The Mosquito
Page 14
This marked the beginning of a period of relative European peace and homogeneous Christianity. This facade of unity spawned commercial diversification, guild specialization, intensified trade, and rising prosperity. In turn, the intensification of agronomy, market capitalism, and commercial traffic and trade spread the mosquito farther afield. This economic boom permitted the development and maintenance of local rule and the origins of feudal monarchy-based nations or princely states based on agricultural serfdom. These despotic rulers and their subordinate fiefdoms were protected by private mercenary armies of knights and tenant farmers conscripted as serfdom soldiers in times of need.
The new royal regions operated under the divine right of kings sanctioned by the always watching, always judging, wary eye of the papacy, which gradually became more concerned with the accumulation of wealth and power than with saving souls. The origins of the church as a remedial, antimalarial, therapeutic faith were now unrecognizable. The attainment of salvation was conveniently used as an intimidating, bribing weapon to reap the whirlwind of wealth from the ignorant huddled peasant masses. The papacy was eagerly carving out a profitable place within this lucrative commercial revolution that was engulfing Europe and beyond.
A successive line of Holy Roman emperors, beginning with Otto I, tried in vain to subdue an avaricious Rome and other rebellious Italian city-states, while also forcing an increasingly powerful and independent papacy to legitimize their supremacy. The mosquitoes of the Pontine Marshes continued to protect Rome and the Vatican from foreign invasion during the conflicts of this era, as they had done in the past against swarms of Carthaginians, Visigoths, Huns, and Vandals. Like so many conquering suitors who previously courted Rome, including Hannibal, Alaric, Attila, and Geiseric, the armies of emperors Otto I, Otto II, Henry II (not to be confused with his later English counterpart), and Henry IV were also bested by the malarious mosquitoes.
The Germanic army of Otto I was plagued by malaria while suppressing an Italian revolt that was then inherited by his son Otto II, who died of malaria without victory in 983. Otto II’s sudden death at the age of twenty-eight initiated a period of turmoil with numerous Germanic and foreign nobles vying for his vacant throne, which had been nominally filled by his three-year-old son, Otto III. Within this infighting, Germanic king Henry II loosely held the shrinking Holy Roman Empire together. By now this inheritance existed in name only. With ethnic states being carved out on its perimeters, the so-called Holy Roman Empire now consisted primarily of the Germanic kingdom in central Europe.
In his attempt to pacify Italy in 1022, Henry II was forced by a devastating sickness to abort his punitive campaign. Benedictine monk and cardinal Peter Damian (canonized in 1828), working in Rome at this time, summarized the life-sucking atmosphere of the city. “Rome, voracious of men, breaks down the strongest human nature,” he wrote. “Rome, hotbed of fevers, is an ample giver of the fruits of death. The Roman fevers are faithful according to an imprescriptible right: Whom once they have touched, they do not abandon as long as he lives.” Between 1081 and 1084, Henry IV, weakened by internal and external insurrections against his rule and five separate excommunications by three different popes, laid siege to Rome on four occasions. Rome and its papal rulers held out each time, as Henry was forced to withdraw the bulk of his mosquito-tormented army from the Campagna during the summer months. The shadow forces he left behind were invariably crushed by Rome’s Anopheles allies, which feverishly patrolled the Pontine Marshes.
After a series of forgettable leaders, an impressive ruler finally took the reins of the forlorn Holy Roman Empire in 1155. Frederick I was so beloved by his contemporaries that they gave him the affectionate, everlasting nickname Barbarossa (“Red Beard”). He was a towering figure who combined all the essential talents and virtues of a strong leader. His name has echoed through time for his highly admirable résumé, but also for a more sinister association. A lionizing Adolf Hitler code-named his June 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union Operation Barbarossa to pay homage to the medieval German leader and visionary.*
Barbarossa was eager to restore the empire to its former glory, attained under Charlemagne. The mosquito, however, had other less than glorious designs in mind for the gathering armies of Barbarossa. His five campaigns against Italy and the papacy, beginning in 1154, were all consumed by swarms of malarious mosquitoes. One of Barbarossa’s soldiers considered that Italy “is corrupted by poisonous mists rising from the neighborhood marshes, bringing scourge and death to all that breathe it.” In his contemporary account of Barbarossa’s invasions, Cardinal Boso, a member of the Papal Court, verifies that “suddenly such a deadly fever broke out in his army that, within seven days, almost all . . . were unexpectedly snatched away by a miserable death . . . and in August [he] began to withdraw his diminishing army. He was followed, however, by the deadly disease and, with every attempted step forward, he was forced to leave innumerable dead behind him.” Stymied by the mosquito’s staunch defense of Rome, Barbarossa withdrew to Germany and bowed to the social desire of his subjects, and that of his increasingly autonomous barons, to create “a greater Germany” and secure lebensraum or “living space” by conquering Slavic peoples to the east, a rallying cry resurrected by Hitler’s Third Reich 750 years later.
After the malarial death of Pope Urban III, his successor, Gregory VIII, reversed the excommunication of Barbarossa and made peace with his old friend. When Gregory summoned Europe to reclaim the Holy Land during the Third Crusade, Barbarossa, now in the good graces of the papacy, responded with fervent Christian zeal. Concerned with Saladin’s Muslim occupation of Egypt, the Levant, and the sanctified city of Jerusalem, and unsettled by the erosion of Christian custody of the Holy Land, in 1187, Pope Gregory issued a papal bull calling for his Crusade.
Although he was struck down by malaria after only fifty-seven days in office, Pope Gregory’s call to arms to reverse these setbacks, under the guise of “an opportunity for repentance and doing good,” was answered by European Christendom. The Christian soldiers of Barbarossa were shepherded onward alongside the armies of Philip II of France, Leopold V of Austria, and a newly crowned Richard I “Lionheart” of England. These mustering Crusaders led by the greatest rulers of Europe marched headlong into a maelstrom of death driven by mosquitoes and by Muslims defending their homeland.
From its shaky start, the mosquito and her prodigious patrols of the Pontine Marshes shielding Rome and the papacy helped to transform Christianity from a small and scattered cult of healing to a corrupt spiritual, economic, and military enterprise of power. The mosquitoes of the Holy Land were not amused by this conversion from custodians of care to covetous Crusaders. She exacted her revenge on Christian trespassers to the Levant, halting their expansion into Islamic lands while slowly eating away at the fragile footholds of Christian Crusader states in the Middle East.
The term “Crusades” was not in use during the actual events. It became the catchall descriptor only around 1750, to represent nine separate Christian expeditions to the Middle East between 1096 and 1291 in a sustained attempt to wrest the Holy Land from Muslim hands. Coinciding wars in Europe ending with the Reconquista of Spain from the Muslims in 1492, the same year Columbus unwittingly changed the world, are often included or at least given as a footnote to the forays to the Holy Land. The First Crusade, launched in 1096, led to a series of ventures to the Holy Land spanning two hundred years to satisfy a compelling combination of greed and ideology and the lightly veiled religious catechism of invade to enrich trade.
While evangelists, movies, and children’s books, including Robin Hood, would have us believe that the Crusades were championed to counter the infidel Islamic rule of the Holy Land, the religious element of the Crusades was far more sweeping, to include the suppression and extermination of all other non-Christian faiths. The Crusades were by no means as simplistic as some stirred-up crazy Christian jihad against Islamic rule of the Levant carried out by chi
valrous European knights in shining armor atop their noble steeds storming Muslim castles. They were far more complicated than the symbolic fairy-tale imagery. As one leading Crusader casually explained, it was foolhardy to travel to attack Muslims, when other non-Christian heathens lived right next door. “That,” he decreed, “is doing our work backward.”
In truth, these faithful, cross-shielded knights, fulfilling the indulgences of their lordships or church leaders, were more the equivalent of Al Capone’s or Pablo Escobar’s mobsters and thugs than they were of the mythologized Arthurian saviors of damsels in distress and the guardians of greater Christendom. The routes through Europe to the Holy Land were specifically chosen for their high concentrations of Jews and pagans, who were subjected to a merciless orgy of ethnic and religious cleansing. As was customary, this was accompanied by the unbridled looting and pillaging of all local inhabitants, including fellow Christians. Another element of the Crusades was the resolution of conflict among rival Catholic factions. Monarchs and clergy looked the other way under the propaganda slogan “God wills it.” After all, in the hopes of raising troops, popes offered mercenaries absolute forgiveness of sin, and the trials and tribulations of crusading would trump ordinary penance.
From the peasantry to the nobility, European men and women joined the movement to fight for God, as an opportunity for a military-escorted pilgrimage, as voluntary or conscripted soldiers, to excess in the debauched fleshpots of the Far East, to rape and plunder, or some personally motivated combination thereof. There was no consensus of individual inspirations for joining the crusading cause. Historian Alfred W. Crosby summarizes the Crusades as “a sort of banzai charge by hordes of the pious to rescue the Holy Sepulchre from the Muslims . . . a thought compounded of religious idealism, a desire for adventure, and, it turned out, rampant greed.” The religious component was only one motivation for the architects of the Crusades and was generally used as a shroud to mask their real intention, which at the core was political, territorial, and economic advantage.
As the number of successive Crusades piled up, they became a lucrative commercial enterprise. The transport, maintenance, and supply of massive armies and hordes of pious pilgrims from Europe to the Eastern Mediterranean was no small feat, and no small financial undertaking. With the Levant in Christian hands, the entire Mediterranean economic sphere would be under the jurisdiction of the political monarchies of Europe and their religious masters. Over the next few centuries, avaricious rulers conveyed cloaked messages to their excited throngs, exhorting them to “wrest that land from the wicked race, and subject it to ourselves.”
Driven by a Christian fervor, roughly 80,000 people from all walks of life abandoned Europe during the First Crusade (1096–1099) to brave the treacherous journey to Jerusalem, ravaging non-Christians along the way. As this motley crew advanced toward the Holy Land, their numbers thinned. When the diehards crossed into Asia at Constantinople, malaria set in, further diminishing their rank and file. Spring of 1098 was ushered in by monsoon rains that provided a summer season of unremitting mosquitoes and malaria. By early fall, thousands of Crusaders had died from the deadly parasite, including an entire German reinforcement of 1,500 men. Yet the remainder persisted, setting up fledgling Crusader states on the northern approaches to Jerusalem, which was eventually wrested from the Muslims in June 1099. “Now that our men had possession of the walls and towers,” wrote the French warrior-priest Raymond d’Aguilers, “wonderful sights were to be seen. Some of our men cut off the heads of their enemies; others shot them with arrows, so that they fell from the towers; others tortured them longer by casting them into flames.” However barbaric the manner of realization, Jerusalem was now in Christian hands.
By 1110, numerous tiny Crusader states, including Antioch and Jerusalem (and its primary port of Acre), had been assembled in the coastal Levant. Given its commercial importance, the region had long been a culturally diverse ethnic melting pot. Since most of the Crusaders returned to Europe with their spoils of war, these lordships and their diminutive European enclaves learned by necessity to coexist and cooperate with local populations, which included Muslims, Jews, Chaldeans, Persians, and Greeks. Trade from across the known world soon flowed in and out of these bustling, vibrant multiethnic ports, and the Eastern Mediterranean became the economic heart of global trade. While the Crusades were marked by violent conflict, they also produced a flurry of trade and a broader exchange of knowledge and innovation. Gaining a monopoly on this trade was worth fighting for, thereby extending this initial foray to the Levant into a string of Crusades.
The success of the First Crusade and the establishment of Christian states in the Levant were a mirage. Inevitably, even with the creation of the Knights Templar (charged by their vows of militant monasticism) in 1139, Christian traction in the Middle East would slowly slip away. Religious fanaticism and a blinding worship of God, conspiring with self-indulgent and lecherous greed, however, are compelling stimuli. Over the next two hundred years, they incited a series of Christian quests to secure Mediterranean trade and to unseat Islam from the Holy Sepulchre.
The Second Crusade (1147–1149), led by King Louis VII of France, accompanied by his brilliant, vivacious, and strong-willed warrior-wife Eleanor of Aquitaine—who, by the way, brought more troops than he did—and by Emperor Conrad III of Germany, was hastily designed to secure Damascus. Unleashing a wave of miasmatic biological warfare, the defenders of Damascus purposefully sabotaged all sources of water leading to and surrounding the city, creating a ripe malarial environment for the Crusaders’ grand entrance. The five-day siege of Damascus in July 1148 during malaria season was a poorly planned and executed, parasite-peppered disaster.
The most important consequence of this mosquito-induced defeat was that a jilted Louis took out his disappointment on his wife, Eleanor, who had yet to bear him a son and whom he suspected of committing adultery with her uncle Raymond, the ruler of the Crusader state of Antioch. Upon their return to France, the pope “dissolved” their loveless marriage. Eleanor summarily wed her cousin Henry II, who was anointed king of England in 1154, just two years after their nuptials. The union of Henry and Eleanor (and her lands in France) would have eternal ramifications, as two of their eight offspring, Kings Richard and John, would lead directly to the ratification of the Magna Carta.
Following the botched Second Crusade, in 1187, Pope Gregory summoned Europe to reclaim Jerusalem from Saladin and his Muslim army. Newly minted King Richard the Lionheart raised the gauntlet of Christendom for England during the Third Crusade, alongside Leopold V of Austria, Philip II of France, and Barbarossa of Germany until his accidental death in transit to the Holy Land. Saladin blocked the Crusaders’ path 100 miles north of Jerusalem at the coastal fortress city of Acre. A siege was initiated in August 1189 by a hodgepodge of local Crusaders led by the recently freed former king of Jerusalem, Guy of Lusignan, and the national contingents of Philip and Leopold. As malaria began to sap the strength of the siege, Saladin, in a brilliant and unexpected move, surrounded his enemies, allowing the mosquito ample opportunity to feed on the trapped Crusaders.
By the time Richard arrived with his army in June 1191, the Crusaders had suffered almost two years of nagging endemic malaria with frequent epidemic outbreaks. Malaria had already killed roughly 35% of the European Crusaders and drained the survivors of their once pulsating Christian ideology and fervor. Immediately upon landing, Richard contracted malaria, which his caretakers called “a severe illness to which the common people gave the name Arnoldia, which is produced by a change of climate working on the constitution.” Battling malaria, scurvy, and Muslims, a feverish Richard broke the siege and captured Acre within a month. His European cohorts, however, no longer had the numbers nor the will to fight on to Jerusalem. The mosquito had effectively rendered them impotent. Both Philip, who was also incapacitated by malaria and scurvy, and Leopold felt cheated by the haughty Richard upon receiving their meager share
of the spoils after the fall of Acre. Realizing their inferior military and economic position, the two sour and jaded kings gathered the wretched remnants of their national contingents and quit the Holy Land in August. They would, however, eventually exact their revenge upon Richard.
Undaunted by the desertion of his comrades, Richard vowed to push on to Jerusalem. When negotiations between Richard and Saladin foundered, the English king decapitated 2,700 prisoners in full view of the Muslim army. Saladin responded in kind. Richard proceeded south and was able to take and hold the city of Jaffa against fierce Muslim counterattacks. Richard’s reputation for courage, military skill, and prowess, and for possessing a coeur de lion, was born (Richard spoke French, not English). His first push on Jerusalem faltered and stumbled in the heavy rains and mud of November, which is also often the worst month for malaria in the Levant. “Sickness and want,” wrote an observer, “weakened many to such a degree that they could scarcely bear up.” A second try for Jerusalem was also forced into a malarial retreat. Richard fell sick again with what his doctors whispered to be an “acute semi tertian” or a combination of vivax and falciparum malaria.