The Antecedents of the Black Death.
When the Black Death in its progress westwards came to Constantinople in 1347, the emperor-historian, John Cantacuzenes, was present in his capital to witness the arrival of the pestilence; in his history he wrote that it came among them from the country of the hyperborean Scythians, that is to say, the Tartars of the Crimea. The other contemporary Byzantine historian, Nicephorus Gregoras, says that the pestilence began among the Scythians in the Crimea and at the mouths of the Don. The Russian annals, which are an independent source, and likely enough to have a correct tradition, also say that the plague was God’s punishment on the people of the Don territory and of several other localities with obsolete names, including the famous city of Sarai on the Volga[281]. The Chersonese, and the country from the Don to the Volga, or from the Euxine to the Caspian, are the regions thus clearly indicated as the scene of the first outburst of the Black Death; but there was no clue to its unaccountable appearance there, or to the connexion between its outburst on the confines of Europe and the distant home in the East which the rumour of the day vaguely assigned to it. The more definite association of the Black Death with China dates from 1757, when the abbé Des Guignes, in his Histoire des Huns[282], took up the old tradition of the Arab historian, Aboel Mahasin, that the plague began in Tartary, that the smell of corpses spread on every side, that the infection passed from Cathay or Tartary to the Tartars of the Kaptchac (Crimea), and from them to Constantinople and Europe on the one hand, and to Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt and North Africa on the other. He pointed out also that the overland caravan trade was a ready means of transport for the infection. That which specially attracted his attention as the historian of the Mongol power was the other statement of the Arab historian in the same context, that China had been visited by floods so disastrous that men, beasts, and even birds perished, and that the country was almost depopulated. Upon that hint Des Guignes collected from the Chinese annals of the first half of the fourteenth century a considerable list[283] of calamities, which had actually happened—floods causing the loss of millions of lives, earthquakes, and the like, appending the catalogue without comment as a note to the text where he has occasion to mention the Black Death. Des Guignes’ note was reproduced verbatim by Hecker in his essay on the Black Death in 1832, and the unwonted series of phenomena in China was made the basis of certain mystical speculations as to the effect of earthquakes in causing a “progressive infection of the zones,” a perturbation of “the earth’s organism,” a “baneful commotion of the atmosphere,” or the like. In that nebulous and unsatisfactory state the old tradition of the Black Death originating in China has remained to the present hour; the intuition of the Peking Jesuit had merely been appropriated and set forth in his own way by the German “Naturphilosoph[284].”
Meanwhile, in 1842 a clue to Des Guignes’ conjecture of a connexion between the importation of the Black Death and the China land-route was found (but not followed up) in the discovery by Henschel of a Latin manuscript in the Rhediger Library at Breslau[285]. This was a narrative compiled by one Gabriel de Mussis, a jurist of Piacenza, who had been practising as a notary or advocate among the Genoese and Venetians trading around the shores of the Euxine and Caspian, and had been an eyewitness of the outbreak of the plague in that region. De Mussis has no theory of the origin of the plague; he merely narrates the events as they unfolded themselves before his own eyes; so much was he in the midst of them that he was a passenger on board the very ship which brought the first seeds of the Black Death direct from the Crimea to Genoa as early as the spring of 1347.
The substance of this story is that the Italian merchants, who were then settled in considerable numbers at the various termini or entrepôts of the overland trade from China and Central Asia by the more northern route, were harassed by the Tartar hordes; that they had stood a siege in Tana, on the Don, but had been driven out of it, and had sought refuge for themselves and their merchandise within the walls of Caffa, a small fortified post on the Crimean Straits (of Kertch), built by Genoese not long before; that Caffa was besieged in due course by the Tartar barbarians; that the investment lasted nearly three years; that the merchants and others, crowded into the narrow space within the walls, were put to great straits and could hardly breathe, being only partially relieved by the arrival of a ship with supplies; that the plague broke out among the besieging Tartar host and daily destroyed thousands; that the Tartars threw the pestilent dead bodies inside the walls by their engines of siege, so that the infection took hold of those within the fort; that the Tartars dispersed in panic and spread the infection all over the shores of the Euxine, Caspian and Levant; that such of the Italian traders as were able, De Mussis himself with them, escaped from Caffa in a ship; and that the infection appeared in Genoa in its most deadly form a day or two after the arrival of the ship, although none of those on board were suffering from the plague.
These are all the circumstances related by De Mussis of the beginning of the outbreak as known to himself at first hand: the rest of his narrative is occupied with various incidents of the plague in Europe, with pious reflections, and accounts of portents. His single reference to China is as follows: “In the Orient, about Cathay, where is the head of the world and the beginning of the earth, horrible and fearful signs appeared; for serpents and frogs, descending in dense rains, entered the dwellings and consumed countless numbers, wounding them by their venom and corroding them with their teeth. In the meridian parts, about the Indies, regions were overturned by earthquakes, and cities wasted in ruin, tongues of flame being shot forth. Fiery vapours burnt up many, and in places there were copious rains of blood and murderous showers of stones.” De Mussis has certainly no scientific intention; nor can it be said that any scientific use has been made of his manuscript since its discovery. For Häser, its editor, merely reproduces in his history the passage from Hecker on the three overland routes between Europe and the East, without remarking on the fact that De Mussis definitely places the outbreak of the plague at the European terminus of one of them: its remote origin is involved in “impenetrable obscurity;” all we can say is that it came from the East, “the cradle of the human race[286].”
But the entirely credible narrative by De Mussis of the outbreak of plague at the siege of Caffa is just the clue that was wanting to unravel the meaning of the widespread rumour of the time, that the plague came from China. Let us first examine somewhat closely the source of that rumour. It finds its most definite expression in an Arabic account of the Black Death at Granada, by the famous Moorish statesman of that city, Ibn-ul-Khatib[287]. Besides giving the local circumstances for Granada, he makes various remarks on the nature of the plague, and on its mode of spreading, which are not exceeded in shrewdness and insight by the more scientific doctrines of later times. Its origin in China he repeats on the authority of several trustworthy and far-travelled men, more particularly of his celebrated countryman Ibn-Batuta, or “the Traveller,” whose story was that the plague arose in China from the corruption of many corpses after a war, a famine, and a conflagration.
The mention of Ibn-Batuta, as the authority more particularly, has a special interest. That traveller was actually in China from 1342 to 1346. In his book of travels[288] he tells us how on his way back (he took the East-Indian sea-route to the Persian Gulf) he came at length to Damascus, Aleppo and Cairo in the summer of 1348, and was a witness of the Black Death at each of those places, and of the mixed religious processions at Damascus of Jews with their Hebrew Scriptures and Christians with their Gospels. But he says not one word anywhere as to the origin of the plague in China, whence he was journeying homewards. He continued his journey to Tangier, his birthplace, and crossed thence to Spain about the beginning of 1350. At Granada he spent some days among his countrymen, of whom he mentions in his journal four by name; but the most famous of them, Ibn-ul-Khatib, he does not mention. However, here was Ibn-Batuta at Granada, a year or two after the Black Death, discoursing on all manner of topics with the most eminent Moors of the place; and here is one of them, Ibn-ul-Khatib, in an account of the Black Death at Granada, quoting the report of Ibn-Batuta that the pestilence arose in China from the corruption of unburied corpses. None of the other statements of an Eastern origin can compare with this in precision or in credibility; they all indeed confuse the backward extension of the plague from the Euxine eastwards to Khiva, Bokhara and the like, with its original progress towards Europe from a source still farther east. The authority of Ibn-Batuta himself is not, of course, that of historian or observer; although he was in China during part, at least, of the national calamities which the Chinese Annals record, he says nothing of them, and probably witnessed nothing of them. But the traveller was a likely person to have heard correctly the gossip of the East and to have judged of its credibility; so that there is a satisfaction in tracing it through him.
The siege of Caffa, and the general circumstances of it, we may take as historical on the authority of the Italian notary who was there; but it may be doubted whether the plague began, as he says, among the nomade hordes outside the fort. In sieges it has been not unusual for both sides to suffer from infective disease; and although it is not always easy to say where the disease may have begun, the presumption is that it arose among those who were most crowded, most pressed by want, and most desponding in spirit. It is, of course, not altogether inconceivable that the Tartar besiegers of Caffa had bred a pestilential disease in their camp; the nomades of the Cyrenaic plateau have bred bubo-plague itself more than once in recent years in their wretched summer tents, and plague has appeared from time to time in isolated or remote Bedouin villages on the basaltic plateaus of Arabia. There is nothing in the nomade manner of life adverse to pestilential products, least of all in the life of nomades encamped for a season. But such outbreaks of bubo-plague or of typhus fever have been local, sporadic, or non-diffusive. On the other hand the plague which arose at the siege of Caffa was the Black Death, one of the two greatest pestilences in the history of the world. Let us then see whether there is any greater likelihood of finding inside the walls of Caffa the lurking germs of so great a pestilence. Within the walls of the Genoese trading fort were the Italian merchants driven in from all around that region, with their merchandise—as De Mussis says, fugientes pro suarum tutione personarum et rerum. Previous to their three years’ siege in Caffa they, or some of them, had stood a siege in Tana, and had retreated to the next post on the homeward route. Tana was at the eastward bend of the Don, whence the road across the steppe is shortest to the westward bend of the Volga; a little above the bend of the Volga was the great city of Sarai—whence the caravans started on their overland journey along northern parallels, across mountain ranges and the desert of Gobi, to enter China at its north-western angle, just within the end of the Great Wall[289]. The merchandise of Sarai and Tana was the return merchandise of China—the bales of silks and fine cloths, spices and drugs, which had become the articles of a great commerce between China and Europe since Marco Polo first showed the way, and which continued to reach Europe by the caravan routes until about 1360: then the route was closed owing to the final overthrow of the authority of the Great Khan, which had once secured a peaceful transit from the Yellow Sea to the Black Sea—so completely closed that men forgot, two hundred years after, that it had ever existed.
Did these bales of Chinese stuffs, carried into Caffa for protection, contain the seeds of the Black Death? There is, at least, nothing improbable in the seeds of plague lurking in bales of goods; that mode of transmission was afterwards recognized as highly characteristic of the plague during its Levantine days. Nor is there anything improbable in the seeds of an infection being carried thousands of miles across the deserts of Central Asia; cholera came in that way from India in 1827-8 by the caravan-route to Cabul, Balkh, Bokhara, Khiva and the Kirghiz Steppe to Orenburg, and again in 1847 to Astrakhan; and the slow land-borne viruses of those two great epidemics exceeded in virulence the later importations of cholera by the sea route from the East. Still farther, there is nothing improbable in the germs of plague lying latent for a long time, or in the disease existing as a potency although not manifested in a succession of cases. The next stage of its progress, from Caffa to Genoa, illustrates that very point; for we know that there were no cases of plague on board ship, although the very atmosphere or smell of the new arrival seemed sufficient to taint the whole air of Genoa, and to carry death to every part of the city within a couple of days. And lastly the long imprisonment of a virus in bales of goods, the crowding of merchants and merchandise into the narrow space of a walled seaport, amidst the almost inevitable squalor and fœtor of a three years’ siege, were the very circumstances needed to raise the potency of the assumed virus to an unusual height, to give it a degree of virulence that would make it effective, and a power of diffusion that would spread and continue the liberated infection after the manner of the greatest of pestilences.
Thus, if we have to choose between the origin of the plague-virus among the Tartar hordes besieging the China merchants within the walls of Caffa, and the pre-existence of that virus, for a long time latent, among the goods or effects of the besieged, the latter hypothesis must be accorded the advantage in probability. Accepting it, we follow the virus back to Tana on the Don, from Tana to Sarai on the Volga, from Sarai by a well-trodden route which need not be particularized[290], for many weeks’ journey until we come to the soil of China. According to a dominant school of epidemiologists it is always enough to have traced a virus to a remote source, to the “roof of the world” or to the back of the east wind, and there to leave it, in the full assurance that there must have been circumstances to account for its engendering there, perhaps in an equally remote past, if only we knew them. If, however, we follow the trail back definitely to China, it is our duty to connect it there with an actual history or tradition, immemorial if need be, of Chinese plague. But there is no such history or tradition to be found. We know something of the China of Kublai Khan, fifty years before, from the book of Marco Polo; and the only possible reference to plague there is an ambiguous statement about “carbuncles” in a remote province, which was probably Yun-nan. Not only so, but if we scrutinize the Chinese Annals closely, we shall find that the thirty years preceding the Black Death were indeed marked by many great calamities and loss of life on a vast scale, by floods, droughts, earthquakes, famines and famine-fevers, but not by pestilence unconnected with these; on the other hand, the thirty or forty years after the Black Death had overrun Europe, beginning with the year 1352, are marked in the Chinese Annals (as summarized in the Imperial Encyclopædia of Peking, 1726) by a succession of “great plagues” in various provinces of the Empire, which are not associated with calamitous seasons, but stand alone as disease-calamities pure and simple[291]. If the Black Death connects at all with events in China, these events were natural calamities and their attendant loss of life, and not outbreaks of plague itself; for the latter, assuming them to have been bubo-plague, were subsequent in China to the devastation of Europe by the plague.
We are left, then, to make what we can of the antecedent calamities of China; and we may now revert to the curious rumour of the time that the relevant thing in China was the corruption of many corpses left unburied after inundation, war and conflagration. So far as war and conflagration are concerned they are quite subordinate; there was no war except an occasional ineffective revolt in some remote western province, and the conflagrations were minor affairs, noticed, indeed, in the Annals, but lost among the greater calamities. The floods, droughts and famines were events of almost annual recurrence for many years before, so that no period in the Annals of China presents such a continuous picture of national calamity, full as Chinese history has at all times been of disasters of the same kind. It was the decadence of the great Mongol empire, founded by Genghiz and carried by Kublai to that marvellous height of splendour and prosperity which we read of in the book of Marco Polo. The warlike virtues of the earlier Mongol rulers had degenerated in their successors into sensual vices during the times of peace; and the history of the country, priest-ridden, tax-burdened, and ruled by women and eunuchs, neglected in its thousand water-ways and in all the safeguards against floods and famine which wiser rulers had set up, became from year to year an illustration of the ancient Chinese maxim, that misgovernment in the palace is visited by the anger of the sky.
The following epitome of the calamities in China is taken from De Mailla’s Histoire générale de la Chine. Paris, 1777, 9 vols. 4to., a translation of the abridged official annals.
The year 1308 marks the beginning of the series of bad seasons. Droughts in some places, floods in others, locusts and failure of the crops, brought famine and pestilence. The people in Kiang-Hoaï were reduced to live on wild roots and the bark of trees. In Ho-nan and Chan-tong the fathers ate the flesh of the children. The imperial granaries were still able to supply grain, but not nearly enough for the people’s wants. The provinces of Kiang-si and Che-kiang were depopulated by the plague or malignant fever which followed the famine. The ministers sent in their resignations, which were not accepted.
In 1313 the same events recur, including the resignations of ministers. An epidemic carried off many in the capital, and the whole empire was desolated by drought. At a council of ministers to devise remedies and avert further calamities it was proposed by some to copy the institutions of ancient empires celebrated for their virtue, and by others to abolish the Bhuddist priesthood of Foh as the cause of all misfortunes. The throne is now occupied by Gin-tsong, an emperor of a serious and ascetic disposition. In 1314 he revived the old Chinese system of competitive examinations and the distinctive dress among the grades of mandarins, which the earlier Mongol rulers had been able to dispense with. Next year there is a public distribution of grain, and a check to the exactions of tax-gatherers in the distressed districts. In 1317, it appears that the provincial mandarins, in defiance of express orders, had neglected the laws of Kublai with reference to the distribution of grain, although it was dangerous to defer such public aid longer; they had failed also to relax their rigour in collecting the taxes. One day the emperor found at Peking a soldier in rags from a distant garrison, and discovered that a system of embezzlement in the army clothing department had been going on for five years. Gin-tsong is reported to have said to his ministers, “My august predecessors have left wise laws, which I have always had at heart to follow closely; but I see with pain that they are neglected, and that my people are unhappy.”
In 1318 we read of a great flood in one province, of multitudes drowned, and of a public distribution of grain. In 1320, forty of the Censors of the Empire remonstrated against the cruel exactions of “public leeches,” and against a practice of calumniating honest men so as to get them out of the way. The emperor Gin-tsong died in that year, aged thirty-three, and with his death the last serious attempt to check the flood of corruption came to an end. In 1321 there is drought in Ho-nan, followed by famine. In 1324 we read of droughts, locusts, inundations and earthquakes. The emperor demanded advice of the nobles, ministers and wise men, and received the following answer: “While the palace of the prince is full of eunuchs, astrologers, physicians, women, and other idle people, whose maintenance costs the State an enormous sum, the people are plunged in extreme misery. The empire is a family, and the emperor its father: let him listen to the cries of the miserable.” In 1325 famine follows the disasters of the year before; and we learn that the people were supplied from the full granaries of the rich, who were paid, not out of the State treasury, but by places in the mandarinate! In 1326 the tyranny and licentiousness of the Bhuddist lamas reaches a climax, and an edict is issued against them. The year 1327 is marked by a series of calamities and portents—drought, locusts, ruined crops, earthquakes, inundations. In 1330, again floods and the harvest destroyed, a cruel famine in Hou-Kouang, millions of acres of land ruined, and 400,000 families reduced to beggary. In 1331 the harvest is worse than in the year before—in Che-kiang there were more than 800,000 families who did not gather a single grain of corn or rice,—and all the while enormous taxes were ground out of universal poverty.
In 1333 begins the long and calamitous reign of Shun-ti, who came to the throne a weak youth of thirteen. Next year the misfortunes of China touch their highest point. Inundations ruined the crops in Chan-tong; a drought in Che-kiang brought famine and pestilence; in the southern provinces generally, famine and floods caused the deaths of 2,270,000 families, or of 13,000,000 individuals. In 1336 inundations in Chan-tong ruined the harvest; in Kiang-nan and Che-kiang the first harvest was a failure from drought, multitudes perished of hunger, and a plague broke out. The emperor, insensible to the misfortunes of his people, abandons himself to his pleasures. Next year sees the first of those provincial revolts, led by obscure Chinese peasants, which eventually overthrew the dynasty in 1368. Floods occurred in more than one river basin, by which multitudes of men and beasts were drowned; in the valley of the Kiang (a tributary of the Hoang-ho) four millions perished. For several years we read of numerous and repeated shocks of earthquakes, in 1341 of a great famine, in 1342 of a famine so severe that human flesh was eaten, in 1343 of seven towns submerged, in 1344 of a great tract of country inundated by the sea in consequence of an earthquake, in 1345 of earthquakes in Pe-chili, in 1346 of earthquakes for seven days in Chan-tong, and of a great famine in Chan-si. In 1347 earthquakes in various provinces, and drought in Ho-tong, followed by many deaths. The record of disasters in De Mailla’s abridged annals, and in Des Guignes, who had clearly access to fuller narrations, comes to an end for a time at the year 1347.
It will be observed that in these records there is comparatively little said of epidemic sickness. The references to pestilence would in no case suggest more than the typhus fever which has been the usual attendant upon Chinese famines, and has never shown the independent vitality and diffusive properties of plague. But the minor place occupied by actual pestilence in China, in the years before the Black Death in Europe, is brought out even more clearly on comparing that period with the section of the Chinese annals for the generation following. In the chronology of Chinese epidemics drawn up by Gordon (London, 1884) from the Peking Encyclopædia of 1726, there are, from 1308-1347, just the same entries of pestilence as are given above from De Mailla’s and Des Guignes’ French adaptation of the Annals. (Gordon makes the obvious mistake of attributing to pestilence the enormous loss of life which the Annals clearly assigned to floods and famines, with their attendant sickness.) But with the year 1352 we enter upon a great pestilential period, as clearly marked in the history of China by the annual recurrence of vast epidemics as the decades before it were marked by the unusual frequency of floods, famines and earthquakes. Every year from 1352 to 1363, except 1355, has an entry of “great pestilence” or “great plague” (yi-li), in one province or another, although the old tale of floods and famines has come to an end in the Annals. The last of the nearly continuous series of great pestilences is in 1369, when there was a great pest in Fukien, and “the dead lay in heaps on the ground.” There is then a break until 1380, and after that a longer break until 1403. It would thus appear as if the great pestilential period of China in the fourteenth century had not coincided with the succession of disastrous seasons, but had followed the latter at a distinct interval. Conversely the years of plague from 1352 to 1369 do not appear to have been years of inundations and bad harvests; they stand out in the chronology, by comparison, as years of plague-sickness pure and simple; and although nothing is said to indicate the type of bubo-plague, yet the disease can hardly be assumed to have been the old famine fevers or other sickness directly due to floods and scarcity, so long as not a word is said of floods and famines in that context or in the Annals generally. The suggestion is that the soil of China may not have felt the full effects of the plague virus, originally engendered thereon, until some few years after the same had been carried to Europe, having produced there within a short space of time the stupendous phenomenon of the Black Death. If there be something of a paradox in that view, it is the facts themselves that refuse to fall into what might be thought the natural sequence.
The historian Gaubil thinks that the national Annals make the most of these recurring calamities, having been written by the official scribes of the next dynasty, who sought to discredit the Mongol rule as much as possible[292]; but it is not suggested that the compilers had invented the series of disasters,—now in one province or river basin, now in another, at one time with thirteen millions of lives lost, at another with four hundred thousand families reduced to beggary, this time a drought, and next time a flood, and in another series of years a succession of destructive earthquakes.
We are here concerned with discovering any possible relation that these disasters, coming one upon another almost without time for recovery, can have had to the engendering of the plague-virus. According to the rumours of the time, it was the corruption of unburied corpses in China which caused the Black Death; and certainly the unburied corpses were there, a vera causa, if that were all. Recent experiences in China make it easy for us to construct in imagination the state of the shores of rivers after those fatal inundations of the fourteenth century, or of the roadsides after the recurring famines. Thus, of the famine of 1878 it is said[293]: “Coffins are not to be got for the corpses, nor can graves be prepared for them. Their blood is a dispersed mass on the ground, their bones lie all about.... Pestilence [it is otherwise known to have been typhus fever] comes with the famine, and who can think of medicine for the plague or coffins for the multitude of the dead?” Or, again, according to a memorial in the official Peking Gazette of 16 January, 1878, “the roads are lined with corpses in such numbers as to distance all efforts for their interment[294].”
There is much of sameness in the history of China from century to century; what happened in 1878, and again on a lesser scale two or three years ago, must have happened on an unparalleled scale year after year during the ill-starred period which ended about 1342; there must have been no ordinary break-down in the decencies and sanitary safeguards of interment in such years as 1334, when thirteen millions (two million, two hundred and seventy thousand families) were swept away by the floods of the Yang-tsi, or destroyed by hunger and disease. But we are not left altogether to the exercise of the imagination. A strangely vivid picture remains to us of a scene in China in those years, which a returning missionary saw as in a vision. The friar Odoric, of Pordenone, had spent six years in Northern China previous to 1327 or 1328, when he returned to Italy by one of the overland routes. The story of his travels[295] was afterwards taken down from his lips, and it is made to end with one gruesome scene, which is brought in without naming the time or the place. It is a vision of a valley of death, invested with the same air of generality as in Bunyan’s allegory of the common lot.
“Another great and terrible thing I saw. For, as I went through a certain valley which lieth by the River of Delights (flumen deliciarum) I saw therein many dead corpses lying. And I heard also therein sundry kinds of music, but chiefly nakers, which were marvellously played upon. And so great was the noise thereof that very great fear came upon me. Now, this valley is seven or eight miles long; and if any unbeliever enter therein, he quitteth it never again, but perisheth incontinently. Yet I hesitated not to go in that I might see once for all what the matter was. And when I had gone in I saw there, as I have said, such numbers of corpses as no one without seeing it could deem credible. And at one side of the valley, in the very rock, I beheld as it were the face of a man very great and terrible, so very terrible indeed that for my exceeding great fear my spirit seemed to die in me. Wherefore I made the sign of the Cross, and began continually to repeat Verbum caro factum, but I dared not at all come nigh that face, but kept at seven or eight paces from it. And so I came at length to the other end of the valley, and there I ascended a hill of sand and looked around me.”
Narrated as it is of no specified place and of no one year of his journey, it may stand, and perhaps it was meant to stand, for a common experience of China in the period of Mongol decadence. Whether he left the country by the gorges of the Yang-tsi and the Yun-nan route, or along the upper basin of the Hoang-ho by the more usual northern route to the desert of Gobi, his vision of a Valley of Corpses is equally significant.