Plagues and Peoples (46 page)

82.
See Appendix for details.

83.
Carrier and Will, op. cit., p. 178.

84.
Ping-ti Ho, “An Estimate of the Total Population of Sung-Ching China,” in
Etudes Song I: Histoire et Institutions
(Paris, 1970), pp. 34–2.

85.
Ibid.

86.
My remarks on Japanese encounters with epidemic diseases are based on Fujikawa Yu,
Nihon Shippei Shi
, Matsuda Michio, ed. (Tokyo, 1969), pp. 11–66. His admirably learned and critically assembled chronological table of epidemic disease in Japan was translated for me by Dr. Joseph Cha.

87.
The Japanese term used for this disease is the modern one for smallpox; and Fujikawa Yu accepts the term as describing a single infection. This may be so: certainly the chronology of its early appearances in Japan fits very well with what would happen if the same disease were repeatedly introduced to an islanded population at intervals of thirty to fifty years, i.e., when antibodies had had time to disappear.

88.
Irene Taeuber,
The Population of Japan
(Princeton, 1958), p. 14.

89.
Josiah Cox Russell,
British Medieval Population
(Albuquerque, 1948), pp. 54, 146, 246, 269, 270.

90.
Or so Procopius reports,
Persian Wars
, 23:21.

91.
Cf. Thorkild Jacobsen and Robert M. Adams, “Salt and Silt in Ancient Mesopotamian Agriculture,”
Science
, 128 (1958), 125Iff; Robert M. Adams, “Agriculture and Urban Life in Southwestern Iran,”
Science
, 136 (1962), 109–22.

92.
Vilhelm Moller-Christensen, “Evidence of Leprosy in Earliest Peoples,” in Brothwell and Sandison,
Diseases in Antiquity
, pp. 295–06.

93.
Erwin H. Ackerknecht, History and Geography of the Most Important Diseases (New York, 1965), p. 112.

1.
Christopher Dawson, ed.,
The Mongol Mission
(London and New York, 1955), pp. 165–69.

2.
V. N. Fyodorov, “The Question of the Existence of Natural Foci of Plague in Europe in the Past,”
Journal of Hygiene, Epidemiology, Microbiology and Immunology
[Prague] 4 (1960), 135–41, asserts an age-old antiquity for bubonic infection solely on the ground that conditions were suitable for rodents in Europe in geologically distant ages. N. P. Mironov, “The Past Existence of Foci of Plague in the Steppes of
Southern Europe,”
Journal of Microbiology, Epidemiology and Immunology
, 29 (1958), 1193–98, makes the same assertion on the same grounds. This is absurd, for the mere existence of a rodent community suitable to sustain a plague infection does not guarantee that the plague bacillus will in fact be present, as the spread of endemic plague to the rodents of North America in the twentieth century amply proves.

3.
For details, see K. Chimin Wong and Wu Lien-teh,
History of Chinese Medicine
, 2nd ed. (Shanghai, 1936), pp. 508ff.

4.
Cf. R. Pollitzer,
Plague
(Geneva, 1954), p. 26.

5.
These remarks are based on L. Fabian Hurst, The Conquest of Plague: A Study of the Evolution of Epidemiology (Oxford, 1953).

6.
Howard M. Zentner,
Human Plague in the United States
(New Orleans, 1942).

7.
Wu Lien-teh, J. W. H. Chun, R. Pollitzer and C. Y. Wu,
Plague: A Manual for Medical and Public Health Workers
(Shanghai, 1936), pp. 30–43; Carl F. Nathan,
Plague Prevention and Politics in Manchuria 1910–1931
(Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1967). In Yunnan, too, whence the plague had initially come, local folkways prescribed behavior that minimized human exposure—including temporary abandonment of houses in which unusual numbers of rats had died. Cf. C. A. Gordon,
An Epitome of the Reports of the Medical Officers of the Chinese Imperial Customs Service from 1871 to 1882
(London, 1884), p. 123. This report is especially interesting since Colonel Gordon was himself entirely ignorant of how plague infection occurred.

8.
According the Charles E. A. Winslow,
Man and Epidemics
(Princeton, 1952), p. 206, no fewer than eight minor epidemics of bubonic plague broke out in the United States between 1908 and 1950 as a result of contagion from wild rodents. In the U.S.S.R. plague has been officially abolished, but scraps of evidence strongly suggest that similar outbreaks continue to occur there too. Cf. Robert Pollitzer,
Plague and Plague Control in the Soviet Union: History and Bibliography to 1964
(New York, 1966), pp. 6–8.

9.
J. N. Biraben and Jacques LeGoff, “La Peste dans le Haut Moyen Age,”
Annales: Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations
, 24 (1969), 1508.

10.
Michael Walter Dois,
The Black Death in the Middle East
(unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton, 1971), p. 29.

11.
The roster of recorded plague episodes down to 1894 is conveniently assembled in Georg Sticker,
Abhandlungen aus der Seuchengeschichte und Seuchenlehre
, I (Glessen, 1908). Sticker’s erudite register shows that the plague was never absent from Europe for as much as fifteen years after 1346—and since many outbreaks assuredly escaped Sticker’s attention, we must believe that human infections were even more prevalent than his list shows.

12.
Daniel Panzac, “La Peste à Smyrne au XVIII
^e
Siècle,”
Annales: Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations
, 28 (1973), 1071–93. This article proves, I think, that the plague was not endemic in Smyrna but arose through recurrent reinfection from the hinterland, i.e., from rats, fleas, and human beings who picked up infection from wild rodents of the grasslands. Reading this article provoked my hypothesis about the background of the fourteenth-century plague present here.

13.
Suitably populous burrowing rodent communities exist only in semi-arid grasslands, and cultivation, by destroying their burrows, tends to push such communities back from lands where enough rain falls to support a grain crop. Hence the exact geographical limit of plague endemicity among the rodents of the steppe has undoubtedly shifted across the centuries, and may in the fourteenth century have extended westward from twentieth-century boundaries throughout much or all of the Ukraine. Cf. N. P. Mironov, “The Past Existence of Foci of Plague in the Steppes of Southern Europe,”
Journal of Microbiology, Epidemiology and Immunology
, 29 (1958), 1193–98.

14.
Cf. Appendix.

15.
Ping-ti Ho,
Studies on the Population of China, 1368–1953
(Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1959), p. 10. For a useful graphic summation of recent scholarly opinion about China’s fluctuating population, see John D. Durand, “The Population Statistics of China,
A.D
. 2–1953,”
Population Studies
, 13 (1960), 247. Durand’s graph is also reproduced in R. Reinhard et André Armengaud,
Histoire Générale de la Population Mondiale
(Paris, 1961), p. 107.

16.
Cf. A. von Kremer, “Uber die grossen Seuchen des Orients nach arabischen Quellen,” Oesterreich, Kaiserlichen Akademie,
Sitzungsberichtey Phil-Hist. Klasse
, 96 (1880), 136. Von Kremer transliterates the author in question as Ibn Wardy, referring, presumably, to Abu Hafs Umar ibn al-Wardi, who died in 1349 of plague.

17.
Sticker,
Abhandlungen
, I, 43.

18.
I owe recognition of the role of rat-flea concentrations at caravanserais and gristmills in the propagation of the plague to correspondence with Barbara Dodwell of Reading University. She found it necessary to hypothesize concentrations of rats around European gristmills to explain the propagation of the disease inland away from cities and ships; the same clustering of susceptibles (whether of rats or humans) is required to explain a rapid propagation across Eurasia through thinly populated landscapes.

19.
Cf. Pollitzer,
Plague
, p. 14.

20.
D. H. S. Davis, “Plague in Africa from 1935 to 1949,” World Health Organization,
Bulletin
, 9 (1953), 665–700.

21.
For details of this key event in European history see Roberto
Lopez, Genova Marinara nel Duecento: Benedetto Zaccaria, ammiraglio e mercanti (Messina-Milan, 1933).

22.
David Herlihy, “Population, Plague and Social Change in Rural Pistoia, 1201–1430,”
Economic History Review
, 18 (1965), 225–44.

23.
In Europe, a “Little Ice Age” starting about 1300 climaxed between 1550 and 1850 and has been succeeded by warmer temperatures in the twentieth century. Cf. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie,
Times of Feast, Times of Famine: A History of Climate Since the Tear 1000
(New York, 1971), and the speculative explanation of long-term fluctuations offered by H. H. Lamb,
The Changing Climate
(London, 1966), pp. 170–94. Roughly parallel alterations in climate can be inferred also from Chinese records. See the graph of fluctuating temperatures in Chu K’o-chen, “Chung kuo chin wu ch’ien nien lai ch’i hou pien ch’ien te ch’u pu yen chiù” [Initial researches
into
changes in the Chinese climate during the past five thousand years],
ICao ku hsüehpao
(1972), p. 37. Hush Scogin brought this chart to my attention and translated the Chinese headings for me. The principal basis for Chu K’o-chen’s graph is local records of years when the Yangtze lakes froze over in wintertime.

24.
Conditions under which this “pneumonic” form of plague occur remain obscure. There are experts who deny the importance of pneumonic plague in Europe in the fourteenth century. Cf. J. F. D. Shrewsbury,
A History of Bubonic Plague on the British Isles
(Cambridge, 1970), p. 6 and
passim
and the rebuttal by C. Morris, “The Plague in Britain,”
Historical Journal
, 14 (1971), 205–15. Barbara Dodwell’s explanation for the propagation of the infection via rat concentrations at gristmills is probably a satisfactory reconciliation of Shrewsbury’s epidemiology and the historical facts. She developed the hypothesis to explain how the plague could penetrate thinly populated regions as records attested but which Shrewsbury had declared impossible on epidemiological grounds. Being a meticulous scholar, Miss Dodwell has not yet published anything to resolve the problem, but generously shared her ideas with me in correspondence.

25.
Shrewsbury, op. cit., p. 406. As a bacteriologist, Shrewsbury is an expert guide to the medical aspects of plague, even if his historical judgments remain controversial. The last outbreak of plague that ran its course without benefit of penicillin and related antibiotics (which destroy the infection rapidly) occurred in Burma in 1947, where 1,192 reported deaths from a total of 1,518 cases made a lethal percentage of 78. Pollitzer,
Plague
(Geneva, 1954), p. 22.

26.
August Hirsch, Handbook of Geographical and Historical Pathology, I, 498.

27.
Josiah C. Russell, “Late Ancient and Medieval Population,”
American Philosophical Society Transactions
, 48 (1958), 40–45; Philip
Ziegler,
The Black Death
(New York, 1969), pp. 224–31. Shrewsbury, op. cit., p. 123, vehemently argues for a mere 5 per cent die-off in Great Britain from bubonic plague—on the assumption that pneumonic plague did not manifest itself; but he allows an undiagnosed typhus, following in the rear of the plague, to raise mortality toward the 40–50 per cent die-off recorded among English clergy for the years 1346–49. Whether the well-attested and extraordinarily high death rates among English clergy can be projected upon the population at large has been the focus of considerable debate from the time F. A. Gasquet,
The Black Death of 1348 and 1349
, 2nd ed. (London, 1908), first discovered them by perusing monastic and diocesan records.

28.
Italian records are potentially very rich but have only begun to be carefully studied. Cf. William M. Bowsky, “The Impact of the Black Death upon Siene se Government and Society,”
Speculum
, 39 (1964), 1–34; David Herlihy, “Population, Plague and Social Change in Rural Pistoia, 1201–1430,”
Economic History Review
, 18 (1966), 225–44; Elisabeth Carpentier,
Une Ville Devant la Peste: Orvieto et la Peste Noire de 1348
(Paris, 1962). Some French towns also have abundant notarial records that can yield data on plague losses. Cf. Richard W. Emery, “The Black Death of 1348 in Perpignan,”
Speculum
, 42 (1967), 611–3, who estimated a die-off of 58–68 per cent among the notaries of Perpignan from the plague.

29.
The plague was, however, serious in Russia. Cf. the discussion of plague losses in Russia and their socio-political effects in Gustave Alef, “The Crisis of the Muscovite Aristocracy: A Factor in the Growth of Monarchical Power,”
Forschungen zur osteuropaischen Geschichte
, 15 (1970), 36–39; Lawrence Langer, “The Black Death in Russia: Its Effects upon Urban Labor,”
Russian History
, II (1975), 53–67.

30.
A useful sampling of recent scholarly opinions about the effects of the plague on European history may be found in William M. Bowsky, ed.,
The Black Death: A Turning Point in History?
(New York, 1971), pp. 65–121.

31.
John Saltmarsh, “Plague and Economic Decline in the Later Middle Ages,”
Cambridge Historical Journal, 7
(1941), 23–41; J. M. W. Bean, “Plague, Population and Economic Decline in England in the Late Middle Ages,”
Economic History Review
, 15 (1963), 423–36; J. C. Russell, “Effects of Pestilence and Plague, 1315–1385,”
Comparative Studies in Society and History
, 8 (1966), 464–73; Sylvia Thrupp, “Plague Effects in Medieval Europe,” idem., 474ff; A. R. Bridbury, “The Black Death,”
Economic History Review, 26
(1973), 577–92.

32.
Cf. Roger Mols, Introduction d la Démographie Historique des Villes d’Europe du XIV au XVIII Siècle (Louvain, 1956), II, 426–59.