The world of the mid-fourteenth century, devastated by the Black Death, was in the midst of massive change. People and goods were traded from Asia to Europe to the Middle East at an accelerating pace, at a higher volume, and on larger ships than ever before. The globalizing world was shrinking.
It is believed the plague entered Genoa in 1347 from a ship that arrived from a trading outpost in Crimea. Russian and Muslim chroniclers recorded that the plague had struck the Golden Horde the year before. That summer, it reached Constantinople, Sicily, and Alexandria. The next year, the plague spread throughout the Mediterranean world. The meticulous Venetians maintained excellent records. To give some indication of how the disease struck, nine wills were prepared in the city in January, and 662 in May. The city lost two-thirds of its residents. The "merciless scourge" inflicted severe psychological and physical pain on those who lived to see a vastly diminished world. The records maintained in the Middle East were not as detailed as the Europeans', but many estimate that the death toll in the Muslim world was higher, likely because of the "Islamic prohibition on flight." Cairo, with 500,000 residents, was significantly larger than any city in Europe, and it "suffered the most devastating mass mortality of any population center during the Black Death." As the plague spread north into Europe, the story of death and destruction continued unrelentingly. The afflicted developed buboes in the groin area, neck, and armpits, vomited blood, and died in three days. The more populated an area, the faster it spread. Usually, the affliction of one in a family meant death to the entire household. Paris lost 80,000 of a population of 150,000. The British Isles followed the same path, as did Scandinavia, Germany, Eastern Europe, and Russia.
"Over the course of six horrifying years, the Black Death spread across the face of the known world. The astonishing scope and scale of this pandemic were unprecedented. Never before in human history had a disease wrought such terrible suffering among so many tens of millions and across so vast an expanse of territory. By the end of 1353, the plague was subsiding, but the appalling era of sudden mass mortality and the abject horror that it engendered caused a seismic convulsion in society that brought much of the medieval world to the brink of collapse."
The Black Death killed approximately 100 million people, scything through communities in 6–9 months and taking away half of the population. No one knew its cause or possible duration. Society abandoned the traditional rituals of mourning and funerals and simply dumped the dead in pits. Everywhere, people abandoned relatives and even children. Urban governments stopped functioning, and agricultural activities were suspended. A Tunisian observer wrote, "Civilization itself approached the point of annihilation and dissolution." Both Venice and England had such capable civil structures that they were able to recover quickly.
Many thought "they were witnessing a world-ending catastrophe." Muslims and Catholics believed they were being punished by God, but throughout, almost all retained their faith, and Muslims continued their annual Haij. Pope Clement VI was a particularly skilled leader who modified many of the rules about confession, the last rites, and funerals in order to fit within the new paradigm. He told all Catholics who attended a special Mass that they would receive a papal indulgence reducing their time in Purgatory. Religious institutions accumulated significant funds as the dying left assets to churches, monastic orders, and hospitals. In the Muslim world, all three faiths survived peaceably. The Catholic world "did not promote the same sentiments, and the persecution of religious minorities was commonplace in the West." In Cyprus, they rounded up their Muslim slaves and butchered them all in a single afternoon. In Europe, the Jews were the wealthy people "responsible for the death of Christ." The first pogroms were in 1096 during the First Crusade. Every few generations, Europe would unleash a "frenzied barbarity" on their neighbors. Throughout the plague years and across the entirety of Europe, Jews were blamed, often on the pretense of poisoning the water, and indiscriminately murdered. Frequently, they were executed only after confessing and naming others after they had been tortured on the rack. Conveniently, their credit books showing who owed them money disappeared, along with their movable assets. Pope Clement failed in a serious effort undertaken to stop the slaughter. When the plague abated, many Jews migrated to the east. "The Black Death left the medieval world deeply scarred but not broken."
The Tunisian historian, Ibn Khaldun, wrote twenty-five years later: "In both the East and the West humanity was visited by a destructive plague that swallowed up many of the good things and wiped them out... Civilization decreased with the decrease of mankind and the entire inhabited world changed." The world would continue to face regular plague resurgences for centuries. Nonetheless, Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia made remarkable comebacks in the 1350s. The return to some sense of normalcy was also challenged by the Little Ice Age, a century and a half of unremitting war, and the failure of the population to materially increase for over a century.
Strategically, both the Mongol Horde and the Byzantine Empire were hastened to their ends by the plague, and the Ottomans replaced the Mamluks in the Middle East. Many European historians believe that the Church's hierarchy was so unable to respond to the crisis that it propelled the Reformation. The Black Death destroyed a world, and slowly ushered in a changing one with Europe precluded from Asia after the fall of Constantinople, and required Europe to sail into the Atlantic. This is a far-ranging, very interesting read.
No comments:
Post a Comment