1Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Voyages, the Columbian Exchange, and Their Historians (1987), p. 25.
In fairness, it wasn’t only men from Spain who did bad things to Indians in North and South America. From Portugal, next door to Spain, and later England, colonists arrived in other places in the Americas, and they often treated Indians as the Spaniards did.
In a way, the Indians had their revenge on the Old World. Not all historians agree, but these appear to be the facts: One of the very few diseases from which the Indians suffered before the arrival of the Spanish was syphilis, apparently in a mild form. When Columbus reached the New World in 1492, his sailors probably caught the disease from Indian women. In any case, syphilis apparently arrived in Spain and went from there to Naples, which had close ties to Spain. It now had changed its nature, as diseases sometimes do, and was often deadly.
When a French army conquered Naples in 1494 (as described in chapter 8), the soldiers and their women caught the new disease. Later, when they withdrew from Naples, they scattered it through Italy and France. From there it raced through Europe, Africa, and Asia. Each country named it for the place from which it had had the honor of contracting it. The French called it “the Naples disease,” and the Italians “the French disease.” The English called it “the French pox” or “the Spanish disease.” As it spread through eastern Europe, Poles named it “the German disease,” and Russians in turn called it “the Polish disease.” In the Middle East it was “the disease of the Franks [Europeans].” The Chinese called it “the disease of Canton” (one of their port cities), and then the Japanese called it “the Chinese disease.” All these countries paid a price for Europe’s conquest of the New World.
Chapter 11
We suffer famine, war, and plague.
ANY SPECIES’ MISSION is survival, but we humans have done more than just survive. We did what God, according to the Bible, ordered us to do: “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth.” However, let me make this clear: this chapter deals with reasons why we humans formerly increased about as fast as sloths climb trees. In chapter 16, we will look at humans’ later rapid rise.
Until quite recently, our numbers grew extremely slowly. Ten thousand years ago, when our ancestors were hunters and gatherers, they probably numbered between only five and ten million. Ten millennia later, in the 1600s, at the start of the global population explosion, the people of the earth numbered roughly half a billion. Yes, this was a big increase; our number had doubled six or seven or eight times. But the rate of increase had been slow. Each doubling had required about fifteen hundred years.
In a way, it’s strange that formerly our numbers increased so slowly. Until modern times married couples who lived long enough would often have from five to seven children. Given this ability for making babies, you might think that long ago we would have swamped the Earth.
The reason why our numbers used to increase so slowly isn’t hard to find: about as fast as some of us were born, others died. Through most of our history, births have, on average, only slightly outnumbered deaths. That doesn’t mean that our increase, though slow, was steady. Not at all. At least till recent times, humans always went through waves of increase and loss. We slowly increased until we were too many and troubles started, and then we decreased. If we showed this story as a line upon a graph, it would look like a series of self-canceling rises, crests, and falls. Only if we followed it for centuries, maybe millennia, would we notice that the wavy line was very slowly rising.
Take, for example, China, and the changes in its population. For most of early Chinese history we know nothing of the rises and the falls. But in the 1200s and 1300s there must have been a giant fall. The Chinese suffered first the bloody Mongol conquest, and (later) civil war, famine, and epidemics. Even if we don’t have the numbers, we can be certain that these disasters killed the Chinese by the tens of millions.
Then their number rose. In the 1400s and 1500s, under the Ming dynasty, the Chinese probably increased quite fast. At the end of those two centuries a historian wrote disgustedly about the government’s official census figures. These showed southeast China’s population having risen only 20 to 30 percent. “During a long period of peace,” he wrote, “the population must have grown and multiplied…. The empire has enjoyed, for some two hundred years, an unbroken peace unparalleled in history. During this period of recuperation and economic development the population should have multiplied several times.” Modern experts basically agree with him. The Chinese, and not only those in the southeast, must have increased rapidly under the Ming dynasty.
The long rise ended in the 1600s, when there were endless bandit wars, peasant risings, and invasions by the Manchus. The number of Chinese surely fell again, but we don’t know how many died in battle or of hunger or disease, and the data are so poor we’ll never know. The census figures for the early 1600s are especially unbelievable. To illustrate: not long before the fall of Peking in 1644 a government official, not expecting the collapse, drew up arbitrary census figures for a number of years after 1644!
So no one really knows the number of Chinese before these disasters or after them. The losses clearly were terrific, but demographers can only guesstimate them. One expert thinks China lost a quarter of its people, and another says it may have lost a third.
This terrible decline was followed by another rise. With so many Chinese dead, farms were plentiful for those who had survived, so they lived well and married and had children. By the early 1700s, China’s population seems to have climbed back to where it had been before the horrors of the 1600s began. It continued rising throughout the 1700s until there were again too many people, and the stage was set for yet another fall.
The Chinese story fits the classic pattern, common everywhere till recent times. Human beings (in any given area) would increase for decades, even centuries. Finally they would reach the point of surfeit, when many didn’t have enough to eat. At this point everything that could go wrong would do so: famine (or at least malnutrition), civil wars (which fed on misery and hunger), and disease. The fall was sometimes slow, sometimes quick and dreadful.
Our gradual increase over many thousand years was linked to those cycles of gain and loss happening all over earth. Again and again, a rising flood of humans would be followed by a nearly equal ebb. The gain made in one century would be nearly wiped out in the next. Nearly wiped out, but not quite. For at the end of the cycle of slow gain and rapid loss a little plus remained, a small addition to our numbers. It was these tiny bonuses at the end of each cycle that made our total number rise, from the time when farming began down to roughly 1750. We increased with the speed of a glacier.
EUROPE’S POPULATION HISTORY, like China’s, is full of rises and declines. But for Europe we have fuller information on the causes of death, as well as better population figures. We can better see how losses nearly canceled out the gains, and just what caused those losses.
Europe’s Dark Age, full of turmoil, ended in about the year 1000. In the next three centuries, down to about 1300, the average person’s life improved, and, as a result, the population rose. The clearest evidence of this increase is the way the towns were growing. For security, people often built walls around their towns. Later, and this is the important point, they built new walls to enclose the houses that had been built just outside the town since the earlier walls were made. These new walls are evidence of population growth. They tell a tale of rapid population rise in the centuries after the Dark Age.
Europeans also were increasing farmland, or using it better, to feed their growing numbers. Near Milan, in northern Italy, they built a network of canals to deal out river water so that farmers could raise several crops of hay. In the Netherlands, people garnered many thousand acres from the sea by building dikes to hold the water back. In Germany they drained their marshes, and in France they leveled forests.
By about 1300, however, Europeans had increased too much. Whole regions suffered famines since the
y had too many mouths to feed. And famines were only the most shocking signs of an agriculture that was overstrained. We have no census figures, but no doubt many died each year of malnutrition and diseases that thrive on it.
Another killer now appeared, ghastlier than famine. In the fall of 1347, European merchants who were trading in the Black Sea region (like the Polo brothers, fifty years before) took fright when plague broke out among two warring armies. (One side catapulted bodies of their dead inside their enemies’ camp, to share the dread disease with them.) So the European merchants climbed aboard their ships and sailed back home. They probably carried with them rats infested with plague-infected fleas. Plague soon raged in several ports on Europe’s southern coast. Then it hurried inland, and in 1348, 1349, and 1350 plague sometimes crawled and sometimes leaped through much of Europe. It soon acquired a name: the Black Death.
In southern Ireland a churchman kept a chronicle that tells what it was like to live and die in a time of plague. “That pestilence,” John Clyn wrote, “deprived villages and cities, and castles and towns of human inhabitants, so that scarcely a man was found to dwell therein; the pestilence was so contagious that whosoever touched the sick or dead was immediately infected and died…many died of boils and abscesses, and pustules on their legs and under their armpits; others frantic with pain in their head, and others spitting blood…. And lest things worthy of remembrance should perish with time, and fall away from the memory of those who are to come after us…so have I reduced these things to writing; and lest the writing should perish with the writer…I leave parchment for continuing the work, if haply any man survive, and any of the race of Adam escape this pestilence and continue the work which I have commenced.”
Clyn lived long enough to write another entry while plague still raged around him. Then these words appear in his chronicle, in another hand: “Here it seems the author died.”1
1Charles Creighton, A History of Epidemics in Britain from A.D. 664 to the Extinction of Plague (1891), p. 115.
The Black Death probably spared villages that were isolated from the outside world by miles of dusty roads. In the towns, however, it killed anywhere from an eighth to two-thirds of the people. At least a quarter of all Europeans died from plague. In one Italian town a chronicler recorded, “there was not left [even] a dog pissing on a wall.” For about a hundred years, plague returned again and yet again, now here, now there. In a small Italian town not far from Rome, a chronicler observed: “The first widespread pestilence took place in 1348 and was the worst.” But then he added: “Second pestilence, 1363. Third pestilence, 1374. Fourth pestilence, 1383. Fifth pestilence, 1389.” Another hand added the words, “Sixth pestilence, 1410.” In most of Europe, plague kept coming back until about 1450.
And then the European population cycle turned around again; the population rose. The reasons for the rise seem fairly clear. Plague was now less common (no one knows the reason), and France and England had ended their Hundred Years’ War. Most important, so many people had earlier died of plague that there was land and food enough for those still living. And a well-fed population was more resistant to disease.
Europeans noticed that their numbers were increasing. A chronicler in Germany wrote that “hardly a nook, even in the bleakest woods and on the highest mountains, is left uncleared and uninhabited.” Another noted that “all the villages are so full of people that no one is admitted. The whole of Germany is teeming with children.” An ambassador to France wrote in 1561 that the country “is heavily populated…; every place has as many inhabitants as it can well have.”
We have even better evidence for this rise: beginning at this time in European history we have solid population numbers. In some countries a few records have survived of the numbers of “fireplaces” or family units paying taxes, and these totals were rising. Italian towns were even counting individuals, not “fireplaces,” and these censuses also show big rises. Judging by this data, it looks as if Europeans in the year 1500 probably numbered between 80 and 85 million. A century later they had reached 100 to 110 million. This is an increase of about a quarter.
However, just like China at the same time, Europe was headed for trouble. This had to happen, given what we know about population cycles, and finally it did. By about 1600 Europe’s population rise was at an end. In some places the human increase only slowed and almost halted; in others populations actually declined.
AN ANCIENT CHRISTIAN prayer requests: “From famine, war, and pestilence, deliver us, O God.” We will see the way these population spoilers worked, mainly in the seventeenth century.
Famine was always a threat. In these times Europeans, like most people in the world, depended on a grain crop as the mainstay of their diet. Whether the grain was wheat or barley, corn or millet, the supply was crucial to survival. Famines and great loss of life took place when either too much rain or too little of it spoiled the all-important harvest. Suppose that in a given region there were so many people that the grain supply was barely adequate even in years when the harvest was good. In such a place a dismal harvest might cause a famine and great loss of life. A war could make a famine lethal. Armies ate the food on hand, burned the growing crops, and blocked the roads that farmers’ wagons bearing food had to use.
Shortages of food were common everywhere, especially where too many lived, or the soil was poor, or the climate harsh. For example, “Old” Castile, in central Spain, is semiarid. (According to a legend, Jesus visited the town of Ávila and when he saw the sun-baked land around it, he wept.) Spaniards say the climate is “nine months of winter and three months of hell.” In this region poor harvests and high grain prices used to occur roughly once a decade.
The history of Beauvais, a town in northern France, shows how famines killed. In the year 1600 about 12,000 people lived here. Most Beauvaisians were clothworkers, laborers, or servants, and they lived in crowded, tottering houses around a cathedral that had a habit of collapsing.
Like many places, Beauvais had a problem with its food supply. The nearby peasants barely raised enough to feed themselves and the town. What made the food supply so risky was that farmers mostly raised a single crop: a mix of wheat and rye. They grew no other crops to give themselves insurance against disaster, and a frigid winter or a rainy summer could trim a year’s supply of food to almost nothing. When the crops were good, the area could feed itself, but when they failed the price of bread would rocket up. Shortages would follow, and many would die of hunger and disease.
Imagine the plight of the ordinary textile worker, probably a weaver. He earned about seven and a half sous a day. Of these, at least one sou went for taxes, rent, and payments to his church and trade association. This left six sous for bread, the staple in his family’s diet. At the price for which bread sold when times were good, he could buy enough for himself, his wife, and one or two children.
Suppose, however, that the price of bread should double, or triple, or even quadruple. Between the early 1670s and the early 1700s that often happened. Poor harvests caused the price of grain, and therefore the price of bread, to double in twelve of those years, triple in four of them, and quadruple in three. When prices rose this way, the family could not afford to eat. Records show that in the same years when the harvest failed the number of deaths in Beauvais would jump to three or four times the normal number.
This is what happened to one family, the Cocus, all five of whom had work as spinners and weavers. In the summer of 1693 a poor harvest made the price of bread rise steeply. At the same time, the failure of the harvest caused a crisis in the textile business. So work was scarce and family incomes fell just when the price of bread went up. It is easy to guess what happened to the Cocus. At first, says the historian Pierre Goubert, they probably used the coins saved up for rainy days, and then they pawned their few belongings. Then “they began to eat unwholesome food, bran bread, cooked nettles, moldy cereals, entrails of animals picked up outside the slaughterhouses.” Soon they were starving, weak,
and listless, and suffered from “pernicious and mortifying fevers.” As winter began, the Office of the Poor had the Cocus on its list. Three months later the youngest daughter died, and two months after that the eldest daughter and the father. “All that remained of a particularly fortunate family, fortunate because everyone in it worked, was a widow and an orphan. Because of the price of bread.”2
2Pierre Goubert, Beauvais et le Beauvaisis de 1600 à 1730 (1960), pp. 76–77, as translated in Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost (1965), pp. 112–13.
The second of the spoilers, the life-takers, was war. In Europe, with so many quarreling nations, war was almost constant. Only in three years between 1540 and 1640 was there no warfare anywhere in Europe or on the Mediterranean. As we saw in an earlier chapter, warfare at this time became more deadly. Armies still used pikes and swords but now they also carried muskets, and battles often ended with the winners slaughtering the losers.
Europe’s Thirty Years’ War is the classic illustration. Picture armies fighting here, marching there, fighting, wintering, marching, and fighting once again. Since countries paid their soldiers poorly and rarely gave them clothing, food, or shelter, the troops were forced to loot and pillage to maintain themselves. They robbed and murdered travelers, and they fried peasants on their stoves until they told where they had hidden food and horses. Since the wretched peasants often gave up farming, famine soon was everywhere. Meanwhile, armies ruined towns and cities. They besieged Leipzig five times and Magdeburg ten, burning it to the ground in 1631. Worst of all, the armies spread bubonic plague and typhus, which took a heavy toll of both the soldiers and civilians.
The Human Story Page 20