Catastrophe: An Investigation Into the Origins of the Modern World (4 page)

J
ohn was describing the epidemic of 541–543—the first visitation of the plague. But the full social and political impact of the disease lay in its remorseless habit of returning to claim the lives of those it had previously spared.

The church historian Evagrius lived through four great plague epidemics and lost most of his family to them. In the year 593, at the age of fifty-eight, he wrote down his memories in a very personal lamentation.

“I believe no part of the human race to have been unafflicted by the disease,” for it occurred in some cities “to such an extent that they were rendered empty of almost all their inhabitants.” Evagrius regarded it as his responsibility to describe these events, as he was present at the beginning of the spread of the bubonic plague, and was struck by it while still a schoolboy.

“And during the course of the various visitations, I lost to the disease many of my children and my wife and much of the rest of my kin … For now, as I write this, I am 58 years old and it is not quite two years since the fourth outbreak of plague struck Antioch and I lost my daughter and the son born to her in addition to those [I lost] earlier.

“The means by which one contracted this disease were diverse and beyond telling. For some perished just through association and living together, others by physical contact, or by being in the same house, or even [through contact in] the market-place. Some people had escaped infected cities and themselves remained well, but passed on the disease to those who were not sick. There were those who remained entirely unaffected, even though they lived with many of the afflicted, in fact coming into contact not only with many sufferers but also with the dead. Others positively embraced death on account of the total loss of their children and family, and for this reason went cheek-by-jowl with the sick, but still were not struck down, as if the disease resisted their will.”

M
any historians have tended to see the plague pandemic that devastated so much of the world in the sixth and seventh centuries as consisting of a series of distinct outbreaks. Some church historians and others who were alive at the time even saw it that way, but they were often looking at the catastrophe from the vantage point of the large cities where they lived—places such as Constantinople, Antioch, and Alexandria.

In reality, both the major plague epidemics and the less extensive outbreaks should be regarded as one integrated event, albeit a very long one, which lasted for between 180 and 210 years. Rather than looking at the records of simply the most prolific contemporary historians, it is vital to trawl through a wider number of sources to find even the smallest reference to plague.

Historians have found that there were
dozens
of outbreaks over the years from 541 to 717, and perhaps even as late as 745.
⁴
And those are just the epidemics and outbreaks that are recorded. From c.
A
.
D
. 600 onward, there appears to be a reduction in the frequency of plague outbreaks in the Roman Empire, but this may simply be a function of the paucity of sources from the seventh century. Indeed, probably only a small percentage of the outbreaks were ever recorded, and of those records that were made, only an even smaller percentage have survived to the present day. These records are best for the eastern Mediterranean region and for western Europe; the pandemic also affected, though not initially, China and Persia. Yemen was almost certainly hit by some time in the 540s. And then there are vast areas—such as Africa or central Europe—that no doubt were affected but for which virtually no written records exist.

The plague passed from rat to human, sometimes from human to human, hardly pausing on its unpredictable journeys. Everywhere it rampaged, it must have substantially reduced population levels, thus creating vast tracts of abandoned agricultural land.
⁵
Sometimes it would spread to myriad towns
⁶
and villages in a single year, while on other occasions it would bide its time, skulking in a few quiet or remote localities, only to burst forth from these nameless havens of death a few years later. Indeed, it is likely that at no time between 541 and c. 750 was the plague ever entirely absent from the Mediterranean region and its various hinterlands.

T H E  O R I G I N S  O F 
T H E  P L A G U E

T
wenty-five days’ sailing time down the east coast of Africa, one arrives at a “metropolis” called Rhapta.
¹
This information, recorded by the second-century
A
.
D
. Greek geographer Ptolemy, is the last-known contemporary reference to a now long-lost African city that once flourished somewhere along the coastline of what is now Kenya and Tanzania.
²

The only other reference—in a first-century
A
.
D
. pilots’ manual called
The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea
—says Rhapta was a source for “great quantities of ivory and tortoiseshell” and was inhabited by “very big bodied men.”
³
The metropolis was located on a river “not far from the sea”
⁴
and was also involved in the export of “rhinoceros horn, and a little nautilus shell” and the importation of glass beads and iron goods, especially “axes, knives and small awls.”
⁵

According to
The Periplus,
written around
A
.
D
. 40, the place was at least nominally under the control of Arab merchants from Yemen. It appears that these merchants intermarried with local women, gave gifts of wine and grain to the local chiefs, and had royal Yemeni approval to exact tribute from the area.

From
The Periplus
and Ptolemy, it is clear that Rhapta was the most remote—and the largest—of four ancient East African trading ports, from north to south: Opone (now known as Ras Hafun, in Somalia), Essina and Toniki (both near modern Barawa in Somalia), and Rhapta itself.

Opone—spectacularly sited on what is essentially an island linked to the coast by a thirty-mile-long sandbar—may have had several hundred inhabitants, covered up to five acres, and appears to have been abandoned some time in the mid–sixth century
A
.
D
. The latest pottery found by archaeologists on the site dates from the fifth or early sixth century. Up till that time, it seems to have acted as a transshipment point for Mediterranean, African, and Indian trade goods.

The other three ports, Essina, Toniki, and Rhapta, have never been archaeologically detected—probably because, like Opone, they never made it into the medieval period. Certainly an examination of the twenty-two pre-eleventh-century settlement and trading sites on the East African coast that have been archaeologically investigated shows that nineteen started functioning only between the seventh and ninth centuries
A
.
D
., two may possibly have started up before the sixth century, and only one definitely came into existence before the sixth. That strongly suggests severe settlement discontinuity in the sixth century. What is more, throughout East Africa, the pottery type abruptly changes at exactly the same time. Before the sixth century it is all early Iron Age (Kwale ware), while after the sixth century it is all late Iron Age (Tana ware). There was also a move in some areas at the same time from a concentration on agriculture to a more pastoral economy.
⁶

The sixth century was a great watershed in East African history—a period of very rapid change and probably decline, in which the key ports simply ceased to exist and the agricultural economy shrank. The culprit was almost certainly plague—the same epidemic that devastated Europe and the Near East in that same fateful century.
⁷
Indeed, it was most likely from an ancient East African wild-animal reservoir of plague that the disease broke out to infect so much of the late antique world.

Historically, there have been several major natural plague reservoirs in which the disease circulated harmlessly among specific high-immunity wild animals. These areas—the Himalayas, Central/East Africa, and the central Asian steppes—have been the ultimate sources for the plague epidemics that have hit Europe and elsewhere over the centuries.
⁸

Evidence that the sixth-century pandemic originated in Africa rather than Asia is very clear.
⁹
First of all, the major Asian high-population region, China, did not become infected until half a century after the Mediterranean region had suffered its first visitation. Indeed, China was infected from the Mediterranean region via the Middle East. Certainly the major Middle Eastern power, Persia, was infected only after the disease had hit the Roman Empire. The Persians apparently contracted it from Roman soldiers. Second, there is no evidence of plague being endemic on the central Asian steppes prior to the later medieval period. Third, a major contemporary source, the Syrian-born historian Evagrius, actually recorded that the epidemic came from Africa (“Aethiopea”).

As already described, the first town in the Mediterranean world to be hit was the port of Pelusium, where, after transiting the Roman world’s equivalent of the Suez Canal, cargo originating in the Red Sea area and in Africa was unloaded for transshipment to the rest of the Roman world. What’s more, Yemen—halfway between East Africa and the Mediterranean—seems to have been an early victim of the plague, being hit by the disease sometime in the 540s.
¹⁰

But why did the plague break out of its animal reservoir in East Africa at that particular time?
¹¹
The answer is prosaic in the extreme—the weather.

Modern research on surviving wild-animal reservoirs of plague—monitored by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control—has concluded that most plague outbreaks are caused by sudden and severe climatic change. Massively excessive rainfall is the most likely cause of plague spread, especially if it follows a drought, although a severe drought followed by normal weather could theoretically also spark an outbreak.

When there is excessive rainfall, vegetation growth increases. Thus there is more food available for herbivorous animals and insects, and rodents—including those that are carriers of the plague bacterium but are themselves immune to it—therefore breed more. Their larger numbers enable a greater survival rate vis-à-vis the slower-breeding predators who feed off the rodents, and a rodent breeding explosion occurs. In order to find their own foraging territory, the cumulative range of the rodents has to increase, and a virtual bow wave of these plague-carrying wild animals spreads inexorably outward over a period of months. Soon the creatures come into contact with other normally plague-free rodents, which then spread the disease to humans.

In the slightly less likely, though theoretically feasible, drought scenario, lack of rainfall and food kills huge numbers of plague-carrying wild rodents and the larger predators that normally eat them. However, the minute the drought is over, the fast-breeding rodents recover their numbers quickly compared to the slower-breeding predators. There is then, for a few years, a great imbalance between hunter and hunted in favor of the hunted. A breeding explosion takes place and the plague-infested rodents spread like wildfire.