Plagues: The Other Invaders

Pandemics were a major aspect of life in the Middle Ages. They left in their train regions and cities sometimes robbed of half of more of all their people. We might also call these plagues invasions, analogous to those by Turkic hordes, the subject of the last post in this series. Most plagues also appeared travelling from East to West from as far away as China following the Silk Road. I use the plural in my title because two major pandemics marked the Middle Ages—541-750 and 1346-1353—but these were trailed by others. The plural is also appropriate in that the cause of these mass die-offs was a bacterium called Yerisinia pestis which, like the barbarians themselves, was (and still is) divided into different tribes. We have the tribes Bubonic, Septicemic, Pneumonic, Pharyngeal, Meningial, and the miscellaneous “Other,” the smaller tribes. The majors are associated with (1) lymph glands (and bulbous swellings), (2) circulation problems, (3) lung failure, (4) a kind of tonsillitis, and (5) meningitis (brain and spinal column). The “Other” category affects the skin and people may recover; they may also recover from the pharyngeal version of the plague.

The premature deaths caused in the Middle Ages by Y. pestis far outnumber the deaths caused by either Germanic, Turkic, or Ugric invaders, but such is the nature of history, focused as it tends to be on political and military power, that we learn about the Other Invaders in more or less footnote fashion: they “contributed” to trouble rather than, as in actuality, being the most potent problems society had had to face and on a scale no barbarian war band could even dream of imposing. With that in mind, let me here present a picture of the Plagues—and what they meant in the context of the rise of Western Culture.

My first and summary graphic provides a broad view. It simply shows the medieval centuries in which either pandemics or major outbreaks devastated the European and Near-Eastern lands. We see here that in the eleven centuries of the medieval period, five centuries were marked by plagues—at the beginning and at the end. The white space in the center first inaugurates and then unveils the High Middle Ages, the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries. Next I present a timeline:

The shaded area is that of the Middle Ages (476-1453). I start this list in BC times because plagues were not a unique medieval phenomenon, of course. They devastated regions all over the world. I include the Plague of Athens which may well have been a pandemic; Pericles died of that plague. It coincided with the Peloponnesian war and we hear something about it from Thucydides. That plague (traditionally thought to have been bubonic) killed a third of the people of Athens and then spread from Athens to the entire Mediterranean region. The Antonine Plague, associated with Emperor Antoninus Pius and the Plague of Cyprian, named after St. Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage, who wrote about it, are assigned to smallpox, but the cause is not unambiguously known. In Cyprian’s time Claudius II ruled Rome —and also had the easier job of dealing with the Alamanni and the Goths; he, however, succumbed to the plague; it took his life in 270. At the plague’s peak, 250-266, it was said to be taking 5,000 people a day in Rome (Wikipedia). Such numbers, however, are at best cloudy. If the peak was 17 years in duration, that rate would yield a total population loss of 31 million in a city alone that had an estimated population of 1 million in 200 AD. Such, however, is the historical reporting—there is little under it beyond scattered statements of contemporary witnesses.

The Plague of Justinian is reported narrowly(541-542), meaning its effect on Constantinople alone, as well as widely (541-750), as a pandemic that extended over most of the Mediterranean basin. Here again we meet that same number: 5,000 dying daily in Constantinople; the City then had roughly a population of roughly 450,000. Another and more reasonable estimate is that the city lost 40 percent of its population or 90,000. Spreading from Constantinople, the disease is said to have reduced the population of the imperial realm by 25 percent overall. The map shows its extent:

It is worth noting that Y. pestis kills two in three of those infected in the span of about four days. One of those infected had been Emperor Justinian himself, but he had survived. This plague began six years into the Gothic War (which was launched in 535); the war ended in 554; the plague lasted until 750, although it had ended in Constantinople much earlier. The pandemic indubitably affected Justinian’s efforts to restore the Western Empire—by weakening that effort—so that the Lombards soon claimed again what Justinian’s general, Belisarius, had managed to return to Byzantium.

The greatest calamity to visit the Medieval World was the Black Death. It lasted for eight years and covered all of Europe (see the following map). It killed an estimated 75 million and half of each European population that it touched. My source for that is a Reuters story (link), which, however, fails to give a reference to its source which, in the story, is “according to some estimates.” I’ve looked all over and find 200 million deaths as the highest estimate (BBC). Take your choice. The plague came from Asia and speculation has it that it was carried by black rats in ships infested by rat fleas. I show the image of such a flea here; it is huge compared to the disease that it carries. Y. pestis is the dark mass inside it made up of millions of bacteria. If the carriers were rats, it would explain episodic outbreaks of the plague in the centuries that followed, well into the times of the Renaissance; I did not track the disease beyond that period.

Please note, on this map, that the coloration does not indicate the intensity of the pandemic by depth of color. The colors mark chronological spread.

A note on the eventual conquest of Y. pestis. It took until 1897 to test an effective plague vaccine. It was tried and found to be effective by Waldemar Haffekin, a Russian bacteriologist who, working in India, discovered the method. Haffekin, whose name does not sound Russian, came from a Russian Jewish family. Streptomycin, the first of several antibiotics that came to be used later, dates to 1943.

The consequences of the plagues can only be summed up by making some gestures. I’ll focus on the Black Death, the better-documented of the two great pandemics. Depopulation was a significant issue—but, paradoxically, it helped in a way by reducing the number who had to be fed. During the reign of Yerisinia, the Little Ice Age was marching forward in time and would reach its peak about a century later. The Great Famine (1315-1317), due to extremely rainy weather, short summers, and exhaustion of arable land with the technology of the time had come before the plague. Depopulation weakened the feudal system in that labor shortages appeared and paid labor, versus owned labor, became more common. Serf labor was tied to the soil—so long as the serf wanted to work it. When serfs died, they could not be replaced, as in Roman times, by buying new ones. You had to pay someone. The religious consciousness of Europe was decisively weakened. Why did God permit this massive and clearly random dying—not least of its clergy? The Church lost standing. A sense of cynicism, largely absent before, rose to pave the ways toward the Renaissance. In yet other segments of the population the plague intensified the religious feeling and drove it to extremes, witness the heretical Flaggelant movement which combined extreme religious forms with hostility to Church authority; the movement predated the Black Death but culminated at its peak. Jewish persecutions flared up as the mob-mind sought someone to blame. And so on to the Renaissance and beyond, both to its cure and modernity. The Black Death was a game changer.

Another observation that doing this brief research suggested to Brigitte, and I concurr, is how the human mind, by and large, always has its attention focused on the survivors, and even more narrowly, on what humans can control. The Hitlers of the world are long remembered, the Dr. Haffekins of the world are rapidly forgotten. Some of the greatest and most influential events, those caused by Mother Nature, are rapidly forgotten again. As soon as it is over, the last disaster, mass shooting, or whatever, we’re back to guessing who’ll run for president two or three years from now.

Y. pestis is almost gone today—although still some 200 people die of it annualy, here and there. But is the “invisible Goth,” in a larger sense, still at the door of modern humanity? Waiting? I have looked back and noted—sparing the details, not least medieval art showing the infected—what it could do. Now a look forward. A good while back now, probably in the year of its publication, 1994, Brigitte bought a copy of The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance. It is a massive book by Laurie Garrett, a Pulitzer Prize Winner for Explanatory Journalism. That quite excellent work provides a rather dark projection of the future—certainly as dark as the picture I’ve presented looking back. And just this morning, knowing what I’m working on, Brigitte handed me a brief article in today’s New York Times titled, “Zombies in the Garden, Killing Themselves Slowly.” Should such a protein manage major inroads, we may be facing the Great Famine again. The story reports on a protein that takes over crop plants and causes them to do its will. It rides on tiny insects, leaf hoppers, and causes what one biologist in the story, Saskia A. Hogenhout, calls “a living death for the plant.” Should such a protein manage major inroads, we may be facing the Great Famine again. The Goth is still there. Vigilance is still advised. If we’re not careful, the Middle Ages may dawn once again and, in the future, some other scribe will have to rise to the challenge of sorting its chaos…

Image credits:

Plague of Justinian: University of California, Irvine (link)

Image of flea carrying Y. pestis: Wikipedia (link)

Black Death map: Wikipedia (link)

Middle Ages Posts:

Attila and the Great Wall

Augustine and the Visigoths and Vandals

Theodoric and Encircling German Arms

Arius and His Converts

Justinian and an Attempted Restoration

Saint Benedict and Western Monasticism

Iberia Absorbs the Visigoths

Saint Lucy and Light in the Middle Ages

Frankish Victory: From Clovis to Charlemagne

The Papacy in the Middle Ages

Charlemagne and the Quest for Order

Women in  the Middle Ages

From Attila to Osman

As in the Past So in the Future?

In 1994 Farrar, Strauss and Giroux published The Coming Plague by science-journalist Laurie Garrett. Brigitte read a review of it the following year and immediately ordered the 750 page tome. Just a year after its publication, it had already had fourteen printings. Garrett had spent a decade researching the book, subtitled “Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance,” a monumental portrait of one of the Four Horsemen. Garrett won the Pulitzer Prize for Exploratory Journalism in 1996.

Just recently we’d dug out the book for renewed perusal. Yesterday I saw a story on CNN about a new virus—category coronavirus—that has no known treatment yet and, thus far killed 23 of 44 infected (that’s 52 percent). It’s origins are in the Middle East and the condition produced is called Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome (MERS). The virus has claimed the most lives in Saudi Arabia and has already spread to France and the United Kingdom in Europe.

I expected stories in the papers today on this outbreak—but saw nothing at all. Until such things show up in the United States, the media, with the admirable exception of CNN, this time, shrug it off. There are plenty of warning voice—some as distinguished as Garrett’s, others less prominent. One of our own publications Social Trends & Indicators USA, Volume 3: Health & Sickness, published in 2003, featured the following graphic:

I reproduce the first paragraph that came with this illustration:

At the timer when news periodically reaches us that now this bacterium and now that virus have become resistant to our antibiotics or antivirals, it may be useful to look at some diseases that the 19th century would have immediately recognized—and some that stem from Biblical times. The graphic charts actual cases of seven such diseases from 1944 to 1999. They are still with us. We are still getting cholera and the bubonic or pneumonic plague. In 1999, for instance there were 35,600 new cases of syphilis and 17,500 people were diagnosed with tuberculosis; more than 1,600 cases of malaria were documented, up from the year before; 350 new cases of typhoid fever were reported, and more than 100 people came down with leprosy. That year, doctors notified the Centers of Disease Control of fewer than 10 cases each of plague and cholera—but these diseases were beginning to show up in some numbers toward the latter part of this 56-year period—having been absent in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s.

To which I might add that brand new viruses, such as the most recent variant of MERS, are also busy innovating.

Fast Plagues and Slow

What do the Black Death and Modern Capitalism have in common? They both shed people. The Black Death did so outright; it killed people. It did it rapidly; people died in two to seven days after being infected. World population was around 443 million when it began, spreading from Asia to Europe around 1328.  In Europe in lasted until 1351 and took around 45 percent of the population, world-wide about 15 percent. World population in 1400 was around 374 million, thus 69 million had disappeared. This almost unspeakable phenomenon has faded from memory, by now, but it brought in its trail incredible chaos in social and economic life.

Modern Capitalism sheds people—but they stay alive. They’re simply pushed aside by a combination of machines and fossil fuels. The process, however, is very slow—and in consequence of it, humanity has adapted. Its consequence was first noted around 1811, with the rise of the Luddite movement. It is still doing its thing, but by now that people-shedding tendency has been institutionalized and is called productivity. The very wealth created by those fuels, furthermore, has been used—through income redistribution—to keep the shed people fed, clothed, and housed.

One of the consequences of the “slow plague” has been the huge rise in the services sector in all modern economies—so that that sector is where most of the employment is. And that sector, in turn, is under attack by machines—else I’d get a human voice when I call a company or government agency. Some components of services (transportation, warehousing, wholesale, and retail trade, and health care) are intimately related to goods production; major portions of it, however, produce services the population can quite easily do without. Hence in economic downturns, when, of necessity, people have to mind their nickels and their dimes, we have surging unemployment. Indeed full employment absolutely demands passionate consumption, not just to maintain employment in services but even in those elements of goods production that make unnecessary products.

Another similarity between these two is that we are helpless in facing them. In the fourteenth century no one understood or could cure the disease. It just rolled over the population and then crossed the next border, riding on flees that rode on rats. In our day, vis-à-vis the economic “ecology,” we are equally ignorant of what is in store for us as the Fossil Age passes. And our methods of government are such that we cannot implement adaptations that will help us transit to an age where labor will once more be desperately needed.

Ironically, one of the great problems Europe faced in the wake of the plague was a shortage of people. The one that’s slouching toward us is a shortage of jobs.