The Black Death in Egypt and England: A Comparative Study

ONE: INTRODUCTION

o n e INTRODUCTION Plague and Methodology We live in an age of steadily growing population and urban sprawl, with industrial growth continually encroaching on the few untouched pockets of our ecosystem, so it is hard for us to imagine our distant ancestors ’ fear of nature as an encroaching predator. It is harder still for us to conceive of the terror and shock they experienced as urban centers shrank and cultivated fields slowly reverted to their natural states. Yet this was the predominant mood that gripped the survivors of the Black Death. Their numbers had been devastated by a mysterious and horrifying disease that had come from “the East” and revisited generation after generation in waves of epidemics. Bewildered communities watched in dismay as nature took the place of humanity’s civilized infrastructure. They drew together in fear as small hamlets disappeared from the map and villages dwindled to ghosts of their former selves. People fled in panic to the largest cities, only to find that the former epicenters of civilization were themselves shrinking, as once-crowded neighborhoods and bustling marketplaces fell into decay. Others held out in their familiar rural settings , helplessly trying to confront the powerful forces of nature as their small numbers grew too few to resist the oncoming wave of indigenous plants and forests that their ancestors had once cleared. The natural environment , aided by a small rod-shaped bacterium, had returned with a vengeance to reclaim its former dominance. A ship arrived in Alexandria. Aboard it were thirty-two merchants and a total of three hundred people—among them traders and slaves. Nearly all of them had died. There was no one alive on the ship, save four of the traders , one slave, and about forty sailors. These [forty-five] survivors [soon] died in Alexandria.1 1 t h e b l a c k d e a t h i n e g y p t a n d e n g l a n d 2 This same story, often accompanied by a vivid account of a ship full of corpses drifting into port, was repeated in virtually every civilization of the Old World. A report of the Black Death’s arrival at Bristol in England reads like the one from Alexandria. The death toll and symptoms were the same. The morbid story was reiterated in France, the Holy Roman Empire, the kingdoms of Spain, the Italian city-states, the Golden Horde in Russia, the Byzantine Empire, the principalities of North Africa, the al-Khanate sultanate in Persia, the kingdoms of India, and the Mongol Empire in China. This disease was “a random occurrence in history and almost unique.”2 So high and sudden was the mortality that some scholars maintain that its effects resembled those of a nuclear war more than those of a pandemic.3 As Norman Cantor describes it, “It threatened the stability and viability of civilization. It was as if a neutron bomb had been detonated. Nothing like this has happened before or since in the recorded history of mankind, and the men and women of the fourteenth century would never be the same.”4 “Black Death” is a term for the fourteenth-century manifestation of a plague caused by Yersinia pestis, a small rod-shaped bacterium (bacillus ) that is usually carried by the rat flea, Xenopsylla cheopis.5 In rodent colonies, the bacillus lives in the guts of the fleas and is transmitted back and forth between fleas and rodents.6 The disease can remain endemic to rodent colonies indefinitely and does not need Homo sapiens to survive. When the disease does break out of its natural environment, it is usually, although not exclusively, spread by the joint action of fleas and the black rat, Rattus rattus.7 When a flea bites a plague-infected rodent, its esophagus becomes blocked with plague bacilli.8 This blockage makes it impossible for the flea to eat. The flea eventually dies, but not before it vainly attempts to Account of a plague ship at Alexandria, 1347 i n t r o d u c t i o n : p l a g u e a n d m e t h o d o l o g y 3 feed on the black rat or another warm-blooded host.9 If the flea happens upon a human, it bites into the flesh, but rather than swallowing a small...