Plagues and Peoples (28 page)

The disease consequences for Egypt were probably severe. A simple count of epidemic disasters mentioned by Arabic writers shows a sudden and dramatic upsurge in the frequency with which Egypt suffered from pestilence in the fifteenth century as compared to other parts of the Mediterranean and Moslem worlds.
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Depopulation and impoverishment were a result, enhanced no doubt by Mameluke oppression and misgovernment. But since disease has always been a more efficient killer than human muscles, the decay of Egyptian wealth and numbers was probably due more to the microparasitic risks inherent in Egypt’s special link with the western steppelands than to anything the Mamelukes did deliberately. Certainly, as long as their rule endured, Egypt maintained a sinister reputation among Europeans, who could often trace a new outbreak of plague affecting the rest of the Mediterranean either to Alexandria or Cairo. Although Egypt’s ill repute among Christians was undoubtedly enhanced by religious xenophobia, it remains true that after Napoleon overthrew Mameluke rule in 1798, thus severing Egypt’s long-standing tie with the coastlands of the Black Sea, outbreaks of plague diminished and even disappeared for a number of decades after 1844.
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In other parts of the Islamic world, major bouts of bubonic plague often lasted for several years, shifting from town to town or region to region with the seasons, but persisting as an unbroken chain of infection until susceptible human hosts ran out and the pestilence disappeared for a while. As in Europe, such visitations of plague tended to affect any given region at irregular intervals of twenty to fifty years, i.e., after a new human generation had arisen to replace those who had been exposed to the infection before.
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Moslem response to plague was (or became) passive. Epidemic disease had been known in Arabia in Muhammad’s time, and among the traditions that Islamic men of learning treasured as guides to life were various injunctions from the Prophet’s own mouth about how to react to pestilential outbreaks. The key sentences may be translated as follows:

And again:

And still again:

The effect of such traditions was to inhibit organized efforts to cope with plague, though the word here translated as “epidemic disease” presumably applied to other forms of pestilential disease in Muhammad’s own time—smallpox, perhaps, in particular, outbreaks of which seem to have preceded and accompanied the first Moslem conquests of Byzantine and Sas-sanian territories.
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By the sixteenth century, when Christian rules of quarantine and other prophylactic measures against plague had attained firm definition, Moslem views hardened against efforts
to escape the will of Allah. This is well illustrated by the Ottoman Sultan’s response to a request from the imperial ambassador to Constantinople for permission to change his residence because plague had broken out in the house assigned to him: “Is not the plague in my own palace, yet I do not think of moving?” Moslems regarded Christian health measures with amused disdain, and thereby exposed themselves to heavier losses from plague than prevailed among their Christian neighbors.
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In the Balkans and nearly all of India, where Moslems constituted a ruling class and lived by preference in towns, this turned into a demographic handicap. After all, exposure to most infectious diseases was intensified in towns. Only a steady stream of converts from the subject populations could countervail Moslem losses from plague and other infections. When in the Balkans (though not in India) conversion slowed almost to a halt in the eighteenth century, the human basis for Moslem dominion speedily began to wear thin in regions where the rural, peasant population remained of a different faith. National liberation movements among Balkan Christian peoples could not have succeeded as they did in the nineteenth century without this underlying demographic impetus.

As for China, from the fourteenth century onward that vast country possessed two frontiers vulnerable to plague: one to the northwest, abutting on the steppe reservoir, and one to the southwest, abutting on the Himalayan reservoir. Available records, however, do not make it possible to distinguish bubonic plague from other lethal epidemic diseases until the nineteenth century, when outbreaks in Yunnan, connected with the Himalayan reservoir, eventually broke through to the coast in 1894, with world-wide consequences already described. Before 1855, lethal infections were common enough in China; and many outbreaks were probably bubonic. But available information does not allow more definite statement. All the same, the halving of China’s population between 1200 and 1393 is better explained by plague than by Mongol barbarity,
even though traditional Chinese historiography preferred to emphasize the latter.
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Nor can China have been the only part of Asia to suffer from plague losses. Throughout the lands north of the Himalayas, it is reasonable to suppose that significant population decay occurred in the fourteenth century, when the steppe exposure to bubonic infection was still new, and local human adjustments to the risk of mortal infection had not yet had time to work themselves out. But information is almost wholly lacking, save for a very few scattered, casual remarks that modern scholars happen to have picked up. Thus, for example, an Arabic writer reported that before the plague reached Crimea in 1346 and began its devastating career in Mediterranean lands, Uzbek villages of the western steppe had been completely emptied by the disease.
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If we think instead of the eastern portions of the steppe, the fact that the decay of the Mongols’ power, signalized by their retreat from China in 1368, followed rather closely on the presumed spread of
Pasteurella pestis
throughout the steppe is very striking. One may, surely, wonder whether intensified exposure to disease, and especially to bubonic plague, was not a real factor in undermining Mongol military might. If the hypothesis presented here is correct, it is hard to doubt that steppe nomad populations, all the way from the mouth of the Amur to the mouth of the Danube, suffered population decay as a consequence of their new exposure to highly lethal infection. If so, one can see why replenishment of military manpower needed to sustain the Mongol hegemony over settled populations—whether in China, Persia, or Russia—faltered, and how the processes accelerated whereby nomad overlords were overthrown and/or absorbed by their erstwhile agricultural subject populations across all of Asia and eastern Europe.

Such a demographic disaster—if such it was—also would account for the decay of urban centers on the steppe, where trading cities had assumed considerable significance in the early part of the fourteenth century. The destruction of cities on the Volga has usually been attributed to the ruthlessness of
Timur the Lame (campaigned 1369–1405). Timur assuredly did transfer artisans en masse to his capital at Samarcand; and he plundered, killed, and burned far and wide in India, Asia Minor, and across the western half of the Eurasian steppe. But the ravages of such a conqueror were nothing new; and devastated cities recovered quickly, if a suitably populous rural base from which to attract new inhabitants lay at hand. This appears to have occurred in Asia Minor and in India in Timur’s wake; it did not happen in the western steppe.

The intrinsic fragility of caravan linkages upon which the prosperity of these cities depended may explain this failure: successful organization of long-distance trade, after all, required favorable conditions across broad territories, and excessive macroparasitism or any other serious malfunction at any point in the system could quickly disrupt costly caravan movement of goods. This may adequately explain why recovery from Timur’s ravages in the grasslands of western Asia was so slow as to be imperceptible. Yet altered patterns of microparasitism may have played the really critical role. In fact, political disorder in the steppe after 1346 may perhaps have been a violent and shortsighted response on the part of rulers accustomed to a higher level of income than could any longer be provided by plague-riddled merchants and artisans whose more numerous and prosperous predecessors had supported all earlier efforts at state-building in central Asia and eastern Europe by paying heavy taxes.

We may be sure that personnel who made a living by assembling goods, protecting them in transit, and buying and selling en route or at the caravan termini, were particularly vulnerable to plague. Especially in the decades when the disease was novel, so that tried-and-true rules for coping with it were lacking, heavy die-offs may have done much to destroy the caravan network that had sprung into existence throughout the Eurasian grasslands in the wake of Mongol conquests. It is ironical to reflect that if this reconstruction of events is well founded, the very success with which the Mongols exploited
the military potentialities of steppe life exposed Eurasian nomadry to epidemiological disasters from which the nomad warriors, herdsmen, and traders of Eurasia were never to recover.
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This hypothesis of demographic disaster on the steppe is rendered more plausible by another obvious yet little considered change in the human ecology of Eurasia—a change that becomes unmistakable after the fourteenth century. Prior to that time, for more than three thousand years, steppe populations had persistently taken advantage of their superior mobility and military prowess to expand southward into agricultural, civilized regions. They came sometimes as conquerors, sometimes as slaves, sometimes as mercenaries; but the drift off the steppe and into the Eurasian agricultural world was unmistakable and persistent. From time to time it became massive enough to alter linguistic and ethnic boundaries in lasting ways. The distribution of Indo-European and of Turkish languages is testimony to the magnitude and persistency of this process. Moreover, in the centuries before 1300, movement from the steppe had attained a particularly massive scale, as Seljuk and Ottoman expansion, capped and climaxed by the Mongol storm itself, surely proves.

Yet after 1346 this pattern of migration disappeared and by the sixteenth century the drift of population on the western steppe had clearly reversed itself. Instead of nomads pressing outward from the grasslands and encroaching on cultivated ground, as had been happening for millennia, by 1550 at the latest, agricultural pioneers began to penetrate the western steppelands. They moved into what had, for the most part, become an uninhabited sea of grass.

The deserted condition of Europe’s grasslands in late medieval and early modern times must be seen as a problem to be explained, though historians have usually been content to accept the situation of 1500 as “normal.” But the Ukrainian steppe was excellent farmland, as Russian cultivators soon showed. It was equally promising as a habitat for nomads,
offering the best pasture anywhere west of Mongolia. Why, then, was it almost devoid of human life in early modern times? Raiding, especially slave raiding, certainly served to diminish human numbers, once it assumed organized form in the late fifteenth century. Ottoman slave markets were limitless. Tartar horsemen of the Crimea capitalized on this fact by attacking Russian villages, traversing miles of emptiness before they could find suitable human victims. But such slave raiding does not explain the emptiness of the steppe itself. Where had nomads and their herds gone?

Withdrawal to the Crimea, and partial urbanization in that specialized environment may represent a deliberate choice on the part of those who made such a withdrawal. It allowed closer contact with Ottoman civilization and all the delectations civilization involved. But it is impossible to believe that nomad inhabitants of the rich grasslands of the Ukraine could all have fitted within the narrow confines of the Crimea unless some prior, massive disaster had radically diminished their numbers and made the defensible bastion of the Crimean peninsula look especially attractive to the remnant.
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Inferential evidence from the eastern reaches of the steppe suggests that the peoples of Mongolia and Manchuria learned how to insulate themselves effectually against plague by the seventeenth century or earlier. Otherwise, the Manchu conquest of China in the 1640s, which matched older steppe invasions exactly, could not have taken place. Lasting success required a relatively numerous and disciplined military force of Manchu “banner men” to support the new dynasty.

Simultaneously, among Mongols and Tibetans, a vigorous religious and political movement manifested itself in the seventeenth century—the rise of the so-called “Yellow Church” of Lamaistic Buddhism. The resulting reorganization of nomad society was sufficiently formidable that the new Manchu rulers of China had to concern themselves with it from the 1650s. Eventually the Manchus used China’s vast resources to sustain campaigns of conquest that added Tibet and Mongolia
to their empire. This required substantial effort, however, and definitive success did not come to Chinese armies until 1757, when smallpox disrupted the last fighting confederacy of the steppe, led and organized by Kalmuks.

This military-political record implies that by the middle of the seventeenth century the peoples of the eastern steppe retained or regained numerical strength sufficient to sustain their traditional roles vis-à-vis settled Chinese society. How this occurred cannot, of course, be known. But, as we have seen already, by the time medically trained observers became aware of the ecology of
Pasteurella pestis
and could study its relationship with humans, marmots and the other burrowing rodents of Manchuria and Mongolia, effective folkways had indeed developed to make human infection unlikely. If we assume that these customs date back to the seventeenth century (or before), the revival of political-religious-military expansiveness among the peoples of the eastern steppe becomes intelligible.