Plagues in World History (6 page)

Perhaps the most distinct impression of all that was made by the plague upon its chroniclers is the disposal of the ever-mounting corpses of its victims. The daunting and distressing prospect of what to do with all the dead had already been briefly noted by Thucydides, who reports that Athenian citizens resorted to mass cremation.31 Since this method of disposal was proscribed to Christian authorities, the challenge was what to physically do with perhaps thousands of 26 y Chapter 1

bodies dying each day. It seems this was the most important and urgent brief for the imperial government during the crisis, dictated by both Christian duty and medical necessity, and both Procopius and John of Ephesus report that Justinian’s court responded with impressive alacrity and efficiency, something that is not always evident even in a modern, developed society of today.32 Mass burial pits were dug or improvised in existing buildings on Galata across the Bosphorous straits from the city, and corpse-bearers were drafted from among the soldiery, bribed with money from the imperial treasury, or simply forthcoming out of a sense of charity.33 A memorable detail, supplied by John of Ephesus, tells of how gravediggers piled up and pressed down layers of bodies “as a man might heap up hay in a stack” or trod on them with their feet “like spoiled grapes,” while the trampled bodies sank and were immersed in the pus of five-to ten-day-old rotting corpses below.34 This is just one of any number of John’s anecdotes that stick in the mind: litters bearing dead bodies bumping into each other on their way down to the docks; pus and viscera bursting out of rotting, bloated bodies and flowing down to the sea; noble families abandoned by their servants, including even the royal household, now reduced to a miserable handful huddled together in an empty palace; a house full of twenty forgotten victims whose bodies were so decayed worms were crawling through them; and infants still suckling from the breasts of their mothers even though they had died.35 One can’t help but wonder if at least some of these searing images were directly inspired by what the author himself had witnessed.

The sheer enormity of the mortality—which meant that all the usual rites of Christian burial had to be set aside and the dead treated like beasts—is what seems to have shocked observers the most. Allied to this was John of Ephesus’

observation that people of all ranks, ages, and conditions were jumbled together into a degrading, meaningless muddle by the “wine press” of mass burial.36 This is a theme that will crop up later during the Black Death and perhaps inspire the Dance of Death, one of the most powerful and popular artistic genres in the later Middle Ages. The fear of dying a nameless death was such that people took to going out with identification tags hung on their arms or necks.37 The business of making wills and providing for inheritance was thrown into chaos, and both chroniclers report that all traffic and commerce came to a complete halt in the capital, which was mirrored in the countryside with domestic animals wandering about wild in the pastures and stands of grain ripening unharvested in the fields.38 Aside from performing autopsies to investigate the source of bubonic swellings, physicians were alleged to be markedly ineffective in prognosis and treatment of the disease.39

What is strikingly absent from contemporary descriptions is any role or presence of the Church during the crisis; instead, people resorted to their own Plague y 27

prayers or superstitions in an attempt to ward off the plague, such as hurling pitchers from their windows, which John of Ephesus claims was started by some mad “foolish women” inspired by demons. Indeed, monks and priests were apparently viewed as messengers of death and shunned with personal invocations of protection whenever they were encountered in the street.40 There is even evidence of Christian backsliding in the face of the disaster, which is perhaps not unsurprising at this early stage of Christianity. In the border regions of Palestine, inhabitants began worshipping a bronze pagan idol, while even a good Christian like Evagrius might wonder how God could take away his whole family and yet leave the children of his pagan neighbors untouched.41 Pagans and homosexuals seem to be the only candidates for scapegoats during the crisis, even though measures were taken against them only after the danger had passed.42 While guilt could certainly be collective as an explanation for why God allowed plague to happen, authorities also made it clear that the extraordinary sin of certain groups provoked divine displeasure and therefore were in urgent need of correction.43

This provided an important precedent that would help justify later pogroms, such as against the Jews during the Black Death.

It is probably fair to say that the First Pandemic of plague helped prevent the renovatio imperii
, or “restoration of the empire,” that had been the life’s ambition of the Byzantine emperor Justinian (527–565).44 By 554, Justinian had completed the reconquest of North Africa, Italy, and part of Spain, thus recreating in large part the Mediterranean sphere of influence that had once been the glory of ancient Rome. The empire’s failure to hang on to these conquests as the sixth century came to a close has been attributed to a number of other factors besides the plague.45 But the massive mortality occasioned by the First Pandemic undoubtedly played its part, largely by sapping the empire of the manpower it needed to defend its newly won territory. This was particularly true as the plague kept striking again and again after its first arrival on the scene in 541–542: plague’s returns to Constantinople in 558 and 573–574, for example, were especially ill timed due to incursions by a new enemy, the Avars, in the Balkans.46

Moreover, the plague seems to have engendered a sense of weariness, and perhaps even guilt, over what otherwise should have been much celebrated accomplish-ments of the reign. In his
Secret History
, for example, Procopius confesses what he really thought of his emperor, whom he blamed for the death of no less than a trillion people. Most of these lives, we are informed, were lost in Justinian’s unending series of wars, for which the emperor was directly responsible. However, Procopius also believed that Justinian was, quite literally, a “demon in human form,” whose very presence goaded God to allow natural catastrophes to occur, one of which was, of course, the plague of 542.47 Perhaps no writer in history has been so abashed of his civilization’s success.

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Before we take our leave of the First Pandemic, we should note some other, later outbreaks of the disease and responses to them that were to have important implications for the Second Pandemic of the late Middle Ages. In 590, an outbreak of bubonic plague struck Rome that, according to the chronicler Gregory of Tours, inspired the new pope, Gregory the Great, to preach a sermon calling for a procession of all the churchmen and inhabitants of the city. Like John of Ephesus, Pope Gregory amply quotes from the Old Testament to show how plague is an expression of God’s anger in retribution for people’s wickedness and sin; the difference, of course, is that Gregory now holds out the promise of re-prieve from God’s punishment if the faithful but show their repentance. Despite the fact that eighty people fell dead in their midst, the procession continued.48

Later legend supplied by Jacob of Voragine in the thirteenth century credited the procession with ending the plague when Gregory had a vision of an angel atop the Tomb of Hadrian sheathing his sword, indicating that the divine displeasure had finally been appeased. (By the ninth century, the tomb had been renamed the Castel Sant’Angelo to commemorate the event.) Yet, even this later medieval fiction had its Old Testament prototype, namely, the story told in the first book of Chronicles of how King David persuaded God to spare Jerusalem from a pestilence that had already killed seventy thousand Israelites.49 Thus was established a precedent for prayers and processions, including perhaps the Flagellant movement, that were to play such a central role in how medieval society responded to the Black Death.

By the seventh century, sermon cycles were being compiled to be recited on a regular basis whenever plague struck a region as part of the Church’s now standard response to urge its flock to repent in the face of God’s wrathful chastisement; this at least is the overarching theme of four homilies composed at this time in Toledo, Spain, which, as expected, are replete with quotations from the Old Testament.50 Yet, one sermon, the third in the series, adopts a strikingly different tone by employing the carrot rather than the stick (although even the sermons that dwell on God’s anger and chastisement hold out the hope of forgiveness and abatement of the plague if hearers will only repent). In a remarkable passage, one that seems to be inspired by the New Testament, in particular the letters of St. Paul, the preacher now dangles the promise of immortality during the Christian afterlife or resurrection in order to help his listeners conquer their fear of imminent death from the “groin disease”: But what should we say? You who take fright at this blow (not because you fear the uncertainty of slavery, but because you fear death, that is, you show yourselves to be terrified), oh that you would be able to change life into something better, and not only that you could not be frightened by approaching death, but rather that you Plague y 29

would desire to come to death. When we die, we are carried by death to immortality. Eternal life cannot approach unless one passes away from here. Death is not an end, but a transition from this temporary life to eternal life. Who would not hurry to go to better things? Who would not long to be changed more quickly and reformed into the likeness of Christ and the dignity of celestial grace? Who would not long to cross over to rest, and see the face of his king, whom he had honored in life, in glory? And if Christ our king now summons us to see him, why do we not embrace death, through which we are carried to the eternal shrine? For unless we have made the passage through death, we cannot see the face of Christ our king.51

A very similar kind of response was developed concurrently in the Muslim world, as we will shortly see.

The last major outbreak to mention is the first to occur in the Islamic tradition, the so-called Plague of ‘Amwâs (named after the town in Palestine where Islamic troops first contracted the disease), which struck Syria and Mesopotamia in 638–639.52 This was an epidemic of bubonic plague that hit hardest in Syria and Palestine, including the capital, Damascus, beginning in the spring of 638

and not burning itself out until the autumn of 639. By taking out a whole generation of Muslim leaders, the plague seems to have paved the way for the rise of Mu‘awiya, the founder of the Umayyad dynasty of caliphs (661–680). In 640, after the death of several Companions of the Prophet, which included his own brother, Mu’awiya was made governor of Syria, a position from which he was able to claim the caliphate after the assassinations of Uthman (644–655) and Ali (656–661). By extension, then, the plague also had a hand in the eventual splin-tering of Islam between the Shi‘ites (followers of Ali) and the Sunnis, who followed Mu‘awiya.

But for our purposes, the most important outcome of the Plague of ‘Amwâs was the germination of the Muslim tradition that flight to or from a plague-infested area was prohibited to believers. This tradition only fully emerged later, by the eighth century; all that can be known for certain from a historical point of view is that Caliph Umar ibn al-Khattāb (r. 634–644) attempted to make a journey from Arabia to Syria in c. 638 but turned back upon hearing of a “pestilence” there. Embellishments over the course of the next century and more added much drama to this story: how Umar, upon reaching the way station of Sargh on the border between Arabia and Syria, was met by the commander of his forces in Syria, Abū ‘Ubayda, who warned him that plague was raging in the region; how a debate then ensued among the caliph’s advisers about what to do, some urging him to keep going and not turn back and others urging him to not expose himself and other leaders, including the Companions of the Prophet, to the plague; how after Umar decided upon retreat ‘Ubayda (who was to die from the plague in Syria) taunted him with the words “fleeing from the decree of 30 y Chapter 1

God?”; how Umar then employed the parable of grazing camels on a lush slope rather than the opposite, barren slope to explain how they were “fleeing from the decree of God to the decree of God”; and how the debate was ended when one of the Companions belatedly arrived on the scene to quote Muhammad’s precedent, “If you hear of it [the plague] in a land, do not approach it; but if it breaks out in a land and you are already there, then do not leave in flight from it.” On this basis, Umar finally turned back to Medina. On historical grounds, the “Umar at Sargh” story has an air of inconsistency about it: why would ‘Ubayda, for example, both warn Umar against the plague and rebuke him for trying to avoid it? But in terms of the Prophetic tradition of Islam, it both satisfied a recurring theme in the Qur’an that resists any flight from adversity and deferred to a practical need to avoid unnecessary risks to the lives of the faithful. It was also a way to quarantine Arabia, which as yet was untouched by the plague, and to redeem the reputation of one of Sunni Islam’s most revered leaders, who was otherwise known as a fearless campaigner against the Byzantine and Persian Empires that he conquered.53 This issue, along with two other alleged tenets of Islam concerning the plague—that the disease was a mercy and martyrdom for believers and that there was no contagion of plague since it came directly from the will of God—were to assume a very important and highly contested role in the religious/legal/medical communities of the Islamic world when the Second Pandemic, or Black Death, struck in 1348–1349. But for now, it is unclear what guidance was available to believers about how to respond to plague; it should be noted that, throughout the Near East during the First Pandemic, settled populations seem to have fled the disease in large numbers.54