Plagues in World History (39 page)

44. Josiah Cox Russell, “That Earlier Plague,”
Demography
5 (1968): 181–82.

45. See Guy Halsall,
Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, 376–568
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 507–15, for a discussion of the various issues involved. Russell’s monocausal explanation is criticized by Stathakopoulos, “Crime and Punishment,” 116–17.

46. Conrad, “Plague,” 121–22, 134.

47. Procopius,
The Secret History
, trans. G. A. Williamson (London: Folio Society, 1990), 83–88. In an earlier chapter, Procopius cites the testimony of several witnesses, including the emperor’s own mother, who alleged that they had personally experienced the demonic origins or character of the emperor (58–60). The fact that Justinian himself came down with bubonic plague, and survived, could be taken as evidence either for or against a theory that was considered not implausible for its time.

48. Gregory of Tours,
History of the Franks
, X:1, trans. Lewis Thorpe (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1974).

49. 1 Chronicles 21:14–27, discussed in Lester K. Little, “Life and Afterlife of the First Plague Pandemic,” in
Plague and the End of Antiquity: The Pandemic of 541–750
, ed. L. K. Little, 3–32 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 31–32.

50. Michael Kulikowski, “Plague in Spanish Late Antiquity,” in
Plague and the End of Antiquity: The Pandemic of 541–750
, ed. L. K. Little, 150–70 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 155–56, 160–70.

51. Kulikowski, “Plague in Spanish Late Antiquity,” 167–68.

Notes to Pages 29–34 y 193

52. For a detailed history of the Plague of ‘Amwâs, see Conrad, “Plague,” 167–246.

53. Conrad, “Plague,” 169–76; Lawrence I. Conrad, “Umar at Sargh: The Evolution of an Umayyad Tradition on Flight from the Plague,” in
Story-telling in the Framework of Non-fictional Arabic Literature
, ed. S. Leder, 488–528 (Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz, 1998); Dols,
Black Death
, 21–25.

54. Conrad, “Plague,” 460–65.

55. Michael W. Dols, “The Comparative Communal Responses to the Black Death in Muslim and Christian Societies,”
Viator
5 (1974): 272–73, 279, 285.

56. Kulikowski, “Plague in Spanish Late Antiquity,” 164–65.

57. Stathakopoulos, “Crime and Punishment,” 107–8; John Haldon, “The Works of Anastasius of Sinai: A Key Source for the History of Seventh-Century East Mediterranean Society and Belief,” in
The Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East, Volume I: Problems in the Literary Source Material
, ed. A. Cameron and L. I. Conrad, 107–47 (Princeton, N.J.: Darwin Press, 1992), 143–44.

58. Paul the Deacon,
History of the Lombards
, II:4, trans. William Dudley Foulke (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1974).

59. S. P. Brock, “North Mesopotamia in the Late Seventh Century: Book XV of John Bar Penkāyē’s
Rīš Mellē
,”
Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam
9 (1987): 68–69; Morony, “‘For Whom Does the Writer Write?’” 76–77.

60. Stathakopoulos, “Crime and Punishment,” 116–18.

61. Russell, “That Earlier Plague,” 178–84. Russell bases his argument on the assumption that plague mortality during the First Pandemic can be modeled on that of the Second, but there simply is not enough evidence to justify his position. For a more subtle version of this thesis, arguing for the rise of Western Europe on the basis of plague’s differential mortality, see Biraben and Le Goff, “Plague in the Early Middle Ages,” 63.

62. Conrad, “Plague,” 293–94, 329–38, 415–89.

63. Richard Hodges and David Whitehouse,
Mohammed, Charlemagne and the Origins of Europe: Archaeology and the Pirenne Thesis
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornel University Press, 1983), 20–76; Michael McCormick,
Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce, A.D. 300–900
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 27–119.

64. McCormick,
Origins of the European Economy
, 40–41.

65. Conrad, “Plague,” 449–89; Hodges and Whitehouse,
Mohammed, Charlemagne
, 52–53, 75–76.

66. Michael McCormick, “Toward a Molecular History of the Justinianic Pandemic,” in
Plague and the End of Antiquity: The Pandemic of 541–750
, ed. L. K. Little, 290–312 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 310–12.

67. John Norris, “East or West? The Geographic Origin of the Black Death,”
Bulletin of the History of Medicine
51 (1977): 10.

68. Michael W. Dols, “Ibn al-Wardi’s
Risalah al-Naba’ ‘an al-Waba’
, a Translation of a Major Source of the History of the Black Death in the Middle East,” in
Near Eastern Numismatics, Iconography, Epigraphy and History: Studies in Honor of George C.

Miles
, ed. D. K. Kouymjian, 443–55 (Beirut, Lebanon: American University of Beirut, 1974), 448.

194 y Notes to Pages 34–37

69. J. B. Hinnebusch, “Bubonic Plague: A Molecular Genetic Case History of the Emergence of an Infectious Disease,”
Journal of Molecular Medicine
75 (1997): 645–52; Sallares, “Ecology,” 245–54.

70. Norris, “East or West?” 7–16; Benedictow,
Black Death
, 44–54.

71. Another contemporary commentator on the Black Death, the Moorish physician Ibn Khātima, who, like al-Wardī, claims to have received information on the plague’s origins from merchant sources, writes from Almería, Spain, in February 1349 that the Genoese in Caffa were “besieged by an army of Turks and Romans.” This would imply that Greek Byzantines from Constantinople had joined the Mongols in the siege.

72. H. H. Lamb,
Climate, History and the Modern World
, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1995), 200; Dols,
Black Death
, 41; Norris, “East or West?” 4.

73. Dols,
Black Death
, 39.

74. Rosemary Horrox, trans. and ed.,
The Black Death
(Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1994), 17.

75. For the geographical spread of the Black Death in Europe and the Middle East, readers are advised to consult the detailed work of Benedictow,
Black Death
, 57–224, which has now supplanted Biraben’s chronology in
Les Hommes et la Peste
, 1:71–85.

76. The one article devoted to this topic mainly addresses whether the First Pandemic was bubonic or pneumonic plague but never really questions that it was plague.

See T. L. Bratton, “The Identity of the Plague of Justinian: Part 1,”
Transactions and Studies of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia
3 (June 1981): 113–24.

77. My greatest contempt, however, is reserved for those who refuse to enter into the debate at all but argue that medieval and modern diseases simply can’t be compared, which strikes me as an attempt, unintentional or not, to suppress historical enquiry. See the introduction.

78. For instance, Samuel K. Cohn Jr., in his revisionist history,
The Black Death Transformed: Disease and Culture in Early Renaissance Europe
(London: Arnold, 2002), 247, refuses to propose any alternative at all to plague, while the revisionist authors, Susan Scott and Christopher J. Duncan, in
Biology of Plagues: Evidence from Historical Populations
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 384–89, make up their own disease to replace plague, which they call “hemorrhagic plague,”

which seems akin to Ebola (caused by a virus). But one can’t even engage in debate over a fictional illness.

79. The original French results, their detractors, and the new evidence are all cited by Little, “Life and Afterlife,” 19–21, and McCormick, “Toward a Molecular History,”

294–97.

80. See, in particular, William M. Bowsky, ed.,
The Black Death: A Turning Point in History?
(New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971).

81. See Benedictow,
Black Death
, 245–384.

82. Massimo Livi Bacci,
The Population of Europe: A History
, trans. C. De Nardi and C. Ipsen (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 74; Stathakopoulos, “Crime and Punishment,” 105.

83. Carlo M. Cipolla,
Miasmas and Disease: Public Health and the Environment in the Pre-Industrial Age
, trans. E. Potter (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992), 68.

Notes to Pages 38–45 y 195

84. John Aberth,
From the Brink of the Apocalypse: Confronting Famine, War, Plague and Death in the Later Middle Ages
, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2010), 96–99; C. N.

Fabbri, “Continuity and Change in Late Medieval Plague Medicine: A Survey of 152

Plague Tracts from 1348 to 1599” (PhD diss., Yale University, 2006), 126; Cipolla,
Miasmas and Disease
, 6.

85. A much fuller study of the medical response to the Black Death will be forthcoming in my
Doctoring the Black Death: The Late Medieval Medical Response to Epidemic Disease
, to be published by Rowman & Littlefield.

86. Dols, “Comparative Communal Responses,” 275; Dols,
Black Death
, 109; Lawrence I. Conrad, “Epidemic Disease in Formal and Popular Thought in Early Islamic Society,” in
Epidemics and Ideas: Essays on the Historical Perception of Pestilence
, ed. T.

Ranger and P. Slack, 77–99 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

87. A point made most cogently by Justin Stearns with regard to contagion in his dissertation, “Infectious Ideas: Contagion in Medieval Islamic and Christian Thought”

(PhD diss., Princeton University, 2007), but one that is also made by Marie-Hélène Congourdeau and Mohamed Melhaoui, “La Perception de la Peste en Pays Chrétien, Byzantine, et Musulman,”
Revue des Études Byzantines
59 (2001): 95–124.

88. Stearns, “Infectious Ideas,” 182–99; Conrad, “Epidemic Disease,” 86–91.

89. Stearns, “Infectious Ideas,” 204–9; John Aberth,
The Black Death: The Great Mortality of 1348–1350. A Brief History with Documents
(Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2005), 62–63.

90. Stearns, “Infectious Ideas,” 32–43, 182–211; Aberth,
The Black Death
, 56.

91. Stearns, “Infectious Ideas,” 204.

92. M. Isabel Calero Secall, “El Proceso de Ibn al-Jatīb,”
Al-Qantas: Arab Studies Journal
22 (2001): 437–38.

93. Gentile da Foligno,
Consilium contra Pestilentiam
(Colle di Valdelsa, c. 1479), 4–5.

94. Horrox,
The Black Death
, 182–84.

95. Sudhoff, “Pestschriften aus den ersten 150 Jahren nach der Epidemie des ‘schwarzen Todes’ 1348,”
Archiv für Geschichte der Medizin
4 (1911): 422.

96. Stearns, “Infectious Ideas,” 208.

97. Aberth,
The Black Death
, 45, 51.

98. Sudhoff, “Pestschriften aus den ersten 150 Jahren nach der Epidemie des ‘schwarzen Todes’ 1348,”
Archiv für Geschichte der Medizin
16 (1925): 170.

99. Sudhoff, “Pestschriften aus den ersten 150 Jahren nach der Epidemie des ‘schwarzen Todes’ 1348,”
Archiv für Geschichte der Medizin
11 (1919): 44–47.

100. Sudhoff, “Pestschriften aus den ersten 150 Jahren nach der Epidemie des ‘schwarzen Todes’ 1348,”
Archiv für Geschichte der Medizin
5 (1912): 341–48.

101. Sudhoff, “Pestschriften aus den ersten 150 Jahren nach der Epidemie des ‘schwarzen Todes’ 1348,”
Archiv für Geschichte der Medizin
14 (1923): 159.

102. Stearns, “Infectious Ideas,” 112–13.

103. Aberth,
The Black Death
, 115.

104. Aberth,
The Black Death
, 115.

196 y Notes to Pages 45–52

105. Stearns, “Infectious Ideas,” 204–5.

106. Stearns, “Infectious Ideas,” 116–30.

107. Stearns, “Infectious Ideas,” 138–41, 218.

108. Galen’s original aphorism was “I urge you, go far away and don’t come back soon.” However, it is unclear which of Galen’s works, if any, this is from. See Stathakopoulos, “Crime and Punishment,” 111n93.

109. Sudhoff, “Pestschriften aus den ersten 150 Jahren nach der Epidemie des ‘schwarzen Todes’ 1348,”
Archiv für Geschichte der Medizin
16 (1925): 26.

110. Horrox,
The Black Death
, 203.

111. Foligno,
Consilium contra Pestilentiam
, 3.

112. Sudhoff, “Pestschriften aus den ersten 150 Jahren nach der Epidemie des ‘schwarzen Todes’ 1348,”
Archiv für Geschichte der Medizin
5 (1912): 333.

113. Horrox,
The Black Death
, 184.

114. Aberth,
The Black Death
, 77.

115. S. K. Wray, “Boccaccio and the Doctors: Medicine and Compassion in the Face of the Plague,”
Journal of Medieval History
30 (2004): 301–22.

116. Aberth,
The Black Death
, 76.

117. Aberth,
The Black Death
, 77.

118. Horrox,
The Black Death
, 28.

119. MS Vatic. Lat. 4589, fols. 138r–155v.

120. Aberth,
The Black Death
, 112–13.

121. Aberth,
The Black Death
, 110–14.

122. Stearns, “Infectious Ideas,” 116–26, 189–97, 212–18.

123. Dols, “Comparative Communal Responses,” 276–77; Dols,
Black Death
, 112–13.

124. Sudhoff, “Pestschriften aus den ersten 150 Jahren nach der Epidemie des ‘schwarzen Todes’ 1348,”
Archiv für Geschichte der Medizin
16 (1925): 26.

125. Aberth,
The Black Death
, 73.

126. MS Vatic. Lat. 4589, fols. 146r.–149r.

127. Sudhoff, “Pestschriften aus den ersten 150 Jahren nach der Epidemie des ‘schwarzen Todes’ 1348,”
Archiv für Geschichte der Medizin
11 (1919): 150.

128. Julian of Norwich,
Revelations of Divine Love
, in
A Book of Showings to the Anchoress Julian of Norwich
, ed. Edmund Colledge and James Walsh, chap. 27 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1978).