Plagues in World History (7 page)

How did such concerns play out in the Christian West? We have already noted how a sort of martyrdom that promised a spiritual communion with Christ was proffered to the faithful who died of plague in a Toledo sermon from the seventh century. By and large, however, the Christian tradition seemed to emphasize punishment rather than reward in its religious interpretation of plague, in contrast to the Muslim approach.55 Perhaps this has something to do with the influence of the Old Testament and the Hebrew legacy upon Christianity. But I also think it very much ties in with Augustine’s theology of original sin, which would naturally endorse a more flagellating attitude. It is significant that the second Toledo sermon urging repentance in the face of plague bases itself on and quotes generously from Augustine’s own sermon on the threatened destruction of the city of Constantinople, which was narrowly averted by communal procession and prayer (
De excidio urbis
).56

On the other hand, Christian tolerance for flight from the plague (which during the Black Death was arguably far more pronounced and universal than in Islam, whose greater emphasis was on one’s duty to stay and tend the sick) seems Plague y 31

to be traceable back to pagan Greek influences upon Christianity, specifically the Quaestiones et Responsiones
(
Questions and Answers
) of Anastasius of Sinai, a Greek monk writing toward the end of the seventh century. In Question 114, Anastasius offers a compromise between the religious and rational responses on the issue of whether one can escape the plague by fleeing from it: If the plague comes from God’s will, then flight is useless, an answer that accords quite well with Islamic beliefs, except for the interpretation that the disease is a form of divine punishment. But if the plague originates from corrupt air, then fleeing to a healthier location is efficacious, which obviously owes much to the Hippocratic corpus (which also will form the basis of the Arabic medical tradition). Since Anastasius was both a Greek and a Christian, he seems here to be trying to reconcile the two sides of his heritage, a struggle that was quite a common one for the apologists in the early days of Christianity.57 Although flight was to become a perfectly acceptable response for Europeans, even if they were churchmen, by the time of the Black Death, this by no means precluded that plague ultimately came from God’s design, a widely held notion even among late medieval doctors.

As it did for Islam at this time, the plague therefore posed something of a conundrum for Christians in terms of how to respond to it based on competing traditions, which was not to be resolved until the Second Pandemic centuries later.

Yet another literary tradition emerged during the First Pandemic that likewise evinced ambivalent attitudes toward the flight response to plague, but this time primarily from a social, rather than religious, point of view. Paul the Deacon, in his eighth-century
History of the Lombards
, recalls how, during a plague in Italy in 565, even close family members abandoned each other, as allegedly “sons fled, leaving the corpses of their parents unburied; parents forgetful of their duty abandoned their children in raging fever.” This might seem to be a clear condemnation of those who abrogated their social obligations in order to save their own skins, yet the moral of Paul’s story is rather ambiguous, since he also tells us that even those who stayed behind out of “longstanding affection” to bury relatives were themselves unburied and unmourned. What is incontestable is that people believed plague was contagious and therefore were faced with a stark choice, to either run away or face death. This, at least, seems to have been the general consensus of the population according to Paul, for “common report had it that those who fled would avoid the plague,” with the result that “dwellings were left deserted by their inhabitants, and the dogs only kept house.”58

Paul was not the only one who observed the fragile social fabric in the face of plague; the East Syrian Orthodox monk John bar Penkāyē alleged that, during a plague in North Mesopotamia in 686–687, “No brother had any pity on his brother, or father on his son; a mother’s compassion for her children was cut off.”

John certainly disapproved of this behavior, for he noted that, when Christians 32 y Chapter 1

failed to bury their dead and simply fled, their behavior descended to the level of pagans (in this case the Persian Zoroastrians) or else of “dogs and wild animals.” Further proof of their ungodliness was how they responded if reminded that “no one can escape from God, except by means of repentance and conversion to Him.” According to John, they replied with blasphemous rebukes such as, “Get out; we know very well that escape is much more profitable to us than supplication.” This indicates that the rational response noted by Anastasius of Sinai was alive and well among the population at large. If not pursued by the plague itself, such sinful refugees were “harvested” by looters or dogs and wild animals. A more practical consideration was that abandoned exposed corpses, strewn about like “manure on the earth,” then contaminated water sources such as springs and rivers, which would only help perpetuate the disease.59 On both moral and medical grounds, John informs us, flight had its drawbacks, even if it seemed to be dictated by self-preservation. These issues will necessarily be raised again during the Second Pandemic.

Scholarly consensus is inclined to be cautious in assessing the long-term impact of the First Pandemic of plague. There seems to be a desire to attribute neither too much impact to the disease nor too little.60 This is in contrast to the cataclysmic upheaval almost universally accorded to the Black Death of the late Middle Ages. Yet, the case has been made that the First Pandemic of plague did no less than usher in the Middle Ages by sweeping away classical civilizations in Byzantium and Persia, thus clearing the way for the rise of peoples formerly on the periphery of the empire, such as the northern “barbarians” of Europe or the nomadic tribesmen in Arabia, both of whom allegedly suffered far less from the plague’s ravages.61 This thesis is easily refuted if one but remembers that the Roman Empire, at least in the West, declined and fell well before the plague first struck in 541, or that Muslim armies had to contend with plague, particularly in their conquest of Syria, no less than Byzantine or Persian ones. In fact, the Umayyad dynasty was to reach its greatest extent at the very time when its power base in Syria was heavily targeted by plague, buffeting it with depopulations, agricultural contraction, and urban and rural dislocations; curiously, however, the dynasty came to an end at the very moment when the First Pandemic also reached its demise.62 And it was not until the dawn of the ninth century, when a generation or more of Europeans had lived with no need to fear of plague, that the northern barbarian kingdoms under the leadership of Charlemagne were finally able to achieve recognition as equals from rivals in Constantinople and Baghdad. If plague did indeed play a role in such momentous events as the rise and fall of empires or the emergence of Europe, then surely it was only in conjunction with other forces that crashed in on the late classical or early medieval world: the mass migrations of Germanic tribes, for instance, or the birth of a Plague y 33

dynamic, new religion—Islam—that was to become the great rival of Christianity. Instead, I believe that the varied and intangible cultural responses to plague outlined above, both with respect to Christian and Muslim communities in Europe and the Middle East, comprised the most enduring legacy of the First Pandemic: as already indicated, they helped set the stage for what was to come during the Second Pandemic centuries later.

Six centuries, to be exact, were to pass before another major outbreak of plague was to arrive in Europe and the Middle East. Since trade had played an instrumental role in spreading the plague in the Mediterranean at the beginning of the First Pandemic, particularly so as Egypt was the grain basket of the empire, the steady decline of international commerce through to at least the eighth century was probably responsible for the disappearance of the disease. Much new evidence has come to light—including distribution of pottery shards, ship-wrecks, and even traces of ancient pollution trapped in ice cores or peat bogs (indicating the relative strength of the metal smelting industry)—that points to the contraction of the Mediterranean economy and its shipping traffic, both on the sea and inland along rivers, which would thereby impose a virtual quarantine on the increasingly isolated port cities, first in the West and then later in the East.63 Over time, the process also probably snowballed due to the fact that plague and the economy were undoubtedly intertwined: the more population declined due to disease, so too inevitably did demand for goods from abroad.64

Indeed, the repeated occurrences of plague about once a decade throughout the First Pandemic ironically contributed to the very circumstances of the plague’s demise. For instance, we now know that it was the plague, and not the irruption of Islam, that caused so much upheaval to the urban environments and settled regions of the Near East.65 Other factors aside from plague assuredly played their role in disrupting Mediterranean trade and commerce and thus breaking the chain of infection of the disease; in turn, other possibilities besides trade, such as unintentional quarantine as people fled or avoided the already declining population centers of the Mediterranean once they became infected and changes due to genetic mutation or contamination in the virulence of
Yersinia pestis
, may have contributed to the decline of plague.66

Plague returned to the world in a Second Pandemic that is traditionally seen to have begun in the 1330s from an endemic center in Central Asia. Evidence for this includes the archaeological discovery of three Nestorian Christian headstones from the region of Lake Issyk Kul in present-day Kyrgyzstan, which record ten victims as dying from “pestilence” in 1338–1339.67 Meanwhile, our most informed contemporary source, the Muslim author Ibn al-Wardī, writing in 1348 from Aleppo in northern Syria, a hub of trade for routes further east, states that the plague “began in the land of darkness” fifteen years earlier and then 34 y Chapter 1

spread eastward from there to China and India and westward to the land of the Uzbeks, Transoxiana, Persia, the land of the Khitai (perhaps Turkestan), and finally, Crimea and the Byzantine Empire.68 (According to the fourteenth-century Muslim traveler Ibn Battūta, the “land of darkness” was an unexplored region lying beyond the Volga Bulgar state in present-day Tartarstan.) Modern-day research has confirmed that the Central Asian steppes are an ancient reservoir of plague, containing perhaps the oldest strains of
Yersinia pestis
based on the genetic mapping of its DNA.69

Some scholars, however, propose southern Russia as an alternative origin to the Second Pandemic in place of Central Asia, arguing that references to “pestilence” and “land of darkness” are too vague to indicate a specific disease or geographical location, that the overland trade route across Central Asia presented insurmountable obstacles and would have taken too long to spread the plague from its endemic center to the West, and, finally, that the Mongol Khanates of the Golden Horde, Persia, and Turkestan all converted to Islam by 1326, which ensured a disruption of trade to both China and Europe.70 If so, then this would imply that the Second Pandemic, like the first, was confined to Europe and the Middle East. Yet, Mongol efforts to expel the Genoese trading presence at Tana and Caffa during the 1340s were actually motivated more by the ongoing commercial rivalry between Genoa and Venice, the latter allying itself with the Kipchak Khanate of the Golden Horde, and were therefore not designed to eliminate all Christian merchants from Mongol trade, let alone Muslim merchants who served as al-Wardī’s informants.71 And although the various references to disease outbreaks in the East may be too vague to positively identify them as plague, neither do they rule it out. In addition to the Nestorian headstones at Issyk Kul, native Chinese annals do record a major epidemic in Hopei province in 1331 and epidemics in other regions beginning in 1345–1346, while Battūta mentions a disease epidemic in Madurai in southern India in 1344, from which he himself suffered. Both the Mongols in China and the Delhi Sultanate in India were in trade contact with Central Asia at this time, and there is a catastrophic drop in China’s population recorded at the end of the fourteenth century that needs to be explained. If the Black Death was indeed a worldwide pandemic, affecting both East and West, then a Central Asian origin, at the crossroads of trade, is by far the most logical choice. Moreover, since Chinese annals report a series of other natural disasters—including floods, famines, droughts, and earthquakes—that coincided with its epidemics during the 1330s, this provides a powerful ecological explanation for why plague at this time should have suddenly erupted out of its endemic centers to become pandemic.72 The sudden advent of a wetter and more unpredictable climate—part of a “Little Ice Age”

that began in the early fourteenth century—may have forced rodents carrying Plague y 35

the plague out of their remote habitats and into closer contact with humans.73 It is also likely that the bad weather created famine conditions—as it did in northern Europe between 1315 and 1322—that compelled natives to hunt and eat marmots in greater numbers and more indiscriminately.

Wherever the plague began, there seems little disputing that the disease’s entry point into Europe came at the Crimea, along the north coast of the Black Sea in southern Russia. Muslim and Christian merchants traveling back from this region, which served as the westernmost terminus of the Mongol trade routes, carried reports back to the chroniclers al-Wardī and Gabriele de Mussis of Piacenza that the plague was rampant here in 1346. The Muslim source claims to have counted eighty-five thousand dead in the Crimea in that year, while Mussis tells his famous story of how Genoese merchants besieged in their trading factory at Caffa by the Mongol forces of the Kipchak Khan, Janibeg, were given the plague in an early form of biological warfare when the Mongols decided to catapult their dead into the town once they began to be decimated by the disease.74 In reality, it is far more likely that plague was communicated via rats making their own, unobtrusive siege of the town or else by means of fleas hitching a ride on animal furs, which was the most important export product of southern Russia. However it came about, it is significant that plague first appeared outside Central Asia in the Crimea, rather than, say, in Iraq (1349) or Yemen (1351). This argues strongly for an overland dissemination route rather than by sea from the Indian Ocean and up through the Persian Gulf or the Red Sea.