Plagues in World History (10 page)

In fact, it is quite likely that it was Lubb’s two
fatwas
on the plague that Khatīb had in mind when he famously wrote, “And amidst the horrible afflictions that the plague has imposed upon the people, God has afflicted the people with some Plague y 45

learned religious scholars who issue
fatwas
, so that the quills with which the scholars wrote these
fatwas
were like swords upon which the Muslims died.”104

Khatīb then goes on to cite approvingly the example of “a group of pious people in North Africa” who nonetheless renounced their previous
fatwas
on the plague “in order to avoid being in the posion of declaring it permissible for people to engage in suicidal behavior.”105 One can easily imagine that Lubb himself did not see things quite this way.

It was in his second
fatwa
that Lubb responded to an enquiry as to whether it was permissible for a Muslim to flee a plague epidemic once one saw it afflicting his religious brethren. Given that his first
fatwa
emphatically denied plague contagion, it should come as no surprise that Lubb also denied to Muslims any right to flee the plague under any circumstances, citing a series of precedents from the Prophetic tradition culminating with that of the Plague of ‘Amwâs. As Lubb movingly recites, “A Muslim is a brother to a Muslim, he does not forsake or oppress him.” As he did in the first
fatwa
, Lubb did not just rely on religious arguments to make his case; he also appealed to the social and moral duty of a Muslim not to abandon a fellow believer when sick with the plague. To do otherwise would be to threaten the integrity of the whole fabric of the
umma
, or Islamic community.106 Thus, in evident contrast to Khatīb, who seems focused on saving individual lives, for Lubb the greater cruelty was
to
allow a Muslim to flee and forsake his obligations to others: one must never forget that one is part of a whole. This argument against flight as a “moral failing” was to persist in Muslim plague treatises down through the fifteenth century and beyond. The only exception comes in a fifteenth-century poem or
maqāma
attributed to ‘Umar of Málaga, who urged the sultan of Granada to flee to Málaga to save his life during a plague in 1441, on the grounds that the Prophet’s injunction not to flee was not an absolute decree, along the lines earlier laid out by Rushd.107 But his was a lone voice in the wilderness.

On the Christian side, there was an equally strong tradition
in favor
of fleeing the plague. It was nearly ubiquitous advice in European plague treatises to advise readers that, as soon as there was word that plague was coming to town, “to start early, go far, and return late,” a turn of phrase apparently derived ultimately from Galen.108 Yet, some doctors also recognized that patients who were left unattended were more likely to succumb to the plague: the fifteenth-century German doctor John of Saxony listed “a lack of faithful servants to assist the sick man,” particularly in performing his “operations of nature,” as one of the contributory causes to why people died of the disease, and an anonymous Bohemian treatise of c. 1450 said basical y the same thing. But if doctors were advising people to flee the plague because they believed it was contagious, then they real y only had themselves to blame if sick patients were left unattended.

46 y Chapter 1

John of Saxony can hardly have been surprised, for example, when he observed that even “parents during this plague also fear to draw near to their children and other beloved relatives,” an observation that was echoed in many chronicles of the Black Death.109 Moreover, the plague regulations passed by some Italian cities, such as Milan in 1374, actually penalized those who attended the sick by quarantining them from the rest of society for a period of days.110 In a sense, this paradoxical dilemma distantly reflects the early history of Christianity itself, when Jesus’ followers saw it as their duty to both succor the sick and the poor
and
flee from the world with all its dangers and temptations (as the desert fathers did in a very literal sense).

To square this circle, doctors did not so much advise people not to flee as provide preventative measures so family members and servants might safely stay and nurse the sick: precautions such as fumigation or ventilation of the air around the patient or keeping one’s distance from the patient, all the while inhaling aro-matics, taking pills, and evacuating one’s excess humors by means of bloodlet-ting—al intended to “fortify” the body against the plague. The dilemma doctors faced in terms of these competing agendas can be seen in the various
consilia
on the plague written by Foligno. We have already seen how in his
Long Consilium written early in 1348 Foligno fully endorsed plague contagion on the basis of Galen, and on these grounds he advised that “it is of the highest importance that one flee from [bad] air” before the plague spread inexorably “from man to man, household to household, neighborhood to neighborhood, and city to city.”111 But in a shorter
Consilium
written later that year, Foligno changed his tune, stating that it was important for the healthy to take preventative measures, “in order that those who attend the sick may be able to be by their side more securely [and] in order that those who become sick are not neglected beyond all inhumanity and abandoned in such a miserable way as hitherto and in a manner that is usually accorded to brute beasts.”112 The anonymous physician from Montpellier who championed contagion by sight in a treatise of 1349 warned that attendants of plague patients were in especial danger, particularly if they look “at the sick man in his death throes.” But any visitor, whether he is “a doctor or priest or friend,”

could easily remedy this situation by blindfolding the patient.113 (So much for the medieval bedside manner!) Over a century later, another anonymous treatise, dated to 1481, gave six special medicines to be taken by anyone having to stay with a sick person; even though it also advised fleeing the ill, this was to happen particularly when patients were in their last death throes, by which time it was understood that there was not much to be done for them anyway.

In addition to these medical misgivings, some Christian Europeans also had social and moral reservations against flight. Giovanni Boccaccio, for example, in his introduction to the
Decameron
that describes the impact of plague in his na-Plague y 47

tive city of Florence, famously writes that, during the Black Death of 1348, “this scourge had implanted so great a terror in the hearts of men and women that brothers abandoned brothers, uncles their nephews, sisters their brothers, and in many cases wives deserted their husbands. But even worse, and almost incredible, was the fact that fathers and mothers refused to nurse and assist their own children, as though they did not belong to them.”114 As we have seen, some such observation had already been made during the First Pandemic by Paul the Deacon and John bar Penkāyē. However, the plaint of abandonment received much wider circulation during the Black Death: it was repeated by no less than nine other Italian chroniclers; three writers from Avignon, including the surgeon Gui de Chauliac; and by two French poets, Simon of Corvino and Guillaume de Machaut. Either all these various authors were borrowing from Paul, or each other, or else at least some of them were recording genuine historical incidents, which seems more likely given that plague doctors
were
advising their clients to flee the plague.

It is even argued by one historian that Boccaccio’s entire introduction is designed as a “strong, moral critique” of doctors and their medical advice, which he saw as a threat to society’s obligations to have compassion and take care of the sick.115 At one point, Boccaccio writes,

Some people, pursuing what was possibly the safer alternative, callously maintained that there was no better or more efficacious remedy against a plague than to run away from it. Swayed by this argument, and sparing no thought for anyone but themselves, large numbers of men and women abandoned their city, their homes, their relatives, their estates and their belongings, and headed for the countryside, either in Florentine territory or, better still, abroad. It was as though they imagined that the wrath of God would not unleash this plague against men for their iniquities irrespective of where they happened to be, but would only be aroused against those who found themselves within the city walls; or possibly they assumed that the whole of the population would be exterminated and that the city’s last hour had come.116

This kind of behavior had real consequences and was in effect a self-fulfilling prophecy of doom for the city’s remaining inhabitants, since as a result of being abandoned “a great many people died who would perhaps have survived had they received some assistance.”117 All this is quite similar to what Lubb was saying in his
fatwas
on the plague in Islamic Spain.

At the same time, however, Boccaccio and others who seemed to disapprove of flight freely admitted that plague was contagious, which Boccaccio illustrated with his own eyewitness testimony of how two pigs fell down dead after mauling the rags of a pauper who had died of the disease. If plague could transfer itself 48 y Chapter 1

not only from sick to healthy people but even through inanimate objects like clothing, it was no wonder that it spread “with the speed of a fire racing through dry or oily substances that happened to be placed within its reach.”118 Could anyone then be blamed for seeking to save his life by fleeing? Is this not what Boccaccio’s ten protagonists do, who while away their time in voluntary exile from Florence by each telling a story on each of ten days (something that plague doctors also recommended in order to take the mind off the plague, as it could be spread by what was called “accidents of the soul”)? So long as he admitted contagion, Boccaccio could not very well come out and explicitly forbid people to flee, as Lubb did; the most he could do was shame them into staying.

Toward the end of the Middle Ages, in fact, the Church finally issued a kind of pronouncement on the morality of flight, which definitively settled the matter in favor of the right of everyone, including priests, to flee the plague. This comes in a little-known treatise residing in the Vatican Archives in Rome entitled
Quod liceat pestilentiam fugere
(“That it should be permitted to flee the pestilence”), by the Italian bishop of Brescia, Dominico Amanti, who wrote it at the request of the papal cardinal of St. Grisogono, James of Pavia.119 Thus it has the unmistakable stamp of authority, written apparently in order to settle “some matter of doubt” or debate among “learned and eminent men” on the question of flight, which had evidently existed ever since Boccaccio raised the issue in the
Decameron
. Although the treatise is undated, it was penned between 1464 and 1477

when Amanti was bishop and James was cardinal, and it represents the fullest and most direct treatment of the subject in the medieval Christian West.

It is in the last third of his treatise that Amanti addresses Boccaccio’s objection that flight from the plague “is contrary to [Christian] charity, prayers, and good works.” Amanti concedes that, in his day, “a father abandons his son, and brother abandons brother, and a servant abandons his fellow servant: there is no one who [is left] to console a poor soul” and that this moral failing is perhaps why “pestilences rage more frequently [now] than in former times.” However, Amanti refuses to conclude from this that flight from the plague will lead to a breakdown of society, since that would impose an impossibly burdensome communal duty upon each individual, such that everyone would need to be a tiller of the land or a builder of houses, because we all need food and shelter to live; by the same logic, even “all of us clerics should get married, because marriage is necessary for the [propagation of the] human race.” Amanti goes so far as to turn the charity argument on its head, pointing out that for a prelate “it would be against charity to not flee [the plague],” since “his death would do great damage to God’s Church.” He also quotes St. Augustine’s
De Doctrina Christiana
(On Christian Doctrine) for claiming that the order of charity decrees that care of one’s own body take precedence over that of one’s neighbor. The only exception Amanti Plague y 49

allows that would prohibit flight is if a pastor would thereby provide a “perni-cious example” to his flock, who would then abandon sick neighbors to their death and despair. But since churchmen can usually arrange for a substitute to do their duties in their absence, this is largely a moot point. In any case, Amanti concludes that the act of flight from the plague is, by its very nature (
ex genere
), intrinsically good; only the end or circumstance surrounding it can make it bad.

What this is, however, must be up to the individual, for the conditions can vary “in terms of place, time, person and many other circumstances.”

In the earlier part of his treatise, Amanti responds to another objection that one also finds in Boccaccio and that is reflected in the Prophetic tradition of Islam, namely, that flight is an attempt “to alter God’s design” that had brought the plague in the first place. Here, Amanti is in remarkable sympathy with medical doctors and their theories about the plague. Quoting Avicenna, who taught men “how to recognize pestilential air from its qualities” so that they could then “apply the most preferable remedy, namely flight,” he notes that animals such as kites and storks are accustomed to flee before the “corrupt air” (a very common observation in European plague treatises), so that to deny to humans what is done instinctively by beasts is to set oneself up as “an enemy of nature.” In the same way, “if you refuse anyone the right to flee, it is also necessary that you refuse to allow anyone to send for a physician or to seek medications, which is absurd.” On the contrary, medicine is sanctioned by the Bible, and here Amanti quotes from the same “honor the physician” passage from Ecclesiasticus 38:1–14 that was also used by the Paris medical faculty in their Consultation
of 1348 to the king of France.