Plague in the Ancient & Medieval World

Burying the Dead

From Ancient History Encyclopedia:

The word 'plague', in defining a lethal epidemic, was coined by the physician Galen (l. 130-210 CE) who lived through the Antonine Plague (165 - c. 180/190 CE) but the disease was recorded long before in relating the affliction of the Plague of Athens (429-426 BCE) which killed many of the city’s inhabitants, including the statesman Pericles (l. 495-429 BCE). Plagues certainly may have existed prior to the Athenian outbreak – and almost certainly did – but most studies of the epidemic begin with Athens as it is the first recorded by an eyewitness and survivor, the historian Thucydides (l. 460/455 - 399/398 BCE). Plagues are routinely named either for the person who reported them, the monarch at the time of the outbreak, the region afflicted, or by an epithet as in the case of the Black Death.

The major recorded plagues of the ancient and medieval world are:

• Plague of Athens
• Antonine Plague
• Plague of Cyprian
• Plague of Justinian
• Roman Plague
• Near East Plagues
• Black Death
• Columbian Exchange Epidemics

Of these, the Columbian Exchange Epidemics are not considered plague as they were a sweeping contagion of smallpox and other diseases but were just as lethal to the indigenous people of the Americas as plague was elsewhere. Other epidemics not considered plagues but which still ravaged populations were leprosy – especially during the 11th century CE in Europe – and the Japanese smallpox epidemic of 735-737 CE. Epidemics and pandemics continued into the modern era and, among the deadliest, were the 1918-1919 CE Spanish Flu epidemic and the HIV/AIDS epidemic (1981-present) though there were many others. At the time of this writing, the Covid-19/coronavirus is proving itself the latest addition to the list of most lethal pandemics in world history. (Read more.)

From The Conversation:

We should assess the impact of such mortality in the short term and the long. The immediate calamity saw utter dislocation: food prices soared, people lost their loved ones, clergy died in large numbers. Those who could, escaped to safer spaces, but most could not. Workers were in high demand to maintain the production of food and goods, and so their wages rocketed, despite the emergency legislation introduced by most rulers to fix pay at pre-plague levels. 

In hundreds of towns - first in southern France and Iberia in 1348, then in the Holy Roman Empire in 1349 – rumours spread that Jews had caused the mortality by poisoning water supplies. Jews were killed in the thousands. Pope Clement VI repeatedly attempted to stop the killings, by pointing out in widely circulated letters that Jews were also dying of the plague. (Read more.) 

Also from The Conversation:

From 1347-51, the Black Death killed anywhere from one-tenth to one-half (or more) of Europe’s population. One English chronicler, Thomas Walsingham, noted how this “great mortality” transformed the known world: “Towns once packed with people were emptied of their inhabitants, and the plague spread so thickly that the living were hardly able to bury the dead.” As death tolls rose at exponential rates, rents dwindled, and swaths of land fell to waste “for want of the tenants who used to cultivate it….” 

As a medieval historian, I’ve been teaching the subject of plague for many years. If nothing else, the feelings of panic between the Black Death and the COVID-19 pandemic are reminiscent. Like today’s crisis, medieval writers struggled to make sense of the disease; theories on its origins and transmission abounded, some more convincing than others. Whatever the result, “… so much misery ensued,” wrote another English author, it was feared that the world would “hardly be able to regain its previous condition.” (Read more.) 

A meditation for the plague. From The National Review:

Two of Pascal’s best-known passages come into play in connection with the coronavirus. The first has it that “all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” The second speaks to the human condition: “Imagine a number of men in chains, all under sentence of death, some of whom each day are butchered in the sight of others; those remaining see their own condition in that of their fellows, and looking at each other with grief and despair await their turn. This is an image of the human condition.” The coronavirus has forced almost all of us, either in enforced or self-imposed quarantine, to sit quietly in our room, and the news of the continuing deaths it is causing — of the obscure and the celebrated — concentrates our minds on Pascal’s dark human condition. 

Montaigne, whom one does not think of as a dark writer, felt one couldn’t think too often or too much about death, especially one’s own. He wrote about death in three separate essays — “On Fear,” “Why We Should Not Be Deemed Happy Until after Our Death,” and “To Philosophize Is to Learn How to Die” — and his general point was that we should accustom ourselves to the idea of death, of our own death specifically, in order “to educate and train [our souls] for their encounter with that adversary, death.” Doing so, we would thereby fight free of the fear of death, so that when it does arrive “it will bear no new warning for [us]. As far as we possibly can we must have our boots on, ready to go.” Montaigne wished to die tending his cabbages, but, alas, he was instead the victim, at 59, in 1592, of quinsy, a disease of the throat that can be painful and that, in his case, rendered him speechless at the close of his life. 

“So it has come at last, the distinguished thing,” uttered Henry James of death on his own deathbed. Far from clear is what is distinguished about it, death, that most democratic of events, “an old joke,” as Turgenev once referred to it, “that comes to each of us afresh.” Yet if not death generally, then some deaths do seem more distinguished than others. Surely there are good and bad deaths, and sad because unnecessary deaths. A good death for men, most would agree, is one on the battlefield in a war fought for an important cause. The classic good death is thought to be that of Socrates, his principles intact, calmly drinking hemlock in the company of friends. For a woman a good death might be one in which she dies for her children or to stave off the death of others, a death marked by selflessness. A good death is often thought an easeful death, one unaccompanied by pain or mess. A death in one’s sleep at home at an advanced age is for most of us the very model of a good death. 

Perhaps the most famous easeful death was that of the philosopher David Hume — famous because James Boswell recorded it in his Life of Johnson. Hume “was quite different from the plump figure which he used to present,” Boswell wrote. “He seemed to be placid and even cheerful. He said he was just approaching to his end.” When Boswell asked him “if the thought of annihilation never gave him any uneasiness,” Hume answered: Not in the least, “no more than the thought that he had never been, as Lucretius observes.” Boswell reported Hume’s calm in the face of death to Samuel Johnson, who retorted: “He lied. He had a vanity in being thought easy. It is more probable that he lied than that so very improbable a thing should be as a man not afraid of death; of going into an unknown state and not being uneasy at leaving all that he knew.” 

Sad deaths sometimes seem to constitute the preponderance of deaths. Sad is a death that comes about through malfeasance, foolish misbehavior, accident. Sad it seems to die too soon because of heavy smoking, obesity, drugs, careless driving. (I write “too soon,” but then Balzac, in Cousin Pons, notes that “death always comes too soon.”) A too-early death, in which one is deprived by a large measure of the full share of one’s days, is inherently sad. Too early is any death that falls well below the life expectancy of the day. One thinks of Anton Chekhov, George Orwell, F. Scott Fitzgerald, all of whom died in their forties. (Read more.) 

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