by Dan Carlin
Yet, there’s some interesting historical irony—or perhaps karma—involved in this “renewed Roman Empire,”* run, as it was, by descendants of the Germanic tribesmen who helped end Roman rule in the West. These new emperors were plagued with one of the same problems the Western Roman emperors had faced when they last ruled from Italy: ferocious Germanic tribes. In fact, they could well have been the same tribes.
It’s almost as though nothing had changed. In Roman Britain, for example, the Roman Empire had protected the island from the sea raiding of the Germanic Saxons. The legendary King Arthur supposedly fought these same Saxons after Rome left, and now three hundred years later Charlemagne was still fighting the pagan Saxons.* He was the one who finally beat them, but it was a brutal twenty-year conflict that seems eerily like the era when Varus and his legions were being snuffed out in the German forests.
Alessandro Barbero writes: “It was a ferocious war in a country with little or no civilization, with neither roads nor cities, and entirely covered with forests and marshland. The Saxons sacrificed prisoners of war to their gods, as Germans had always done before converting to Christianity, and the Franks did not hesitate to put to death anyone who refused to be baptized.”
The effort was infused with religion. The pagan Saxons were known to kill those who tried to preach to them, yet the conversion of the Saxon tribes was part of the conditions of victory.* This is a perfect example of how different the optics are between “defending the church with the sword” and, as Roger Collins has phrased it, “armed evangelizing.” Either way, it’s difficult to keep the faith clean during such a brutal religious conflict.
Saint Lebuin—who it was said devoted his life to converting the pagan German tribes—is, according to Barbero, supposed to have given his famous ominous warning to the Saxons about Charlemagne: “If you will not accept belief in God, there is a king in the next country who will enter your land, conquer it, and lay it waste.”
The Saxons apparently ignored the warning, continued to kill evangelizing clergy, and never ceased their usual small-scale raiding and banditry on the border. Charlemagne fought campaign after campaign against them, and eventually succeeded in cutting down the sacred tree they venerated as holding up the universe* and allegedly beheading 4,500 of them in a day at Verden in 782. And, like the Roman emperors who preceded him, Charlemagne found out that there always seemed to be more ferocious barbarians behind the ones he’d just subdued. In this case, behind (and to the north of) the Saxons were the Danes. And the era of the great Viking attacks that swarmed out of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway was just ramping up.
There’s an apocryphal story about Charlemagne seeing Vikings near the end of his reign. They were not yet the large problem they would be a few decades hence, but the story is relayed as a sort of premonition. A monk named Notker, writing in about 887 (Charlemagne died in 814), claimed that the emperor was visiting what is now modern-day France near the coastline and saw a lone Viking ship. Affronted by its boldness, and with tears in his eyes, Charlemagne could supposedly see the future—that is, that it wouldn’t be long before these Vikings would become a nightmarish headache.
While the story reeks of an after-the-fact prediction coming true, there’s an aspect of it that seems to make some sense—if anyone should understand the potential danger posed by warlike “barbarians” from the frozen north, it would be a Roman emperor. This “Roman” emperor might have been expected to know this better than most; he was, after all, a tall, light-haired, mustachioed, blue-eyed German-speaking warrior king. And he was a man who had been fighting “pagan” German tribesmen long before he became the first Roman emperor to rule in the West in three hundred years.
Sometimes in history, what goes around, comes around. Charlemagne might have known that, too.
Chapter 6
A Pandemic Prologue?
It’s much safer to be alive now than it used to be. Before the middle of the eighteenth century or so, the environment humans lived in was unfathomably lethal.* One of the things that makes our modern existence so different from that of almost all the human generations before us is that the threat of death, and especially untimely death, by disease is so much more remote. The fact that we live in an age when we don’t expect a large percentage of our children to die in childhood makes us the historical anomaly. Does it make us different? How so? The everyday illness and epidemics that people in the past faced, and the pandemics they occasionally dealt with, are beyond the scope of our understanding. Imagine all the ripple effects if our modern world were hit with a pandemic that killed just 10 percent of the human population. That’s not close to the worst sorts of numbers of some earlier plagues, but given how many people there are in the world today, that would mean seven hundred million deaths in a short span of time. One out of every ten people. About ten times the deaths of the Second World War. What’s the aftermath of that like?
Yet even a modern plague still wouldn’t give us a good idea of what the experience of our ancestors was like, because we moderns understand the basic science of it all and they didn’t. It’s easy to minimize the effect of this, but throughout most of human history, no one really understood disease or germs, so sickness was attributed to all sorts of causes. Once again, it’s easy to note that the damage done by disease over the ages, combined with the lack of understanding up until recently of what causes illness, must have affected people and societies deeply. It’s terribly difficult, though, to say in what ways and to what degree this must have been so. It’s possible, perhaps even likely, that people in eras when such death rates were common and expected were more emotionally insulated than we would be. But what this might mean falls into the same unquantifiable gray region that such things as toughness and the effects of child-rearing practices do.
Disease has always been a constant human companion; as soon as records began to be kept, accounts of epidemic and plague appear. It’s often hard to determine from the ancient descriptions what the actual illnesses were, but some specific maladies have been identified. William Rosen, in his book Justinian’s Flea, offers a sampling of the nightmarish plagues our forebears dealt with.* Ancient Greek physicians as early as the fifth century BCE diagnosed outbreaks of tetanus, mumps, and possibly malaria. All three of these diseases were much worse to contract back then than nowadays—many of today’s common childhood maladies were fatal before the availability of modern vaccines and medicine.
The ancient historian Thucydides was an eyewitness to the devastating Plague of Athens that began in 430 BCE during the Peloponnesian War when the city was under siege by Sparta. As many as a hundred thousand people perished over the ensuing three years—approximately a quarter of the population, according to Robert J. Littman. The deaths included the general and statesman Pericles, one of the greatest Athenians who ever lived.* There has been disagreement about the nature of this plague, but the discovery of a mass grave in 2006 revealed that the likely culprit was typhoid fever.
The Bible, Rosen notes, lists a catalog of diseases, including, of course, the plagues of blood and boils and locusts visited upon the pharaoh. The Book of Lamentations, describing the siege of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar in the sixth century BCE, notes the “blackened skin”* that is characteristic of scurvy.* Some other highlights:
In 396 BCE, the Carthaginian army was “stricken with a plague featuring dysentery, skin pustules, and other symptoms.”
During the first century CE, malaria and bubonic plague infected the citizens of Rome.
165 CE marked the beginning of the fifteen-year Antonine Plague brought to the Mediterranean from Mesopotamia by legionnaires of Marcus Aurelius. It is believed to have been smallpox.
From 251 to 266 CE, the Plague of Cyprian reared its head; consensus says the disease in question was measles.*
Certainly these instances represent spikes in mortality, but people in the premodern world lived with what we would consider to be extreme levels of death by disease at all times. If we moderns liv
ed for one year with the sort of death rates our pre–industrial age ancestors perpetually lived with, we’d be in societal shock. Their disease- and death-heavy environment perhaps gave them some increased level of emotional or cultural immunity to such things.* From time to time, though, the rogue waves of history were large enough to overwhelm even those with the sturdiest psychological constitutions. In 541 CE, what’s been described as the world’s first true pandemic arrived, and huge numbers of people died.
The Plague of Justinian, as historians have dubbed it, was once believed to have killed a hundred million people.* That number is now thought to be far too high, but it gives a sense of what a large event this was. It was the precursor to the Black Death of the Middle Ages, and it was caused by the same thing—the plague bacillus Yersinia pestis, which was spread by fleas hosted by rats. It was a horrific way to die.
William Rosen describes its effects on Constantinople when the outbreak hit the city hard: “Every day, one, two, sometimes five thousand of the city’s residents—one in one hundred of the preplague population—would become infected. A day’s moderate fever would be followed by a week of delirium. Buboes would appear under the arms, in the groin, behind the ears, and grow to the size of melons. Edemas—of blood—infiltrated the nerve endings of the swollen lymphatic glands, causing massive pain. Sometimes the buboes would burst in a shower of the foul-smelling leukocytes called pus. Sometimes the plague would become what a modern epidemiologist would describe as ‘septicemic’; those victims would die vomiting blood.”
Rosen goes on to say that these were the lucky ones, because “at least they died fast.”* In earlier eras or in other places, an epidemic this deadly would usually burn itself out because infected people die before they can travel far, slowing the spread of the disease. But the pandemic of 541 CE got onto ships departing from the large Egyptian port at Alexandria, and this allowed the plague to make it to new harbors before it could wipe out an entire crew; in cases where the crew died before arrival, the contagion continued via what had effectively become a ghost ship.
The disease spread far and wide, but details of the contagion are available only from a small percentage of the affected areas. Constantinople is one of them. According to Nick Bostrom and Milan Ćirković, the editors of Global Catastrophic Risk, 40 percent of that large urban center’s citizenry was felled. And Rosen notes that more widely, over twenty-five million people—perhaps as much as half the population of the known world at the time—died in about one year. The plague would bedevil Europe for two centuries or more . . . and then, after about 750 CE, it seems almost to have gone away.
The next time the plague came, in the 1340s, it had a new name: the Black Death. Eight hundred years after the Plague of Justinian burst on the scene, the terrible disease once again visited itself on the known Western world. It was thought to have possibly started a decade earlier in Asia—there are reports of Chinese cities almost being wiped out, perhaps a 90 percent mortality rate in some places.
Nothing like this plague had ever hit humankind before, dwarfing even the Plague of Justinian. One reason it produced such high casualties might have had to do with the fact that human population levels had reached a critical mass. More effective transportation, too, facilitated societies interacting in ways they never had before—and these factors didn’t just affect the spread of the plague, they also affected its persistence. Persistence is a key factor in how deadly any pestilence will be, because if an illness burns out a village and kills everyone in it, the disease is usually eradicated along with its victims. But because the plague kept coming back, thanks to the numbers of people on the planet and how much they now traveled, the plague’s effects only widened.
The first reports of the disease describe ships showing up at Western ports from the East with entire crews dead, or dying, of some unknown pestilence. Any possible survivors would then unload the ship’s cargo, interacting with unsuspecting people on the dock and in the town—and very quickly, the pestilence spread.
Soon Europe was seeing death rates similar to those that had afflicted the Chinese. Whole towns simply disappeared from the map. Aerial photos today show the outlines of places where settlements existed before the Black Death. In the big cities, hundreds and hundreds of corpses were carted off every day, while the nobility and the rich fled to the countryside, hoping to escape what they didn’t understand. One chronicler described the devastation:
Great pits were dug and piled deep with the multitude of the dead. And they died by the hundreds, both day and night. And as soon as those ditches were filled, more were dug. And I, Agnolo di Tura, called the Fat, buried my five children with my own hands. And there were also those who were so sparsely covered with earth that the dogs dragged them forth and devoured many bodies throughout the city. There was no one who wept for any death, for all awaited death. And so many died that all believed it was the end of the world.
The victims of the plague didn’t have the tools to understand that they were dealing with a biomedical contagion. In fact, from time immemorial people have thought plagues to be divine anger or justice; in the case of the Black Death, many people thought the pandemic was God’s will or a manifestation of the devil on earth.
Barbara Tuchman’s book A Distant Mirror chronicles how Europeans of the fourteenth century dealt with the rippling effects of the plague. She quotes one Brother John Clyn, of Kilkenny, Ireland, who wrote a message, in essence, to the future. Sensing “the whole world, as it were, placed within the grasp of the Evil One, I leave parchment to continue this work, if perchance any man survive and any of the race of Adam escape this pestilence and carry on the work which I have begun.” The last sentence of his note was written in another hand and said that Brother John had died of the disease.
The human ripples of pain are still heartbreaking when made visible to us now.
Our friend Agnolo the Fat wrote: “Father abandoned child, wife husband, one brother another; for this illness seemed to strike through the breath and sight. And so they died. And none could be found to bury the dead for money or friendship. Members of a household brought their dead to a ditch as best they could, without priest, without divine offices.”
The essence of that account is of an epidemic destroying the very bonds of human society. When was the last time the developed world experienced such a rapid descent into a microbial hell?
And if parents abandoning children wasn’t destabilizing enough, other support elements in society were shattered by the justifiable fear of the pestilence. The natural human inclination to seek companionship and support from one’s neighbors was short-circuited. No one wanted to catch whatever was killing everybody. In an era when people congregating together was so much more important than it is in our modern, so-called connected world, people kept their distance from one another, creating one of the silent tragedies of this plague: that they had to suffer virtually alone.
Religion, too—which in the Middle Ages in Europe formed the entire conception of how the universe was ordered—took a battering. Fear of joining the ever-growing piles of bodies stacked in graves like cordwood destroyed the Middle Ages version of a “social safety net,” the element of the system designed to cope with tragedy, loss, and, literally, “acts of God”: namely, the clergy. The church was one of the key support pillars of that society, and the clergy played very important roles, only some of which we would call religious; they were also medical practitioners, lawyers, and notary publics. They held management positions in society and formed an entire middle level of the medieval social strata. And of course, they were indispensable for religious functions like marriages and, notably during a plague, last rites.*
But the clergy were only human.* At one point during the raging epidemic, the pope was compelled to give mass absolutions and allow citizens to give the last rites to other citizens because there weren’t enough priests willing to do the job and face a likely death sentence.
In the end, the clergy suffered fata
lities at the same rate as the rest of the population, and their deaths led to unexpected consequences. For example, to replace losses in their ranks, the church lowered the ages at which people could attain positions of authority. This led often to very young, hardly prepared people in positions that had previously been held by much older, more august figures.
Before the epidemic, members of the clergy had devoted their whole lives to the church. The people who replaced them weren’t necessarily as committed or as educated. Corruption began to creep in, especially as men attained elevated positions in the church due to money changing hands, not thanks to their lifelong commitment or qualifications. Over the course of around two centuries, the clergy’s reputation diminished, tarnished by abuses and excess and a lack of high standards. This dissatisfaction led to the development of the many complaints that the German theologian Martin Luther is said to have nailed to the door of the church at Wittenberg Castle in 1517, marking the onset of Protestantism and a break with the Catholic Church.*
In the wake of so much death, society was hammered down, and darkness filled people’s thoughts. Having witnessed so many of their neighbors and loved ones die, survivors had no confidence that life was going to last very long. This attitude is reflected in the art of the period, which is a window into the psyche of these traumatized people. For a start, the physical manifestation of death, usually portrayed as a skeleton of sorts, begins to appear everywhere. When the great mortality began, people turned to holy relics and prayers, anything that they believed could help protect them—but when people saw their loved ones die anyway, it shook their confidence in their belief systems. A generation after the plague struck the West, a terrible pessimism permeated society. Having witnessed a scourge that had carted off perhaps seventy-five million people—up to half of the world’s entire population at the time—some folks went off the deep end with quackery and mysticism. Many others adopted a live-for-today attitude. There were orgies and rapes and robberies and killings by people who figured they had nothing to lose. A quarter of the people in fifteenth-century England didn’t marry. That’s an amazing statistic in that era.