The first pestilence and the preceding famine had shaken the very foundation of the Byzantine empire. The Plague had killed millions of people all over the new Roman empire and Asia Minor, especially the city of Constantinople where 40% of the population was eradicated. The accuracy however is hard to gauge but the impact was so wide-ranging that it resonated throughout the empire. Towards the following years during the peak of the plague, various Germanic people conquered the former Roman Empire in West and North Africa. Justinian’s attempts to reunite the Roman Military dwindled in the wake of the social and economic disruptions caused by the plague. Not many able-bodied men were alive to be in the military. Above that, there was no tax revenue as agriculture declined in the region for extreme weather changes. After Justinian, the succeeding Byzantine emperors only found a pyrrhic empire where the plague kept on resurfacing in cities and towns until about 750 AD. But by then, the world had transformed.
The Byzantine Empire, however, witnessed a revival during the reign of the Macedonian emperors during the 9th and 10th century AD. The empire acquired vast territories from the Adriatic sea, southern Italy and the city of Antioch and to the Euphrates and Tigris rivers to the east. But this expansion and glory were not devoid of adversaries. The Muslims, especially the Turks were gaining power towards the east and Asia minor. By 867 AD the Byzantines saw the rise of Muslim power; sometimes even aided by some renegades of the empire itself. The Muslims slowly but surely gained power over the territories and cities of importance.
In the year 1081, Alexios-I Komnenos succeeded to the throne of Byzantium, by then an empire faced with constant warfare against Seljuk Turks in Asia Minor and the Normans in western Balkans. Seljuks by that time had amassed most of Asia Minor. Alexios was successful in securing the coastal regions by sending peasant soldiers but such victories were not able to deter the Turks altogether. Alexios sought western assistance to fight off the Turks. In 1095, his ambassadors had appeared before Pope Urban-II at the council of Piacenza. The Pope, too, saw this as an opportunity to mobilise the Christian military against the non-believers, who were the Muslims. Thus, began the Crusades, a series of religious wars, intending to conquer the holy land from the Muslims. The Crusades started with the mobilisation of Christian commoners and peasants by Peter, the Hermit, in 1095. As a response to the call of Pope Urban-II and extinguished with the fall of the crusader cities of Tripoli in 1289 and Acre in 1291. It had a great socio-economic impact all over Europe. Trade routes revamped, people controlling lands transformed and thus, changed the status of the erstwhile superpower, the Roman Empire.
Meanwhile, the Mongols were on the rise in the east. They moved westwards and were unstoppable. While galloping with all their conquests and wins, the Mongols carried with them a disease that originated in China – a disease carried by the black rats in Mongolian grain carts that travelled all the way from China to Central Asia and found its way to Europe. It was the year 1347 when an army led by the Mongol ruler Janibeg, attacked the Genoese trading port of Kaffa (now, Feodosiya or Theodosia) in Crimea. As infected soldiers succumbed to the disease, Janibeg catapulted their plague-infested bodies into the town to infect his enemies. From Kaffa, Genoese ships carried the disease westward to the Mediterranean ports.
In October 1347, twelve such ships from the Black Sea reached the Sicilian port of Messina. People gathered at the port were met with a horrifying surprise. Most sailors aboard the ships were already dead and those few alive were gravely ill, covered in black boils oozing blood and pus. This was the symbolic beginning of the “Black Death” in Europe. The death ships were ordered by authorities to leave, but it was too late. The plague was already there, entering Europe through different fronts and over the next five years, that would go on to consume more than 20 million people in Europe, which is one-third of the continent’s population.
It may have been in the 1300 AD that the plague had struck China. Later it entered India and slowly made its way to the Middle East via trade routes. But the haste and reckless movement of the Mongols might have been the primary reason for the plague entering Europe through the Crimean Region. Europe at that time was scarcely equipped for the horrible reality of the Black Death that was going to strike. Frequently changing rulers and wars at different fronts added to the quick spread of the epidemic.
“In men and women alike, at the beginning of the malady, certain swellings, either on the groin or under armpits…waxed to the bigness of a common apple, others to the size of an egg, some more and some less, and these the vulgar named plague-boils”
– Giovanni Boccaccio
Black Death was an epidemic of the Bubonic Plague, which now can be treated with some easily available and inexpensive antibiotics. If one dies of bubonic plague now then the person is severely unlucky but in the 1300s, he was doing just what others in his neighbourhood were doing. There were times when entire villages were annihilated. So many people died that those alive had only one job to do; take the bodies to the burial ground. At every church they dug deep pits down to the water table; thus those who were poor and died during the night were quickly bundled up and thrown into the pit. In the morning when a large number of bodies were found in the pit, they took some earth and shovelled it down on top of them. Later on, others were placed on top of them and then another layer of earth. “…in many places in Siena, great pits were dug and piled deep with the multitude of dead. And some were so sparsely covered with earth that the dogs dragged them forth and devoured their corpses throughout the city…” – the chronicler Agnolo di Tura relates from his Tuscan home. The Black Death was terrifyingly and indiscriminately contagious: “the mere touching of the clothes, appeared to communicate the malady to the toucher.” wrote Boccaccio.
Today, with the massive evolution of studies related to this and strides in medical knowledge, it is now established that Black Death, now commonly known as the plague, spreads through the air and/or through the bites of fleas and rats. Both of these were extremely abundant in medieval Europe. They were particularly at home aboard ships, which housed large ration granaries and grain carts. This made it possible for the epidemic to move from one place to another and turn into a pandemic. Contrary to popular belief, it was not the cough and sneeze of the infected person that was responsible for the contamination. It was not even the rats and their bites. These factors were responsible for a small fraction of the total infections. The main carriers were the fleas. The rats die, but the fleas find a new host. Another rat or maybe even a human being. The rat fleas, unlike human fleas, were adapted to riding with their hosts; the body of rats or the clothes of people. This gave the plague a peculiar rhythm, a rapid pace of development and a characteristic pattern of dissemination. Not long after it struck Messina, the death found its way inwards to Europe. It reached the port of Marseilles and the port of Tunis in North Africa soon after, followed by Rome and Florence, two cities at the centre of an elaborate trade route. By mid-1348, death reached the doorsteps of Paris, Bordeaux, Lyon and London.
No one actually knew exactly how the Black Death was transmitted from one person to another. Treating someone was nearly impossible. Even then the plague doctors were trying hard to save people, using various methods, most of which were totally unscientific and even illogical. Some such practices were burning a boil with a hot iron or slicing off the boil, letting the blood out of a boil. Those practices were unsanitary, to say the least. They also burned aromatic herbs to scare off the evil spirit and bathed the sick in rosewater or vinegar. Plague doctors could be identified by their long robes completed with the beak-shaped mask, which to this day is considered as an object that spawns horror. According to one doctor, “instantaneous death occurs when the aerial spirit escaping from the eyes of a sick person strikes the healthy person standing near looking at the sick.”
The brutality of the catastrophe cannot be expressed in mere words. The death and devastation annihilated almost half of the cities and towns, if not in totality. The population was lowered significantly over a short span of time. Meanwhile, out of panic, the healthy avoided the sick at all costs. Plague doctors soon refused to see patients, priests refused to administer last rites, shopkeepers closed shops and fled towards regions where the death and devastation were seemingly less, only to be soon followed by the plague. It even affected cows, goats, sheep and pigs. The death of sheep was so unbelievably high that it led to a shortage of wool in Europe. People became so desperate that they started abandoning their loved ones to die, to save themselves. “Thus doing, each thought to secure immunity for himself,” wrote Boccaccio.
(The second part is continued to Light at the end of the tunnel – finding the light)