Friends, I get angry sometimes. Yes, I know you are aware of that because this blog is, more or less, a catalogue of the various righteous indignations which I seize upon from time to time. Often this comes from seeing something silly in the wild and getting worked up about it, but this week it happened because I was talking to a colleague of mine, Prof. Philip Slavin, about the Black Death, as one does.
We were discussing his work (as part of a large interdisciplinary team) looking at the likely place where yersinia pestis made its way off of rodents and on to people. They’ve done a bunch of interesting work doing DNA analysis of skeletons and buried under the gravestones which state that their occupants died of pestilence. As a result, they’ve found that it’s likely that the beginnings of the Black Death went down in what is now Kyrgyzstan.[1] So far, so cool. Excellent work everyone.
But that’s not what got me thinking.
See, what is now Kyrgyzstan now seems to us in the twenty-first century to be a very remote sort of place. I mentioned to him that his team’s findings show how well connected the medieval world was. The Silk Roads, which went through Kyrgyzstan, were not so far away that they couldn’t spark a pandemic that would eventually reach even the most far away pockets of Europe. The Silk Roads were an incredibly prosperous place full of people from, well, everywhere hence the reason that the plague was able to spread as quickly as it did.
One Russian account, the Voskresenkaia Letopis described the process by which the plague swept out of this area and further west in 1346, “…God’s punishment struck the people in the eastern land, in Ornach [now Azov], and in Khastorokan [Astrakhan], and in [New] Sarai, and in Bezdezh and in other towns/cities in those lands. The mortality was great among the Besermens, and among the Tartars, and among the Armenians, and the Abkhazians, and among the Jews, and among the friazy [European foreigners], and among the Circassians, and among all who lived there, so that they could not bury them.”[2]
Now you may be thinking to yourself, “That’s cool/harrowing Eleanor, but why are we using a Russian source to talk about central Asia?” Well, the answer is we don’t get a lot of sources out of central Asia about this because, as Philip Slavin said to me in our conversation, multiple Silk Road cities just collapsed as a result of the plague. We don’t have sources from them other than archeological ones. Entire thriving cities? Gone. See how I linked to where you can find some of the cities mentioned above, but not Bezdezh? Yeah, that’s cuz Bezdezh is gone. It was about 40 k from what is now Volgograd. Was.[3]
Now this isn’t to say that every Silk Road city that was hit by the plague collapsed completely. Some simply went into a massive depression. Take, for example Tabriz, which had been Iran’s largest city due to a prosperous position along said Silk Road. It was described by Odoric of Pordenone (1286-1331), a visiting Franciscan. He wrote that it was “for traffic of merchandise, said to be the chief city of the world. There is no kind of provision, nor anything else belonging to merchandise, which is not to be had there in great abundance. This city stands very well situated, for to it all nations of the whole world may resort for traffic.”[4]
Now that’s real cute until there’s yersinia pestis on the caravan routes and suddenly that is in your city along with fabulous spices, silks, and whatever-you-desire. By the 1340s when the Black Death was in full swing, so many had died, and foreign merchants were so averse to traveling lest they encounter the plague, that an ambassador was dispatched to Genoa to attempt to drum up more trade with the now absent Europeans.[5]
So, I was considering all these things, and loving my job and the fact that sitting around talking to people and thinking is part of it. And it was from this that the tiny fire of anger which lives in my heart was sparked.
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See, the thing is that one of the weird myths I have to deal with all the time is that the Black Death was somehow a European experience, as opposed to an Afro-Eurasian one, and that Europeans were uniquely attacked by it because of something stupid/gross/superstitious that they did that everyone else avoided. Sometimes that’s people saying Europeans killed all their cats and so rats proliferated. Sometimes its people saying that Europeans didn’t bathe and therefore germs spread. (Of course, that’s beside the point anyway, because last time I checked fleas, which are what spreads plague, DGAF about how clean you are, but OK! Europeans still bathed! I am so tired!) Sometimes, it’s people saying that Europeans’ backwards medical ideas involving the humoral system is to blame. (The entire Arabic world also believed in the humoral system! The only thing that works to treat the plague is antibiotics! No one in the entire world had medicine that could fight this until the nineteenth century!) Sometimes its people saying that Europeans threw sewage in the streets. (They didn’t, but I’ll have to talk about that another time. And also! Plague comes from fleas! Which do not live in human excrement anyway! So that’s really beside the point! And even when it’s pneumonic not bubonic it spreads via droplets! Which are in your breath! Not excrement! Oh my god!)
But here’s the thing, if any of that were true, (and it isn’t) that would mean that the theoretically smarter rest-of-the-world wouldn’t be affected by the Black Death at all because they were having a bath with their cat next to a fully piped sewage system while not believing in humoral theory or something.
Fun fact! No.
Now we might not have a lot of sources from the totally collapsed Silk Road cities, etc., but we do have a lot from our friends in the Middle East. And they are here to tell you that everyone was having a hard time, and they had a pretty clear idea of how the plague spread.
The historian Ibn al-Wardī (c.1291 – 1349), writing in Aleppo described the onslaught of the plague thusly:
“The plague frightened and killed. It began in the land of darkness [Northern Asia]. Oh what a visitor! It has been current for fifteen years. China was not preserved from it, nor could the strongest fortress hinder it. The plague afflicted the Indians in India. It weighed upon the Sind. It seized with it’s hand and ensnared even the lands of the Uzbeks. How many backs did it break in what is Transoxiana! The plague increased and spread further. It attacked the Persians, extended its steps toward the land of the Khitai, and gnawed away at the Crimea. It pelted Rum with live coals and led the outrage to Cyprus and the islands. The plague destroyed mankind in Cairo. Its eye was cast upon Egypt, and behold, the people were wide-awake. … Oh Alexandria, this plague is like a lion which extends its arm to you. Have patience with the fate of the plague, which leaves of seventy men only seven. … The plague attacked Gaza, and it shook ‘Asqalan severyly. The plague oppressed Acre. The scourge came to Jerusalem … It overtook those people who fled to the al-‘Aqsa Mosque, which stands beside the Dome of the Rock. If the door of mercy had not been opened, the end of the world would have occurred in a moment. It, then, hastened its pace and attacked the entire maritime plain. The plague trapped Sidon and descended unexpectedly upon Beirut, cunningly. Next, it directed the shooting of its arrows to Damascus. There the plague sat like a king on a throne and swayed with power, killing daily one thousand or more and decimating the population.”[6]
He died of the plague.
Later, writing in Algeria, the historian Ibn Khaldûn (1332-1406) said of the pestilence that “It swallowed up many of the good things of civilization and wiped them out. It overtook dynasties at the time of their senility, when they had reached the limit of their duration. It lessened their power and curtailed their influence. It weakened their authority. Their situation approached the point of annihilation and dissolution. Civilization decreased with the decrease of mankind. Cities and buildings were laid waste, roads and way signs were obliterated, settlements and mansions became empty, dynasties and tribes grew weak. The entire inhabited world changed. The East, it seems, was similarly visited, though in accordance with and in proportion to (its more affluent) civilization. It was as if the voice of existence in the world had called out for oblivion and restriction, and the world had responded to its call. God inherits the earth and all who dwell upon it. … it is as if the entire creation had changed and the whole world been altered”.[7]
So, this is all very depressing, but I think it’s important that I lay this all out here for everyone’s perusal. Because the thing is until we begin to approach the medieval world as an interconnected place, weird myths are going to persist. As a Europeanist I am as guilty as anyone of aiding those who want to create a world where the Black Death is a phenomenon that happened on one continent to a group of uniquely stupid people. If no one sees the sources where our friends in Asia and Africa discuss the horrors around them, then of course they are going to continue to believe that the Black Death is something that happens when the Pope takes a disliking to cats. Or something.
I’m not writing this, however, just to defend Europe. I checked, these people are all dead and probably fine. I’m writing it because persisting with the myth that everywhere other than Europe was actually an enlightened paradise does a major disservice to those histories as well. Whole communities collapsed. Death was everywhere. The historians who wanted you to understand the chaos and pain happening all around them died of that plague and if we don’t witness that, then it’s for nothing.
Further, to pretend that only idiots couldn’t figure out that this pestilence was spread by germs in fleas is actually calling all our friends in Africa and Asia stupid as well. Because they also didn’t have germ theory, and they also died in huge numbers. This does not make them foolish.
We can’t go back in time and save the hundreds of millions of people who died of the Black Death in Afro-Eurasia. What we can do from our safe distance of almost seven hundred years, behind a wall of antibiotics, is to at least do them the service of acknowledging their experience and not calling them stupid. These were real people who lived in a complex world and were doing their best in it. Frankly, if you chose to ignore their suffering and their own testaments to it, then you are the one who is ignorant.
Societies are not a hierarchy, and we don’t need to impose one. We certainly don’t need to go back in time to do that either. Ideas of a divided medieval world where people from different continents were all separate and doing totally different things do nothing but serve to uphold outdated and racist ideas of the pre-modern world. Don’t do that in a rush to condemn Europe for its modern problems.
[1] Spyrou, M.A., Musralina, L., Gnecchi Ruscone, G.A. et al. “The source of the Black Death in fourteenth-century central Eurasia”. Nature, 606, (2022), 718–724. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-04800-3
[2] Quoted in Ole J. Benedictow, The Complete History of the Black Death, (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2021), p. 141.
[3] See, Ibid.
[4] Quoted in, Ahmad Fazlinejad and Farajollah Ahmadi, “The Black Death in Iran, according to Iranian Historical Accounts from the Fourteenth through Fifteenth Centuries”, Journal of Persianate Studies 11, 1 (2018): 65.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Michael Dols, “Ibn al-Wardī’s Risālah al-naba’ ‘an al-waba’: A translation of a major source for the history of the Black Death in the Middle East.” Near Eastern Numismatics, Iconography, Epigraphy and History: Studies in Honor of George C. Miles, ed. Dickran K. Kouymjian (American University of Beirut, 1974), pp. 448-449.
[7] Ibn Khaldûn, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, The Classic Islamic History of the World, trans and intro Franz Rosenthal, ed. N. J. Dawood, intro. Bruce B. Lawrence, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), p. 83.
For more on medieval myths, see:
On colonial mindsets and the myth of medieval Europe in isolation from the Muslim world
On the myth of short life expectancy and COVID complacency
On finding inspiration for change
I assure you, medieval people bathed
On cats
JFC calm down about the medieval Church
On treating sex with the utmost reverence
On sickness and conspiracy
For more on the Black Death, see:
I assure you the Black Death was actually bad
On collapsing time, or, not everyone will be taken into the future
Not every pandemic is the Black Death
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© Eleanor Janega, 2024
Going Medieval 