Ancient World Review

Plague Doctors: Fact And Fiction

These weird plague doctor outfits aren't medieval. They were invented in the 1600s.

"You’ve seen them before: mysterious figures, clad from head to toe in oiled leather, wearing goggles and beaked masks. The plague doctor costume looks like a cross between a steampunk crow and the Grim Reaper, and has come to represent both the terrors of the Black Death and the foreignness of medieval medicine." Source: Live Science.

"However, the beak mask costume first appeared much later than the middle ages, some three centuries after the Black Death first struck in the 1340s. There may have been a few doctors in the 17th and 18th centuries who wore the outfit, including the iconic beak mask, but most medieval and early modern physicians who studied and treated plague patients did not."

Note: "Medical historians have attributed the invention of the 'beak doctor' costume to Charles de Lorme, who adopted in 1619 the idea of a full head-to-toe protective garment, modeled after a soldier's armor. This consisted of a bird-like mask with spectacles, and a long leather (Moroccan or Levantine) or waxed-canvas gown which went from the neck to the ankle. The over-clothing garment, as well as leggings, gloves, boots, and a hat, were made of waxed leather. The garment was impregnated with similar fragrant items as the beak mask." (Wikipedia)

The long beaks attached to the mask contained scented materials which included "juniper berry, ambergris, roses (Rosa), mint (Mentha spicata L.) leaves, camphor, cloves, laudanum, myrrh, and storax. Due to the primitive understanding of disease at the time, it was believed this suit would sufficiently protect the doctor from miasma while tending to patients." (Wikipedia)

Nostradamus, the famous astrologer, physician and supposed prophet, was, at one time, a plague doctor.

The Discovery & Examination Of A Black Death Mass Grave At Thornton Abbey

Video from 2016.

"The discovery of mass burial sites is rare in Europe, particularly in rural areas. Recent excavations at Thornton Abbey in Lincolnshire have revealed a previously unknown catastrophic mass grave containing the remains of at least 48 men, women and children, with radiocarbon dating placing the event in the fourteenth century AD. The positive identification of Yersinia pestis in sampled skeletal remains suggests that the burial population died from the Black Death. This site represents the first Black Death mass grave found in Britain in a non-urban context, and provides unique evidence for the devastating impact of this epidemic on a small rural community." Source: Antiquity (2020).

Thornton Abbey "was founded as a priory in 1139 by William le Gros, the Earl of Yorkshire, and raised to the status of abbey in 1148. It was a house for Augustinian or black canons, who lived a communal life under the Rule of St Augustine but also undertook pastoral duties outside of the Abbey. Officers within the abbey included a cellarer, bursar, chamberlain, sacrist, kitchener and an infirmer." (Wikipedia)

"The abbey was closed in 1539 by Henry VIII as part of the Dissolution of the Monasteries" but kept operating for the next eight years by turning itself into a school.

Note: These deaths apparently occurred during the second great plague pandemic in England (1348-1349 AD) when something like one-third to half the population died in less than two years, according to Antiquity. This new (Feb. 2020) article goes into considerable detail about the history of the discovery of the mass grave and what is currently known about the site.

The population of medieval England was never very large. According to Wikipedia, there may have been around 5 million people living in the country when the Black Death reached Europe in 1348. By the year 1400, that number had dropped to around two million, a decline of at least 50 percent.

Related: The History of the Plague: Every Major Epidemic (short animated video).

Comment: As bad as the current coronavirus pandemic is, it's nothing compared to the Black Death. If it's true that one-third to one half of the population in England died during the 14th century, an equivalent outbreak here in the States could cause something like 150 million deaths. As of April 12, we've had around 20,000 deaths from COVID-19, but it's hard to know how accurate these numbers are because the current policy is that if someone died with the virus then they died of the virus.

The coronavirus has been mild so far compared to the medieval plague or even the modern flu and other causes of death. To put this into perspective, something like 60,000 people died from the regular flu during the 2017-2018 season in the US and 37,00+ died from traffic accidents in 2016 alone. Assuming that the COVID-19 mortality statistics are correct, it's hard to understand why controlling the current outbreak is so critical that it justifies destroying the US economy.

Peter Schiff, one of the best financial commentators in the country.

Plague Of Justinian Same As Black Death?

Video from the great Voices of the Past primary-sources channel.

"Researchers have compared medieval and modern plague pathogens. In a comparison of more than 300 contemporary strains of Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes bubonic plague, with ancient bacterial DNA isolated from victims of the Black Death (1347 -- 1351), a team led by researchers at University of Tuebingen obtained evidence suggestive of a bubonic plague outbreak in the late antique period (8th to 10th centuries AD). The study raises strong suspicions that the plague of Justinian, a massive pandemic that is thought to be in part responsible for the collapse of the East Roman Empire, may have been caused by the same bacterium implicated in the Black Death." Source: Science Daily (2012).

Comment: History is a lot more contingent than we like to believe. For instance, Justinian might have been able to complete his reconquest of the western Roman empire if the east hadn't been ravaged by the plague that "devastated and depopulated the Roman Empire [Byzantine Empire]," (Wikipedia).  There were other factors involved -- the outbreak of the so-called Roman-Persian War and the incompetence and infighting of various generals in Italy -- but the plague put an end to Justinian's ambitions in the west and probably played a large role in the eventual collapse of the Byzantine Empire and its conquest by the Ottoman Turks.

Constantinople, once the eastern capital of the Roman Empire and later the capital of the Byzantine Empire, is now Istanbul, a primarily Muslim city. If Justinian had been able to reconquer the west, a reunited Roman Empire would have changed the course of European history in unpredictable ways. Ironically, the plague later intervened again when the Black Death devastated Europe, but this time its net effect was beneficial, leading to the collapse of the feudal system, weakening the grip of the church, and playing a large role in the birth of the Renaissance. It's unnerving, to say the least, that all these major historical events were influenced by a bacterium invisible to the naked eye which no one even knew existed at the time.

Related: Bacteria In Ancient Flea May Be Ancestor Of Black Death

Six Mysterious Ancient Outbreaks

Video from 2019.

Note: According to a 2019 paper published in the scientific journal Cell, the earliest known outbreak of plague occurred around 5000 years ago in Sweden and may have been partly responsible for the Neolithic Decline, a rapid collapse in populations that occurred back in the Stone Age:

"Between 5,000 and 6,000 years ago, many Neolithic societies declined throughout western Eurasia due to a combination of factors that are still largely debated. Here, we report the discovery and genome reconstruction of Yersinia pestis, the etiological agent of plague, in Neolithic farmers in Sweden, pre-dating and basal to all modern and ancient known strains of this pathogen." -- "Emergence and Spread of Basal Lineages of Yersinia pestis during the Neolithic Decline."

Related: Six Devastating Plagues.

The Secret Of The Black Death

The Black Death peaked in Europe in 1348-1350 and by the time it was over, the "Great Mortality" had killed something like 25 million people--one-third of Europe's population at the time. In some places, it wiped out so many people that the authorities had to outlaw the ringing of church bells at funerals because the ringing never stopped. Entire villages disappeared into plague pits and bishops were sometimes forced to consecrate rivers so they could be used to dump the bodies. The exact number of fatalities is still a matter of conjecture, but there's no doubt that the Black Death was one of the worst natural disasters in human history.

Image: detail from The Triumph of Death (1562) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

"According to the Foster scale, a kind of Richter scale of human disaster, the medieval plague is the second greatest catastrophe in the human record. Only World War II produced more death, physical destruction, and emotional suffering, says Canadian geographer Harold D. Foster, the scale's inventor." --"The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time," by John Kelly. P.11.

No one knows where the Black Death came from exactly, but it's generally agreed that it "originated somewhere in inner Asia and spread westward to the Middle East and Europe and eastward to China along the international trade routes." (The Great Mortality, p.7) In other words, the spread of the pestilence was accelerated by a medieval form of globalism which brought Europe into contact with a lot of different cultures--something to keep in mind these days when air travel and open borders make it possible to spread diseases from one corner of the world to another in a matter of hours.

The Mongols picked up the disease on the steppes of Asia and brought it to Europe through trade and war. In 1346, during their siege of the Crimean city of Caffa, they were said to have catapulted the bodies of their own plague victims into the city--an early example of biological warfare if it actually happened. Once the Black Death caught hold, Genoese merchant ships--the notorious "plague ships"--carried it to ports throughout Europe, their holds full of merchandise, infected sailors and rats crawling with the fleas which carried the plague bacillus: Yersinia pestis, aka Y. pestis. No one understood the connection between fleas, rats and plague at the time, however. They thought the Great Mortality was the result of astrological alignments, foul air, the wrath of God and Jews poisoning their wells.

The pestilence itself apparently consisted of three different types of plague: bubonic plague -- transmitted by flea bites with a two-to-six-day incubation period; pneumonic plague -- a fast-acting and highly contagious form of the disease which attacks the lungs and can be spread like the common cold through the air; and the lethal septicemic plague, which floods the bloodstream with plague bacilli and kills everyone who gets it. According to Kelly, "during one outbreak of septicemic plague in the early 20th century, the average survival time from onset of symptoms to death was 14.5 hours." (The Great Mortality, p.22)

The Black Death spread so quickly--modern plague is fairly slow--that some scientists have speculated that it wasn't plague at all, but a form of anthrax or hemorrhagic fever similar to Ebola, or some kind of extinct disease unknown to science. The consensus view, however, is that it was a particularly virulent ancestor of the modern bubonic plague. Whatever it was, it raced through Europe in an incredibly short period of time, wiping out millions and creating massive social upheavals.

The effects of this calamity were enormous.

Video from 2013. Mass graves of plague victims have been discovered all over Europe.

Before the Black Death, medieval Europe was in a state of decline and stagnation. The feudal system was locked in place, the church corrupt and despotic, medicine and science crippled by religion and superstition. The population was very low by today's standards, but the number of people had grown to the point where it was putting a strain on available resources. The Black Death broke this stalemate by killing off a third of the population, driving up labor costs and forcing social reforms and technical innovations that played a large role in the Reformation.

"In the fifty years after the Black Death, the medieval world's traditional economic winners and losers exchanged places. The new losers, the landed gentry, began to see their wealth shredded by the scissors of low food prices and high labor costs; the new winners, the people at the bottom, saw their one marketable asset--labor--increase dramatically in value, and with it their standard of living rise." The Great Mortality, p. 285.

The depopulation brought about by the Black Death led to technological innovations like the invention of the printing press. The shortage of men for the armies led to new developments in firearms like the musket and cannon. The church's inability to respond to the crisis seriously damaged its prestige, leading to the emergence of new "heretical" movements like the anti-clerical Lollards and a general longing for a more personal religious experience. Medicine started using more scientific methods. Public health systems were created. New colleges were founded. Women began to move into the work force, taking over businesses previously run by their husbands who had died in the outbreak. The disaster played a huge role in the rejuvenation of Europe.

And that's the secret of the Black Death. Demographic collapses like this can be beneficial. "Mortality has its advantages," according to The Plague, a great documentary from the History Channel. For example, if you want to improve wages for the lower class, one of the most direct ways to accomplish this is to kill off a third of them. This will drive up wages for the survivors by creating a major labor shortage and turn the social system on its head. Natural catastrophes are one of the main engines of historical transformation. In the final analysis, the Black Death was a good thing because it helped to destroy a corrupt, dead-end culture dominated by the Catholic Church, facilitating the rebirth of Western Civilization.

Plague Victims In Medieval Mass Grave Were "Arranged With Care" By Last-Chance Hospital's Clergy

Video from 2016.

"Archaeologists in England recently uncovered new details about a medieval mass burial of victims of bubonic plague." Source: Live Science.

"When the so-called Black Death swept through northern Lincolnshire during the middle of the 14th century, sick and desperate people turned to the nearby Thornton Abbey's hospital for care. So many people died there that the members of the abbey's clergy were unable to prepare individual burials and instead had to bury the bodies in a so-called plague pit, Live Science previously reported. 

"But even though dozens of people were consigned together to a shallow mass grave over a period of just a few days, the remains were nonetheless treated with respect and received individual attention, according to a new study."

Despite the care given to the victims, this rural community must have been devastated by scale of the disaster. According to The Independent (Feb. 2020), "The first confirmed mass grave of Black Death victims outside London has cast doubt on accepted theories that rural communities were better equipped to deal with plague deaths than those in crowded cities.

"The remains of 48 people including more than two-dozen children were found on the site of a 14th-century monastery hospital at Thornton Abbey, in northern Lincolnshire.

"People living around the monastery must have been 'overwhelmed' by the plague, the researchers said, given the size of the pit."

Next video describes the 2016 discovery of what I'm assuming is the same plague pit. According to Wikipedia, "DNA [from the remains] was successfully extracted and tested positive for Yersinia pestis, the bacterium responsible for the plague."

Details Of First Historically Recorded Plague Pandemic Revealed By Ancient Genomes

"Analysis of eight new plague genomes from the first plague pandemic reveals previously unknown levels of plague diversity, and provides the first genetic evidence of the Justinianic Plague in the British Isles." Source: Science Daily.

"...The Justinianic Plague began in 541 in the Eastern Roman Empire, ruled at the time by the Emperor Justinian I, and recurrent outbreaks ravaged Europe and the Mediterranean basin for approximately 200 years. Contemporaneous records describe the extent of the pandemic, estimated to have wiped out up to 25% of the population of the Roman world at the time. Recent genetic studies revealed that the bacterium Yersinia pestis was the cause of the disease, but how it had spread and how the strains that appeared over the course of the pandemic were related to each other was previously unknown."

Note: "Some scholars have suggested that the plague facilitated the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain, as its aftermath coincided with the renewed Saxon offensives in the 550s. Maelgwn, king of Gwynedd in Wales, was said to have died of the 'Yellow Plague of Rhos' around 547 and, from 548 to 549, plague devastated Ireland as well. Saxon sources from this period are silent, as there are no 6th-century English documents." (Wikipedia)

How Yersinia Pestis Evolved To Cause Pneumonic Plague

Pneumonic plague, a particularly nasty form of the disease, spreads very quickly. Untreated, it has a mortality rate of almost 100 percent, according to Wikipedia, and "[s]ome hypothesize that the pneumonic version of the plague was mainly responsible for the Black Death that resulted in approximately 50 million deaths in the 1300s."

Report from 2017.

There are three different strains of the plague and it's possible that they were all involved in the Black Death along with several other diseases:

"Many scholars arguing for Y. pestis as the major agent of the pandemic suggest that its extent and symptoms can be explained by a combination of bubonic plague with other diseases, including typhus, smallpox and respiratory infections. In addition to the bubonic infection, others point to additional septicemic (a type of 'blood poisoning') and pneumonic (an airborne plague that attacks the lungs before the rest of the body) forms of the plague, which lengthen the duration of outbreaks throughout the seasons and help account for its high mortality rate and additional recorded symptoms."

Ancient, Unknown Strain Of Plague Discovered In 5,000-Year-Old Tomb In Sweden

"In a nearly 5,000-year-old tomb in Sweden, researchers have discovered the oldest-known strain of the notorious bacterium Yersinia pestis — the microbe responsible for humanity's perhaps most-feared contagion: the plague." Source: Live Science.

"The finding suggests that the germ may have devastated settlements across Europe at the end of the Stone Age in what may have been the first major pandemic of human history. It could also rewrite some of what we know of ancient European history."

Note: "The researchers discovered the previously unknown strain of plague in the remains of a woman at the Frälsegården site [1]. Carbon dating suggested she died about 4,900 years ago during a period known as the Neolithic Decline, when Neolithic cultures throughout Europe mysteriously dwindled."

[1] I couldn't find anything about this site in English, but I think it's located in the Falkoping region in eastern Sweden. According to Wikipedia, "Falköping or Falbygden (when meaning the agricultural landscape in which Falköping is located) is widely known for its ancient remains of Stone Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age. ... The location has been inhabited since the end of the ice age and cultivated by people for the last 6000 years."

Also see: An Ancient Strain of Plague May Have Led to the Decline of Neolithic Europeans

Bacteria Causing Medieval Black Death Extinct? (2011)

"The bacteria that caused the Black Death, which wiped out millions in mid-14th century Europe, may be extinct, according to a new study." Source: Live Science (2011).

"Hoping to resolve some controversy regarding the cause of the Black Death, researchers examined more than 100 samples taken from bodies buried in London during that time.

"'The Black Death was caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis — the one responsible for current plague outbreaks. This settles the controversy surrounding the causative agent. Although we cannot rule out, at this stage, that there was another co-circulating strain,' said study author Hendrik Poinar, a biological anthropologist at McMaster University in Ontario.

"However, the genetic sequence of the bacteria in the London bodies differed from the sequences of modern versions of Y. pestis, suggesting that the strain responsible for the Black Death is likely extinct, the researchers said."