Plagues in World History (12 page)

How to sum up a comparison of Christian and Islamic responses to and interpretations of the plague? Any attempt to paint such differences with too broad a brush, as perhaps Dols is guilty of, is criticized these days as failing to take into account the manifold differences of opinions
within
each religious tradition, at both the popular and intellectual level, and the lack of clarity that this then produces for establishing differences
between
the two traditions themselves, since points of overlap or obfuscation can always be found.139 Certainly, one can uncover authors on both sides who endorsed contagion, who condoned flight from the plague, and who saw the disease as a mercy, or at least somehow beneficial, for its sufferers. But it would also be false to deny that there weren’t differences of
emphasis
between the two faiths in terms of how they approached the plague.

Christian doctors, for instance, were able to endorse contagion unreservedly, without having to take into account religious objections as did their Muslim colleagues. It was also easier for Christian physicians to advise fleeing the plague, since any moral or ethical objections could be overcome simply by prescribing the appropriate medical precautions to take for those who stayed, whether by choice or necessity, as opposed to having to confront a long cultural tradition that frowned upon such behavior. Finally, Christian commentators on the plague were far more willing to question God’s direct agency and entertain alternative explanations of the disease, whether these be purely natural causes or human-directed ones. These still made a difference and had an impact upon each society’s experience with the plague, such as why the Flagellant movement or the Jewish pogroms arose in one culture and not in the other.

Plague y 55

It also very much mattered
how
each side expressed itself in taking the positions that they did, even if there were similarities or concurrences between them.

Dols has been criticized for insisting on making religious interpretations of the plague emblematic of an entire culture’s response to the disease, disregarding other influences.140 But this is precisely the point: religious responses to plague were all too often bound up with medical, social, psychological, and other cultural considerations, in which the manner of the response indicates how these various perspectives interacted with each other and which had significant consequences for each culture’s history with the disease. Bishop Amanti’s fifteenth-century treatise on flight from the plague is an excellent example of this. I’ve already noted how much in sympathy Amanti was with the medical agenda of his day, marshaling principles enunciated in medical plague treatises in support of his position that flight is a moral y acceptable response to plague; he was even wil ing to equate the medical necessity of flight with a Christian virtue, while any opposition to it was akin to a wrongheaded religious interpretation or worse, heresy. For Amanti, a priest was not even obligated to seek out plague patients to give them last rites, unless their case was incurable or there was no one left to attend them. (This certainly gives some substance to the criticisms of priests’ behavior during the Black Death that was made by chroniclers!) One need only contrast this with the hostile attitude toward medicine and the medical profession evident in the Islamic treatises of al-Qayyim in the fourteenth century and Hajar in the fifteenth.

Amanti’s treatise also supports Dols’s contention that Christians were more concerned with individual priorities over communal interests, especial y when this is compared with the works of Lubb or of the sixteenth-century Ottoman jurist Tāshköprüzāde.141 The parallel anecdotes told by Gilles li Muisis of Tournai and Ibn Battūta from Morocco (the Christian chronicler relating how some pilgrims “left in great haste” once they learned in the morning that their host and his whole family were dead from plague, while Battūta and his companion stay to pray over and bury a
faqir
, or Muslim holy man, who had died in their company during the night) neatly illustrate the differences here as well.142

Islamic religious hostility toward medicine almost assuredly had wide-ranging consequences for communities facing plague, if one is to go by Khatīb’s com-plaint “that the quills with which the scholars wrote these
fatwas
were like swords upon which the Muslims died.”143 This is also borne out by the rather less known and studied plague treatise of Khatīb’s student and fellow physician in Granada, Muhammad ibn ‘Alī ash-Shaqūrī. Although Shaqūrī does not encroach upon the thorny issue of contagion in the manner of his teacher, he does come to the defense of medicine as “a sanctuary provided by God and His mercy,” whose practitioners are like “beacons of light in a dark cave” of ignorance and folly.144

This is rather like Christian doctors who quoted perfunctorily from the “honor 56 y Chapter 1

the physician” passage in Ecclesiasticus 38:1–14. But Shaqūrī goes further than this in the following passage:

Many people understand from what is often said that medicine runs counter to God’s command, yet there is scarcely anyone more ignorant than the person who makes this claim. The person who violates God’s command is the one who hinders a created being in any fashion. Obligatory belief in this regard is that medicine is among God’s commands, and it is among the affairs that He entrusted to His emissary [the Prophet Muhammad], God’s peace and prayer upon him. It is also among the blessings and the deeds which God has bestowed upon those who worship Him. It is His command, and thus does He wish it. There is no gainsay-ing His wisdom.145

Nestled within this spirited defense of medicine is considerable resentment and indignation at those who would oppose medical practitioners out of a mis-guided and blind belief that, by opposing, they are doing God’s will, which echoes much of the tone of Shaqūrī’s teacher, Khatīb. This is important evidence, I think, of the frustration and obstruction late medieval Muslim doctors had to contend with compared to their Christian colleagues, who did not need to justify their profession to nearly the same extent.

On the other hand, the ease and readiness with which Christian authorities such as Amanti proved willing to conform their religious principles to medical priorities is of great significance for the implementation of plague controls around this same time in northern Italy. By the mid-fifteenth century, and even earlier in the case of Milan, permanent health boards were being set up by some Italian cities in order to be able to respond to plague outbreaks with measures such as quarantine, setting up of sanitary cordons, disinfection or outright destruction of the living quarters and belongings of plague patients, isolation of the sick and those deemed contagious in their homes or in
lazarettos
and pesthouses, and so on. Amanti seemed to be signaling that, from his quarter at least, nothing was going to stand in the way of these controls, although mercantile interests in Florence and other Italian republics may have had concerns about their impact on trade.146 By the seventeenth century, when plague controls were at their height of implementation by health boards across Europe, they began to attract some resistance, even to the point of physical threats made against health board members, due to the intrusiveness, scope, and rigor with which they had been allowed to be imposed, unfettered by any competing cultural considerations except perhaps economic ones. As expected, these protests came largely from the merchant community, who objected to the disruption caused to trade and to the putting-out system of cottage industry, but also from the Church, which, perhaps to its chagrin considering its earlier acquiescence to such controls, now Plague y 57

began to be alarmed at restrictions placed upon processions and other religious services during time of plague. Yet, the threat that plague posed to public health was deemed too great, and its controls—directed largely against the poor and other “dangerous” classes at the margins of society—were deemed too effective, to be seriously dislodged; moreover, health boards had much the upper hand over their would-be detractors, backed up as they were by the full force of the law and the power of government apparatuses.147

By contrast, when Western-style plague controls were introduced into Muslim countries, such as Tunisia in North Africa, by the eighteenth century, their effectiveness was already limited by opposition from the
ulema
, or religious scholars who spoke on behalf of the Muslim community. This opposition was such that it forced the Tunisian
bey
to rescind some of the more objectionable measures, such as burning the clothes and possessions of those who had died from the plague.

Natives also questioned the medical necessity of plague controls when the disease reappeared in spite of them. Although some Islamic traditions, such as that one must not flee to or from a plague-infected area, might be more compatible with other measures like quarantine, Western observers frequently noted how Muslim attitudes, in particular their fatalistic acceptance of the disease as wel as native remedies for plague, differed very much from their own.148 If one accepts that these controls played a role in the demise of the Second Pandemic of plague,149

then their greater acceptance in the Christian West as opposed to the Muslim Middle East may help explain why plague ended a hundred years earlier in Europe, by the early eighteenth century, as opposed to the early nineteenth century in North Africa and Palestine. On the other hand, these controls did not come without a price, as those who protested them in both Europe and the Middle East knew all too well. Such conflicts during the Black Death set the stage for even greater clashes between European colonial powers and their native subjects when the former attempted to impose similar controls during the Third Pandemic of plague primarily in India at the turn of the twentieth century.

In other respects, both Muslim and Christian responses to the Black Death followed a familiar pattern that had already been set during the First Pandemic of plague. Such high mortality necessitated mass burials and hurried, disordered funerals: the description by al-Maqrīzī of Cairo, of how “funeral processions were so many that they could not file past without bumping into each other” and how the dead were carried to their graves on bare wooden planks or whatever else was to hand, echoes that of John of Ephesus during the plague of 542 in Constantinople.150 Likewise, Marchionne di Coppo Stefani’s vivid analogy of how the dead were layered with dirt in mass graves in Florence “just as one makes lasagna with layers of pasta and cheese” rivals John of Ephesus’s imagery of the dead being pressed together like in a winepress.151 Prayers and processions of supplication to 58 y Chapter 1

end the plague again took place as they had during the First Pandemic, even in Islamic cities over the objections of some religious scholars that this went against the traditional view of plague as a mercy and martyrdom for the faithful.152 Just as the tolling of bells ceased in many European cities as a sign of the plague’s disruption of everyday life, so too did the call of muezzins to prayer in Cairo or Damascus, although the latter did not go so far as to deliberately constrain or even ban commemorative and religious services in line with medical prescriptions against the plague that we find contained in some European ordinances passed in response to the Black Death. And there were people who found a way to profit from the plague in both Christian and Muslim lands, whether these are the
bec-chini
who carted away the dead for fat fees in Florence or the readers of the Qur’an who now made ten
dirhams
per funeral in Cairo.153

However, there is one area in which I believe Europe had a cultural advantage over the Middle East in terms of addressing plague, aside from its greater propensity for medical plague controls. This relates to each culture’s attitudes toward and beliefs in the afterlife. Medieval Europe during the Second Pandemic had a remarkably concrete, palpably tangible conceptualization of the afterlife, one that was quite possibly unique in al of recorded history. One only has to read Dante’s Divine Comedy
from the early fourteenth century, just before the arrival of the great outbreak of plague in 1348, to understand just how fully articulated and profoundly real this conceptualization was to our medieval forebears. Purgatory, in particular, was ideally suited to a “cult of remembrance” of the dead, in which the dead were assured that they would not be forgotten among the living in their prayers and the living were comforted with the promise that death was not the end but just the beginning of their spiritual journey, a journey that would end only with the Last Judgment when bodies ravaged by disease would finally triumph over death by being resurrected whole and sound to rejoin their souls. This cult of remembrance so intimately bound up with the concept of purgatory was bound to be attractive at a time of plague when its mass death threatened to con-sign al to oblivion in a common grave. Purgatory, which was “invented” by the Western Church in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century and which is described by Dante as a great mountain of nine terraces, was completely foreign to Hebraic and Muslim cultures, even though they too had their versions of final judgment and resurrection. Europe’s late medieval cult of remembrance is well attested by the wil s proved in central Italy and in Douai in Flanders during the second half of the fourteenth and during the fifteenth centuries, when a greater percentage of them in the aftermath of plague specify some kind of commemoration, such as individual portraiture in tomb sculptures or within larger artistic commissions.154 Thus, when facing a uniquely mortal disease like plague, which portended for its many victims a swift and sudden demise, Europe’s “death-Plague y 59

friendly” culture, I would argue, with its detailed topography of purgatory and elaborate preparations for death in this life, was uniquely equipped for the psychological challenge posed by plague compared to the belief systems in place in the Middle East and in other regions around the world.155