Outbreak! Plagues That Changed History (3 page)

The bacterium
Yersinia pestis

Europeans who experienced the Black Death had no idea what caused the disease, but they had some inventive guesses. Some people blamed
miasmas,
poisonous gases they believed were released from the ground by, among other things, earthquakes. To ward off miasmas, they would barricade themselves in their houses (Pope Clement VI did this) or flee to the countryside. Other people thought the Pest was caused by the malevolent influence of the planets. Astrology was taken very seriously in those days. Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars had been aligned in the House of Aquarius, a bad sign. Not blamed were the legions of rats that fed on the omnipresent filth, or the fleas that tormented everyone. Like the wretched odors, they were just part of life’s daily struggles.

Most historians believe the bacterium that causes bubonic plague hitchhiked from Central Asia to Europe in the fleas that live on black rats. As the rats spread, so did the disease.

In an attempt to slow the spread of the disease, city officials in Venice instituted the
quaranta giorni
(from which we get the word
quarantine
), named after the period Jesus spent in the wilderness. It was a forty-day period of isolation for newly arrived ships, to ensure that any onboard epidemic would burn itself out before the passengers were allowed to mingle with the general population. To treat the disease, doctors bled patients and also lanced and drained buboes to relieve pain. Priests ministered to the sick with prayer.

No one knew when the mass dying would stop. Some Christians were convinced this was the long-awaited end times, the apocalypse prophesied in the Bible’s Book of Revelation that would accompany the Second Coming of Christ. Other people became unhinged. They partied wildly or even robbed and murdered. In Germany, increasing numbers of people joined the Flagellants. Adherents of this popular sect sought God’s forgiveness by whipping themselves bloody with iron-tipped lashes. By 1350, the movement had been stamped out by order of the Pope, but not before the Flagellants had turned blame for the plague on the Jews, Europe’s perennial scapegoat of choice. They were accused of causing the plague by poisoning Europe’s wells.

Jews were rightless noncitizens, serfs of the king, continually degraded and persecuted for refusing to convert to Christianity. Thomas Aquinas called them “slaves of the Church.” In 1205, Pope Innocent III had damned them to perpetual servitude for their role in the death of Jesus. But Jews were also essential cogs in Christendom’s economy. They were banned from most occupations but allowed to lend money at interest (Christians were forbidden this job). They were heavily taxed, so interest rates were high. Thus, they made handy tools for extracting wealth from the population and useful social lightning rods, diverting civil unrest away from the rulers.

In those days, it didn’t take much to incite a Christian mob to attack Jews. Across Europe they did
so nearly every year during Easter week. Killings at other times were not infrequent. But the plague massacres were larger and more terrible then anything European Jewry had ever experienced. In 1348 and 1349, Christian Europeans tried, tortured, burned, murdered, and executed Jews by the thousands. Many leaders, including Pope Clement VI, condemned these acts. But other notables, who had borrowed heavily from Jewish moneylenders, effectively canceled those debts by instigating or leading the attacks. After the plague, confiscated Jewish property was the basis for several Gentile fortunes. Such thefts are only one example of the way the plague turned society on its head.

The feudal order died with the plague and the system that would become capitalism was born. With fewer hands available, the lot of peasants improved. No longer tied to a particular estate, they could work where they pleased, where wages were highest. Out-raged rulers tried repressing raises with wage laws, but employers, desperate for workers, ignored them. When the authorities tried to crack down, peasants revolted. In England, they nearly brought down the government.

With more money, peasants could eat better, use silverware, afford nicer clothes, and move into upscale housing. For many, these changes would be temporary. Soon enough, they were poor again. But for some—particularly merchants, traders, and bankers—the postplague chaos offered numerous opportunities to move up in the world. For the quick, the opportunistic, and the ruthless, wealth that previously had taken generations to acquire could be amassed in a few years. Among this increasingly influential class of people, status and power was measured not in land, titles, and familial connections, but in money.

As the lot of merchants improved, nobles’ fortunes declined. Many noble families were immiserated or exterminated by the plague. Inheritance claims were chaotic. Disputes over who really owned what provided years of employment for lawyers. From these battles evolved a confusing welter of real estate laws and the take-no-prisoners style of lawsuits still with us today.

As economic distinctions blurred, social distinctions sharpened. To show off their status, nobles dressed more extravagantly. At the same time, they enacted “sumptuary laws” that specified what types of clothing could be worn by commoners, to prevent the newly wealthy from dressing or eating like their betters. Nobles also treated the new rich with contempt. But, like it or not, the merchant class was here to stay. Eventually they would outshine the nobility. With every century, as global trade and urbanization increased, financiers, bankers, and traders became more and more dominant. In time—our
time—they would become more powerful than most governments.

Neither the Church nor medical science could offer satisfactory answers to the plague. The sinful and the pious had died in equal numbers. Among the dead were three successive archbishops of Canterbury, seven of the Pope’s cardinals, and many, many priests. With such a massive die-off, the Church’s power was severely eroded. Its monopoly on knowledge was broken. Latin, the language of the Church, began a long decline. Vernacular writing (English, French, German, and Italian) flourished. So did a pessimistic style of art that emphasized death, decay, sin, and the torments of hell. New religious ideas spread, eventually leading to the Protestant Reformation and the rational thinking of the Enlightenment. For some, this would include the denial of God altogether.

The Flagellants were a popular religious movement that spread across Central Europe during the Black Death. Flagellants traveled in groups from town to town, led by a Master to whom they swore allegiance. They wore distinctive hooded costumes and sought God’s forgiveness by beating themselves bloody with iron-tipped whips.

Even Catholicism eventually changed. In 1348, Pope Clement VI lifted the ban on human dissection, so doctors could try to understand what caused the Black Death. The age of modern medicine starts here. In 1965, the Church finally (and officially) stopped blaming all Jews for the death of Jesus. It was a belated admission, six hundred years after the Black Death, that the need for a feudal scapegoat, like feudalism itself, had vanished. Capitalism, and the mobile, porous, dynamic society it powers, was here to stay.

While the cultural, economic, political, and scientific changes wrought by the Black Death continue to resonate down the centuries to the present day, plague itself hasn’t gone away. The third plague pandemic started in Hong Kong in 1894 and has yet to end. Initially, shipboard rats spread plague to rodent reservoirs around the world, from marmots in Siberia to squirrels and prairie dogs in the Americas. So far, the third pandemic has killed about thirteen million people, most in the early twentieth century. The pandemic is being controlled, but only with vigilance and fast action. Eradicating diseased rodents can control outbreaks, and victims can be successfully treated with antibiotics. A 1994 epidemic in India was stopped this way.

In 1995, however, a plague strain showed up in Madagascar that is resistant to all known antibiotics. In 2004, plague broke out among the desert gerbils of Turkmenistan, a country with no functioning health system and a dictator who has fired all foreign-trained doctors. Because the country’s government-controlled press is forbidden to mention the disease, it is uncertain how many people are affected or dead. It remains to be seen whether this outbreak will be controlled or spread.

So a global Black Death and all that might mean for humanity is a remote nightmare. But it’s not impossible.

The year 1492 closed one door for Spain and opened another for the world. In January, the armies of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella toppled Granada, the last Muslim stronghold in their Christian kingdom. In March, they published the Edict of Expulsion, which required all Jews to either convert to Christianity or depart within three months, leaving property and precious metal behind. These two events effectively ended Spain’s golden age of religious tolerance and intellectual brilliance, the
convivencia
(coexistence), a period of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim amity. Indeed, Sultan Beyazit II of Turkey is said to have remarked of the Jews pouring into his realm, “How can anyone call Ferdinand wise when he impoverishes his kingdom to enrich mine?” In August, another of the king and queen’s projects got under way: Christopher Columbus set sail on his intrepid voyage to the Indies. For this gamble, Columbus demanded the title Admiral of the Oceans, a coat of arms, and 10 percent of the profits. His promises of gold, slaves, converts to Christianity, and new land across the sea marked the beginning of the Spanish Empire, the start of European dominance, and the globalization of disease.

Although many explorers from other societies preceded Columbus, 1492 is the starting gate of the Age of Exploration because it caused permanent European colonization and long-lasting worldwide change. It ignited an unprecedented race for discovery and empire. It opened the transatlantic slave trade (Columbus was a champion slaver, exporting more human beings from America than any other single individual). It exposed Europe to new political ideas and a bulging cornucopia of New World foods. Most importantly, it unleashed the greatest biological assault in history.

Columbus and the Europeans who rushed after him had a few advantages over Native Americans, including oceangoing ships, advanced navigation, deadly firearms, and an implacable belief in the superiority of their culture and religion. These alone, however, were not enough to ensure Europe’s conquest of the New World. The Native Americans were many, after all, and the first Europeans few. The explorers often arrived sick and hungry. They were dependent on native hospitality for survival. Once the natives understood that the Europeans intended to enslave them and steal their land, they resisted fiercely. In a fair fight, they often won.