The plague tormented humanity for at least one and a half thousand years. How people resisted the black death and went from doom to salvation - in our article.
In 542 A. D. e. in the Roman city of Pelusius, in Egypt, an epidemic of black death began. It was during the reign of Emperor Justinian, after whom the disease was named - the Justinian plague. She quickly reaped her terrible harvest. One of the witnesses wrote with horror about hundreds of dead people rotting in the streets. There were not enough infirmaries, there was nowhere to bury people.
Byzantine historians and scholastics left eerie descriptions of epidemics.
The pandemic gradually devastated the Byzantine Empire. In 544, four to five thousand people died every day in Constantinople, and at some point - ten thousand. Witnesses of the pestilence began to believe that God was angry with humanity and that Armageddon was about to begin.
Then the epidemic spread throughout the European south and the Middle East, eventually covering the whole of Europe. For two centuries, the plague tormented the inhabitants of this part of the world, killing more than 60 million people. And then in the seventh century the Persians fell upon Byzantium, and then the Arabs. Armageddon's witnesses waited for him - the world has irreversibly changed.
Demons roaming among us
Promotional video:
When another plague broke out in the middle of the 14th century, eight hundred years after the outbreak of the first pandemic, Europeans were better prepared. The first thing they started with was organizing Jewish pogroms and joyfully killing lepers.
For the lepers, as they say, everything was visible immediately. And the medieval man did not particularly reflect - he immediately killed. Even before the outbreak of a massive pandemic in France in 1321, many patients with leprosy were executed. They were considered to be poisoners of wells and carriers of all kinds of infection. To understand the scope - in the country already in the middle of the XIII century, about 2,000 leper colony were established!
In general, the bodies were lying all over the country. In 1348-1350, the situation repeated itself. People were killed as carriers of pestilence. Many lepers fled the cities, but even in the forests they could not find rest. Local God-fearing peasants hunted them down. But here people had at least a ghostly chance to survive.
In May 1348, Jewish pogroms, lovely and familiar to everyone, took place in three French cities. And in the fall of that year, in the city of Chillon, Switzerland, a Jewish doctor incriminated himself under torture. Like, he and several other Jews poisoned the wells. The villains were immediately condemned and joyfully burned at the stake.
Why is there France - all over Europe. In Basel, a wooden house was specially built to burn local Jews. There they were all burned, in bulk. The same thing happened throughout Alsace.
Mass burnings took place in Augsburg, Munich, Erfurt, throughout Germany. In Paris, Jews were killed so actively that their corpses simply did not have time to be buried - they were lying on the street right during the plague epidemic.
In short, in just a couple of decades, the Europeans destroyed about 200 Jewish communities and staged 350 pogroms. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed. They, of course, were immediately put on the account of the vile plague microbe. Who else was to blame?
Medicine on the brink of collapse
There was some good news, though. Despite the bloody psychosis, the quarantine system was improved. Experience suggested that epidemics most often spread along trade routes. And the unimaginably multiplying numbers of rodents and insects are formidable signs of an impending epidemic.
And some Europeans, like those depicted in the miniature from the chronicle of Gilles Le Mouisi, believed the Jews were the culprits of the plague. And burned them
The Venetians were the trendsetters in quarantine and hygiene in Europe at that time. For a trading republic with links to literally the whole world, fighting the epidemic was a matter of survival.
In every port, at every customs, the Venetians closely monitored the condition of the arriving people. The slightest suspicion - and a ship or a whole caravan were sent to quarantine. The sick were denied access to the city. They had to hurt and die outside its walls.
In Milan, they did even better. There they began to keep the "Book of the Dead" - obituaries. Those who died from disease were counted separately from ordinary dying.
Of course, it is not so easy to accurately diagnose the deceased on the basis of such records. But even such imperfect measures made it possible to track the focus of the epidemic and quickly isolate its inhabitants. True, the price was enormous: entire quarters, placed in quarantine, died out of the disease. Their inhabitants were hostages of undeveloped medicine. But this allowed the rest of the city to survive.
The plague spurred the authorities to take action. At the end of the XIV century, a real anti-epidemic system was created in southern Italy and France. The closure of ports, the establishment of isolation points and quarantines, the requirement for residents to report sick people, the isolation of patients and attending personnel. Finally, quite in the spirit of that era, it was decided to burn everything that was related to the patient, and primitive disinfection of hospitals.
Despite all these measures, and despite the fact that Italian cities already had their own municipal doctors, the plague epidemic significantly thinned the European ranks. It is estimated that more than 20 million Europeans have fallen victim to it in forty years.
Funeral of the victims of the black death from the chronicle of Gilles Le Mouisy.
Pandemic psychosis
Outbreaks of plague lasted almost four centuries. And the worst thing was the psychosis that accompanied her during this time. The plague in Geneva in 1530 and 1545, in Lyon in 1565, in Milan in 1630 caused a veritable witch-hunt and executions of the suspicious.
In Geneva in 1530, a conspiracy of "carriers of infection" was uncovered. It was attended by: the head of the hospital, his doctor and a priest with him. All were executed. In 1545, 39 people were already executed there. In the 1560s and 1570s, about 200 "contaminants" were executed. Nobody knew how the city was not empty. And the magistrate, out of the kindness of his soul, did not think. There was no need for this - Calvin was kindling in the city, it was dangerous to think.
In France, it was even easier. In some cities, guards and good people were allowed to simply shoot the suspicious. In the glorious city of Paris, good citizens in 1581 received the right to kill all suspicious on the spot - "so that it serves as an instructive example to others." And of course, witches were immediately discovered - in Focigny in 1571, five were burned.
But there were also some rather strange cases. In 1563, several dumb Italians made their way to the French king and invited him to infect the cities of the Huguenots.
And here's the most interesting thing: right after that, for a couple of years in Protestant Montpellier, Nimes, Egmort and other cities there were episodic outbreaks of the "plague". What it was - one devil knows. But everyone was sure that the pasta kept their promise.
At the same time, in Italy itself, the situation has long and reliably got out of control. Plague mowed down the south and Sicily in the 16th-17th centuries. Often, one careless gesture was enough - and you went to another world with the characteristic "murderer and plague infector."
In Milan, in the middle of the 17th century, an old man was executed, who somehow very suspiciously straightened his cloak during prayer in the church. The city had recently experienced an epidemic, everyone was on edge. The old man was accused of spreading infection with a cloak in the church. And quickly burned away from sin. In 1630, the pharmacist Giangiacomo Moro and the health commissioner Gulyamo Piazza were executed. Allegedly, they anointed the handles of city doors with plague ointment. In the sense of "why"? Because vile creatures. In the case of Piazza, the vileness was heightened because he was the magistrate's official in charge of the state of urban medicine!
They were tortured, quartered, and then burned. The house where this villainy was allegedly plotted was demolished. A plague column was put in its place with a reminder. Such plague columns were often erected at the places of executions and on other occasions in various European states. Often their pommel was made in the form of plague buboes. In Austria alone, they delivered about 200.
The last epidemics associated with strains of the Asiatic plague took place in Marseille in 1720-1722. But French absolutism left no chance for the pathogen Yersinia pestis. The city was quarantined. Having destroyed several thousand people, the disease temporarily admitted defeat from the enlightened Aesculapians. On November 16, Bishop Belsens, from the height of the Akkul bell tower, called to heaven, begging to stop the plague. Struck in the very heart by such a powerful sorcery, the plague experienced a fierce facepalm.
Asian darkness from China
It struck another time in the 1850s in the western Chinese province of Yunnan. In pursuit of profits from copper mining, people disturbed natural foci of the plague. The consequences were both unexpected and dire.
The disease quickly began to devour the population. Within a few years, the epidemic killed millions. And unexpectedly led to a sharp rise in the Taiping sect.
The outbreak of civil war spread the plague throughout China. Dying tens of millions of lives in 35 years, the plague swept to British Hong Kong. There, the epidemic claimed the lives of about 100 thousand people and penetrated into India.
Savior of the world from Odessa
An outbreak of the bubonic plague occurred in Bombay in 1896. British authorities reacted toughly and quickly. They tried to isolate the plague in the port, but colonial India of the late 19th century is not an absolutist France of the early 18th century. They did not have time to close the port, the quarantine was not very effective at first. The disease broke free, one after another seizing the port cities of East Hindustan. As in the Middle Ages, trade routes were its back roads.
Plague Hospital in Bombay.
The Indian authorities have taken unprecedented measures. For isolation and quarantine, troops were used. But in the stash of the authorities there was a miracle remedy that neither the Chinese nor the medieval Europeans had - anti-plague vaccinations. Plague committees were engaged in mass vaccination of residents of affected areas.
The inventor of the world's first vaccine against bubonic plague was Vladimir (Mordechai-Wolf) Khavkin. He was born in Odessa, was a member of the Narodnaya Volya circle. In 1888, the young doctor and scientist emigrated to Switzerland. In Russia, his scientific career was limited by religion and origin.
In 1896, at the request of the local authorities, he came to the epidemic-stricken Bombay. The scientist had already lived in India for three years to test his cholera vaccine - the first in the world. Khavkin literally saved India. Thanks to his vaccine, the incidence has decreased tenfold. Millions of people have been saved from death.
Vladimir Khavkin.
Thanks to Khavkin's vaccine, the plague was gradually isolated. The epidemic began to fade. However, she still reaped her bloody harvest - more than ten million Indians died in this epidemic. Another 12.5 million died from periodic outbreaks that lasted until the late 1920s.
The plague epidemic also had its political continuation. The Indian authorities fought so hard against the plague, so actively interfered in the life of traditional Indian society, that it was regarded by local nationalists as unprecedented violence and tyranny. They shot Walter Rand, a member of the plague committee in the city of Pune. The authorities accused the Indian press of inciting. Bal Gangadhar Tilak, a prominent figure in the national movement who justified the murder, was accused in 1897 of "incitement to rebellion." He spent the next 18 months in prison. This not only damaged the image of the colonial authorities, but also powerfully added to the popularity of local nationalists. From the margins, they were rapidly turning into a serious problem.
Doctor administers plague-infected medicine, Karachi, 1897.
The epidemic changed the world again. But, although its outbreaks were observed in the United States and Hawaii, by and large it only ironed out Asia.
The last failure?
In 1910-1911, the Black Death tried to repeat its success half a century ago already in Manchuria. This time, things were complicated by the outbreak of pneumonic plague, the most deadly form of the disease.
Having spread in the workers' suburbs of Harbin, the plague went for a walk along the CER. The mortality rate from it was 100 percent. The Chinese population of Harbin has decreased by a quarter in a couple of months. The situation went from bad to disastrous.
The Russian Duma immediately asked the government what it intends to do to prevent this "ancient evil" from entering the country. The government took unprecedented measures. Troops, Amur river flotilla, military medics were used. In fact, cordons sanitary were set up throughout the Chinese Eastern Railway. Strict quarantine and anti-plague vaccinations completed the job.
Sanitary detachment in Harbin.
The doctor measures the temperature of a potentially infected person.
From the Chinese side, Dr. Wu Liande, who was educated at Cambridge, took over the business. His actions were largely symmetrical to those of Russia. He introduced a strict quarantine, massively vaccinated the population, forced medical personnel to wear masks. Before that, the Chinese did not bother with such measures: there is a mask, there is no one - do not care. And as a result, a bunch of junior medical staff became infected from the sick and quickly died.
But there were also specific measures. For example, the unusually lavish celebration of the Chinese New Year. The thing is that there was sulfur in the firecrackers - a good disinfectant element. Leande thought it would be nice to combine the pleasant and the useful. In April 1911, the last case was recorded.
The spread of plague around the world in 1855-1910.
During the epidemic, 942 medical workers (mostly Chinese) died. They sacrificed their lives to stop the epidemic.
This was the last great plague pandemic. And, although its echoes tormented Asia for another half a century, the Black Death failed to repeat its medieval success. Largely due to the development of public medicine and urbanization - the city demanded a tough attitude to hygiene. The plague became a dangerous routine for which an "antidote" was found. But new ailments came to the fore.
Author: Farid Mamedov