Chapter III: The Black Death (2)

Some historians have doubted whether after all the Black Death made so very much difference to the course of affairs[280]. It is perhaps inevitable that scholars, accustomed to deal only with obvious human causation, should look with some distrust upon the large claims made, in the way of moral and social consequences, for a phenomenon which has been apt to be classed with comets and earthquakes. The sudden thinning of the population may indeed become a subject for economists without any regard to the causation, and irrespectively of the means by which the numbers were reduced; and that has been the only historic interest of the great mortality hitherto. But the operation of pestilence is peculiar; the thinning of the population is not effected as if in the due course of nature; the analogy is closer with a decimating or exterminating war. The invasion of the Black Death was part of the great human drama, just as if a swarming people or a barbarous conqueror had been visibly present in it. If things were moving in the fourteenth century towards a particular issue, as historians find in their retrospect that they were, then the coming of a great plague was part of that movement, organically bound up with the other forces of it, and no more arbitrary than they. Thus it becomes of interest to trace the antecedents of the Black Death before we attempt to follow out its consequences; and it is not the less of interest to do so, that the train of events leads us as far eastwards as the soil of China, and to the incidents that attended the collapse of the greatest government of the Middle Ages, the empire of the Great Khan.

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.

The Theory of the Plague-Virus.

The question that remains is the connexion, in pathological theory, between the bubo-plague and the corruption of the unburied dead or of the imperfectly buried dead. Some such connexion was the rumour of the time, before any scientific theory can well have existed. Also the factor in question was undoubtedly there among the antecedents, if it were not even the most conspicuous of the antecedents. But we might still be following a wandering light if we were to trust the theory of the Black Death to those empirical suggestions, striking and plausible though they be. It is not for the Black Death only, but for the great plagues of the Mohammedan conquests, which preceded the Black Death by many centuries and also followed that great intercurrent wave until long after in their own strict succession, for the circumscribed spots of plague in various parts of Asia and Africa in our own day, and above all for the great plague of Justinian’s reign,--it is for them all that a theory of bubo-plague is needed. A survey of the circumstances of all these plagues will either weaken or strengthen, destroy or establish, the theory that the virus of the Black Death had arisen on the soil of China from the cadaveric poison present in some peculiar potency, and had been carried to Europe in the course of that overland trade at whose terminus we first hear of its virulence being manifested.

The theory of the origin of the plague-virus from the corruption of the dead was a common one in the sixteenth century. It was held by Ambroise Paré among others, and it was elaborately worked out for the Egypt of his day by Prosper Alpinus, physician to the Venetian Consulate at Cairo towards the end of the same century. But the most brilliant exposition of it, one of the finest exercises of diction and of reasoning that has ever issued from the profession of medicine, was that given for the origin in Egypt of the great plague of Justinian’s reign by Etienne Pariset, secretary to the Académie de Médecine and commissioner from France to study the plague in Syria and Egypt in 1829[296].

In the plague-stricken Egypt of that time, overburdened with population and still awaiting the beneficent rule of Mehemet Ali, Dr Pariset had his attention forcibly directed to the same contrast between the modern and ancient manner of disposing of the dead, and to the insuitability of the former to the Delta, which had been remarked by Prosper Alpinus in 1591, and by De Maillet, French consul at Cairo, in 1735, and had been specially dwelt upon by _philosophes_ of the eighteenth century, such as Montesquieu, Volney and De Pauw. On the one hand he saw under his eyes various revolting things in the Delta,--brick tombs invaded by water, an occasional corpse floating at large, canals choked with the putrefying bodies of bullocks dead of a murrain, the courtyards of Coptic and Jewish houses, and the floors of mosques, churches and monasteries filled with generations of the dead in their flooded vaults and catacombs. On the other hand he saw, on the slopes of the Libyan range and on the edge of the desert beyond the reach of the inundation, the occasional openings of a vast and uncounted series of rock-grottoes in which the Egyptians of the pre-Christian era had carefully put away every dead body, whether of bird, or of beast, or of human kind. He was persuaded of the truth of Volney’s remark, “In a crowded population, under a hot sun, and in a soil filled deep with water during several months of every year, the _rapid_ putrefaction of bodies becomes a leaven of plague and of other disease[297].” The remark of De Pauw, although it is not adduced, was equally to the point: “Neither men nor beasts are any longer embalmed in Egypt; but the ancient Egyptians seem to have done well in following that mode, and in keeping the mummies in the deepest recesses of excavated rocks.... Were we to note here all that those two nations [Arabs and Turks] have left undone, and everything that they ought not to have done, it would be easy to understand how a country formerly not altogether unhealthy, is now become a hotbed of the plague[298].” These eighteenth-century reflections, casual and discursive after the manner of the time, were amplified by Pariset to scientific fulness and order, and set in permanent classical form. Like De Pauw and Volney, he extolled the ancient sanitary wisdom of Egypt, and excused the priestly mask of superstition for the implicit obedience that it secured. De Pauw had pointed out that the towns most remarkable for the worship of crocodiles,--Coptos, Arsinöe (Crocodilopolis), and Athribis,--were all situated on canals at some distance from the Nile; the crocodiles could never have got to them unless the canals were kept clear; according to Aelian and Eusebius the crocodile was the symbol of water fit to drink; so that the superstitious worship of the animal was in effect the motive for keeping the canals of the Nile in repair. The priests of Egypt, says Pariset, with their apparatus of fictions and emblems, sought to veil from the profane eyes of the vulgar and of strangers the secrets of a sublime philosophy[299]. They made things sacred so as to make them binding, so as to constrain by the force of religion, as Moses did, their disciple. They had to reckon with the annual overflow of the Nile, with a hot sun, and a crowded population. Suppose that all the dead animal matter, human or other, were to be incorporated with the soil under these rapid changes of saturation and drying, of diffusion and emanation, what a mass of poison, what danger to the living! What foresight they showed in avoiding it, what labour and effort, but what results! Can anyone pretend that a system so vast, so beautiful, so coherent in all its parts, had been engendered and conserved merely by an ignorant fanaticism, or that a people who had so much of wisdom in their actions had none in their thoughts? Looking around him at the Egypt of the Christian and Mohammedan eras, he asks, What has become of that hygiene, attentive, scrupulous and enlightened, of that marvellous police of sepulture, of that prodigious care to preserve the soil from all admixture of putrescible matters? The ancient learning of Egypt, the wisdom taught by hard experience in remote ages and perfected in prosperous times, had gradually been overthrown, first by the Persian and Greek conquests which weakened the national spirit, then by the Roman conquest which broke it, then by the prevalence of the Christian doctrines, and lastly by the Mohammedan domination, more hostile than all the others to sanitary precaution.

Pariset’s remaining argument was that ancient Egypt, by its systematic care in providing for a slow mouldering of human and animal bodies beyond the reach of the inundation, had been saved from the plague; in the historic period there had been epidemics, but these had been of typhus or other sickness of prisons, slavery, and famines. According to Herodotus, Egypt and Libya were the two healthiest countries under the sun. But when St Paul’s vehement argument as to the natural and the spiritual body began to make way, when men began to ask the question, “How are the dead raised up, and with what body do they come?” the ancient practice of Egypt was judged to be out of harmony with Christian doctrine. Embalming was denounced as sinful by St Anthony, the founder of Egyptian monachism, in the third century; and by the time that the church of North Africa had reached its point of highest influence under St Augustine, bishop of Hippo, the ancient religious rites of Egypt had everywhere given place to Christian burial[300]. Bubo-plague had already been prevalent in at least one disastrous epidemic in Lower Egypt at the time of the great massacres of Christians in the episcopate of Cyprian; and in the year 542 it broke out at Pelusium, one of the uncleannest spots in the Delta, spread thence on the one hand along the North African coast, and on the other hand by the corn ships to Byzantium, and grew into the disastrous world-wide pestilence which has ever since been associated with the reign of Justinian.

After the Mohammedan conquest things went from bad to worse; and from the tenth century until the year 1846, plague had been domesticated on the soil of Egypt.

The theory of Pariset was communicated by him to the Académie de Médecine on 12 July, 1831, and finally published in a carefully designed and highly finished essay in 1837. It was received with much disfavour; according to his colleague Daremberg, the learned librarian of the Academy, nothing but its brilliant style could have saved it from being forgotten in a week. It was vigorously opposed by Clot Bey, on behalf of Egyptian officialdom, because it fixed upon Egypt the stigma of holding in the soil an inherent and abiding cause of the plague[301]. Besides the general objection that it was the theorizing of a _philosophe_, exception was taken to particular parts of the argument. Thus Labat demonstrated by arithmetic that the mummied carcases of all the generations of men and animals in Egypt for three thousand years would have required a space as large as the whole of Egypt, which should thus have become one vast ossuary. And as to the fact, he added, embalming was the privilege of the rich, and of some sacred species of animals. Clot Bey asserted that the whole class of slaves were not thought worthy of embalming. He found also, in the language used by Herodotus, evidence that the people of Egypt felt themselves to be under “the continual menace” of some great epidemic scourge and took precautions accordingly--the very ground on which Pariset based his theory. The objection which weighed most with Daremberg was the fact that, just about the time when Pariset had asserted the immunity of Egypt from plague in her prosperous days, evidence had been found, in the newly-discovered collections of Oribasius, that a bubonic disease was recorded for Egypt and Libya by a Greek physician two centuries before the Christian era, and by another Greek medical writer about the beginning of our era.

It does not appear to have occurred to the opponents of Pariset’s theory that the two chief objections, first that embalming was far from general, and second that cases of plague did occur in ancient Egypt, answered each other. But, as matter of fact, it can be shown that there were cheaper forms of embalming practised for the great mass of the people. Again, it was found by De Maillet that bodies not embalmed at all, but laid in coarse cloths upon beds of charcoal under six or eight feet of sand at an elevation on the edge of the great plain of mummies at Memphis, and beyond the reach of the water, were as perfectly preserved from putrid decay as if they had been embalmed, the dry air and the nitrous soil contributing to their slow and inoffensive decomposition[302]. These facts tended to support the notion that it was not ceremony which really determined the national practice, but utility, into which neither art nor religion necessarily entered. The existence also of bubonic disease in the period of the Ptolemies proved that the risk assumed in Pariset’s theory was a real risk, the precautions having been not always sufficient to meet it.

The plague which overran the known world in Justinian’s reign (542) was, according to this theory, the effect on a grand scale of an equally grand cause, namely, the final overthrow of a most ancient religion and national life, which had not been built up for nothing and had a true principle concealed beneath its superstitions. The parallelism between China and ancient Egypt has been a favourite subject. In China whatever of religion there is runs upon the Egyptian lines--reverence for the dead or worship of ancestors. The Chinese do not indeed embalm their dead, but they practise an equivalent art of preservation which may be read in almost identical terms in the book of Marco Polo and in modern works on the social life of China[303]. To prevent the products of cadaveric decay from passing into the soil may be said to be the object of their practices. The pains taken to secure dry burial-places are especially obvious in those parts of the country, such as the “reed lands” of the Yang-tsi, which are subject to inundations, annual or occasional[304]. Much of the national art of Feng-shui is concerned, under the mask of divination, with these common-sense aims.

Both Egypt and China are liable to have their river-basins flooded at one time and parched to dust at another. These extreme fluctuations of the ground water are now known to scientific research to be the cause of peculiar and unwholesome products of putrefaction in the soil: given a soil charged with animal matters, the risk to those living upon it is in proportion to the range of fluctuation of the ground water. If it happen as an annual thing that the pores of the ground are now full of water, now full of air, or if these extreme alternations be a common liability, then a soil with the products of animal decomposition dispersed through it will be always unwholesome, and unwholesome on a national scale. It is often held that even vegetables rotting on the ground are pestiferous; Ambroise Paré believed that the rotting carcase of a stranded whale caused an outbreak of bubo-plague at Genoa; but human decomposition is something special--at least for the living of the same species[305]. Most special of all is it when its gross and crude matters pass rapidly into the ground, getting carried hither and thither by the movements of the ground water, and giving off those half-products of oxidation which the extreme alternations from air to water, or from water to air, in the pores of the ground are known to favour. There may be nothing offensive to the sense, but the emanations from such a soil will in all probability be poisonous or pestilent. In particular circumstances of locality the permeation or leavening of the soil with the products of organic decomposition produces Asiatic cholera; in still more special circumstances the result is yellow fever; in circumstances familiar enough to ourselves the result is typhoid fever, and probably also summer diarrhœa or British cholera. These are all soil poisons. Bubo-plague also is a soil poison; and it is claimed as specially related to the products of _cadaveric_ decomposition, diffused at large in such a soil as soil-poisons are ordinarily engendered in.

It is possible to subject that theory of the plague to the test of facts still further. Thus bubo-plague dogged the steps of Mohammedan conquest from the first century after the Hegira, now in Syria when Damascus was the capital, now in Irak when Bagdad was the centre of Mohammedan rule, now in Egypt when the seat of empire shifted to Grand Cairo; and, over a great part of the period, simultaneously in all the regions of Islam. That long series of plague-epidemics has been recorded in Arabic annals, and has lately been published in an abstract accessible to all, with a summary of conclusions[306].

What are the conclusions of the learned commentator on the Arabic annals, as to the general causes of the thousand years of Mohammedan plague?--“War, with the wasting of whole nations, in disregard of all established rights, with plundering of towns and concentration of great masses of men ill provided for and unregulated, who developed the seeds of communicable and malignant diseases. Add to these things the negligent or wholly neglected burial of those who had fallen in battle, the straits and privations of the wounded, and the effects of a hot climate, especially in flooded and swampy tracts of country.... The kind of burial, in very shallow and often badly covered graves, which used to be practised in most Eastern towns, and in part is still practised, may also have had disastrous consequences not unfrequently.”

The Theory tested by Modern Instances.