Plagues in World History (11 page)

But Amanti also posits a theological response to the objection, in that he turns it into a discussion of predestination and free will. Those who would fatally resign themselves to facing the plague by not fleeing what had been al egedly decreed by God as a just punishment are like those who deny good works as having any role in human salvation or who are convinced prematurely of their own damnation: just as God may have “decided to save you in this way, namely by your doing good works,” so does God save you when “He has decided to deliver you from the pestilence. . . . He has decided that you might be delivered in this way, namely by fleeing.” Therefore, to deny the option of flight is to deny to humankind the use of his God-given reason, which recognizes “that corrupt air harms a man and that the disease of the pestilence is contagious”; viewed in this way, flight is simply one means by which he chooses to save himself, “since the means by which he ought to do this is his choice, just as if these should be ordained by God.” By implication, then, Amanti accuses those who would resist flight from the plague as guilty of a kind of proto-Protestant heresy. Not only that, they are simpletons and fools, akin to those who in their “silliness” interpret their religion so literally that they 50 y Chapter 1

take that part of the Lord’s prayer, “Give us this day our daily bread,” as meaning they should not work but simply “sit unprepared at table [and wait] for the Lord to send down bread through his angels!”

Finally, there is the last Islamic tenet on the plague to consider that is perhaps best summed up by a writer from Aleppo in northern Palestine who himself succumbed to the Black Death in 1349, al-Wardī: This plague is for the Muslims a martyrdom and a reward, and for the disbelievers a punishment and a rebuke. When the Muslim endures misfortune, then patience is his worship. It has been established by our Prophet, God bless him and give him peace, that the plague-stricken are martyrs. This noble tradition is true and assures martyrdom. And this secret should be pleasing to the true believer.120

Al-Wardī goes on to refute contagion, citing the Prophet’s response to the pagan Bedouin (who believed in contagion): “Who infected the first?” In other words, Muhammad was bypassing intermediary causes to ask who infected the first mangy camel, which must have come directly from God. It was also “devotion to noble tradition,” al-Wardī assures us, that “prevented us from running away from the plague,” for which he apparently paid with his life. But al-Wardī ends his “Essay on the Report of the Pestilence” with a series of supplications to God that certainly sounds like he would much rather not be blessed with martyrdom from plague at all, which he describes as an “evil and torture.” This impression is buttressed by the contemporary chronicle of Ibn Kathīr from Damascus, who records plague processions and prayers that the crowd hoped and expected would take away the plague, something that one more usually associates with the Christian response to placate an angry God who had sent the plague down as a punishment, for believers and infidels alike.121 Other fourteenth-century Muslim writers who discuss the Prophetic tradition of plague as a mercy and martyrdom do so in a distinctly ambivalent way. Ibn al-Qayyim, for example, begins his chapter on the plague in his treatise on Prophetic medicine with a standard statement that plague is a martyrdom for every Muslim, but he then goes on to endorse contagion as a secondary cause of plague much in line with Galenic theories of the spread of disease.

Likewise, Lubb only mentions the martyrdom interpretation of the plague in a halfhearted way at the very end of his first
fatwa
, which otherwise could have cleared up much of the contradictions in the Prophetic tradition regarding contagion that he addresses in earlier sections. It is only with Hajar’s plague treatise of the mid-fifteenth century, which was to influence nearly all other treatises that came after it, that we get a strong, unreserved endorsement of the tradition that plague is a martyrdom for believers, to which Hajar devotes an entire chapter.122

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According to one scholar, the interpretation that plague was a mercy and martyrdom was “a major theological innovation of Islam” and unique to it, being akin to the promise of paradise for those who waged jihad, or Muslim holy war.123 This is not quite accurate, however. We have already seen how in seventh-century Spain, the promise of the resurrection was held out to those who died of plague in one sermon composed during the First Pandemic, which is somewhat akin to Muslims’ positive spin on the plague. An even closer parallel is to be found in the German physician John of Saxony’s treatise from the fifteenth century, in which he states that one of his impediments for treating people with plague was their morbid resignation to death, either due to their belief that “a fixed term of life and death has been established for each individual” or else, even worse, they had “a disposition and desire to die” because “they hoped to go immediately to heaven, which is why they did not seek out doctors to prolong their life.” John recalled how during “a certain great pestilence in Montpellier” this happened when “many men chose to die because the pope gave absolution to those dying [from the plague] for their penance and their sins.”124

Otherwise, some Christians challenged the notion that plague was always a punishment from God that had to be feared. Petrarch first questioned this in a letter to his friend, Louis Sanctus, in May 1349, when he mused almost blasphemously as to whether “could it be perhaps that certain great truths are to be held suspect, that God does not care for mortal men,” since he chooses to punish the current generation in a much harsher way through the plague than our forebears who had sinned equally as much?125 Over a century later, Amanti attempted to resolve this conundrum, such as that Job or the children of the sinners of Sodom and Gomorrah were punished even though they were innocent, by pointing to a silver lining to disasters like the plague: For some, he claimed, the disease was a blessing “in that they don’t wallow in their sin, for in their wisdom, one is carried off by the plague in order that no evil quality might change their soul.” For others, it inspires them to turn to prayer and penitence that God might save them from the plague, which he does by inspiring his elect to flee!126 In a rather innovative theological twist, a Lübeck doctor speculated in 1411 that, since pestilences “cannot be altered by cures, prayers, or other offerings,” it was not a punishment from God but rather his way of gathering “unto Himself those pleasing to Him, that is, young boys and other good people, so that His host with its great numbers may be able to overpower the host of the devil.”127 The late medieval English mystic, Julian of Norwich, also came up with an alternative theology to explain why a merciful and loving God would allow evils such as disease: for her it is simply part of God’s plan for the ultimate salvation and redemption of the human race, or as she famously puts it, “Synne is behovely [necessary], but alle shalle be wele, and alle shalle be wele, and alle maner of thynge shalle be wele.”128

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Two other responses to the Black Death, this time exclusively on the part of the Christian community, have also been seen as emblematic of a religious or cultural divide between Christianity and Islam. One is the Flagellant movement, which spread from Austria and Hungary in 1348 westward through Bohemia, central and southern Germany, and Strasbourg before finally ending up in Flanders by the late summer and early autumn of 1349. This movement consisted of processions sometimes hundreds strong that would come to town to engage in ritualistic whipping ceremonies that, according to one observer, Heinrich of Herford, might spatter the walls nearby with the Flagellants’ blood and move the spectators to tears.129

Traditionally, the Flagellants have been viewed by historians as an apocalyptic or millenarian movement with a radical heretical taint.130 One scholar uses this as a pretext for noting a major difference between Christian and Muslim responses to the Black Death: according to Michael Dols, there is no apocalyptic ideology in “orthodox” or Sunni Islam that would have given birth to a Flagellant movement.131 (Shi’ia Islam, however, does have some millenarian tendencies, and to this day flagellation does figure in some Shi’ite commemorations to Husayn ibn Ali during Muharram, the first month of the Islamic calendar.) But in fact, a closer look at the evidence reveals very little support for Christian Flagellants being any more motivated than Muslims would have been by beliefs in an impending apocalypse—nor do I think that guilt over sin played a major role in why the Flagellant movement arose in Europe and not in the Middle East or Spain. According to Dols, “There is no doctrine of original sin and of man’s insuperable guilt in Islamic theology,” as there is in Christianity.132 Regardless of the truth of this statement, I see it as irrelevant to the raison d’être behind the Flagellants. For even though the “Christian belief in plague as a divine punishment for men’s sins”

certainly underlay why flagellation was chosen as the means by which the Flagellants were to achieve their ends, atonement in and of itself does not satisfactorily explain why the Flagel ants were performing their whipping ceremonies nor why these were so popular, at least among their supporters.133

As for why Muslims did not also flagellate themselves during the Black Death, the answer may be found not in some esoteric difference in theology but rather in a more eminently practical explanation. The Flagellants participated in an itinerant-based movement that depended on an infusion of fresh recruits as they traveled from town to town. This was simply impractical for Muslim communities if they were to abide by the longstanding Prophetic tradition to not flee to or from a plague-infested area. For all we know, isolated flagellant demonstrations may in fact have taken place in the course of Muslim processions against the plague but did not attract the attention of chroniclers because they were not part of a broad-based, wide-ranging movement as in Christian Europe.134

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Another puzzle is why no scapegoats emerged in Islamic countries during the Black Death, such as we typically find in the Jewish pogroms that occurred in over three hundred towns and other communities in primarily German-speaking lands from Switzerland, Alsace, and the Low Countries in the west to Poland, Bohemia, and Austria in the east between 1348 and 1351.135 (Pogroms also occurred in northeastern Spain, southern France, and the Savoy between the spring and autumn of 1348.) It is no longer sufficient to say that Jewish pogroms in Europe were an outgrowth of the Flagel ant movement, since the connections between the two are tenuous at best. In terms of timing, Flagellants often arrived in town long
after
a Jewish pogrom occurred, as was the case in Strasbourg, where two thousand Jews were burnt in February 1349, months before the Flagel ants arrived later that year in June or July. We must therefore find some other reason for why such a phenomenon occurred, and why it did so among Christians and not Muslims.136

Respective attitudes toward the Jews are irrelevant, in my view, toward explaining the pogroms. Like the Flagellants, the Jewish massacres were really about a desperate attempt to end the Black Death, although certainly medieval Christian “anti-Judaism” helps explain why Jews were targeted. Instead of being a religiously based accusation bound up with the victims’ Jewishness, the charge of well poisoning that was leveled against the Jews during the Black Death was part of an entirely rational outlook that was grounded in contemporary medical and scientific theories about the disease that likewise viewed it as primarily caused in the human body by some sort of “poisoning.” The latter were usually interpreted in terms of a naturally occurring causation, such as a “poisonous vapor” ingested into the body from the surrounding air, but a few Christian doctors, such as the Spanish physician based at the medical school at Montpellier in southern France Alfonso de Córdoba, did admit of plague poisoning by human agency. These theories were then mutually reinforced by trials against Jews and poor men that charged them with poisoning wells or food in order to spread the Black Death among Christians; these trials first took place in the Languedoc, Provençal, Dauphiné, and Savoyard regions of France and Switzerland, all quite close to Córdoba’s theater of operations at Montpellier.137

If we are right that the poison accusation was primarily about a mistaken hope to end the plague, why then did it not take root in Islamic lands? The answer, I believe, goes back to the Prophetic tradition that plague can only come from the will of God. Even though various authors, such as Khātima, argued for contagion as a secondary natural cause that was not incompatible with this fundamental religious tenet, it would have been another thing entirely to argue that humans themselves could cause the plague by a sheer act of wil . This would then place the plague almost entirely out of God’s causation, something that no Islamic jurist 54 y Chapter 1

would stomach. Therefore, it is most unlikely that Muslim jurisprudence would grant the legal imprimatur that had made possible the trials and massacres that we see in Christian Europe. It may be supposed that God could have acted here indirectly by allowing the poisoners to be demonically inspired, as indeed many Christians believed they were, but Muslims usually interpreted the
jinn
or demonic influence as acting
directly
to instil the disease in human beings, not to use them as puppets such as we see alleged during the European witch hunt. A Polish astrologer and physician, Heinrich Ribbeniz, did link an alleged propensity of Jews to poison people with the influence of Saturn during plague that made them more likely to “sin against their gods,”138 but Muslim authors of plague treatises were far more skeptical of astrological influences, preferring to adhere to a strict Hippocratic interpretation of plague as arising (secondarily) from unnatural changes in the seasons. For Muslims, the role for humans in terms of acting according to the free use of their reason came only
after
plague had been sent down by God: at least, this seems to be the meaning of Umar’s parable of grazing camels either on the lush or barren slope of the
wadi
, which he allegedly told to ‘Ubayda during the Plague of ‘Amwâs of 638–639.