The Black Death and the Transformation of the West

David Herlihy, Samuel K. Cohn Jr.

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 1997
• Print ISBN: 9780674076136, 9780674076129
• eBook ISBN: 9780674744233
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

In this small book David Herlihy makes subtle and subversive inquiries that challenge historical thinking about the Black Death. Looking beyond the view of the plague as unmitigated catastrophe, Herlihy finds evidence for its role in the advent of new population controls, the establishment of universities, the spread of Christianity, the dissemination of vernacular cultures, and even the rise of nationalism. This book, which displays a distinguished scholar's masterly synthesis of diverse materials, reveals that the Black Death can be considered the cornerstone of the transformation of Europe.

ONE

Bubonic Plague: Historical Epidemiology and the Medical Problems

The Black Death of 1348 and 1349, and the recurrent epidemics of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, were the most devastating natural disasters ever to strike Europe.¹ We cannot cite exact losses; there are no global figures. The populations of some cities and villages, in areas as far removed from each other as England and Italy, fell in the late decades of the fourteenth century by 70 or 80 percent.² The more we learn of the late medieval collapse in human numbers, the more awesome it appears. Europe about 1420 could have counted barely more than a third of the people it contained one hundred years before.

This was Europe’s greatest known ecological disaster, and also the last of such magnitude it has had to endure. The epidemics of modern history seem mild when compared with the fury of the Black Death. A principal thesis here is that the two salient characteristics of the population collapse of the late Middle Ages—Europe’s deepest and also its last—are not unrelated. The devastating plagues elicited a social response that protected the European community from comparable disasters until the present.

The great medieval epidemics have in recent years attracted considerable attention from historians. There are several reasons for this. In part it reflects the contemporary effort of historians to recapture more of the past than their predecessors accomplished. Ultimately, they would like to reconstruct the entire environment, the total life situation, that prevailed in past epochs. In this quest for total history, they of course include the cultural climate—ideas, ideologies, beliefs, myths and values—that circumscribed human life. But the physical environment also demands consideration. How did human communities interact with their natural surroundings? What were the ecological systems of the past? Indisputably, microorganisms play a crucial role in all systems of human ecology. Parasitic microbes also have a history, dark to be sure, but intimately connected with that of their human hosts.

Then too, current interest in past plagues owes a good deal to present concerns about public health. One hundred years ago, the great bacteriologist Louis Pasteur declared: “It is now in the power of man to cause all parasitic diseases to disappear from the world.”³ The science he helped found went on to spectacular successes. But the victory has not proved total, and the microbiotic legions have proved to be unexpectedly resilient. The disease called AIDS, mysteriously appearing, was once mostly limited to certain clearly delineated social groups; but it now seems poised to make forays into the general population. Almost all current descriptions of AIDS, if they are written with some historical awareness, carry allusions to earlier epidemics, and to the king of them all, the Black Death. An AIDS researcher at New York University was quoted as claiming that this new disease will “probably prove to be the plague of the millennium.”⁴ Not long ago, the accounts of the medieval epidemics, preserved in the great warehouse of history, were regarded as irrelevant to modern life. AIDS has made them relevant again. How do people behave, when their environment becomes life-threatening? History here can serve; it remembers how societies coped in the past with the threat of mors repentina, unexpected death.

The results of much recent research on the medieval epidemics and their impact can be summarized. Some personal interpretations about what they were and what they did can be offered. The plague itself cannot be directly examined. Always it is filtered through the reports of witnesses, who might have been unperceptive, uninformed, gullible, panicked, or eager to prove that they had read earlier accounts of dramatic mortalities. For example, medical writers of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages recognized only one type of epidemic disease marked by only one kind of symptom, inflammations, boils, or buboes in the area of the groin.⁵ The authority of the ancients may have blinded later witnesses to other symptoms, indicating the presence of other types of epidemic disease. Then too, the plagues touched every aspect of social life, but in doing so they became intertwined with every other social influence. From the matrix of forces shaping the late medieval world, it is impossible to factor out those attributable to plague alone. The significance of plague in medieval history can be easily exaggerated. But more easily still, it can be, and usually has been, ignored. It did not of itself redirect European history. But neither can the new directions of European history be appreciated without recognition of its role.

What was the Black Death really?

The name, Black Death, was never used in the Middle Ages.⁶ Apparently the first to coin the term were Danish and Swedish chroniclers of the sixteenth century. “Black” here connoted not a symptom or a color but “terrible,” “dreadful.” The name was slow to achieve currency in the other north-European languages, German and English.

Then, in the early nineteenth century, much as today, a new disease awakened interest in the old. Cholera invaded Europe and America; though not extraordinarily contagious, it was ghastly in the sufferings it imposed. In 1832 a German physician named J. F. K. Hecker, directly motivated by the menace of cholera,published an essay on the pestilence of 1348 and 1349. Dr. Hecker expressly intended his essay for “medical doctors and educated non-doctors.” The title he chose for his essay was Der schwarze Tod, the Black Death.⁷ The essay won immediate attention, thanks largely to the panic which cholera was everywhere inciting. It was quickly translated into English in 1833, and was several times reprinted in the nineteenth century.⁸ Hecker’s large readership, especially among doctors, helped make “Black Death” the standard term in English for the great pestilence of 1348. But he may not have been the sole source of its diffusion. In 1823 the wife of an Anglican minister, Elizabeth Cartwright Penrose, wrote a history of England, ostensibly for the instruction of her own children.⁹ The work, which purported to record conversations between a mother and her children about English history, achieved the status of a school textbook and was many times reprinted, both in England and America. She too uses the term Black Death to describe the pestilence of 1349, but gives no source for her choice. At all events, her textbook made the name familiar to the schooled population of England and America, even as Dr. Hecker established its usage in savant circles. However, the name has remained primarily a north-European coinage; even today, for example, it is rarely encountered in Italian works, and its occasional appearance primarily reflects Anglo-American influences.

The modern medical diagnosis of the disease is chiefly based on research and clinical observations made at the turn of the last century. Most notably in 1894, in China, the plague emerged from the inland provinces of Hunan and Canton, where it was endemic, to attack the port city of Hong Kong. Classically a water-borne disease, it went on to menace port cities and their hinterlands all over the world. A Swiss microbiologist named Alexandre Yersin, who had trained at the Pasteur Institute at Paris, was then serving in the French colonial service in Indo-China. He hurried to Hong Kong and set up a laboratory there, in hopes of containing the disease before it struck southeast Asia. In 1894 he isolated the bacillus and went on to develop a serum for the treatment of plague.¹⁰ The disease is consequently called pasteurella pestis, after the Pasteur Institute, or, more commonly today, Yersinia pestis, after Alexandre Yersin.

The efforts to contain the disease at Hong Kong were not entirely successful. In 1896 the plague, apparently brought from the Chinese port, struck the city of Bombay and an adjoining district called the presidency. From India and China we possess extensive clinical descriptions of the character and course of the epidemic. Raging at Bombay until 1899, it flickered sporadically in other ports—Oporto in Portugal, Glasgow in Scotland, and Sidney in Australia. Even American ports, such as San Francisco, passed uneasy moments. But except in India, it could not break through the defenses which centuries of struggle had raised against it.

In current understanding, plague is primarily a disease of small mammals.¹¹ It survives indefinitely in populations of wild rodents—prairie dogs, ground squirrels, marmots, and the like. These wild populations are its natural reservoirs. But it can infect rodents, such as grey rats, that live in or close to human habitations. Humans, on the other hand, are always its secondary, almost accidental victims. Its principal vector, the rat flea, prefers to avoid human beings. The flea will leave the infected rat only when the rodent dies and grows cold, and will seek out a human host only when a live, warm rat is not accessible.

Modern clinical observations of the disease identify three types of plague, though not all are due to the same bacillus. These are bubonic, septicemic, and pneumonic. The presence of bacilli, whether in glandular inflammations called buboes, in the blood, or in the sputum, is the basis for this differentiation. The most common of the three types is bubonic. To judge from the Chinese and Indian data, bubonic plague accounts for three-quarters and more of all cases.

Injected into its human host by the flea’s bite, the plague bacilli pass an incubation period of from two to eight days. A soaring fever then ensues, climbing as high as 105 degrees, and it is often accompanied by convulsions, vomiting, giddiness, intolerance to light, and agonizing pain in the limbs. The patient frequently appears dazed or stupefied. On the second or third day after the inception of fever, swellings, about the size of an egg or small apple, occur in the lymph glands closest to the location of the initial bite, usually in the groin, but sometimes in the armpits or the neck. These are the famous buboes, and much pain accompanies their formation. Left alone, they will usually suppurate and burst. Petechiae, small crimson or livid spots, appear on the patient’s skin in severe cases. If the patient does not succumb to exhaustion, heart failure, or internal hemorrhage, convalescence begins after eight to ten days.

The more lethal forms of plague, apparently always fatal, are the septicemic and pneumonic. At the onset of septicemic plague the bacilli invade the bloodstream in such massive numbers that the patient dies before the buboes can form—typically within 24 to 36 hours. Pneumonic plague is, as its name implies, a form of pneumonia triggered by the plague bacillus. The patient breathes rapidly and must gasp for air, produces a watery and profuse expectoration, and develops edema of the lungs. Alone among the types of plague, pneumonic can pass directly from one human to another. Drops of saliva carry the bacillus, and are spread about by coughing, sneezing, or simple conversation.

How well do the etiology and epidemiology of modern plague fit what we know about the medieval epidemics? In the now largely accepted reconstruction, the original reservoir of the medieval disease was the population of wild rodents, specifically marmots or a kind of large marmot called tarbagan, that inhabited the arid plateau of central Asia, the area that was the Soviet Republic of Turkestan. There the disease was, and is, enzootic. But for centuries it left untouched the indigenous, nomadic populations. Apparently rat fleas do not like the smell of horses, and the nomads did not remain in close proximity to infected rodent populations. Several events disturbed the ecological stability of the area in the early fourteenth century. Western chroniclers speak of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions in eastern lands, but their true effects are impossible to determine.¹² Social and political changes were probably more important, or at least more visible. A great silk route connecting Europe with China ran through the region, and traffic across it had grown intense by the early fourteenth century. The commercial towns of Italy were eager to trade with fabled Cathay. From the middle of the thirteenth century, Italians founded colonies on the northern littoral of the Black Sea. From these stations missionaries and merchants, Marco Polo among them, successfully traversed the overland highway, all the way to China. To serve its flourishing commerce, post stations were set up along its course. Towns grew there too, bringing with them complex social and political organizations. The settled inhabitants of towns were apparently more vulnerable to plague infection than the wandering nomads.

Some years ago, a Soviet archeologist named Khvolson excavated a cemetery of Nestorian Christians at a town called Issyk Kul, south of Lake Balkhash. He noted heavy mortalities in 1338–39; three gravestones actually identify plague as the cause of death. This seems to be the first appearance of the epidemic that would devastate Europe.

In the early 1340s the plague, moving westward along the silk route, penetrated the Mongol Khanate of the Golden Horde, with its capital at Sarai on the lower Volga River. But it still was contained within the great Eurasian landmass. To spread widely and quickly, and to take on the proportions of a true pandemic, the plague must cross water. Contact with water ignites its latent powers, like oil thrown upon fire.

It struck water at the Black Sea port of Kaffa, modern Theodosia, in the Crimea. The Genoese had founded the colony about 1266. A khan of the Golden Horde, named Yanibeg, besieged the town in 1343 and again in 1345–46. In a determined effort to take the town, he catapulted the bodies of plague victims over its walls. The Genoese hurriedly dumped these biological bombs into the sea. But the infection caught on.¹³ In entering Kaffa, the disease broke onto the far-flung trading network of the Genoese. The coastline of the entire Mediterranean Sea now lay open to attack.

The now rapid diffusion of the plague through Europe followed a characteristic pattern. In a first phase, the plague leapt from infected port to one still uncontaminated. It then fell quiescent for a while, usually during the cold months of winter. Then, in a second phase, usually in the following spring, it invaded the hinterland and simultaneously moved by sea to the next accessible port. These again served as bases, for forays inland, and for farther leaps by sea. The deadly cycle was renewed.

Thus, in 1347, plague leapt from Kaffa to Constantinople and then to Cairo and Messina in Sicily. A Byzantine observer noted its pattern of infesting first ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Bubonic Plague: Historical Epidemiology and the Medical Problems
• 2 The New Economic and Demographic System
• 3 Modes of Thought and Feeling
• Notes
• Index