Figure 6-1. Population of Medieval England
The last outbreak in western Europe hit Marseilles in 1720, Russia and the Ottoman Empire were affected well into the nineteenth century, and early in the twentieth century a devastating outbreak killed thousands in China. Europe’s population just before the outbreak of the Black Death was approximately fifty million. Thus, about twelve to fifteen million died in the initial onslaught, and probably far more over the next century, as wave after wave of pestilence overwhelmed the birthrate.
Even this greatest European apocalypse is only a small part of the story. If the cultural and demographic records of the Black Death are imperfect for Europe, those for the Middle East and Far East are essentially nonexistent; there is no Arab, Indian, or Chinese Decameron. However, medical practice in the medieval Muslim world far surpassed that in Europe, and the many precise clinical descriptions by Arab and Indian physicians leave little doubt that a massive outbreak of Yersinia pestis in the East followed hard on the heels of the Black Death in Europe.32 In the midfourteenth century, perhaps five times as many people lived in the Orient as in Europe, suggesting that the plague may have taken as many as one hundred million souls in the East.
The disease spread most rapidly in the fur of horses and the holds of ships, and it is reasonable to assume that the great overland and maritime hubs of the steppe and Indian Ocean would have been disproportionately affected, as occurred on the Continent. We know, for example, that in Europe the plague particularly savaged port cities such as Bruges and Genoa. Venice lost about 60 percent of its population after the first wave of the plague washed over it in 1348. Major port improvements that had been under way almost continuously before the plague came virtually to a halt for more than a century.33
Some idea of what must have happened in Oriental ports can be surmised from the well-recorded events on Cyprus. This island, a predominantly Christian focal point of Mediterranean trade, also had a substantial Muslim minority. The disease struck there in 1348 and devastated the island’s animal population before infecting humans. So many Christians died or fled Cyprus that those left alive, fearing that Muslims would seize the opportunity to grab power, gathered up all Muslim prisoners and slaves and slaughtered them in the span of a few hours. Within a week, three of four Cypriot princes died; the fourth fled, and within a day of embarkation, he too perished, along with almost all his shipmates.
Another merchant galley, that had probably started out with a complement of hundreds, arrived at Rhodes from parts unknown with just thirteen merchants, then sailed on to Cyprus; when it arrived there, only four remained alive. Finding the island deserted, the four proceeded on to Tripoli (in modern Libya), where they related the fantastic narrative to their amazed hosts.34 European observers, overwhelmed as they were by the catastrophe unfolding around them, did not realize that a simultaneous tragedy was also devouring the East. One exception was Gabriele de’ Mussi:
The scale of the mortality and the form which it took persuaded those who lived, weeping and lamenting, through the bitter events of 1346 to 1348—the Chinese, Indians, Persians, Medes, Kurds, Armenians, Cilicians, Georgians, Mesopotamians, Nubians, Ethiopians, Turks, Egyptians, Arabs, Saracens and Greeks (for almost all the East has been affected)—that the last judgment had come.35
De’ Mussi estimated that during three months in 1348, over 480,000 inhabitants of Baghdad succumbed—this at a time when Europe’s biggest city, Paris, had a population of just 185,000. In this case, he probably exaggerated. He also recorded that in China, “serpents and toads fell in a thick rain, entered dwellings and devoured numberless people.”36 Egypt too saw the wholesale destruction from plague of merchant galleys of the sort seen at Cyprus. One ship, presumably arriving from an affected Black Sea port with a cargo of hundreds of mamluks, docked in Alexandria with the following survivors: forty crew, four merchants, and exactly one slave-soldier. All died shortly after disembarkation.37
The disease sailed west into the Muslim ports of North Africa as well, reaching Morocco and Umayyad Spain. It killed, among many others, the mother of Ibn Battuta in 1349. Tunis was particularly hard hit. Muslim doctors were impressed that the tent-dwelling bedouin were rarely affected and, alone among the world’s medical scholars, drew the appropriate conclusion: that the disease was due to some sort of contagion, not divine wrath, miasma, the evil eye, or poisoning by unbelievers.38
The medieval Arab civilizations had by then developed a strong historical (if nonquantitative) tradition, particularly in Mamluk Egypt. There, we find the richest sources of information about the effects of the pestilence in the nonwestern world. The plague arrived at Alexandria almost simultaneously with its first appearance on the Italian coast; Egypt seems to have suffered disproportionately from the virulent pneumonic form of the disease, which slowly churned south up the Nile Valley over the next eighteen months. At that time, wealthy Egyptians eagerly sought out Russian furs as fashion items. These proved to be not only frivolous luxuries in a hot climate, but also an ideal conveyance for fleas.39
The hajj traffic swept the pestilence south from Egypt to its next logical destination: Mecca’s port city of Jeddah, and thence to Mecca itself. The carnage there threw Muslim theologians into turmoil, since the Prophet was believed to have promised the city protection from the plague; the fact that Medina was spared led many to believe that the outbreak was retribution by Allah for the presence of infidels in Mecca.
Although the initial death toll seems to have been about the same as that in Europe, the effects of the plague on the Mamluk Egyptian regime were even more severe and longer lasting than they were in the West. After the initial descent of the plague on Egypt in 1348, the native population eventually acquired a degree of immunity to it. Between 1441 and 1541, no fewer than fourteen epidemics occurred—approximately one every seven years. During this period, three groups would have lacked immunity: small children, adolescents, and newly purchased Caucasian slave soldiers—the latter being the most precious of the regime’s resources. Packed together in Egyptian training facilities, the new mamluks suffered horrific mortality rates. Contemporary observers recorded that “the number of dead among the mamluks was too great to be counted” and that “the barracks in the citadel were emptied of the Royal Mamluks (those of the current sultan) because of their deaths.”40 Considering that these elite troops rarely numbered more than a few thousand, the losses must have been staggering:
Death was terrible among the mamluks inhabiting the barracks; there died in this epidemic about 1,000. And there died of the castrated servants 160 eunuchs; of the slave-girls of the sultan’s household more than 160, besides 17 concubines and 17 male and female children.41
The plague thus hit hardest those just purchased by the current sultan and tended to spare the older, and therefore more likely immune, manumitted troops of the previous sultans—a surefire prescription for governmental instability.
Aside from the plague’s destruction of its military power, Egypt lost much of its human and financial capital. The wealthy Karimi merchants, who spent their working lives in vast warehouses and bazaars teeming with rats and camels, were especially hard hit, becoming easy pickings for Sultan Barsbay in 1428.
The bacillus devastated not only fleas, rodents, and humans but other animals as well. In both Europe and the Middle East, the ground was strewn with the bodies of birds, farm animals, and even wild predators, many with the characteristic buboes at the base of their limbs. Cattle and camels died in large numbers, compounding the economic damage. At Bilbais, a major caravanserai between Cairo and Palestine, most of the sultan’s dromedaries perished along with almost all the town’s human inhabitants.
The European farmer lucky enough to survive the Black Death could at least escape to the forest and begin again. The same option was not open to his Egyptian counterpart, who was hemmed in by a fierce, endless desert that began only a few miles from the Nile’s shores. Contemporary Egyptian accounts frequently mention completely d
epopulated towns. Egypt never recovered even a shadow of its former wealth, power, and influence. Its population, probably around eight million on the eve of the outbreak, was estimated by Napoleon’s invading generals to be just three million in 1798. One recent authoritative account pegs Egypt’s population in the early modern era at about the same level as at the birth of Christ.42
Economic statistics confirm the extent of the damage; before the Black Death, the government took in about 9.5 million dinars in taxes; by the time of the Ottoman conquest in 1517, revenues had fallen to 1.8 million dinars. In 1394, almost a half century after the first epidemic, about thirteen thousand weavers still worked in Alexandria. A half-century later, there were eight hundred.43
The primary human vectors of the disease, the Mongols, never recovered. In 1368, the Ming Chinese rebelled against their now plagueridden overlords from the steppes and threw off their yoke. Mongol attacks grew less vigorous following the death of Tamerlane in 1405; after that date, the depredations of the fierce mounted warriors on their civilized agricultural neighbors to the south gradually tapered off. With the disappearance of the khanates, the steppe returned to its age-old Hobbesian state, and the access to China enjoyed by the Polos, Ibn Battuta, and generations of Genoese merchants disappeared. This drove spice-hungry Europeans to seek alternative routes to the East.
Mongol and Ming census data suggest that between 1330 and 1420, the population of China decreased from about 72 million to 51 million. Until the modern era, even in time of war, the microbe has usually proved a deadlier weapon than the sword against both soldier and civilian, and it seems most reasonable to blame the plague for the decline in population in China between these two dates. The decreased tax revenues from the shrunken Chinese population contributed in no small part to the withdrawal of the Middle Kingdom’s navy from the Indian Ocean after the eunuch admiral Zheng He’s last voyage in 1433.
The nearly total destruction of Egypt’s trading and industrial structure, the disappearance of the Mongols from the world stage, and the withdrawal of China from the Indian Ocean created a vacuum that Europe—the last man standing, if just barely—filled only too happily. Yersinia pestis, which had helped smooth the way for the rise of Muslim power by attacking the Byzantine and Persian empires in the sixth and seventh centuries, greased the skids of Islamic decline in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
Before the Common Era, trade was neither rapid enough nor direct enough to allow the widely separated “disease pools” of Asia, Europe, and Africa to interact; plague was isolated by time and distance to its probable birthplace in the Himalayan foothills, as were smallpox and measles to their origins in the Fertile Crescent. With the explosion of long-distance commerce during the Roman-Han era, and later under Islamic and Mongol influence, these diseases savaged distant, defenseless populations. Over the ensuing 1,500 years, the once-separated disease pools of the Old World collided and coalesced catastrophically, and in the end largely immunized Asians and Europeans. The first Western migrants to the New World could not even begin to comprehend the devastation they were about to visit on the native populations with their microscopic hitchhikers. In the words of William McNeill, by the dawn of the Age of Discovery, “Europe had much to give and little to receive in the way of new human infections.”44
Even more amazingly, the reservoirs of the plague bacillus, once confined to only a few relatively small Asian locations, expanded to circle the globe. Why, then, does not the plague continue to vex the modern world? True, the bacillus has become less deadly to many species since 1346; dogs, cats, and birds, which died alongside humans in the fourteenth century, are no longer highly susceptible. Perhaps this has also occurred to a lesser degree in rats and humans.45
But this cannot be the whole story. The disappearance of the plague in England following the Great Fire of London in 1666 provides the essential clue. The brick houses that replaced the old wooden structures proved less hospitable to rats, and fleas found it far harder to drop onto occupants from the new tile roofs than from the old thatched ones. As wood became scarce in western Europe and brick came into increasing use, the distance between rat and human widened, interrupting disease transmission. By the twentieth century, modern sanitary precautions and antibiotics added yet another layer of insulation that protected humankind from the large underground reservoirs of this deadly pathogen.
The interaction between trade and disease works both ways. Just as trade fanned the flames of pestilence, so too did epidemic outbreaks alter age-old trade patterns. Perhaps the most penetrating analysis of the effect of the Black Death on the trajectory of world trade was offered by the great fourteenth-century Arab historian Ibn Khaldun:
In the middle of the [fourteenth] century civilization in both the East and the West was visited by a destructive plague which devastated nations and caused populations to vanish. It swallowed up many of the good things of civilization and wiped them out. It overtook the Dynasties at the time of their senility. . . . Cities and buildings were laid waste, roads and way signs were obliterated, settlements and mansions became empty, dynasties and tribes grew weak. . . . The East, it seems, was similarly visited, though in accordance with and in proportion to its [wealthier] civilization. It was as if the voice of existence in the world had called out for oblivion and restriction, and the world responded to its call.46
In the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries, the furies reached out and with a perverse will savaged the planet’s long-distance trading apparatus, and along with it the most advanced commercial societies: the great Muslim civilizations of the Middle East and the entrepôts of India and China that so dazzled Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta. Europe too had been devastated, but within a few centuries its survivors, wielding a fearsome combination of religiously inspired brutality and quantitative genius, would wade into the wreckage and establish the modern Western domination of trade.
7
DA GAMA’S URGE
Vasco da Gama, a gentleman of your household, came to my country, whereat I was pleased. My country is rich in cinnamon, cloves, ginger, pepper, and precious stones. That which I ask of you in exchange is gold, silver, corals, and scarlet cloth.—Letter from the zamorin of Calicut to the king of Portugal, 1498.1
In this year [1503] the vessels of the Frank appeared at sea en route for India, Hormuz, and those parts. They took about seven vessels, killing those on board and making some prisoner. This was their first action, and may God curse them.—Umar al-Taiyib Ba Faquih, Yemenite historian2
Sometime around 1440, a Venetian merchant, Niccolò de’ Conti, journeyed to Rome to request an interview with Pope Eugenius IV. While traveling in the Orient, he had committed a grievous sin: captured and threatened with the death of himself and his entire family, he converted to Islam. Soon after, his wife and two sons died of the plague, and the involuntary apostate hastened to the Vatican seeking absolution.
Happily for de’ Conti, the Holy Father harbored a weakness for cinnamon-flavored beverages. Had the merchant encountered its source during his voyages? Indeed he had. Absolution granted! In return, de’ Conti would dictate his observations in detail to the papal secretary, the brilliant and famous humanist Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini.
That de’ Conti’s narrative dovetailed nicely with Marco Polo’s, and was in many regards superior to it, pleased the papal confidante, an astute and learned man. For example, de’ Conti had made more careful notation of distances and travel times than his illustrious countryman had recorded more than a century before. Yes, he had seen the cinnamon trees of Sri Lanka, which he described to the rapt secretary. Moreover, he had encountered fields of pepper and camphor in Sumatra. He next sailed east for over a month until the winds blew no longer, to the island of “Sanday,” where nutmeg and mace grew, and thence to the island of “Bandan,” thick with clove trees. The secretary’s amazed delight can only be imagined: the Venetian, it would seem, had found the legendary Spice Islands.3
Was de’ Conti t
he first Westerner to lay foot on those fabled shores? Almost certainly not. Place yourself in the shoes of a medieval European merchant who has just discovered unlimited quantities of the world’s most precious and sought-after commodity. Travelogue would not be among your first, or even last, concerns.
Although the primary objective of the crusades was not commercial (unless one was Venetian or Genoese), Christians clearly recognized the Muslim command of the spice trade for the money machine it was. During their campaigns in the Holy Land, the crusaders interrupted the caravan traffic between Egypt and Syria with a chain of fortresses that ran from the Mediterranean down to the Red Sea’s northeastern extremity at the Gulf of Aqaba. In 1183 Reginald of Châtillon mounted a series of raids against Arab shipping in the Red Sea itself. The alarm of the Islamic world at the infidels’ penetration of this critical maritime corridor, previously thought to have been a Muslim domain, must have been extreme. The Egyptians mounted a vigorous response and forced Reginald back north.
In 1249, events at Damietta, on the Nile delta, demonstrated the crucial importance of the spice trade in the Muslim world. In that year, Christian forces captured the town, and so anxious were the Ayyubid Egyptians to regain this strategic trade outpost that they offered to return Jerusalem to the Christians in exchange; the offer was refused.4 When it came to the spice trade, Christian and Muslim alike usually favored Mammon over God.
During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, another quest drove Europeans toward the East: the search for an Asian Christian ally in the fight against the Saracen. These two goals—the search for spices and the search for Asia’s warrior of the Cross—were inseparable in the minds of the first Iberian explorers, and it is impossible to understand their motivations without retelling the strange story of the mythical Prester John.
Splendid Exchange, A Page 18