The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time Read online

  The Great Mortality attempts to bring alive the world described in the letters, chronicles, and reminiscences of contemporaries. It is a narrative of a supreme moment in human history told through the voices, personalities, and experiences of the men and women who lived through it. However, since it is impossible to understand the pestilence without understanding its historical context, it is also a book about a time as well as an event. As the British historian Bruce Campbell has observed, the decades preceding the plague were “exceptionally hazardous and unhealthy for both humans and domesticated animals.” Almost everywhere in Europe there was war, overpopulation (relative to resources), economic stagnation and decline, filth, overcrowding, epidemic (nonplague) disease, and famine, as well as climatic and ecological instability.

  In retrospect, contemporaries interpreted the reign of woe as a portent of the coming apocalypse, and in a sense it was. The economic and social conditions of the early fourteenth century, and the environmental instability of the period, made Europe an unhealthy place to live.

  The Great Mortality also looks at new theories about the nature of the medieval plague. For well over a century, it has been considered settled fact that the pestilence was a catastrophic outbreak of bubonic plague and a variant called pneumonic plague, which attacks the lungs. However, since in modern settings neither form of plague looks or acts much like the illness described in the Black Death literature, a number of historians and scientists have recently begun to argue that the mortality was caused by a different infectious illness, perhaps anthrax, perhaps an Ebola-like ailment.

  While history may never repeat itself, “man,” as Voltaire once observed, “always does.” The factors that allowed the Black Death to escape the remoteness of inner Asia and to savage the cities of medieval Europe, China, and the Middle East still operate. Except, of course, today they operate on a vastly larger scale. Trade and human expansion, the twin anthems of modern globalization, have opened up ever more remote areas of the globe, while transportation has enhanced the mobility of both men and microbes incalculably. A journey that took the plague bacillus decades to complete in the fourteenth century today takes barely a day. And for all the triumphs of modern science, infectious disease retains the ability to render us as impotent as our medieval ancestors.

  In the spring of 2001 English journalist Felicity Spector was reminded of that fact when an epidemic of hoof-and-mouth disease spun out of control and the British government, helpless to contain the outbreak, was forced to resort to methods that made Britain seem “suddenly, shockingly medieval.” We thought, wrote Spector in the New York Times, that “modern medicine had brought us beyond the days when the only solution to an infectious disease was to burn entire herds of livestock, to close vast swaths of countryside, to soak rags and spread them on the roads. . . . [M]odernity, it seems, is a very fragile thing.”

  Chapter One

  Oimmeddam

  FEODOSIYA SITS ON THE EASTERN COAST OF THE CRIMEA, A RECTANGULAR spit of land where the Eurasian steppe stops to dip its toe into the Black Sea. Today the city is a rusty wasteland of post-Soviet decay. But in the Middle Ages, when Feodosiya was called Caffa and a Genoese proconsul sat in a white palace above the harbor, the city was one of the fastest-growing ports in the medieval world. In 1266, when the Genoese first arrived in southern Russia, Caffa was a primitive fishing village tucked away far from the eyes of God and man on the dark side of the Crimea—a collection of windswept lean-tos set between an empty sea and a ring of low-rising hills. Eighty years later, seventy thousand to eighty thousand people coursed through Caffa’s narrow streets, and a dozen different tongues echoed through its noisy markets. Thrusting church spires and towers crowded the busy skyline, while across the bustling town docks flowed Merdacaxi silks from Central Asia, sturgeon from the Don, slaves from the Ukraine, and timber and furs from the great Russian forests to the north. Surveying Caffa in 1340, a Muslim visitor declared it a handsome town of “beautiful markets with a worthy port in which I saw two hundred ships big and small.”

  It would be an exaggeration to say that the Genoese willed Caffa into existence, but not a large exaggeration. No city-state bestrode the age of city-states with a more operatic sense of destiny—none possessed a more fervent desire to cut a

  bella figura in the world—than Genoa. The city’s galleys could be found in every port from London to the Black Sea, its merchants in every trading center from Aleppo (Syria) to Peking. The invincible courage and extraordinary seamanship of the Genoese mariner was legendary. Long before Christopher Columbus, there were the Vivaldi brothers, Ugolino and Vadino, who fell off the face of the earth laughing at death as they searched for a sea route to India. Venice, Genoa’s great rival, might carp that she was “a city of sea without fish, . . . men without faith, and women without shame,” but Genoese grandeur was impervious to such insults. In Caffa, Genoa built a monument to itself. The port’s sunlit piazzas and fine stone houses, the lovely women who walked along its quays with the brocades of Persia on their backs and the perfumes of Arabia gracing their skin, were monuments to Genoese wealth, virtue, piety, and imperial glory.

  As an Italian poet of the time noted,

  And so many are the Genoese

  And so spread . . . throughout the world

  That wherever one goes and stays

  He makes another Genoa there.

  Caffa’s meteoric rise to international prominence also owed something to geography and economics. Between 1250 and 1350 the medieval world experienced an early burst of globalization, and Caffa, located at the southeastern edge of European Russia, was perfectly situated to exploit the new global economy. To the north, through a belt of dense forest, lay the most magnificent land route in the medieval world, the Eurasian steppe, a great green ribbon of rolling prairie, swaying high grass, and big sky that could deliver a traveler from the Crimea to China in eight to twelve months. To the west lay the teeming port of Constantinople, wealthiest city in Christendom, and beyond Constantinople, the slave markets of the Levant, where big-boned, blond Ukrainians fetched a handsome price at auction. Farther west lay Europe, where the tangy spices of Ceylon and Java and the sparkling diamonds of Golconda were in great demand. And between these great poles of the medieval world lay Caffa, with its “worthy port” and phalanx of mighty Russian rivers: the Volga and Don immediately to the east, the Dnieper to the west. In the first eight decades of Genoese rule the former fishing village doubled, tripled, and quadrupled in size. Then the population quadrupled a second, third, and fourth time; new neighborhoods and churches sprang up; six thousand new houses rose inside the city, and then an additional eleven thousand in the muddy flats beyond the town walls. Every year more ships arrived, and more fish and slaves and timber flowed across Caffa’s wharves. On a fine spring evening in 1340, one can imagine the Genoese proconsul standing on his balcony, surveying the tall-masted ships bobbing on a twilight tide in the harbor, and thinking that Caffa would go on growing forever, that nothing would ever change, except that the city would grow ever bigger and wealthier. That dream, of course, was as fantastic a fairy tale in the fourteenth century as it is today. Explosive growth—and human hubris—always come with a price.

  Before the arrival of the Genoese, Caffa’s vulnerability to ecological disaster extended no farther than the few thousand meters of the Black Sea its fishermen fished and the half moon of sullen, windswept hills behind the city. By 1340 trade routes linked the port to places half a world away—places even the Genoese knew little about—and in some of the places strange and terrible things were happening. In the 1330s there were reports of tremendous environmental upheaval in China. Canton and Houkouang were said to have been lashed by cycles of torrential rain and parching drought, and in Honan mile-long swarms of locusts were reported to have blacked out the sun. Legend also has it that in this period, the earth under China gave way and whole villages disappeared into fissures and cracks in the ground. An earthquake is reported to have swallowed part
of a city, Kingsai, then a mountain, Tsincheou, and in the mountains of Ki-ming-chan, to have torn open a hole large enough to create a new “lake a hundred leagues long.” In Tche, it was said that 5 million people were killed in the upheavals. On the coast of the South China Sea, the ominous rumble of “subterranean thunder” was heard. As word of the disasters spread, the Chinese began to whisper that the emperor had lost the Mandate of Heaven.

  In the West, news of the catastrophes evoked horror and dread. Gabriel de’ Mussis, a notary from Piacenza, wrote that “in the Orient at Cathay, where the world’s head is . . . , dreadful signs and portents have appeared.” A musician named Louis Heyligen, who lived in Avignon, passed on an even more alarming tale to friends in Flanders. “Hard by greater India, in a certain province, horrors and unheard of tempests overwhelmed the whole province for the space of three days,” Heyligen wrote. “On the first day, there was a rain of frogs, serpents, lizards, scorpions, and many venomous beasts of that sort. On the second, thunder was heard, and lightning and sheets of fire fell upon the earth, mingling with hail stones of marvelous size. . . . On the third day, there fell fire from heaven and stinking smoke which slew all that were left of man and beasts and burned up all the cities and towns in those parts.”

  The Genoese, who were much closer to Asia than de’ Mussis and Heyligen, undoubtedly heard rumors about the disasters, but in the 1330s and early 1340s they faced so many immediate dangers in Caffa, they could not have had much time to worry about events in faraway India or China. The port of Caffa was held under a grant from the Mongols, rulers of the greatest empire in the medieval world—indeed, in the fourteenth century, rulers of the greatest empire the world had ever seen. For the Tartars, Caffa was only a small part of a vast domain that stretched from the Yellow River to the Danube, from Siberia to the Persian Gulf, but, like a pebble in a boot, it was an annoying part—or, rather, its colonial power was. To the Mongols, the Genoese seemed vainglorious, supercilious, and deeply duplicitous, the kind of people who would name their children after you—as the Dorias of Genoa had named three sons after three Mongol notables; Huegu, Abaka, and Ghazan—while picking your pocket. When the founder of the Mongol empire, Genghis Khan, railed against “eaters of sweet greasy food [who wear] garments of gold . . . [and] hold in their arms the loveliest of women,” he might have had the Genoese in mind. In 1343 decades of economic and religious tension between the two powers finally erupted in a major confrontation at Tana, a trading station at the mouth of the Don, famous as the starting point of the land route to China. “The road you take from Tana to Peking,” begins

  La Practica della Mercatura, Francesco Balducci di Pegolotti’s fourteenth-century travel guide for eastern-bound merchants.

  According to notary de’ Mussis,* the brawl grew out of a confrontation between Italian merchants and local Muslims on a Tana street. Apparently insults were exchanged, fists waved, punches thrown. Market stalls tumbled, pigs squealed, a knife flashed, and a Muslim fell to the ground, dead. Shortly thereafter, a Mongol khan named Janibeg, a self-proclaimed defender of Islam, appeared outside Tana, and with him, a large Tartar force. An ultimatum was sent into the besieged town and, according to a Russian historian named A. A. Vasiliev, a response, insolent even by Genoese standards, was sent back. Enraged, Janibeg flung his Mongols into Tana. Amid plumes of black smoke and the thundering cries of sword-slashing Tartar horsemen, the Italians, outnumbered but stout, made a fighting retreat to the harbor; from there, a race westward to Caffa commenced, with the pursued Italians traveling by ship, the pursuing Mongols by horse.

  “Oh God,” writes de’ Mussis of the Mongols’ arrival on the hills above Caffa. “See how the heathen Tartar races, pouring together from all sides, suddenly invest . . . Caffa [attacking] the trapped Christians . . . [who] hemmed in by an immense army, could hardly breathe.” To the Genoese caught inside the city, the siege seemed like the end of the world, but they were wrong. In 1343 the end of the world was still several thousand miles away, on the eastern steppe.

  Medieval Europeans like de’ Mussis and musician Louis Heyligen were aware that plague as well as ecological upheaval raged in Asia. The new global economy had made the world a little smaller. In his account of the siege of Caffa, de’ Mussis writes: “In 1346, in the countries of the East, countless numbers . . . were struck down by a mysterious illness.” Heyligen, too, mentions the plague in his account of “unheard of calamities . . . hard by Greater India.” The musician says that “the terrible events” in India culminated in an outbreak of the pestilence that infected “all neighboring countries . . . by means of the stinking breath.” However, the best medieval guide to the Black Death’s early history in Asia is Ibn al-Wardi, an Arab scholar who lived in the Syrian town of Aleppo, an important international trading center and listening post in the Middle Ages.

  Al-Wardi, who like de’ Mussis also got his information from merchants, says that the pestilence raged in the East for fifteen years before arriving in the West. This timeline fits the plague’s pace of dissemination, which is relatively slow for an epidemic disease. A 1330s starting date would also explain the references to a mysterious illness that begin to appear in Asian documents around the same time. Among them are the Chronicles of the Great Mongol Khanate of Mongolia and Northern China, which state that, in 1332, the twenty-eight-year-old Mongol Great Khan Jijaghatu Toq-Temur and his sons died suddenly of a mysterious illness. In 1331, the year before the Great Khan’s death, the Chinese records also make reference to a mysterious illness; this one, a treacherous epidemic, swept through Hopei province in the northeast region of the country and killed nine-tenths of the population.

  Most modern historians believe that what we call the Black Death originated somewhere in inner Asia, then spread westward to the Middle East and Europe and eastward to China along the international trade routes. One frequently mentioned origin point is the Mongolian Plateau, in the region of the Gobi desert where Marco Polo says the night wind makes “a thousand fantasies throng to mind.” In an account of the pestilence, the medieval Arab historian al-Maqrizi seems to speak of Mongolia when he says that before the Black Death arrived in Egypt, it had raged “a six month ride from Tabriz [in Iran, where] . . . three hundred tribes perished without apparent reason in their summer and winter encampments . . . [and] sixteen princes died [along with] the Grand Khan and six of his children. Subsequently, China was depopulated while India was damaged to a lesser extent.”

  Another often mentioned origin point is Lake Issyk Kul, where medieval travelers would come to pick up the fast road into China. Surrounded by dense forest and snow-capped mountains, in Kirgizia, near the northwest border of China, the lake region is located close to several major plague foci. (Foci are regions were plague occurs naturally.) More to the point, something terrible happened around the lake a few years before the pestilence arrived in Caffa. In the late nineteenth century a Russian archaeologist named D. A. Chwolson found that an unusually large number of headstones in local cemeteries bore the dates 1338 and 1339, and several of the stones contained a specific reference to plague. One reads:

  In the year . . . of the hare [1339]

  This is the grave of Kutluk.

  He died of the plague with his wife Magnu-Kelka.*

  After Issyk Kul, the Black Death remains a shadowy presence for the next several years; there is no reliable information on its movements, except that it always seems to be glimpsed moving westward through the steppe high grass. The year after Kutluk and his wife, Magnu-Kelka, died, one account puts the disease in Belasagun, a rest stop to the west of Issyk Kul where riders of the Yam, the Mongol pony express, changed mounts and Marco Polo’s father, Niccolo, and uncle Maffeo stopped on their way into China. A year or so later, the plague is spotted in Talas, to the west of Belasagun, and then to the west of Talas in Samarkand, a major Central Asian market town and crossroads where medieval travelers could pick up the road south to India or continue onward toward the Crimea. But only in 1346 d
o the first reliable accounts become available. That year one Russian chronicle speaks of the plague arriving on the western shore of the Caspian Sea and attacking several nearby cities and towns, including Sarai, capital of the Mongol Principality of the Golden Horde and home to the busiest slave market on the steppe. A year later, while Sarai buried its dead, the pestilence lurched the final few hundred miles westward across the Don and Volga to the Crimea, came up behind the Tartar army in the hills above Caffa, and bit it in the back of the neck.

  The Genoese, who imagined that God was born in Genoa, greeted the plague’s arrival with prayers of thanksgiving. The Almighty had dispatched a heavenly host of warrior angels to slay the infidel Mongols with golden arrows, they told one another. However, in de’ Mussis’s account of events, it is Khan Janibeg who commands the heavenly host at Caffa. “Stunned and stupefied” by the arrival of the plague, the notary says that the Tartars “ordered corpses to be placed in catapults and lobbed into the city in hopes that the intolerable stench would kill everyone inside. . . . Soon rotting corpses tainted the air . . . , poisoned the water supply, and the stench was so overwhelming that hardly one man in several thousand was in a position to flee the remains of the Tartar army.”

  On the basis of de’ Mussis’s account, Janibeg has been proclaimed the father of biological warfare by several generations of historians, but the notary may have invented some of the more lurid details of his story to resolve an inconvenient theological dilemma. Self-evidently—to Christians, at least—the plague attacked the Tartars because they were pagans, but why did the disease then turn on the Italian defenders? Historian Ole Benedictow thinks de’ Mussis may have fabricated the catapults and flying Mongols to explain this more theologically sensitive part of the story—God did not abandon the gallant Genoese, they were smitten by a skyful of infected Tartar corpses, which, not coincidentally, was just the kind of devious trick good Christians would expect of a heathen people. Like most historians, Professor Benedictow believes the plague moved into the port the way the disease usually moves into human populations—through infected rats.* “What the besieged would not notice and could not prevent was that plague-infected rodents found their way through the crevices in the walls or between the gates and the gateways,” says the professor.