The Mosquito

by Timothy C. Winegard

  The inscription on a fifth-century Roman Christian amulet, for example, was designed to cure a woman named Joannia from malaria: “Flee, hateful spirit! Christ pursues you; the son of God and the Holy Spirit have overtaken you. O God of the sheep-pool, deliver from all evil your handmaid Joannia. . . . O Lord, Christ, son and Word of the living god, who heals every disease and every infirmity, also heal and watch over your handmaiden Joannia . . . and chase away and banish from her every fever-heat and every kind of chill—quotidian, tertian, quartan—and every evil.” In her chapter “A Gospel Amulet for Joannia” in the book Daughters of Hecate: Women and Magic in the Ancient World, AnneMarie Luijendijk, professor of religion at Princeton, forwards that “Irina Wandrey posits a connection between the large number of fever amulets from that period and the increase of malaria in Late Antiquity.” She elaborates that malaria amulets and charms while “seemingly insignificant everyday objects participate in the larger discourse of healing, religion, and power . . . creating a legitimate and socially acceptable Christian practice.” Dr. Roy Kotansky, historian of ancient religion and papyrology, cleverly detects that “during the Roman Empire the treatment of diseases with amulets seems to have required the proper diagnostic identification of the ailment, and we find that the texts found on amulets often indicate specific diseases for which they are written.” While the personal and malaria-specific plea on Joannia’s amulet is hard to ignore, we do not know if the gods she invoked delivered her from all evil and chased away a mosquito-borne death.

  It is not surprising that early Christians, as evinced by Joannia’s beseeching inscription, blended faiths to suit their needs. In times of endemic malarial sickness and religious uncertainty, having a healthy variety of prayers and talismans to multiple gods, both pagan and Christian, increased the odds that one of them, presumably the one that is the authentic, bona fide savior, will take heed and heal. With its sacrament of tending to the ill, including the quaking malarial masses, the Christian god emerged as the top candidate to banish sickness, while offering salvation and an afterlife liberated from fevers, pain, and suffering. While the mosquito was forcefully nudging the momentum of Christianity forward, she received a boosting push from a couple of famous emperors along the way—Constantine and Theodosius.

  During the tumultuous fourth century, Christianity gained traction in the waning Roman Empire and was reinforced by Emperor Constantine’s conversion in 312 and his Edict of Milan the following year. In the aftermath of his predecessor Diocletian’s “Great Persecution” of Christians, Constantine’s legal decree did not make Christianity the official religion of the empire as commonly thought. It did, however, avow that all Roman subjects had the freedom to choose and practice their own faith without fear of persecution, thus satisfying both polytheists and Christians. In 325, Constantine went one step further at the ecumenical Council of Nicaea. To placate the adherents of the diverse and assorted polytheistic and Christian factions, and end religious purges, he blended their beliefs into one faith. Constantine ratified the Nicene Creed and the concept of the Holy Trinity, opening the doors for the compilation of the current Bible and modern Christian doctrine.

  Following Constantine’s codification of canon, between 381 and 392, Emperor Theodosius, the last sovereign to rule over both the eastern and western halves of the Roman Empire, forever fused Christianity and Europe together. He rescinded the religious tolerance of the Edict of Milan. He closed polytheistic temples, executed those worshipping Febris or wearing enchanted abracadabra charms, and officially proclaimed Roman Catholicism as the singular state religion of the empire. The city of Rome would provide the pulsating heart of Christianity and house the earthly seat of God at the Vatican.

  The full-scale arrival of Christianity in Rome itself, and the construction of the Vatican and other monuments of Christianity during the fourth century, were escorted in by entrenched malaria. “The first great Christian basilicas of the city, namely those of San Giovanni, St. Peter, San Paolo, San Sebastiano, Sant’ Agnesi and San Lorenzo,” as Cloudsley-Thompson points out, “were built in valleys that later became terrible centers of infection.” We do know that malarious mosquitoes were present in the area of the Vatican prior to Christian construction of the original St. Peter’s Basilica. As you may recall from the previous chapter, Tacitus tells us that following the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE, large gatherings of refugees and displaced peoples “camped in the unhealthy districts of the Vatican, which resulted in many deaths” and with “the Tiber being close by . . . weakened their bodies, which were already an easy prey to disease.”

  While the early history of the Vatican is unclear, the name itself was already being used in the pre-Christian era of the republic for a marshy area on the west bank of the Tiber River, across from the city of Rome. The surrounding area was considered sacred; archeological evidence has uncovered polytheistic shrines, mausoleums, tombs, and altars to various gods, including Febris. Covering this sacred site, the sadistic emperor Caligula built a circus for chariot races in 40 CE (expanded by Nero), crowned with the Vatican Obelisk, which he stole from Egypt along with Alexander’s breastplate. This towering needle is the only lasting relic of Caligula’s debauched playground. Beginning in 64 CE, in the wake of the Great Fire of Rome—for which Christians were blamed—this eighty-four-foot-tall red-granite pillar became the site of state-sponsored martyrdom for many Christians, including Saint Peter, who was allegedly crucified upside down in the shadows of the obelisk.

  On orders from Constantine, the old St. Peter’s Basilica was completed around 360 CE on the grounds of the former circus and the purported site of Saint Peter’s resting place. The Constantinian basilica quickly became the primary destination for pilgrimages, but also the epicenter for the concentric construction of the Vatican campus, which included a hospital that was often brimming to three times its capacity with malaria patients from Rome and the surrounding Pontine Marshes of the Campagna.

  The legions of mosquitoes inhabiting the Pontine Marshes protected the headquarters of the Catholic Church from foreign invasion while they also killed those whom they sheltered. For most of this time period, popes did not reside at the Vatican. Fear of malaria drove them to live at the Lateran Palace on the opposite side of Rome for the next thousand years. It is not surprising that during malaria’s reign in Rome, Catholics regarded their spiritual headquarters with more terror than respect, or perhaps respectful terror. Nevertheless, prior to the completion of the new St. Peter’s Basilica in 1626 (designed by Michelangelo, Bernini, and others), at least seven popes, including the influential late-fifteenth-century libertine Alexander VI, known to Netflix as Rodrigo Borgia, and five rulers of the Holy Roman Empire died of the “Roman Fever.” Acclaimed poet Dante died of malaria’s inferno fevers in 1321, as he put it, “as one who has the shivering of the quartan.”

  The death trap that was Rome was not lost on outsiders, visitors, and historians. The sixth-century Byzantine administrator and historian John Lydus speculated that Rome was the site of a protracted battle between the spirits of the four elements of nature and the prevailing fever demon. Others believed a fever-puffing dragon lived in a subterranean cave, enveloping the city with its billowing, diseased breath, or a scorned and vengeful Febris was punishing the city for orphaning her in favor of Christianity. A medieval bishop on assignment to Rome remarked that when “the rising of the sparkling Dog Star at the morbid foot of Orion was imminent,” malaria epidemics gripped the city, “and there were hardly any men left who were not debilitated by the seething heat and bad air.” Hippocrates’s miasmatic “dog days of summer” were still as relevant as ever and his catchy buzzword continued to ricochet across antiquity.

  While the seat of Roman Catholicism might have been known for its healing, it could not shake its reputation for being the malarial capital of Europe. Even by 1740, in a letter penned from Rome, English politician and art historian Horace Walpole reported that “there is a h
orrid thing called malaria that comes to Rome every summer, and kills one,” introducing the word “malaria” into the English language for the first time. The British, however, generally called the disease “ague.” A century later, a fellow English art critic, John Ruskin, echoed his predecessor’s words, exclaiming that there was “a strange horror lying over the whole city. It is a shadow of death, possessing and penetrating all things . . . but all mixed with fever fear.” On a visit to the city in the mid-nineteenth century, Hans Christian Andersen, the Danish author of The Little Mermaid, was aghast at the “pale, yellow, sickly” inhabitants. The renowned English nurse Florence Nightingale described the silent, lifeless surroundings of Rome as “the Valley of the Shadow of Death.” Romantic poet Percy Shelley commented on the disease that killed his close friend Lord Byron (despite rumors, they were not lovers), lamenting that he himself was also ailing from “a malaria fever caught in the Pontine Marshes.” As late as the early twentieth century, travelers to these expanses were shocked by the squalor, feebleness, and skeletal complexion of the few pitiful locals trying to eke out an existence in the malaria-ridden Campagna. As we have seen and will continue to see, Rome, the Vatican, and the mosquito had a lengthy interdependent relationship and a capricious and lethal rapport.

  La Mal’aria: This desolate and sullen 1850 painting by French artist Ernest Hébert depicting malaria-ridden Italian peasants fleeing the death trap Pontine Marshes of the Campagna was inspired by his personal travels and observations in Italy. (Diomedia/Wellcome Library)

  While Rome certainly endured heavy malaria pressures, the rest of Europe was not immune, for the disease was marching steadily northward. Though the Romans had brought strains of malaria with them as they expanded into new lands, causing sporadic outbreaks such as those cases in Scotland and Germany referenced earlier, it was not until the seventh century that malaria became endemic in northern Europe. Although the deadly falciparum could not withstand the harsher climates of the frosty region, malariae and vivax, which can still be lethal, found it a suitable home, reproducing as far north as England, Denmark, and the Russian Arctic port of Archangel.

  The mosquito’s plodding grip on Europe was hastened by human interference. As always, mosquito pestilence followed the plow and the shifting and shuffling patterns of human movements, settlements, and trading passages. The expansion of the Roman Empire, and its later offspring of Christianity, activated the extension of mosquito-borne diseases into hitherto untapped human populations. Humankind’s continual conquest of local environments, most notably the disturbed lands of cultivation and the unnatural undermining of ecosystems, produced sprawling mosquito habitats otherwise not organically possible. We reap what we sow. Or where we sow, the reaper appears.

  The delicate balance between all life forces became increasingly subject to the impulses of human intervention. Introduced to Europe in the sixth century, the moldboard plow could be pulled by oxen through heavy loams. It allowed farmers to exploit the compact river-basin soils of central and northern Europe. Human and livestock population densities increased as towns and cities punctually emerged to support these agricultural colonies, generating a surge of traffic on vibrant waterways and at bustling trading ports. The webbed relationships of agriculture, increasing human population densities, and foreign trade allowed for the propagation of malarious mosquitoes.

  With this transition to an agricultural surplus economy, northern Europe joined the global market, and traders and merchants ventured farther for promising capitalist opportunities. “Human migrants,” as historian James Webb explains, “had long been traveling bandwagons of infection.” The misery of the Dark Ages was completed with new diseases and complicated by new approaches to faith. Escorting the mosquito was another foreign movement that would unveil a new global philosophy in the form of Islam.

  Unlike the slow and labored spread of Christianity ministered by the mosquito, Islam sprang from the visions of the prophet Muhammad and quickly stormed the world. In 610, during one of his retreats for solace, a vision of the archangel Gabriel appeared, summoning Muhammad to worship Allah (“the god”), the same deity of the Jews and Christians. Muhammad continued to receive divine revelations and eventually began to relay these words of God to a small but growing assembly of Muslims (“those who submit to Islam”) in Mecca and Medina. His sermons and messages eventually became part of the Qur’an (“recitation”). Islam (“submission to god”) quickly won over the Arabian Peninsula.

  During the seventh century, as mosquitoes and malaria insidiously crept northward in Europe, Islam rapidly expanded its territorial base across the Middle East. This new monotheistic faith patterned on the Christian god cascaded across North Africa and poured into the Byzantine and Persian worlds. When the Muslim Moors sailed the Strait of Gibraltar and invaded Spain in 711, they unleashed another surge of malaria, entrenching the parasite throughout the European Mediterranean. By 750, the Muslim Empire stretched from the Indus River in the east, across the entire Middle East, north to eastern Turkey and the Caucasus Mountains, across North Africa, before occupying Spain, Portugal, and southern France in the west. Islam and Christianity now squared off on two fronts—in Spain in the west and in Turkey and eventually the Balkans in the east. Europe was under siege from both mosquitoes and Muslims.

  While darkness, disease, and death were descending on Europe, a Frankish king, Charles “The Hammer” Martel, and his unlikely bands of farmers and peasants staved off and reversed the remarkable Muslim general Abdul Rahman al-Ghafiqi’s Moorish infiltration of Western Europe in France at the Battle of Tours in 732. His grandson, the Christian Crusader Charlemagne, the first emperor of the newly minted Holy Roman Empire, would deal the Moors another setback in France and Spain and proceed to color Christianity across the map of Europe in bloodred. For the first time since the height of the classical Roman Empire, Charlemagne united most of Western Europe under one regime. Under his visionary yet brutal leadership, Europe began to emerge from the eclipse of the Dark Ages, prompting historians to anoint him the “Father of Europe.”

  The eloquent and brilliant Charlemagne was crowned king of the Franks in 768. He proceeded to launch over fifty military campaigns designed to expand his empire and save souls. A die-hard protector and promoter of Christianity, Charlemagne quickly blunted the Muslim expansion in Spain, before launching campaigns against the Saxons and Danes in the north and the Magyars of Hungary to the east, while also solidifying control of northern Italy. Charlemagne’s military campaigns destroyed neighboring buffer states surrounding his Frankish kingdom, and unleashed a wave of invasions and new threats.

  While not officially considered part of the Crusades, Charlemagne’s zealous and fanatical Christianization of his conquered subjects was so extreme it could be defined as religious genocide. From a faith of conversion and devotion through healing and solace, Christianity under Charlemagne was now tendering another starkly opposite gateway to salvation. The conquered were given a simple choice: Embrace the Christian god or meet that god immediately at the point of a sword. At Verden in 782, for instance, Charlemagne ordered the massacre of over 4,500 Saxons who refused to prostrate themselves before his power and his Christian god. As Charlemagne consolidated his military, political, and spiritual clout, a distressed and scorned Pope Leo III appraised the Frankish king as a means to safeguard and strengthen his own authority and rule.

  Pope Leo was quickly losing favor among Italian elites for his hush-money adultery, stormy affairs, political collusion, and economic scheming. Under Charlemagne’s protection, Leo sought to preserve the legitimacy of the papacy and keep usurpers at bay. When Pope Leo crowned Charlemagne the first emperor of the Holy Roman Empire (or Carolingian Empire) on Christmas Day in 800, he was facing threats to his bastion on every front. While Charlemagne was the first emperor to rule a cohesive Western Europe since the collapse of the Western Roman Empire three centuries earlier, his policy of Christianization and milit
ary forays in all directions upset the balance of power and invited retaliation. When the seventy-one-year-old Charlemagne died of natural causes in 814, his heirs were tasked with defending the delicate and fragile Christian empire he had created.

  His overstretched Holy Roman Empire was soon destabilized and deflated by invasions from the Magyars, a nomadic people originating between the Volga River and the Ural Mountains of eastern Russia. By 900, they drove a wedge into the established order by settling along the Danube River in modern-day Hungary. They continued to attack west into Germany and Italy, and even as far afield as southern France, over the next fifty years. Lastly, although in slow retreat in the west, Islam was still embedded in Spain, and was making headway in the east, knocking on the eastern door of the Byzantine Empire.

  The Magyar design on Western Europe was halted by the German king Otto I in 955 at Lechfeld, earning him a fierce reputation as the savior of Christendom, propelling him to the throne of the decaying Holy Roman Empire in 962. Beginning with Otto, for our purposes, the king of Germany assumed the dual coronation as the ruler of the Holy Roman Empire, although not always with the blessing of the papacy. After defeat, the Magyars adopted Christianity under King Stephen (future Saint Stephen), and settled into a domestic farming culture in Hungary. The agricultural pursuits of the Magyars upset the ecological balance and once again provided the mosquito with new venues to host her malaria road show. For Europe, however, the malarial environment created by the Magyars along the Hungarian Danube was a blessing in disguise. During the merciless Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century, these malarious mosquitoes, farmed by Magyar husbandry, maintained a persuasive defensive perimeter and proved to be the saving grace for greater Europe.

  The Muslim and Magyar offensives marked the final occurrence of major invasions of outsiders into the heart of European territory. The Holy Roman Empire was quickly portioned into various ethnically carved-out kingdoms. In many ways, they were the extension of the mosquito-thwarted raids of the Visigoths, Huns, and Vandals during the Era of Migrations, and of the warfare that had shaken the foundation of the Western Roman Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries. Like those marauding nomads before them, these outsiders stayed on in Europe and were absorbed into local societies or created new ethnic territories for themselves like the Hungarian Magyars, French, Germans, Croats, Poles, Czechs, and the Slavic Rus (Russians and Ukrainians). The ethnic makeup and map of modern Europe were beginning to take shape.