In the Wake of the Plague Read online

  Anthrax spores buried in the ground remain active for half a century or more as extremely toxic for humans. During World War II both German and Allied biomedical scientists developed anthrax to use in germ warfare. It was employed by neither side in the end, but the Allies tested their variety on an island off the Scottish coast. Fifty years after the war live spores buried in the ground there were discovered and the inhabitants of the island had to be evacuated.

  To these known facts and Thompson’s excellent work may be added a paper by Gunnar Karlsson of the University of Iceland. The island was hit by plague in the fourteenth century, but there appear to have been no rats in Iceland before the seventeenth century. The argument against Karlsson’s no rats in Iceland thesis would run like this: Rats carrying plague-ridden fleas got off the boats from Norway or England but immediately died of the cold weather. The fleas then migrated to the nearest warm bodies, namely humans. Possible, but farfetched.

  Thompson’s conclusion that “bubonic plague and anthrax probably coexisted during the fourteenth century” is the best that science can currently provide.

  If medieval physicians did fail to differentiate two separate kinds of plague during the Black Death, that should not surprise us: The scientific method had not yet been invented. When faced with a problem, people in the Middle Ages found the solution through diachronic (as opposed to synchronic) analysis. The diachronic is the historical narrative, horizontally developing through time: “Tell me a story.” With their fervent historical imagination, medieval people were very good at giving diachronic explanations for the outbreak of bubonic plague in Europe and the Mediterranean region in the 1340s. One account was that the pandemic began with climatic disasters and earthquake in China, causing floods, from which came disease that moved westward.

  Most medieval diachrony held that seaport towns in the Crimea sometime in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century were so stricken by plague that when a town was besieged by an unfriendly army, the townsmen heaved corpses infected with plague over the walls at the enemy encampment—bubonic germ warfare missiles. There is a question whether plague-ridden corpses can actually communicate the disease. Most scientists say no, as a matter of fact, but that judgment is not conclusive.

  Today, however, we have scientific—or synchronic—means of analysis. Science has indeed told us much more about this plague of six hundred years ago than the people living then knew themselves. It has not answered every question, but it has yielded surprising specifics.

  For example, a team of research doctors at the Division of Infectious Diseases, St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center, Paterson, New Jersey, reported in 1997:

  “Plague is a zoonotic infection caused by Yersina pestis. . . . Animal reservoirs [carriers] include rodents, rabbits, and occasionally larger animals. Cats become ill and have spread [the] disease to man. . . . Flea bites commonly spread disease to man. Person to person spread has not been a recent feature until the purported outbreak of plague and plague pneumonia in India in 1994. Other factors that increase risk of infection in endemic areas are occupation—veterinarians and assistants, pet ownership, direct animal-reservoir contact especially during the hunting season, living in households with [a disease] case, and, mild winters, cool, moist springs, and early summers.”

  In 1996 a team at the Laboratory of Microbial Structure and Function, working with funding from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Health Institutes, were actually able to explain what went on within a plague-infected flea: “Yersinia pestis, the cause of bubonic plague, is transmitted by the bites of infected fleas. Biological transmission of plague depends on blockage of the foregut of the flea by a mass of plague bacilli. Blockage was found to be dependent on the hermin storage (hms) locus. Yersinia pestis hms mutants established long-term infection of the flea’s midgut but failed to colonize the proventriculus, the site in the foregut where blockage normally develops. Thus the hms locus markedly alters the course of Y. pestis infection in its insect vector, leading to a change in blood-feeding behavior and to efficient transmission of plague.”

  This is something medieval medicine did not know: the inner life of a sick flea.

  More important, perhaps, is that if it is identified early enough, the plague can be cured by science today. For many years I told my students at New York University that if they are taking a shower in the college gymnasium and the person in the next stall emerges with black welts under the armpits and in the groin (the infamous plague buboes) they should dress and leave immediately. And if a rat runs by as well as the buboe-marred student, don’t even bother to dress. Wrap a towel around your body and head for the nearest exit. Like most things I said in class, this got a big laugh; they didn’t believe me. But I was serious.

  What is truly frightening, as reported in the Royal Geographical Magazine in 1998, is that around the world strains of infectious disease, especially tuberculosis and meningitis, not excluding bubonic plague, that are newly resistant to antibiotics are turning up. Recently a superstrength level of antibiotics has been announced to deal with the problem. It is man versus microbe in a continuing, escalating battle.

  But the chance of dying of bubonic plague in the U.S.A. today is much less than the chance of being killed in an airplane crash. Don’t worry—yet. And there is more good news: the Black Death may also have protected you against the current AIDS scourge.

  As part of the intense study of human genetic development related to the genome project—the mapping of the total genetic structure of human beings—a team of six scientists at the National Cancer Institute’s Laboratory of Genetic Diversity in 1997 made an exciting announcement. They discovered that a genetic mutant that “occurred in the order of 4,000 years ago” gave today’s human carrier of this mutant (called CCR5) immunity against HIV and therefore AIDS.

  One of six signatories to the accompanying article in the American Journal of Human Genetics, Stephen J. O’Brien, in the following year in the same journal revealed an even more startling follow-up discovery. The mutant CCR5 could in fact, said O’Brien, be traced back to only seven hundred years ago. At that time a “historic strong selective event involving a pathogen that like HIV-1 utilizes CCR5” established an immunity “in ancestral Caucasian populations.” Eighteen scientists from around the world affirmed O’Brien’s hypothesis.

  The event he described, of course, could only be the Black Death. There is thus—if O’Brien is correct—a genetic relationship between the Black Death and AIDS. If you are descended from a Caucasian who contracted the plague of the mid–fourteenth century and that ancestor survived, you may have complete immunity to HIV/AIDS. And it is believed that up to 15 percent of the Caucasian population could fall into this lucky category.

  Whatever the plague was—or continues to be—it still remains with us in its original form. Since the advent of antibiotics in the 1940s bubonic plague is very rare in the U.S.A., although there are still substantial outbreaks in eastern Asia, especially India. But in the 1980s there were three documented cases in the hill country of eastern California. One woman came down with the bubonic plague after she ran over a squirrel with a power mower. It is likely that the disease entered California at some port on a rodent traveling on a ship from eastern Asia.

  Medieval doctors did not know about the bacillus parasite carried on the backs of rodents. It was assumed that it was spread through the air—as a miasma—from person to person. This induced healthy people to flee cities to isolated country retreats, as was done by most of the English royal family and as described for Florence in Boccaccio’s Decameron. Modern medicine believes that plague can be spread by saliva from an ill person to a healthy one at the pneumonic stage, so medieval physicians were not entirely wrong. Rodents, however, are clearly central to the problem.

  Since rodents were common in the Middle Ages, even in the residence of the affluent, escape was not easy. However, the impact on the rich (from English statistics) seems to have
been not more than 25 percent mortality, while for peasants—including parish priests—mortality averaged in the low 40s and in some places as high as 50 percent. Given the difficulty that medieval towns had getting rid of sewage on which rodents feasted, the urban mortality was also around 40 percent, at least for commoners.

  Rich urban people fled to country retreats and may have done better. But archbishops, great lords, and wealthy merchants also fell to the plague: it was a democratic disease.

  Since medieval physicians were convinced the plague was airborne—a miasma—they induced a change of lifestyle. Windows must remain closed and covered—for the affluent, with thick tapestries. The Black Death did wonders for augmenting the market for the tapestry makers in Belgium and northern France. The magnificent late medieval tapestries in the Cloisters in New York City and the Cluny Museum in Paris were therefore functional as well as decorative.

  Like so much of medieval art, tapestry making originated in the Middle East and spread to Europe through Byzantium. In the West it was taken up by the monks who were already the primary providers of medieval artwork. But the very large tapestries now called for to block the pestilence from entering the homes of affluent people required workshops of imposing size and droves of highly organized and well-paid workers. Mere heavy window coverings were not enough for the rich, who wanted elaborate embroidered narratives of their favorite scenes from popular romances. The weaver guilds in Flanders and northern France responded quickly to the demand.

  Frequent bathing was proscribed as dangerous by the medical profession: You opened your pores to the airborne disease. Europe entered the pungent no-bath era, which lasted until the disappearance of the plague in the mid–eighteenth century. Even Napoleon Bonaparte rarely bathed; instead he had a massage with French cologne each morning, a lifestyle common to the European nobility by 1400 and a legacy of the Black Death and medieval medicine.

  Inevitably medieval physicians attributed the onset of the disease to God’s punishment for sin and to bad astrological conjunctions involving the feared planet Saturn. The king of France appointed a commission of University of Paris professors to account for the Black Death. The professors soberly blamed the medieval catastrophe on the astrological place of Saturn in the house of Jupiter.

  The most immediate problem caused by the mortality of the Black Death, whatever its clinical components may have been, was how to give the dead decent Christian burial. Since parish clergy were hit as hard as any group in society by the pestilence, there was a shortage of priests to administer last rites and preside over funeral services. Nor could gravediggers keep up with mortality. Inevitably the solution was to engage in mass burials.

  All over Western Europe commoners were buried in mass graves with bodies stacked horizontally five layers deep. Archeologists have discovered such layered mass graves in many places, including central London. Since the earth covering the mass graves was thin, the stench rising from the cemeteries was initially unbearable.

  In England the catastrophic rate of mortality did not immediately produce a severe labor shortage in countryside and town. England in the early 1340s was still so heavily overpopulated that peasants were available to take over vacant farms and empty slots for estate workers. The diminished population of cities and towns was replaced from the long waiting list of populations seeking entry to alleged privileged urban life.

  But by the next generation, in the 1370s, the Black Death had caused a critical labor shortage, especially in rural areas. Peasants took advantage of the labor market operating in their favor to demand steep increases in wages from landlords. The aristocracy and gentry responded by using Parliament to force through laws holding down workers’ wages against the inflationary labor market.

  This governmental intervention was a prime cause of the outbreak of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 in eastern England, the greatest proletarian rising before the eighteenth century. Urged on by radical clerics, the rebellious peasants came close to bringing down the government and establishing a Christian socialist regime.

  After the Black Death had raged for more than a year some cities came up with a preventive measure that did some good—or so it was claimed—through the strict quarantining of areas of the city where the incidence of pestilence was heavy. What they really needed to do was quarantine rodents, but human quarantine measures apparently were effective in some towns—or so the town officials, having already disturbed social life, asserted, to make their quarantine policy appear effective.

  They should not be blamed for doing so.

  The level of mortality in the Black Death was so high and so sudden that—until germ warfare on a large scale occurs—to find a modern parallel we must look more toward a nuclear war than a pandemic. The plague shook the wealthy, relatively well-populated, confident, even arrogant society of mid-fourteenth-century Western Europe to its foundations.

  The survivors of the biomedical holocaust were at first too stunned and confused to do more than augment religious exercises. But slowly it was realized that institutions and the populace would be deeply affected by the great biomedical devastation and sudden severe shrinkage of the population. At various levels of society there were challenges to the old order and there were adjustments to be made to a drastically affected world. The pestilence deeply affected individual and family behavior and consciousness. It put severe strains on the social, political, and economic systems. It threatened the stability and viability of civilization. It was as if a neutron bomb had been detonated. Nothing like this has happened before or since in the recorded history of mankind, and the men and women of the fourteenth century would never be the same.

  PART II

  People

  CHAPTER THREE

  Bordeaux Is Burning

  BORDEAUX IS SITUATED ON THE broad Gironde estuary on the west coast of France. It was one of the great port cities of the Middle Ages. It was part of a territory in western France called Gascony that was owned by the English royal family.

  In August of 1348 Bordeaux was visited with much triumphal pomp by the daughter of the English king, who was on her way to Spain to marry the heir to the throne of Castile, the largest of the Iberian kingdoms.

  The baggage that fifteen-year-old Princess Joan carried with her as her ships sailed up the estuary to the harbor at Bordeaux was not only material. It was also historical. Centuries, indeed millennia, of strife and tradition of enterprise and culture had made the little princess what she was, and how she was regarded by awestruck merchants who greeted her at quayside in Bordeaux.

  She was a top-drawer white girl, a European princess, with all that this status and image meant in fourteenth-century world society. She was a product of Caucasian mastery that in the late fifteenth century would explode overseas, first to Africa then to eastern Asia and the Americas where it would bring European civilization and all that it meant in terms of power, exploitation, learning, wealth, and misery to other branches of mankind.

  Western Europe of A.D. 1340 was a politically pluralistic society—that is, government, law, and taxation, were actually administered by a patchwork quilt of country and city holders of power. But everyone held in great honor and esteem the kings and their royal families.

  Kings were regarded as anointed by the Lord, and holders of divine power. They were the echoes and images of the authority wielded by the antique Roman emperors. They were the perpetuators and heirs of the old German chieftains who were much appreciated for their personal strength and valor and for their distribution of gold rings and other booty.

  Most kings filled these awesome roles weakly and uneasily, like third-rate actors playing Hamlet on road circuit in the boondocks. But occasionally there were ambitious and energetic kings thrown up unexpectedly by lottery of birth, and with the assistance of good training and education they would push hard to mobilize the Christian, Roman, and Germanic traditions of kingship.

  Invariably this led to fighting and misery for some people, but often the king
s made an impact and they gained renewed admiration, respect, and fear for the royal family among the common people and even a certain caution and good manners from the great and very rich landholders.

  Steeped in art, poetry, and music, and decorated with expensive plate armor and the latest silk clothes in the Milanese or Parisian mode, this aristocratic, very rich people’s respect for the king and his family became the behavioral pattern and sensibility called chivalry. The word originally meant horsemanship. Owning good riding horses was an expensive proposition, normally confined to the nobility or their high bourgeois imitators. Even today on the Main Line outside Philadelphia or in Fairfield County, Connecticut, owning a show horse is a sign of wealth and good manners.

  Some kings gained much popular prestige and chivalric admiration and used it to their advantage by hiring clerks and lawyers to construct a formidable centralized bureaucracy for the purpose mainly of improved taxation mechanisms. Usually the effectiveness of such centralized government sharply attenuated if the great king’s successor was a weakling, but shards of the original administrative structure could run on for centuries with little rationale and control.

  Such was the history of medieval monarchy and royal dynasties. Yet whatever the king was actually doing in relation to the people (all the way from nothing to strong leadership to tyranny), members of his immediate family, his wife and children, were held in greatest awe and honor by sentient strata of society.

  This meant not only the nobility and gentry but the merchants, capitalists, bankers, and prominent tradesmen in town. In the depth of their crowded houses, surrounded by furniture, art, and servants, the high bourgeoisie might think or even express controversial democratic thoughts. Occasionally someone in the merchant entourage would write down these ideas, nearly always in guarded fabular or metaphorical form. And once in a long while, if a monarchy had suffered terrible battlefield losses that greatly diminished prestige, a group of capitalists might assert political urban autonomy.