The worst century in history

I've always loved a mystery, and for that reason, the European "Dark Ages" have fascinated me for as long as I can recall.

But the moniker itself is off-puttingly self-congratulatory, isn't it?  It's not like Roman rule was that pleasant for your average slob to live under, after all.  Be that as it may, after the conquests of the Roman Empire started to fall apart in the fourth century C.E. from a combination of invasion, misrule, and downright lunacy, things went seriously downhill.  Life was pretty rough until the eighth and ninth centuries, when some measure of order returned as damn near all of Europe coalesced around the Roman Catholic Church, ushering in the Middle Ages.  And what we know about the period in between is... not a hell of a lot.  Accounts are scattered, vague, and full of conflation with mythology and legend.  The few that were written by contemporaries, rather than long after the fact -- such as Gregory of Tours's History of the Franks -- contain as much hagiography as they do history.

St. Gregory and King Chilperic I, from Grandes Chroniques de France de Charles V (fourteenth century) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Which is why I was thrilled to read a paper that appeared in Antiquity about a study of the "worst decade to be alive" -- 536-546 C. E.

The research, which combines the skimpy evidence we have from accounts written at the time with hard scientific data from analysis of ice cores, paints a grim picture.  Writings from the year 536 describe a mysterious "fog" that lasted for eighteen months, generating widespread crop failure and what one Irish cleric called "three years without bread."  From the ice core analysis, medieval historian Michael McCormick and glaciologist Paul Mayewski identified what they believe to be the culprit: a cataclysmic volcanic eruption in Iceland that dropped the global temperature an average of two degrees Celsius in a matter of months.

This was followed by another eruption in 540, and the following year, the single worst plague on record -- the so-called "Plague of Justinian," which killed between a third and a half of the inhabitants of the Eastern Roman Empire, and resulted in so many corpses that people loaded them on ships and dumped them in the Mediterranean.  The disease responsible isn't known for certain, but is believed to be Yersinia pestis -- the same bacterium that caused the Black Death, almost exactly eight hundred years later.  But to give you an idea of the scale, there's reason to believe the Plague of Justinian dwarfed both the fourteenth century Black Death and the Spanish Flu of 1918-1919 -- usually the two examples that come to mind when people think of devastating pandemics.  The death toll is estimated at sixty million.

There probably was a connection between the cold and the plague, too, although not the obvious one that famine triggers disease susceptibility.  Many scholars think that the lack of food, and cold temperatures following a period that had generally been warm, forced mice and rats into homes and on board ships -- not only in close proximity to humans, but in their means of travel.  The fleas they carried, which are vectors for the plague, went with them, and the disease decimated Europe and beyond.

The effects of the eruption, however, were felt all over the Earth.  Tree ring analysis from North America shows 540 and the years following to have been unusually cold, with short-to-nonexistent growing seasons.  Volcanic dust is found in those layers of ice cores everywhere they exist.  Famines occurred in Asia and Central America.

All in all, a crappy time to be around.

Things didn't rebound for almost a hundred years.  Archaeologist Christopher Loveluck, of the University of Nottingham, found traces of dust containing significant amounts of lead in ice strata from the year 640, which he believes were due to a resurgence in silver smelting for coinage.  (I suppose if there's a hundred years during which your three main occupations are (1) not starving, (2) not freezing, and (3) not dying of a horrible disease, then making silver coins is kind of not on your radar.)  And the tree rings and ice cores bear out his contention that this indicates better conditions; although there were a couple of other volcanic eruptions we can see in the glacial records, none were as big as the one in 536.  The silver smelting, Loveluck says, "... shows the rise of the merchant class for the first time."  Things, finally, were improving.

What's coolest about this study -- despite its gruesome subject -- is how hard science is being brought to bear on understanding of history.  We no longer have to throw our hands up in despair if we're interested in a time period from which there were few written records.  The Earth has recorded its own history in the trees and the glaciers, there for us to read -- in this case, telling us the tale of the worst century the human race has ever lived through.

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A commerce in death

My novella We All Fall Down is set during some of the most awful years humanity has ever lived through -- the middle of the fourteenth century, when by some estimates between a third and half of the people in Eurasia died of the bubonic plague, or as they called it, the "Black Death."

Back then, of course, no one knew what caused it.  Not only that the disease came from a microscopic organism, but that it was carried by fleas and spread by the rats that carried them.  The superstition of the time meant that people became desperate to find out why this catastrophe had occurred, and the blame was placed on everything from God's wrath to evil magic by witches, warlocks, and (unfortunately for them), the Jews.

It's natural enough to try to figure out ultimate causes, I suppose, even though they can be elusive.  I tried to express this in words of the narrator of We All Fall Down, the young, intelligent, inquisitive guardsman Nick Calladine, who has found himself entangled in a situation completely beyond his comprehension:

I asked Meg if she would be all right alone, and she said she would.  There were one or two other villagers who had survived the plague, and they were helping each other, and for now had enough to eat.  I wondered what would happen when winter came, but I suppose that their plight was no different from that of many in England.  Some would make it, some would not, and that was the way of things.  We are not given to understand much, we poor mortals.  The religious say that after we die we will understand everything, and see the reasons that are dark to us now, but I wonder.  From what I have seen, things simply happen because they happen, and there is no more pattern in the world than in the path a fluttering leaf takes on the wind.  To say so would be considered heresy, I suppose, but so it has always seemed to me.

The proximal cause of the Black Death -- rats, fleas, and the bacterium Yersinia pestis -- doesn't explain why the disease suddenly caught hold and exploded its way through the population.  One of the more plausible explanations I've heard is that climatic changes were the root cause; the Northern Hemisphere was at the time in the beginning of the "Little Ice Age," and the colder, harsher weather caused crop failure and a general shortage of food.  This not only weakened the famine-struck humans, but it drove rats indoors -- and into contact with people.

Seventeenth-century "plague panel" from Augsburg, Germany, hung on the doors of houses to act as a talisman to ward off illness [Image is in the Public Domain]

The reason all this dark stuff comes up is that a new study, by a team led by Maria Spyrou of the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen and the Max Planck Institute, has added another piece to the puzzle.  Using a genetic analysis of bones from a cemetery in Kyrgyzstan, which lay beneath a stone whose inscription indicated they'd died of the plague, Spyrou et al. found that not only did the DNA from remnants of Y. pestis in the bones match those of European plague victims, it matched extant reservoirs of the bacteria in animals from the nearby Tian Shan Mountains.

The authors write:

The onset of the Black Death has been conventionally associated with outbreaks that occurred around the Black Sea region in 1346, eight years after the Kara-Djigach epidemic [that killed the people whose bones were analyzed in the study].  At present, the exact means through which Y. pestis reached western Eurasia are unknown, primarily due to large pre-existing uncertainties around the historical and ecological contexts of this process.  Previous research suggested that both warfare and/or trade networks were some of the main contributors in the spread of Y. pestis.  Yet, related studies have so far either focused on military expeditions that were arguably unrelated to initial outbreaks or others that occurred long before the mid-fourteenth century.  Moreover, even though preliminary analyses exist to support an involvement of Eurasian-wide trade routes in the spread of the disease, their systematic exploration has so far been conducted only for restricted areas of western Eurasia.  The placement of the Kara-Djigach settlement in proximity to trans-Asian networks, as well as the diverse toponymic evidence and artefacts identified at the site, lend support to scenarios implicating trade in Y. pestis dissemination.

So it looks like the traders using routes along the Silk Road, the main conduit for commerce between Europe and East Asia, may have brought along more than expensive goods for their unwitting customers.

Scary stuff.  I hasten to add that although Yersinia pestis is still endemic in wild animal populations, not only in remote places like Tian Shan but in Africa (there have been recent outbreaks in Madagascar and the Democratic Republic of Congo) and the southwestern United States/northern Mexico, it is now treatable with antibiotics if caught early enough.  So unlike the viral disease epidemics we're currently fighting, at least we have a weapon against this one once you've contracted it, and it's unlikely to wreak the havoc now that it did in the past.

At least we are no longer in the situation of horrified bewilderment that people like Nick Calladine were, as they watched their world shattering right before their eyes.  "My father was one of the first to take ill, in July, when the plague came, and he was dead the same day," Nick says.  "My sister sickened and died two days later, her throat swollen with the black marks that some have said are the devil’s handprints.  They were two of the first, but it didn’t end there.  In three weeks nearly the whole village of Ashbourne was dead, and I left alive to wonder at how quickly things change, and to think about the message in Father Jerome’s last sermon, that the plague was the hand of God striking down the wicked.  I wonder if he thought about his words as he lay dying himself at sundown of the following day."

Although we still don't have the entire causal sequence figured out, we've come a long way from attributing disease to God's wrath.  With Spyrou et al.'s new research, we've added another link to the chain -- identifying the origins of a disease that within ten years, had exploded out of its home in Central Asia to kill millions, and change the course of history forever.

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