundred years before. “It first betrayed itself by the emergence of certain tumors in the groin or the armpits, some of which grew as large as a common apple, others as an egg.” And the disease spread “despite all that human wisdom and forethought could devise to avert it, as the cleansing of the city from many impurities by officials appointed for the purpose, the refusal of entrance to all sick folk, and the adoption of many precautions for the preservation of health; despite also humble supplications addressed to God.”43

  Petrarch himself, who’d moved from Venice back to his childhood home of Avignon, wrote that “in the year 1348, one that I deplore, we were deprived not only of our friends but of peoples throughout the world.… When at any time has such a thing been seen or spoken of? Has what happened in these years ever been read about: empty houses, derelict cities, ruined estates, fields strewn with cadavers, a horrible and vast solitude encompassing the whole world.”44

  Petrarch described his home town Avignon as “the most dismal, crowded and turbulent in existence, a sink overflowing with all of the gathered filth of the world.” That suggests it was probably home to a considerable quantity of rats.45 It was also one of the best connected cities in Europe, and temporary home of the Catholic pope.

  Ecologists José Gómez and Miguel Verdú studied which areas were hardest hit by the Black Death, finding that the loss of life in most cities averaged one-half of inhabitants. And (as is usually the case with pandemics) those cities that were more connected, on trade and pilgrimage routes, were more severely affected. They suffered constantly renewed outbreaks. Avignon saw death rates as high as 70 percent.46

  Pope Clement bought the city a new cemetery to deal with the rising pile of bodies, but it was soon filled with eleven thousand of them, so he simply consecrated the Rhone River as a burial site. Every morning, hundreds of corpses were flung into the river.

  As with previous pandemics, one of the signs of a civilization overburdened was the abandoning of suitable reverence for the dead. Petrarch wrote that “wherever I turn my frightened eyes, their gaze is troubled by continual funerals: the churches groan encumbered with biers, and, without last respects, the corpses of the noble and the commoner lie in confusion alongside each other.”47

  That said, while the poet bemoaned “fields strewn with cadavers,”48 the contemporary descriptions of social breakdown often aped Thucydides’s story of the plague of Athens closely enough to suggest chroniclers may have been writing what felt right to say as much as what had happened.49 And the broader evidence is of remarkably little social disruption.

  There were exceptions: the worst were deadly outbreaks of anti-Semitism, as we’ll see. But, sadly, it hadn’t taken the death of as much as half the European population to spark previous violence against Jews in 1146, 1189, 1204, 1217, 1288, 1298, or 1321.50 Anti-Semitic attacks were an endemic evil throughout much of European history, not a unique sign of a sense of end-times.

  Again, in 1349, flagellants wove through towns singing and scourging themselves in repentance, threatening religious authority. On July 8, they entered Strasbourg. All but one man lay facedown on the ground, while the sole standing flagellant brought out his scourge—a whip with many leather tails, each knotted around a thorn at its end. The leader stood over one of the prone brothers and whipped his back with the scourge, saying “Rise up from the cleansing pain and stay away from sin from now on.” The first man to feel the lash now joined the leader in taking up the scourge, and the two flagellants moved together to their next kinsman and whipped him, repeating “Rise up from the cleansing pain and stay away from sin from now on.” And so they went on around the circle, with each standing brother joining in whipping those who came after, until all two hundred flagellants were upright, walking in a circle, whipping themselves with scourges.

  But for all of the drama, the movement quickly petered out. The pope issued a decree against the flagellants in October 1349, and in a case of the punishment fitting the crime perhaps a little too well, a number were condemned to be flogged by priests before the altar of St. Peter’s in Rome.51

  If evidence is needed of the resilience of social order in the face of even the most incredible stress, it is this: people lived through the Black Death, as they lived through epidemics of measles and smallpox—or the Blitz in the Second World War, the 9/11 attacks, or floods in New Orleans—largely without resorting to Hobbesian misrule. For all cable news and zombie movies would like to pretend that we’re always only a step away from mass hysteria, it’s just hardly ever true. The Black Death struck in the midst of the Hundred Years War between England and France, but provoked a cessation of hostilities that lasted only half a year.52 Edward III’s arguable claim to the throne of France couldn’t be stopped by the mere death of half of his countrymen.

  And, in a world where most people lived largely self-sufficiently and near subsistence, a massive demographic catastrophe had a relatively small short-term impact on the economy. While Sienna’s courts and cloth industry all closed down during the height of the plague between June and August 1348, for example, government and the markets were functioning again by the fall of that year.53

  Mass death in a Malthusian world did eventually have an impact on society and incomes across Western Europe, but that impact was to make the laborers who remained a little better off. In 1349, the English government issued the Ordinance of Labourers. It was prefaced by a justification by King Edward III: “Because a great part of the people, and especially of workmen and servants, late died of the pestilence, many seeing the necessity of masters, and great scarcity of servants, will not serve unless they may receive excessive wages.”54 Workers were using limited supply to demand increased payment, just as they had after the plague of Justinian.

  And echoing Justinian’s response, Edward III tried to stop that, along with people moving to new jobs or charging higher prices. But just as Justinian’s ordinance had been eight centuries earlier, the law was at best partially effective. Suddenly wealthy artisans started eating and dressing better. So the government tried banning that, too. The English sumptuary law passed in 1363 complained of “the Outrageous and Excessive Apparel of divers People, against their Estate and Degree, to the great Destruction and Impoverishment of all the Land.” It set down strict rules on who could wear and eat what: servants were to have “Flesh or Fish, and the Remnant [of] other Victuals, as of Milk, Butter, and Cheese” only once a day.

  Expensive labor once again made people search for labor-saving devices as they had after the plague of Justinian. Gutenberg’s printing technology
replaced skilled copyists with the wood and metal of the press, new salting methods allowed smaller fishing crews to stay at sea longer, better pumps drained deeper mines, saving the labor of opening a new one.55 And in Western Europe, the feudal system that grew up after Justinian’s plague to replace farming based on slave labor finally collapsed in turn as a result of the Black Death.56

  Nico Voigtländer of UCLA and Hans-Joachim Voth, an economist at University Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, suggest the Black Death wasn’t just a boon for laborers in general but also for women in particular. The sudden drop in farm labor encouraged techniques that used less labor on marginal land—like livestock farming, which didn’t require the strength necessary for the heavy plow, making it a job that was equally favorable to men and women alike. Shepherdesses and milkmaids rapidly expanded in numbers, mainly employed in return for money, room, and board. A usual condition of their employment was that they had to remain unmarried and without child—the appearance of a husband or a baby was grounds for dismissal. That helped push up marriage ages, which reduced birth rates. In turn, in a Malthusian economy, that helped keep wages high.57

  But while the northwestern corner of Europe enjoyed growing freedom for the peasantry, across the Mediterranean and in Eastern Europe peasants were forced to perform more labor for their lord, losing rights to move and the right of access to royal courts. The different outcome was in part because it was easier for peasants to run off to a town in comparatively urbanized Western Europe than it was in the east, and also because grain prices didn’t collapse in the east as they did in the west, thanks in part to government grain monopolies.58 That considerably weakened the bargaining position of agricultural laborers—and the serf system remained in place into the nineteenth century. In a step back to the times of Justinian, Venice even imported slaves from the Caucasus to help farm in Crete.

  The Black Death continued scarring Europe for far longer than had the plague of Justinian. The Great Mortality was followed eleven years later by the Children’s Plague. That killed off as much as a fifth of the English population, focusing especially on those born since the Black Death itself (many older people had immunity from surviving the initial wave). And epidemics struck again and again—fourteen times in the Netherlands before 1500.

  The good news, such as it was: plagues became both more localized and less deadly, with mortality rates that merely struck down one in every ten of those living instead of up to one-half.59 Perhaps better building standards played a role. Europeans were increasingly living in structures made of brick, stone, and beams rather than wattle and daub. Perhaps the displacement of Rattus rattus (the comparatively companionable plague rat) by Rattus norvegicus (which is more wary of humans) helped reduce the likelihood of infection.

  * * *

  And what of William McNeill’s theory that plague ravaged China before coming west? Historian George Sussman argued that “we still cannot state with any degree of assurance whether the Black Death… even visited China or the Indian subcontinent in the fourteenth century.” He notes there are no firsthand descriptions of plague or its symptoms in Mongol sources or from Silk Road travelers anywhere to the east of the Caucasus in the entire century.60 The plague first appears in Indian texts in the early seventeenth century, when the Mughal emperor Jahangir himself reported that “it became known from men of great age and from old histories that this disease had never shown itself in this country [before].” And while China’s population halved over the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth century, and epidemics undoubtedly played a role in that alongside war and natural disasters, the first description of a Black Death–like plague in China is from a local gazetteer from Lu-an, Shanxi, in 1644.

  In 2010, a genetic analysis of plague samples from disinterred victims appeared to support McNeill’s view of a source in or near China.61 But more recent exercises involving a greater number of samples have pointed to central Asia as the potential source, closer to modern Kyrgyzstan, which would fit with Sussman’s view of where it likely began.62

  Why was the south and east of Asia likely saved from the Black Death? In the case of India, Sussman suggests distance, the geographical barriers of mountains and deserts, and maybe fewer of the right kind of rat and flea. For China, one factor may have been the nature of the trade along the silk road: we’ve seen that, as in ancient times, Europe ran a trade deficit with the East: slaves from central Asia and silks, porcelain, and spices from China went one way, much of what went back the other was silver and gold. That might suggest rats, fleas, and disease had an easier time going west than east. Another factor might be that Chinese cities were comparatively clean and spread out, which lowered pest populations.

  Economists Voigtländer and Voth argue that the plague played an important role in the relative fortunes of China and Europe over the next few hundred years.63 In the century of the Black Death, China was the font of global technological progress, unified and governed by a career bureaucracy chosen by competitive exam. And yet as the plague was petering out in the eighteenth century, still well before the age of coal and steam, England’s average income and the proportion of the population living in cities in Western Europe as a whole were both twice that of China. How to explain it?

  Voigtländer and Voth suggest that the reason for the reversal in economic fortunes between China and Western Europe was the Malthusian system at work: the plague increased incomes more in the West than in the East because it was more devastating in the West than in the East. The impact of the plague may be one major reason that Europe became the source of colonizers and conquistadors two centuries later.

  * * *

  In the other direction, the Black Death eventually reached Iceland and perhaps even Viking settlements on Greenland. Given the contact between those settlements and Vineland on the coast of North America, the New World had a lucky escape—it was not exposed to the plague of the fourteenth century. The peoples of the Americas were not so lucky a century and a half later, when explorers from Europe rediscovered the continent with far more devastating effect.64

  CHAPTER FOUR Pestilence Conquers

  Great was the stench of the dead. After our fathers and grandfathers succumbed, half of the people fled to the fields. The dogs and vultures devoured the bodies.

  —The Annals of the Cakchiquels

  Napoleon, who suffered multiple defeats thanks to infectious disease, sticks his finger in a bubo. The detail is from Antoine-Jean Gros’s painting Napoleon Bonaparte Visiting the Plague-Stricken at Jaffa. (Source: Bonaparte Visiting the Victims of the Plague at Jaffa, March 11, 1799. Baron Antoine-Jean Gros, 1804. Wikimedia Commons)

  Around twenty thousand years ago, people lived on a large land bridge between Siberia and Alaska that submerged at the end of the ice age. As the glaciers retreated, the survivors were able to expand into the Americas even as they were cut off from Eurasia. Within two thousand years they’d spread across rich hunting grounds from modern Canada to the ends of South America.1

  A number of the larger native mammals became extinct soon after, a process potentially sped up by hunting, climate change, and diseases brought by humans themselves. That may have been one reason to adopt farming, but by that point there were few species left to domesticate—guinea pigs, turkeys, ducks, llamas, and alpacas.2 As it happens, these animals are host to few microbes that can easily jump to humans. Isolated from most Eurasian diseases of civilization, and incubating few new diseases of their own, the first Americans suffered largely from the microbes of prehistory—including herpes viruses, anthrax, worms, and (possibly) yaws, which is related to syphilis.3 Hence, ensuing millennia saw steady population growth. The number of humans may have been suppressed by trying to farm without horses, oxen, cows, and pigs, but the scarcity of fellow-traveling bacteria and viruses conferred a net health benefit.

  By the 1480s, as described in Charles Mann’s 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, both North and South America had developed civilizations with co
nsiderable cities and empires. Varied estimates suggest the continents held between 40 and 80 million people (that compares to Europe with 74 to 88 million).4 The civilizations of the New World built pyramids, carved stepped roads through mountainsides, developed complex calendars, and fashioned beautiful artwork out of metals.5 And in 1491, the Inca controlled the world’s largest empire—bigger than Ming dynasty China.6 The conurbation of Tenochtitlán, Texcoco, and Tlatelolco in Mexica was much larger than Paris and its surrounding suburbs—Europe’s largest metropolis at the time.7 But in a matter of decades, these civilizations were overrun by Eurasian and African microbial invaders.

  In the years after the Black Death, the Mongol Empire fragmented. The rising Ottoman Empire spread from Anatolia through the Balkans and down to the Indian Ocean. It took its own toll (literally) on trade from the Far East to the West. And European adventurers became increasingly enamored of the idea of another route—a way to reach the silks and spices of the East by sea. Compare the horse or camel and its carrying capacity to that of even a rather modest ship; it’s clear that sending goods on a distant journey via the ocean would take less time and require less effort and negotiation than to emulate Marco Polo and try to cross the steppe.

  Christopher Columbus treasured his manuscript copy of Marco Polo’s Travels, and it helped fire him to his own adventures.8 While Portuguese explorers planned routes around Africa to reach the Indian Ocean, Columbus imagined a more direct route—straight across the Atlantic to Cathay. On his first voyage, he found neither China nor spices, nor significant quantities of gold. Instead, he carried back iron pyrite—fool’s gold—along with bark that wasn’t cinnamon and chilies that weren’t pepper.9

  Columbus also found people, noting they were “very well built with fine bodies and handsome faces… fairly tall on the whole, with fine limbs and good proportions.” Ominously, he also reported “they have no iron.… All the inhabitants could be taken away to Castile or held as slaves on the island, for with fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we wish.”10 He told his royal sponsors that with another trip across the Atlantic he could manage so much more: “To speak only of the results of this very hasty voyage, their highnesses can see that I will give them as much gold as they require… also I will give them all the spices and cotton they want.”