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325 5 Negative Feedbacks the bacteriological holocaust The Black Death arrived in Europe in 1348; its first visitation killed roughly half the population. The subsequent recurrences of “The Bacteriological Holocaust” kept attacking the remnant, so that by the mid- fifteenth century there was an overall reduction of the population to only one-third its earlier level. This chapter describes the impact of the plague and explains why recovery was so slow. The pre-plague period is often cited for the “Malthusian” dynamic of “relative overpopulation [which] was so great as to push the death-rates to a punishing height.” In the terse words of another authority, “What a ‘magnificent’ field of action for the Black Death of 1348, that holocaust of the undernourished.”1 While both M. M. Postan and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie suggest that there was some connection between poverty, malnutrition , and mortality from plague, neither is able to explain what that linkage might have been. The richer members of the peasantry did not live in more hygienic surroundings, nor were their bodies kept cleaner. The very nature of the plague was that it did not respect persons. There was, in point of fact, no connection between malnutrition, poverty, and death from disease . The Black Death carried off rich and poor, noble and commoner, prelates and parishioners. There is little evidence to suggest that anyone— rich or poor—was especially knowledgeable concerning the nature of the plague or the mode of its transmission. In the culture of the times, it was seen as a sign of divine warning or even judgment on a sinful people. 1. M. M. Postan, The Medieval Economy and Society (Harmondsworth, 1995), 38; Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, The Peasants of Languedoc (Princeton, 1996), 13. 1. The noxious bacteriological concoction we know as the Black Death had developed its deadly form among the bacillus, Yersina pestis, living in the stomachs of the fleas, Xenopsylla cheopsis, which lived on rodents who were native to the central Asian steppes.The key historical mutation in the bacillus most likely took place as the result of an incorrect genetic replication in the ongoing cycle of reproduction.2 Then, the interaction between Yersina pestis and humans turned deadly. It would seem that the plague flea breeds most freely and lives longest in the debris of cereals.William McNeill has hypothesized that the rats and 326 / Negative Feedbacks 2. There have been recurrent attempts to question the plague’s role in the Black Death. Most recently, Graham Twigg has argued that comparisons with the modern versions of the plague create some significant problems in identifying the earlier disease. Twigg argues that the rat flea, which is the primary carrier of the modern plague bacillus, Yersina pestis, needs average temperatures above twenty-five degrees centigrade for hatching. The modern plague is thus a warm-weather disease , whereas the Black Death spread across Europe, even reaching polar regions. Furthermore, its impact was not limited to the summer months. Second, the spread of modern plague is comparatively slow—“one epizootic in India took six weeks to travel three hundred feet.” In contrast, the Black Death moved at a rate approximating the speed of human foot travel; “The Black Death in England: An Epidemiological Dilemma,” in N. Bulst and R. Delort (eds.), Maldies et société (XIIe –XVIIIe siècles) (Paris, 1989), 75–98; see also Twigg, The Black Death: A Biological Appraisal (London, 1984). Three objections can be made to Twigg’s arguments. First, recent DNA testing of sixteenth-century plague victims’ remains in southern France have provided new evidence that the infectious agent in the Black Death was, indeed, Yersina pestis; cited in Joel E. Cohen, “The Bright Side of the Black Death,” New York Review of Books, March 4, 1999, 26. Second, Twigg’s attempt to compare modern experience of the plague with the Black Death might be misleading because bacilli, like other organisms, can mutate, resulting in a massive increase in their virulence; R. E. Lenski, “Evolution of Plague Virulence,” Nature, August 11, 1988, 473–74 (cited in Rosemary Horrox, The Black Death [Manchester, 1994], 8 n. 8). It is only fair to mention that Twigg has considered and rejected this second point. He notes that Yersina pestis is a stable organism, with “still only one stereotype ” despite the fact that it now can be found in more than 200 rodent species and 100 flea species;“The Black Death in England:An Epidemiological Dilemma,” 93. It would seem, therefore...

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