PLAGUE

PLAGUE. The first great plague pandemic (1347–1350) was the greatest single epidemic interval in European history, yet some of the plagues of the period from 1500 to 1750 witnessed catastrophic mortality, in some cases over 40 percent. However, there was no continent-wide plague during any three-year interval after the Black Death of the fourteenth century. While in particular times and places later epidemics were as great as those of the Black Death, the burdens of mortality and disruption to ordinary life events fell most heavily upon those who could not escape to safe locales. Privileged sectors of the population typically had choices among fairly reliable strategies for avoiding exposure to plague.

The losses and costs of great epidemics between 1500 and 1750 can often be documented because one of the strategies of the elite and of governments representing them was to create surveillance systems that monitored urban mortality. After the invention of printing, local histories of plagues and plague treatises magnified the activities of urban administrators during mortality crises, reinforcing reams of correspondence and other non-printed records of church and state actions to minimize social and economic disruption from plague. In general, Italy and Spain led the rest of Europe in monitoring disease threats, relying upon trade and travel restrictions, urban boards of health, and hospital isolation strategies to segregate the ill from the well. All of these measures expanded bureaucratic surveillance and record keeping, and provided those with access to information a way to minimize the social and economic costs of plague. Collective governmental responses were more readily adopted in regions that remained Catholic. Protestants, instead, tended to encourage individual charitable care of one's afflicted neighbors, while retaining a strong sense that plague occurred as the result of God's moral judgment on the sinful. Therefore, fleeing the plague, as one would flee sin, was also sanctioned. Because plague controls were bureaucratized in what became the Catholic countries, better documentation of plague losses and responses survives from the late Middle Ages. Protestant regions began parish-level registration of births, marriages, and deaths after Catholic reforms at the Council of Trent (1545–1563). Such records were created to reinforce the sense of community and responsibility among members of individual Protestant churches, but historical demographers have used them in modern times to provide documentation of mortality crises comparable to urban mortality registers.

The cause or causes of these recurrent epidemics is the subject of considerable recent debate. Most geographical, demographical, and epidemiological evidence available from rural continental Europe suggests a slow spread of human mortality across trade and travel routes, patterns consistent with a rodent-borne bubonic plague. Great urban regions were served, however, by interregional trade, maritime and riverine, and were centers for distribution of infectious diseases. The practice of confining the ill and the well together in their homes or in vast pesthouses fueled morbidity and mortality during times of plague. The lazaretto of Milan, for example, held 12,000 to 15,000 people daily over the worst month of the murderous 1630 epidemic, in a complex that had a total of 256 enclosed rooms and minimal provision of clean water and medical care.

Recurrent plagues caused local population losses far steeper than chronic warfare or the burdens of other diseases. In the 150 years following the Black Death pandemic, the overall population of Europe fell 30 to 50 percent. Depopulation was especially dramatic in rural areas that had been cultivated during the High Middle Ages, leaving visible aerial traces of "deserted villages" and once-farmed land. As the overall population of Europe fell after the Black Death, the political and economic management of rural areas shifted to urban landowners, typically maximizing profits by turning the uses of the land to labor-conserving tasks, such as sheepherding (in Britain) or cattle-farming (in German and eastern European regions). European population recovery in the sixteenth century still left cities unable to replace their numbers, even in non-plague years. Cities had to draw their labor forces from the countryside. Rural to urban migration fueled early urban industries, such as cloth manufacture. Mountainous regions exploited mining. The first 150 years of recurrent plagues in Europe intersected with the beginnings of print, guns, and global trade all orchestrated from urban monetary sources of power, all requiring the move from agriculture to industry.

The economic costs of plagues in towns and cities increased over the early modern centuries, in part because of surveillance and isolation practices, in part because destruction of personal property dramatically impoverished survivors. Urban health boards devised mechanisms for sealing personal property within homes when early cases of plague were identified. With the seal unbroken, a closet or room could escape the fires and acids of disinfection procedures if plague subsequently entered the household. Maritime states meanwhile created the first international health procedures, codifying lengths of detention of people and goods in quarantine, mechanisms for disinfecting cargo, and the symbolism of a yellow flag, to indicate a ship that had "touched" plague.

Whatever the causes or the demographic and economic effects of recurrent plague, the methods of controlling both exposure to plague elsewhere and the unacceptable consequences of an epidemic locally established a tradition in epidemic management that is still very much a part of Western society. From particular urban plagues there also survives a legacy of literary and artistic production, of which Daniel Defoe's 1722 A Journal of the Plague Year, about the 1665 Great Plague in London, and Alessandro Manzoni's 1827 I promessi sposi (The betrothed), set in seventeenth-century Italy, are the two best-known novels. Plague art typically focused on divine retribution for sin, and the intervention of saints (especially St. Roch and St. Sebastian) to aid the plague-stricken, collective penance, and votive gifts expressing communal thanks for a specific plague's ending were popular themes. By the seventeenth century, plague art often portrayed themes of religious devotion to the sick even amid a chaotic tableau of suffering.

Plague, whatever its cause or causes, receded from Europe during the reign of Louis XIV (1643–1715). The last plagues in northern Europe and Britain occurred in the 1660s; the last plague in southern Europe occurred in Marseilles in 1720–1721. Messina, in Sicily, was stricken in 1743 and during the later eighteenth century the Austro-Hungarian Empire devised an extraordinary thousand-mile-long cordon sanitaire, a military border between Christian Europe and Muslim regions to the east. Whether through such aggressive measures to minimize all contact with plague in the Middle East and southern Russia, or because maritime trade was increasingly directed over the North Atlantic, commerce with regions that still experienced plague declined steeply. Local commercial barriers to the importation of plague certainly played a role in the plague's disappearance. But so, too, did the widespread use of arsenic oxide, a colorless, tasteless rat poison, by the late seventeenth century. Some have further speculated that the disappearance of plague in the years from 1650 to 1750 may have been the result of global ecological changes, reflected in the cooler climate called the "Little Ice Age" and the absence of sunspot activity called the "Maunder Minimum." The disappearance of plague, whatever its cause or causes, did coincide with the beginning of the modern rise of population throughout Eurasia and European domination of overseas trade.

PLAGUE

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