BOOK WORLD June 15, 1969

One-third of Europe dead of the plague

 

 

THE BLACK DEATH. By Philip Ziegler. John Day. 319 pp.

$6.95.
By Joshua Lederberg

 

The plague has always slumbered here and there
around the world. About the year 1340, it flared up in
Central Asia near Lake Issyk Kul, to the east of Tash-
kent. Its ravages in Asia and India are uncounted. By
1346 it had reached the Crimea, a scene of brush-fire

conflicts between the Genoese and Tartar empires. With - -

an intuitive sophistication in bacteriological warfare,
the Tartars infected the Genoese fort by catapulting
their own corpses over its walls. The stricken Genoese
fled back to Italy, carrying the plague with them and
igniting an epidemic, known to history as the Black
Death, that spread rapidly across Europe. During the
next two-and-a-half years it is estimated that about one-
third of Europe’s population was killed by it. But we
do not have accurate statistics, and other guesses vary

from 20 to 60 per cent, which seems a reasonable range -

for the plague’s impact on different communities. The

survivors were beset by repeated but much milder out- -

breaks for the next sixty years.

In this excellent book, Philip Ziegler suggests that
Europe had been ‘weakened by several decades of eco-
nomic and agricultural decline, but we have very little
scientific information to explain the ferocity of the
epidemic. Most specialists believe that the present-day
plague bacillus would be quite capable of a similar
recrudescence except for the availability of antibiotics
and pesticides to control rat fleas, if not the rats them-
selves, both of which maintain the potential contagion.

Fourteenth-century Europe only dimly understood
the role of contagion, and was told by its leaders that

 

Joshua Lederberg, a Nobel Prize winner, is a profes-
sor of genetics in the Medical School of Stanford
University. Dot

 

 

Surgeon opening plague swellings, 1482

 

 

 

the plague was above all a visitation of a vengeful God

. for vaguely specified sins. In Central Europe the Jews

were persecuted as scapegoats, according to long-es-

tablished custom, but the persecutors discovered no

immunity to plague by that route.
One historical side effect of the Black Death in Scan-

dinavia may have been a weakening of support for the
dying colonies of Norsemen in Greenland. This foot-

/

hold collapsed before the rediscovery of the New World
by a Genoese in 1492 — and the fact that we celebrate
Columbus Day is at least one historical consequence.

Ziegler tells the story with ample but not stifling doc-
umentation and with an engaging balance of detached
statement and illustration. The statistical arguments
about the mortality percentages are a necessary build-
ing stone and, happily, are assembled in one chapter.

_ With equal discretion, Ziegler has written another chap-

ter devoted to a fictional synthesis of the experience of

_a composite village in England. Though the primary

data are sparse and Ziegler takes proper pains to point
this out, he builds a most credible, restrained account.
His larger view brings out few conclusions that will

.’ surprise anyone who has read shorter accounts of the
Black Death (like William L. Langer’s in Scientific

American, February, 1964) or chapters in history

" texts and encyclopedias.

The surprising thing about the Black Death is that

. it was assimilated into the historical life of the period

without working any extraordinary change in its larger
institutions. Despite the misery of individuals and fam-
ilies, most communities survived; government rarely
broke down; inheritance taxes were dutifully collected
on the suddenly increased numbers of estates; there .
were few direct challenges to authority or shifts in cen-
ters of power. One can speculate about the role of the
Black Death in accelerating the breakdown of feudal-
ism, but it is hard to substantiate an influence commen-
gurate with the mortality figures. The Black Death was
an unprecedented source of private bereavement, but it
had minimal social impact, perhaps because it visited
rich and poor alike, with little discrimination. Ziegler
points out that the loss of teachers and clergy may have
sped up the vernacularization of education and of the
liturgy. We might also guess that it inspired some skep-
ticism about faith in the power and truth of the Church,
but this assumes a degree of rational intellectual com-
mitment that is rarely evoked by real distress. a