The Mosquito

by Timothy C. Winegard

  The great warrior died in August 1227 and, in keeping with cultural norms, was buried without fanfare or marker. Legend has it that the small burial party killed anyone they met en route to conceal his final resting place, diverted a river over the grave, or alternatively, branded it into historical oblivion with stampeding horses. Like Alexander, the body of the Great Khan has been lost to legend and lore. All attempts and expeditions to locate his grave have ended in disappointment. The mosquito’s thirst for Mongol blood, however, was not yet slaked, and she would continue to saddle his imposing empire.

  Under Genghis’s son and successor, Ogedei, the Mongols launched an unrestrained counterclockwise assault on Europe between 1236 and 1242. The Mongol hordes quickly smashed their way through eastern Russia, the Baltic states, the Ukraine, Romania, Czech and Slovak lands, Poland, and Hungary, reaching Budapest and the Danube River on Christmas Day 1241. From Budapest they continued their western drive across Austria, before heading south, and eventually back east, ransacking their way across the Balkans and Bulgaria. Continuing east, in 1242, the Mongols abandoned Europe, never to return. The invincible Mongols, as it turns out, could not defeat the mosquito and break her dogged defense of Europe.

  Of this seemingly impulsive and surprising retreat Winston Churchill wrote, “At one moment it had seemed as if all Europe would succumb to a terrible menace looming up from the East. Heathen Mongol hordes from the heart of Asia, formidable horsemen armed with bows, had rapidly swept over Russia, Poland, Hungary, and in 1241 inflicted simultaneous crushing defeats upon the Germans near Breslau and upon European cavalry near Buda. Germany and Austria at least lay at their mercy. Providentially . . . the Mongol leaders hastened back the thousands of miles to Karakorum, their capital . . . and Western Europe escaped.” During the summer and fall of 1241, the majority of the Mongol forces were resting on the Hungarian plains. Although the previous years had been unseasonably warm and dry, the spring and summer of 1241 were unusually damp, with higher amounts of precipitation than usual turning the formerly dry Magyar grasslands of eastern Europe into a marshy morass and a minefield of malarial mosquitoes.

  For the Mongol military machine, the negative repercussions of this climate change created the perfect storm to shelter Europe. For starters, the quagmire and high water table robbed the Mongols of the essential grazing grounds and pasturelands for their innumerable horses, which were the crux of their military prowess.* The unusually high humidity also caused Mongol bows to falter. The stubborn glue refused to coagulate and dry in the moist air, and the diminished tautness of their heat-expanding bow strings negated the Mongol advantage of increased velocity, accuracy, and distance. Compounding these military drawbacks was a bursting population of parched mosquitoes. The malaria parasite began its artful invasion of their virgin veins. The Mongol hordes, writes acclaimed historian John Keegan, “ferocious though they were, ultimately failed to translate their light cavalry power from the semi-temperate and desert regions where it flourished in to the high-rainfall zone of Western Europe. . . . They had to admit defeat.” While the Mongols, and accompanying traders like Marco Polo, finally united the east and west, the mosquito helped prevent the west from being completely overrun. She harnessed her malarial might and held the reins of Mongol conquest, steering them away from Europe.

  While the mosquito sucked dry their dreams of European subjugation, the Mongols, under Kublai Khan, the grandson of Genghis, launched their first campaign into the Holy Land in 1260, adding another contender to the ongoing, yet moribund, Crusades. Their entrance into this flagging competition occurred during the intermission between the Seventh (1248–1254) and Eighth (1270) Crusades. Indicative of the confusion engulfing the later Crusades, over the next fifty years, which witnessed four major Mongol invasions, alliances among the Muslims, Christians, and Mongol factions shifted and allegiances were regularly realigned and calibrated. Just like the mosquito, yesterday’s friend colluded today to become tomorrow’s foe. In fact, on numerous occasions, offshoots from each power lined up on opposite sides, as inner turmoil rankled and unraveled the cohesion of the three dominant groups.

  Although the Mongols did have some limited success, including brief stopovers in Aleppo and Damascus, they were repeatedly forced to retreat in the face of malaria, additional disease, and powerful defensive coalitions. General Anopheles, the guardian of Christian Rome, also garrisoned the Holy Land for Islam. As she had done during earlier Christian campaigns, including Richard the Lionheart’s mosquito-racked Third Crusade, she helped to stay the Levant’s Mongol menace. The Holy Land, and its sanctified city of Jerusalem, remained in Muslim hands.

  Rebuffed by the mosquito in both Europe and the Levant, Kublai sought to counter these setbacks by conquering the last independent vestiges of continental Asia east of the Himalayan Mountains. He set loose the weight of his might on southern China and Southeast Asia, including the powerful Khmer civilization, or Angkor Empire. From its origins around 800, Angkor culture quickly spread across Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand, reaching its zenith at the dawn of the thirteenth century. Agricultural expansion, poor water management, and climate change provided the mosquito a textbook opportunity to initiate a complete collapse. “Given the reliance on standing impounded water and the breeding of Anopheles,” asserts Dr. R. S. Bray, “the seven deltaed Mekong River [was] the source of Khmer prosperity and the source of its malaria.” The elaborate system of canals and reservoirs used for trade and rice and fish cultivation; extensive clear-cutting and deforestation to increase rice production to feed a growing population; and frequent violent monsoons and flooding created the perfect paradise for the proliferation of mosquito-borne dengue and malaria.

  During his southern campaigns beginning in 1285, Kublai disregarded the customary tactic of withdrawing his forces to the nonmalarial north during the summer months. As a result, his marching columns totaling roughly 90,000 men were met by an entrenched mosquito defender. Malaria ravaged his armies throughout southern China and Vietnam, inflicting heavy losses and forcing a complete abandonment of his designs on the region by 1288. A straggling, sickly force of only 20,000 survivors staggered northward to Mongolia. This retreat from Southeast Asia and the corresponding collapse of the powerful Hindu-Buddhist Khmer civilization were both triggered by the mosquito. By 1400, the Khmer civilization was washed away, leaving only derelicts of awe-inspiring and majestic ruins, including Angkor Wat and Bayon, as reminders of the once flourishing Khmer sophistication and splendor.

  Akin to the Khmer, following its misadventures in southern China and Southeast Asia, the vast Mongol realm corroded, fragmented, and collapsed over the next century, becoming politically and militarily irrelevant by 1400. By this time, political infighting, military losses, and malaria had drained the once invincible Mongol Empire. Remnants of Mongol provinces lingered until 1500, with one in the backwaters of the Crimean Peninsula and the northern Caucasus limping on until the late eighteenth century. The legacy of the Mongols and of the largest contiguous land empire in history, however, still lives in today’s global DNA. Geneticists believe that 8–10% of people living in the former Mongol Empire are a direct lineage of Genghis Khan.* To put this another way, roughly 40–45 million people currently on the planet are his direct descendants. If we collected all the descendants of Genghis Khan into one country, it would be the thirtieth most populous nation in the world today, ahead of countries like Canada, Iraq, Poland, Saudi Arabia, and Australia.

  While the Mongols did not conquer Europe, thanks in part to the mosquito’s indissoluble line of defense, their disease originating in China did. During the siege of the port city of Kaffa in 1346, the Mongols catapulted infected bubonic plague corpses over the city walls to contaminate the inhabitants and break the siege. More importantly, Kaffa was a bustling Italian trading center, so ships carrying rats with infected fleas, or the plague-ridden sailors themselves, soon made port in Sicily in October 1347, and then docking at Genoa and Veni
ce in Italy and Marseilles in France in January 1348. The disease also traveled along the Silk Road on the backs of traders and Mongol warriors. The Black Death promptly “went viral,” although Yersinia pestis is a bacterium transmitted by fleas that live and hitch a ride on numerous ground rodents, including, in this case, rats.

  The plague peaked between 1347 and 1351 in Europe, with continuous outbreaks into the nineteenth century, including the Great Plague of London in 1665–1666, which killed 100,000 people, or 25% of the city’s population, coinciding with the Great Fire of London in 1666. For the city of London, 1666 was not a great year. None of the frequent reappearances of bubonic plague matched the intensity and butcher’s bill of the Black Death. While some scholars place the death toll of Europe as high as 60%, the modern consensus hovers around 50%. Philip Daileader, professor of medieval history at the College of William and Mary, is careful to point out, “There is a fair amount of geographic variation. In Mediterranean Europe, areas such as Italy, the south of France and Spain, where plague ran for about four years consecutively, it was probably close to 75–80% of the population. In Germany and England . . . it was closer to 20%.” Across the Middle East, the death rate was roughly 40%, with Asia reaching 55%.

  To make matters worse, the Black Death overlapped with the Great Famine, thought to be precipitated by the five-year eruption of Mount Tarawera in New Zealand. In northern Europe, the ensuing climate change caused a sudden spike in mosquito populations and malaria. Calculating a distinct death toll from this event is difficult, but it is generally believed to be in the ballpark of 10–15% of the affected populations. An anonymous eyewitness tells us that “the floods of rain have rotted almost all the seed . . . and in many places the hay lay so long under water that it could neither be mown nor gathered. Sheep generally died and other animals were killed in a sudden plague.” Death dominated Europe.

  In plain numbers, 40 million people in Europe died of the plague, with global fatalities estimated to be conservatively around 150 million and perhaps as high as 200 million. It took two hundred years for the global population to return to its previous level. These numbers are simply mind-boggling and difficult to rationally compute. The Black Death, in a league of its own, is the single most shattering individual Malthusian check in human history. As we have seen, the runner-up Justinian Plague in the sixth century killed only 30–50 million people.* Since the emergence of antibiotics in the 1880s and Alexander Fleming’s penicillin breakthrough in 1928, the plague has mostly disappeared. According to the World Health Organization, plague currently kills 120 people per year.

  Aside from the catastrophic loss of life wrought by the Black Death, the aftermath and implications for European survivors were actually remarkably positive. Large tracts of vacant and now unoccupied land transferred to the living, equating to increased wealth. More land for fewer people meant less demand for the staple crop of wheat, leading to a diversification of agricultural produce and thus creating a much more robust and complete diet. Populations thrived as food was more abundant, cheaper, and more nutritionally balanced. Protein consumption also increased as previously cultivated marginal lands returned to their former natural state of livestock pastures or forests. This significantly reduced spawning haunts for malarious mosquitoes. Competition for jobs was reduced, which translated into higher wages for both skilled tradesmen and unskilled laborers. Birth rates continued to grow as couples could afford to marry at younger ages. Increased wealth, combined with less scholastic competition, allowed for a slow but steady growth of universities and higher education and the general advancement of academia, which eventually led to the Renaissance, the Age of Enlightenment, and a global projection of European power.

  The Mongol invasions, which lasted roughly 300 years, changed the configuration of the world demographically, commercially, culturally, spiritually, and ethnically. The Mongols were willing to allow traders, missionaries, and travelers to navigate their entire empire, opening China and the rest of the east to Europeans, Arabs, Persians, and others for the first time. Small communities of Christian and Muslim converts soon appeared across these formerly unknown and untapped eastern lands, taking their place among the major eastern faiths of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Hinduism. These new land routes opened by Mongol military expansion created an immeasurably smaller global society by fusing two larger, previously distinct geographical worlds.

  Spices, silk, and exotic imports beyond imagination became mainstays on the shelves and stalls of European markets. The Mongol Empire was a flexible, multifarious, and interconnected superhighway of foreign exchange. When a Flemish priest arrived at the Mongol capital of Karakorum in 1254 (hopefully not expecting a welcoming cup of tea), he was greeted in his native tongue by a woman from his neighboring village in his homeland. She had been captured as a child during a Mongol raid fourteen years earlier. Contemporary literature and archives reveal an incredibly safe and permeable Eurasian expanse for trekkers, moguls, and merchants. The travel stories of Marco Polo and others fed the trading frenzy and the economic machine of Europe.

  The famous narrative of Marco Polo, however, was a publication of mere coincidence and chance. While imprisoned in Genoa in 1298–1299, to break the boredom and monotony of incarceration, Polo regaled a fellow inmate with stories spanning the years 1271 to 1295 of his travels across Asia and his tea-less stint in the court of Kublai Khan. The curious and amazed convict recorded these epic tales and eventually published them in 1300 as the Book of the Marvels of the World, now commonly read as The Travels of Marco Polo. Some experts question whether Polo ventured to China at all or was just repeating stories he had heard from other travelers. Researchers do agree that the stories, whether they are personal or plagiarized, are authentic and accurate depictions of contemporary events. A prized possession of Christopher Columbus was his well-worn and heavily marked-up copy of Polo’s book.

  The descriptions of the east and its limitless bounty depicted by Polo inspired Columbus’s attempt to reach the riches of Asia by a westward seafaring route. In 1492, Columbus headed west to reach the east. “In a sense,” articulates Loyola University historian Barbara Rosenwein, “the Mongols initiated the search for exotic goods and missionary opportunities that culminated in the European ‘discovery’ of a new world, the Americas.” This unintended “discovery” unleashed a historically unmatched tidal wave of mosquitoes, disease, and death upon the isolated and nonimmune indigenous inhabitants of the Americas.

  Prior to the Columbian Exchange, deadly Anopheles and Aedes mosquitoes had not yet penetrated the Americas. While pulsating vivacious mosquito populations thrived in the Americas, they were disease-free, and were nothing more than irksome, itchy pests. The Western Hemisphere remained quarantined and free from the forces of foreign occupation for the time being. Since their arrival in the Americas at least 20,000 years ago, at the onset of permanent European contact in 1492, the roughly 100 million indigenous residents had not yet been subjected to her scourge nor witnessed her wrath and so remained unseasoned and defenseless to her diseases. American mosquitoes did not shred human populations, at least not yet.

  During the age of imperialism and biological interchange ushered in by Columbus, waves of fresh Europeans, African slaves, and imported stowaway mosquitoes clattered and rumbled upon the virgin rolling shores of this “New World.” Their inadvertent biological warfare through stealthy foreign infections shuddered through the continents, killing indigenous populations at record rates. The mercantilist European powers of Spain, France, England, and, to a lesser extent, Portugal and the Netherlands clamored for imperial wealth and carried the cross of colonization and a cocktail of genocidal diseases, including malaria and yellow fever, beyond the gates of Europe and Africa to unsuspecting indigenous peoples across the globe. “Great was the stench of death,” a Mayan survivor mourned. “After our fathers and grandfathers succumbed, half the people fled to the fields. The dogs and vultures devoured the bodies. The
mortality was terrible. . . . All of us were thus. We were born to die!” As an accidental agent of the Columbian Exchange, the mosquito was one of the first and most prolific serial killers to stalk the Americas.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Columbian Exchange: Mosquitoes and the Global Village

  Sailing in the shadows of Columbus’s fourth and final voyage, the Spanish-born priest Bartolome de las Casas arrived at Hispaniola (now the Dominican Republic and Haiti) in 1502 and proceeded to pen his famous scathing eyewitness history A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies. King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella were horrified by his original reports of Spanish brutality and he was quickly anointed with the official title and role of Protector of the Indians in 1516. Las Casas chronicles the first decade of colonization with an intense, raw, and unfiltered spotlight on the numerous atrocities committed by his fellow Spaniards against the Taino people. His firsthand account is a lengthy indictment of Spanish colonization and of the immediate human harvest reaped by malaria, smallpox, and other diseases.

  Las Casas reports that the Spanish treatment of the indigenous peoples of Hispaniola was “the climax of injustice and violence and tyranny. . . . The Indians were totally deprived of their freedom and were put in the harshest, fiercest, most horrible servitude and captivity which no one who has not seen it can understand. . . . When they fell ill, which was very frequently . . . the Spaniards did not believe them and pitilessly called them lazy dogs and kicked and beat them. . . . The multitude of people who originally lived on the island . . . was consumed at such a rate that in these eight years 90 per cent had perished. From here this sweeping plague went to San Juan, Jamaica, Cuba and the continent, spreading destruction over the whole hemisphere.” Swarms of malaria-vectoring mosquitoes made up a large portion of his “sweeping plague.”