Page 197 - Berkshire Encyclopedia Of World History Vol Two

546 berkshire encyclopedia of world history

Measure not men by Sundays, without regarding what they do
all the week after. • Thomas Fuller (1608–1661)

time, and as ships began to travel the northern seas more ior was an effective precaution against catching the dis-
frequently, all of Europe became more and more tightly ease. Some customs, on the other hand, intensified infec-
tied into the disease pool centered upon the network of tions. Religious pilgrimage is a prime example, as was
Mediterranean cities. Leprosy, tuberculosis, and diphthe- ritual foot-washing in Muslim mosques, where the water
ria were among the infections that spread more widely in the fountains sometimes contained the organisms that
during these centuries. But their spread cannot be traced cause bilharzia.
since they did not provoke sudden, massive die-offs as Most disease disasters were soon forgotten, which is
smallpox, measles, and the plague did. why so little is knowable about the spread of infections.
Nothing equally detailed is known about how other But the Black Death was an exception.The heavy die-off
centers of civilization in Eurasia and Africa encountered provoked when bubonic plague returned to Europe in
new infections in ancient and medieval times. But two 1346 continued to haunt folk memory and still colors
Chinese texts describe an outbreak of bubonic plague our common speech. About a third of the population of
along the southern coast in 610, so it looks again as Europe died of the plague between 1346 and 1350, but
though China’s disease history matched that of Europe what kept memory of the Black Death alive was the fact
quite closely.This is not really surprising, since the ships that plague continued to break out from time to time in
and caravans that moved back and forth among all the Europe and North Africa down to the present, even after
Eurasian civilized lands carried infections with them, and effective antibiotic cures were discovered in the 1940s.
invading armies occasionally exposed thousands of inex- We know something about how this came to pass.
perienced soldiers to a new infection all at once. First of all, the vast Mongol empire, extending from
North and East Africa shared in this homogenizing China to Russia, permitted rapid, long-range movement
process, while the African interior, Southeast Asia, and throughout Eurasia on a far greater scale than ever before.
northern Eurasia took more sporadic parts and so lagged Plague was only one of several infections that took advan-
somewhat behind. But overall, as disease exposures tage of this fact to expand their domain. More particu-
intensified across the entire Old World, resistance to larly, a Mongol army invaded the borderland between
infections increased, and local populations got used to China and India in 1252, penetrating a region where
living with heavier disease burdens. The assortment of plague infection was chronic, and seem to have carried
prevalent diseases always differed from place to place, the infection back with them to their homeland in the
since climate set limits to many infections. In general, steppes.At any rate, Pasteurella pestis (Yersinia pestis), as
warmer and wetter conditions favored disease organisms; the bacterium that causes plague is called, somehow
infections that depended on mosquitoes, fleas, or other found a new home among burrowing rodents of the
insects to move from host to host also fared best under northern grasslands and spread across them, where it was
those conditions.Winter frost set limits to the spread of discovered by Russian scientists only in the 1890s.This
many kinds of parasites, and so did desert heat and dry- was the reservoir from which the plague of 1346 broke
ness. In addition, local customs sometimes minimized upon Europe and the Muslim world.
disease exposures. In southwestern China, for example, Ships spread it swiftly from Feodosiya (or Kaffa) in the
where bubonic plague germs were endemic among bur- Crimea, where it first broke out, to other Mediterranean
rowing rodents, European doctors in the nineteenth cen- and north European ports. Then the infection moved
tury scoffed at superstitious villagers who fled to higher inland.Wherever the plague arrived, death came quickly
ground whenever they found dead rats in their houses, and unpredictably to young and old. More than half of
yet half a century later, after Europeans had learned how those infected died. In Muslim lands, the disease took a
the plague was transmitted, they realized that such behav- similar toll; China, too, lost about half its population