| Kali Prasad |
Posted
on 28-Apr-01 08:11 PM
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
Studying the Black Death
By NORMAN F. CANTOR
I've written numerous medieval-history books, with about one million copies in print. Yet when an editor at the Free Press called in the summer of 1997, asking whether I would consider doing a book on the Black Death, which swept through Europe in the 14th century, I had my doubts. The press considered the Black Death a timely topic, given all the talk about pandemics and bioterrorism, as well as rapidly intensifying biomedical research on infectious disease.
In the England of 1500, children were singing a rhyme and playing a game called "Ring Around the Rosies." When I grew up in Canada in the 1940's, we still held hands in a circle and chanted:
Ring around the rosies
A pocketful of posies
Ashes, ashes
We all fall down.
The origin of the rhyme was the flulike symptoms, skin discoloration, and mortality caused by bubonic plague. The meaning of the rhyme was that life could be unimaginably beautiful -- and the reality unbearably horrible. The plague, which hit England hardest in 1348-49, was the greatest biomedical disaster in European, and possibly world, history. In England alone, it killed roughly 40 percent of the population; in Western Europe, at least a third of the population. That meant that somewhere around 20 million people died from what was called "the pestilence" (the term "Black Death" was not invented until after 1800). The so-called "Spanish influenza" epidemic of 1918 killed at least 30 million people -- and probably far more -- but that was a smaller proportion of the total population.
In recent years, intriguing new research from biomedicine has suggested some remarkable parallels between the Black Death and modern diseases and pandemics. There will always be a degree of uncertainty about the clinical history of the pestilence, but historians of medicine have been able to determine that it involved at least the bubonic plague, the same pandemic that had devastated the Byzantine Empire in the sixth century. But was that all that was involved? Or was another disease simultaneously occurring in some parts of Europe, and particularly in England, the country that I would be concentrating on?
And could I, a professor of history, sociology, and comparative literature, wend my way through the biomedical research?
Then, too, my own previous interest as a medievalist was in what used to be called the High Middle Ages, particularly the period more recently referred to as the Long 12th Century, ranging from about 1080 to 1240. That was the creative era for medieval government, thought, economy, and visual culture. Turning to mid-14th-century England, I would be crossing into the territory of one of the half-dozen greatest medievalists of the 20th century, the Dutch historical sociologist Johan Huizinga. He had set out to get a doctorate in philology (or what today would be called comparative literature), but had flunked out of the program at a German university. Returning to his native Leiden, he took a degree in medieval history in 1905, but maintained a zealous interest in art and literature and how both could be used to create a sociological picture of late-medieval society.
Unlike most academic medievalists then and now, Huizinga was as much an intellectual and a cultural critic as a scholar. He quietly taught at Leiden until the head of his department told him that it was publish-or-perish time. At that point, he retreated one summer to the attic of his mother-in-law's country cottage and, in a few months in 1919, produced The Autumn of the Middle Ages (sometimes translated as The Waning of the Middle Ages), still considered a classic on the period.
While roaming the stacks of the public library in Winnipeg, Canada, in 1949, while I was a college sophomore, I had chanced upon the well-illustrated translation of the book, published in London in 1924. Nobody had borrowed it from the library in a quarter of a century. I devoured it. In the 1950's, while a graduate student at Princeton, whenever I became depressed by dry-as-dust research seminars, I would read three or four pages of Huizinga to remind myself that medieval history was worth studying.
The shadow of Huizinga wasn't the only one that gave me pause as I considered a book on the Black Death. In addition, I would be entering the territory of Barbara W. Tuchman, whose A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century (1978) had introduced millions of readers to medieval England. Tuchman never earned more than a B.A. (from Radcliffe College); she had no training as a professional medievalist. There is no evidence that she could read the original documents of 14th-century England -- in Latin, French, and Middle English. Yet, with the help of a succession of young women recently graduated from Ivy League colleges, Tuchman burrowed away in the resources of the New York Public Library, where she was privileged with a private study, and produced an imaginative construction of the life of the Anglo-French nobility in the later Middle Ages.
Although Mirror was scoffed at by most academic medievalists, I always thought it a good book and recommended it to students and the educated public at large. Whether writing about the First or Second World Wars or the Middle Ages, Tuchman had a terrific talent for narrative history, often telling her story through the lives of a few key individuals.
So, in 1997, I had a lot of reasons to turn down the Free Press's offer.
I accepted it because it gave me the opportunity to cut a slice through medieval society and culture and exhibit it to today's readers in a way that I had never tried before. Instead of writing a historical monograph or comprehensive analysis of all the evidence on a particular topic, I would be trying to convey the experience of a great event already vaguely resonant -- yet still so distant -- to a broad audience. Briefly, I wanted to bring the reality of the medieval world alive.
I decided early on that the book should be divided into three parts. The first would have to cover biomedical knowledge about plague and other infectious diseases. That discussion would both provide a context for what was happening in 1348-49 and bind a long-ago time to the contemporary world, in which infectious diseases and their potential to become pandemics, once thought to have been defeated by antibiotics, now show disturbing signs of rebounding. The second section of the book would draw a lesson from Tuchman, providing intimate pictures of how the Black Death affected certain individuals, families, and communities. In the last part of the book, I would try to provide a macrohistorical perspective that would put the Black Death in the context of the long history of fearsome diseases -- and to look for parallels in human society in the coming decades.
Infectious diseases had caused pandemics from the days of early history. A pandemic is mentioned in the Old Testament, and certainly one struck Athens during the Peloponnesian War. That disease was probably smallpox. The Roman Empire's population was reduced by 25 percent from A.D. 250 to 400, and the surviving Byzantine Empire was devastated by a pandemic in the sixth century. That time, the diseases were smallpox, bubonic plague, and gonorrhea. Then, around 800, the ravages of infectious disease stopped in Western Europe, and half a millennium of disease-free years followed. With them came the emergence of medieval civilization, its kingdoms, church, law, universities, and high culture. The Black Death was the resumption of pandemic attack on Europe's population. It was immediately preceded by years of famine and intense warfare, which had weakened the physiological resistance of Europeans.
A whole new perspective was provided in 1984 by Graham Twigg, a British zoologist, in The Black Death: A Biological Reappraisal. He hypothesized, on the basis of contemporary scientific knowledge of disease and a careful reading of historical work, that the Black Death was not exclusively caused by plague, but probably also by anthrax or some similar disease spread by cattle.
In 1993, the distinguished astrophysicist Fred Hoyle and his associate, the mathematical physicist Chandra Wickramasinghe, in Our Place in the Cosmos: The Unfinished Revolution, added to the provocation by arguing that infectious disease, as well as human life, came first from outer space in the tails of comets -- suggesting that we may be much more vulnerable to huge epidemics than we had realized. In 1994, Evolution of Infectious Disease, by Paul W. Ewald, a biologist, shed more light on the biomedical development of the Black Death. Ewald argued that infectious organisms have a range of effects, allowing them to adapt to the weapons leveled at them and avoid annihilation. And in 1998, a paper published by geneticists working under the auspices of the National Institutes of Health opened new horizons by raising the possibility of a molecular relationship between the Black Death and H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS.
For a long time, most medievalists simply tried to ignore the questions opened up by Twigg. But in 1997, at an international conference in Leeds, England, Edward I. Thompson, then a historian at the University of Toronto, provided substantial historical documentation for much of Twigg's hypothesis. That included evidence that archaeologists had unearthed anthrax spores from the site of a hospital for plague victims.
There is no question that, without the availability of current scientific research on the Internet, and without the advice given me by William Beers, a microbiologist and vice president for research at Rockefeller University, I could never have made my way through the thickets of biomedical history. Nevertheless, I had spent more than 20 years mastering the intricacies of the history of Anglo-American law; now I found that I could approach the technicalities of biomedical history in the same way -- with the historian's training in scavenging and analyzing bits of meaning.
The scientific work I looked at suggests that the majority of the fatalities in 1348-49 came, as commonly believed, from bubonic plague, spread by parasites on the backs of rodents: particularly, but not exclusively, black rats. However, there was another infectious disease occurring at the same time in Britain -- anthrax, spread from cattle to humans.
No one has yet identified anthrax as a cause of the Black Death outside Britain, but it is probable that it was also involved in parts of France and Germany, wherever intensive cattle ranching was pursued. The main argument for seeing anthrax (along with bubonic plague) as a source of the mortality in 1348-49 runs as follows: First, the very rapid spread of the Black Death from the winter through the summer in remote areas, far from the ratand people-infested centers, indicates a cattle-driven and rodent-driven disease. Second, as Thompson noted, anthrax spores, which seem to endure indefinitely, were discovered in 1987 in a cesspit of a hospital site for plague victims just south of Edinburgh. Third, contemporary observers during the Black Death spoke of disease among cattle on 10 monastic estates that had reportedly sold tainted beef in butcher shops. Fourth, some plague victims in 1348-49 died without the telltale black swellings (buboes) of bubonic plague.
With the recent outbreak of B.S.E. (mad-cow disease) and foot-and-mouth disease in Britain and on the Continent, the significance of a strain of anthrax being implicated in the Black Death becomes all the more relevant today, serving as an eerie warning -- particularly since veterinarians have confirmed some similarities in the way anthrax and foot-and-mouth disease operate. Add to that the fact that anthrax is a preferred component in modern germ warfare, and that Saddam Hussein reportedly has enough anthrax spores to wipe out the human race, and understanding the involvement of anthrax in the Black Death becomes all the more compelling. I read news reports of people bewildered by how B.S.E. and foot-and-mouth disease can be spreading so rapidly; I am reminded of the anguish of people in 1348.
Many consequences have been attributed to the Black Death, including the Italian Renaissance itself ("Out with the old culture, in with the new"). I am skeptical of such grand cultural speculations. They can be neither proved nor falsified; they are mere rhetoric. That kind of grandiose historiography has, thankfully, become obsolete.
The medieval period, nevertheless, does offer a treasure trove for those wishing to look into the lives of individuals. By the 14th century in England, there was a substantial amount of source material, perhaps 30 times what survives from any era or place of the ancient world. A historian can delve into a great variety of central-government documents, like pipe rolls (tax records), close rolls (internal bureaucratic memoranda), and patent rolls (lengthy official documents). Just as valuable are the immensely detailed records of the central and county courts, in French or Latin, which provide entry into the lives of families from the peasant class up to the high nobility. There are documents that spewed out of monasteries in the 1540's, when the abbeys were dissolved and their records bought up. Those include chronicles, biographies, poetry, and a range of papers that neighboring families had deposited in abbey archives for safekeeping.
From such records, three specific consequences of the Black Death in England emerge. First, the pestilence accelerated a number of sociological changes, not least the emergence of a class of affluent free peasants, sometimes called yeomen. Thanks to research by Zvi Razi, a Tel Aviv historian, I was able to draw on the lives of two peasant families -- the Thomkynses and the Moulawes -- who resided on the lands of Thomas of Birmingham, the Abbott of Halesowen Abbey, and who rose to yeoman status as a result of the Black Death. By making judicious marriages (to consolidate acreage with other upwardly mobile peasants) and by striking deals with the abbot, they were able to occupy peasant lands made vacant by the plague. Their example, however, was by no means a sign of increasing social equality; rather, it led to further progress along the road to class polarization in an early capitalist economy, as the gap between rich and poor widened in English villages.
Other changes can be seen by looking at the classic, business-school case study of the consequences of the Black Death for the Abbot Thomas, who managed to put together what would amount, today, to a multimillion-dollar-a-year land corporation. The good abbot faced a multifaceted problem: How to deal with the sudden death of 40 percent of the peasants on the abbey's great estates? How to replace the decimated population of the abbey's monastic community? How to keep up income and feed his monks their customary six-days-a-week diet of two pounds of red meat, plus untold amounts of fish and fowl, beer or wine, and spun-sugar desserts? In the gloom of a late afternoon, the Abbot Thomas sat in the monastic chapel holding, for comfort and solace, the reliquary boxes of the two patron saints of the abbey. Those saints didn't intervene to help him (and one of the two, unbeknownst to the abbot, was, in any case, a fake). But Thomas got to work and righted things by skillful management, like a model businessman today.
Like other successful managers in his twilight world between feudalism and capitalism, the abbot made some good deals with peasants, the church, and the gentry. Because Halesowen lands were mostly of high quality, he was able to attract peasant laborers eager to take up vacant plots (and thereby generate revenue for his treasury); he kept some lands for the abbey, contributing food to fill his monks' stomachs and to sell at local markets and fairs (in 1369, such sales of surplus returned almost 85 pounds to the abbey's treasury -- roughly $300,000 in today's American buying power -- which was also used to keep up the barns and storage sheds that have today become desirable country homes); he talked local gentry into some modest land grants and talked the royal government and the Bishop of Worcester into allowing him to make the lands part of his core estate.
The Black Death also improved the status, wealth, and independence of some women, from both landed families and the working class. In many a gentry family, widows survived their plague-stricken husbands for years and even decades, living well on their dowager rights to one-third the income of their husbands' estates, while stepsons or even biological sons ground their teeth in frustration at the putative wasting of their inheritance. Working-class women -- because of the labor shortage -- became occupationally more active, coming to dominate, for example, the crucial brewing industry in the 15th century.
By contrast, the Black Death fed religious hysteria and fueled pogroms against the Jews in plague-ridden Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Kabalistic rabbis were accused of sending agents to poison wells with deadly bubonic spores. The massacres in German cities impelled the Jews to take up the offer of the Duke of Poland to settle in his thinly populated domains, where they prospered in the 16th century. There they served the nobility as estate agents, supervising the enserfed Christian peasantry in Poland and the Ukraine, and were rewarded with a monopoly over the liquor trade. (Because I am the son of Jewish immigrants to Canada from Poland and Belarus, I tell myself I have been created by the Black Death.)
The second major consequence of the plague can be seen in the weakening of ecclesiastical discipline -- a result of the sudden disappearance of close to 40 percent of the parish and cathedral clergy in England. That, in turn, gave an opportunity for radical Oxford graduates to fan out over the countryside and spread their proto-Protestant doctrines of Lollardy, rooted in the 14th-century theology of John Wycliffe. Over the next few centuries, Wycliffe's views resonated with the later teachings of Calvinism: denying the divine authority of the clergy, whose members were considered more ministers and preachers, and negating the doctrine of transubstantiation, which eliminated the sacrament of the Mass so central to Roman Catholicism. Driven into the northern hinterlands of England by the royal government in the 15th century, the Lollards came out of hiding when Henry VIII broke with Rome in the 1530's (some say to make an honest woman of his pregnant mistress) and contributed to the rise of Protestantism in England.
Third, the Black Death contributed to the fall of another empire, the crystallizing Plantagenet one that had been aiming to solidify England, France, and half of Spain under its rule. Among other blows that the Black Death delivered to this grand scheme of Edward III and the royal family was the death of the 15-year-old Princess Joan in Bordeaux, on her way to marry the heir to the throne of Castile. She died along with the minstrel whom her fiancé, Prince Pedro, had thoughtfully dispatched to Joan's entourage to immerse her in Spanish music. The Black Death also made John of Gaunt, a younger son of Edward III, the richest man in England and the Duke of Lancaster after his father-in-law died in the plague. The inheritance created an imbalance of power within the royal family and led to Gaunt's son's usurping the throne in 1399 from his feckless cousin: Thus did Henry IV oust Richard II, splitting the Plantagenet family into the two contending houses that generated dynastic civil war in the 15th century.
The impact of the Black Death on English politics was comparatively short-lived. In the long term, the 14th-century pandemic was a nodule in the persistent history of infectious diseases that are believed to have first emerged in East Africa, and whose successors followed humanoid migration up the Nile Valley, into the Mediterranean region, and spread across the globe. Such metahistory includes ups and downs of disease. Between 800 and 1348, Western Europe may have been blessed with an absence of pandemics, allowing for the rise of highly creative medieval civilization. But when bubonic plague and anthrax hit Europe, the devastation was all the more catastrophic because, after half a millennium of fortunate public health, the Europeans had no natural immunities to shield them. The reputed origin of H.I.V. in East Africa in the 1930's and the renewed terror over cattle in Europe today show the long continuity of this critical biomedical aspect of the history of human society -- and its likely persistence.
I think Tuchman would have liked my Plague book. Huizinga probably would not have. He would have found it disappointing that I have come to disagree with his fundamental sociological assumption -- that the art and literature of a period directly reflect its politics and society. Twenty years ago, I vehemently agreed with that. Now, it seems to me, we must look for the source of art and literature in the interplay of complex forces -- and those include biological forces, like bubonic plague and anthrax, as well as the psychological effort to comprehend the destruction that such diseases spread.
As for other readers, time will tell. My colleagues among American medievalists always remind me of those Boer farmers in South Africa in the 1860's and 1870's, trying to gain a living from their hardscrabble farms on the veldt, while a dozen or so yards beneath the soil lay some of the largest diamond and gold deposits in the world. So it is with academic medievalists -- exclusively addressing only each other in conferences, journal articles, and university-press books, while there is, I believe, great and unsatisfied interest in the Middle Ages among the educated public.
Norman F. Cantor is an emeritus professor of history, sociology, and comparative literature at New York University. His book In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made has just been published by the Free Press.
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