“However, on the same day, at about noon, Dr. Rie, stopping a car in front of the house, noticed at the end of their street the doorkeeper, who could hardly move, somehow absurdly spreading his arms and legs and hanging his head like a wooden clown. Old Michel's eyes glittered unnaturally, his breath whistled out of his chest. During the walk, he developed such sharp pains in the neck, under the arms and in the groin that he had to turn back …
The next day his face turned green, his lips became like wax, his eyelids seemed to be filled with lead, he breathed intermittently, superficially, and, as if crucified by swollen glands, kept huddling in the corner of the folding bunk.
Days passed, and the doctors were already summoning new patients with the same disease. One thing was clear - the abscesses needed to be opened. Two cruciform incisions with a lancet - and a purulent mass with an admixture of ichor flowed out of the tumor. The patients came out with blood, lay as if crucified. Spots appeared on the stomach and legs, the outflow from the abscesses stopped, then they swelled again. In most cases, the patient died in the midst of a terrifying stench.
… The word "plague" was spoken for the first time. It contained not only what science wished to put into it, but also an endless series of the most famous pictures of disasters: Athens plagued and abandoned by birds, Chinese cities choked with dying voiceless, Marseilles convicts throwing blood-oozing corpses into a moat, Jaffa with her disgusting beggars, damp and rotten bedding lying right on the earthen floor of the Constantinople hospital, the plague, who are being dragged with hooks …”.
This is how the French writer Albert Camus described the plague in his novel of the same name. Let's remember those times in more detail.
It is one of the deadliest diseases in human history, dating back over 2,500 years. The disease first appeared in Egypt in the 4th century BC. e., and the earliest description of it was made by the Greek Rufus from Ephesus.
Since then, the plague every five to ten years has swooped down on one continent or on another. Ancient Near Eastern chronicles noted a drought in 639, during which the land became barren and a terrible famine set in. It was a year of dust storms. The winds drove the dust, like ash, and therefore the whole year was nicknamed "ash". Hunger intensified to such an extent that even wild animals began to seek refuge in humans.
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“And at that time a plague epidemic broke out. It began in the Amavas district, near Jerusalem, and then spread throughout Palestine and Syria. Of the Muslims alone, 25,000 thousand died. In Islamic times, no one heard of such a plague. Many people died from it in Basra too."
In the middle of the 14th century, an unusually contagious plague struck Europe, Asia and Africa. She came from Indochina, where fifty million people died from her. The world has never seen such a terrible epidemic before.
And a new plague epidemic broke out in 1342 in the possessions of the Great Kaan Togar-Timur, which began from the extreme limits of the east - from the country of Sin (China). Within six months, the plague reached the city of Tabriz, passing through the lands of the Kara-Hitai and Mongols, who worshiped fire, the Sun and the Moon and whose tribes reached three hundred. All of them perished in their winter quarters, in the pastures and on horseback. Their horses were also killed, which were left to rot and abandoned on the ground. People learned about this natural disaster from a messenger from the country of the Golden Horde Khan Uzbek.
Then a strong wind blew, spreading the decay throughout the country. The stench and stench soon reached the most remote areas, spread to their cities and tents. If this smell was inhaled by a person or an animal, after a while they would surely die.
At the very Great Clan, such a huge number of warriors died that no one knew exactly their number. Kaan himself and his six children perished. And in this country there was no one left who could govern it.
From China, the plague spread throughout the east, across the country of Khan Uzbek, the lands of Istanbul and Kaisariya. From here it spread to Antioch and destroyed its inhabitants. Some of them, fleeing death, fled to the mountains, but almost all of them died on the way. Once, several people returned to the city to pick up some of the things people had left. Then they also wanted to hide in the mountains, but death overtook them too.
The plague also spread over the possessions of the Karamanov in Anatolia, in all the mountains and the region. People, horses and cattle were killed. The Kurds, fearing death, left their homes, but did not find a place where there would be no dead and it would be possible to hide from the disaster. They had to return to their homes, where they all perished.
There was a heavy downpour in the country of the Kara-Hitai. Together with the rain streams, the fatal infection spread further, bringing death to all living things. After this rain, horses and cattle were killed. Then people, poultry and wild animals began to die.
The plague has spread to Baghdad. Waking up in the morning, people found swollen buboes on their faces and bodies. Baghdad at this time was besieged by the troops of the Chobanids. The besiegers withdrew from the city, but the plague had already spread among the troops. Very few managed to escape.
In early 1348, a plague swept the Aleppo district, gradually spreading throughout Syria. All the inhabitants of the valleys between Jerusalem and Damascus, the sea coast and Jerusalem itself were killed. The Arabs of the desert and the inhabitants of the mountains and plains were killed. In the cities of Ludd and Ramla, almost everyone died. Inns, taverns and teahouses were overflowing with dead bodies, which no one cleaned up.
The first sign of plague in Damascus was the appearance of acne on the back of the ear. By combing them, people then carried the infection all over the body. Then the man's glands swelled under the arm, and he often vomited blood. After that, he began to feel sick from severe pain and soon, almost two days later, he died. Everyone was seized with fear and horror from so many deaths, for everyone saw how those who began to vomit and cough up blood lived for only about two days.
In one day in April 1348 alone, more than 22 thousand people died in Gazze. Death covered all the settlements around Gazza, and this happened soon after the end of the spring plowing of the land. People died right in the field behind the plow, holding baskets of grain in their hands. All the working animals perished with them. Six people entered one house in Gazze for the purpose of looting, but they all died in the same house. Gazza has become the city of the dead.
People have never known such a severe epidemic. Striking one edge, the plague did not always invade the other. Now it covered almost the entire earth - from east to west and from north to south, almost all representatives of the human race and all living things. Even marine life, birds of the sky and wild animals.
Soon from the east, the plague spread to African land, to its cities, deserts and mountains. All Africa was filled with dead people and the corpses of innumerable herds of livestock and animals. If a sheep was slaughtered, then its meat turned out to be blackened and fetid. The smell of other foods, milk and butter, has also changed.
Up to 20,000 people died in Egypt every day. Most of the corpses were delivered to the graves on boards, stairs, and door frames, and the graves were simply ditches in which up to forty corpses were buried.
Death spread to the cities of Damanhur, Garuja and others, where the entire population and all livestock died. Fishing on Lake Baralas ceased due to the death of fishermen, who often died with a fishing rod in their hands. Even on the eggs of the caught fish, dead places were found. Fishing schooners remained on the water with the dead fishermen, the nets were overflowing with dead fish.
Death marched along the entire sea coast, and there was no one to stop it. No one approached the empty houses. In the Egyptian provinces, almost all the peasants were killed, and there was also no one left who could harvest the ripe crop. There were so many corpses on the roads that, having become infected from them, the trees began to rot.
The plague was especially violent in Cairo. In two weeks in December 1348, the streets and markets of Cairo were filled with dead. Most of the troops died, and the fortresses were empty. By January 1349, the city looked like a desert. It was impossible to find a single house that the plague would spare. On the streets - not a single passerby, only corpses. In front of the gates of one of the mosques, 13,800 corpses were collected in two days. And how many of them remained in the deserted streets and alleys, in the courtyards and other places!
The plague reached Alexandria, where at first a hundred people died every day, then two hundred, and on one Friday, seven hundred people died. In the city, a textile manufactory was closed due to the death of artisans, due to the absence of visiting merchants, trading houses and markets were empty.
One day a French ship arrived in Alexandria. The sailors reported that near the island of Tarablus they saw a ship, over which a huge number of birds circled. Approaching the ship, the French sailors saw that its entire crew was dead, and the birds were pecking at the corpses. And there were a great many dead birds on the ship.
The French quickly sailed away from the plague ship. When they reached Alexandria, more than three hundred of them died.
Through the Marseille sailors, the plague spread to Europe.
"BLACK DEATH" OVER EUROPE
In 1347, the second and most terrible plague invasion of Europe began. For three hundred years, this disease raged in the countries of the Old World and took with it to the grave a total of 75 million human lives. She was nicknamed "Black Death" because of the invasion of black rats, who managed to bring this terrible epidemic to the vast continent in a short period.
In the previous chapter, we talked about one version of its spread, but some medical scientists believe that it most likely originated in southern warm countries. Here, the climate itself contributed to the rapid decay of meat products, vegetables, fruits, and just garbage, in which beggars, stray dogs and, of course, rats were digging. The disease took with it thousands of human lives, and then began to wander from city to city, from country to country. Its rapid spread was facilitated by the unsanitary conditions that existed at that time both among the people of the lower class and among sailors (after all, there were a great many rats in the holds of their ships).
According to ancient chronicles, not far from Lake Issyk-Kul in Kyrgyzstan, there is an ancient gravestone with an inscription that testifies that the plague began its march to Europe from Asia in 1338. Obviously, it was carried by the nomadic warriors themselves, the Tatar warriors, who tried to expand the territories of their conquests and in the first half of the XIV century invaded Tavria - present-day Crimea. Thirteen years after the penetration of the peninsula, the "black disease" quickly went beyond its borders and subsequently covered almost all of Europe.
In 1347, a terrible epidemic began in the trading port of Kafa (present-day Feodosia). Today's historical science has information that the Tatar khan Janibek Kipchak besieged Kafa and was waiting for her surrender. His huge army was stationed by the sea along the stone defensive wall of the city. It was possible not to storm the walls and not lose soldiers, since without food and water, the inhabitants, according to Kipchak's calculations, would soon ask for mercy. He did not allow any ship to unload in the port and did not give the residents themselves the opportunity to leave the city, so that they would not escape on foreign ships. Moreover, he deliberately ordered black rats to be allowed into the besieged city, which (as he was told) got off the ships that had arrived and brought disease and death with them. But by sending the "black disease" to the inhabitants of Kafa, Kipchak himself miscalculated. Mowing the besieged in the city,the disease suddenly spread to his army. The insidious disease did not care who to mow, and it crept up to the soldiers of Kipchak.
His numerous army took fresh water from streams descending from the mountains. The soldiers also began to fall ill and die, and up to several dozen of them died a day. There were so many corpses that they did not have time to bury them. Here is what was said in the report of the notary Gabriel de Moussis from the Italian city of Piacenza: “Countless hordes of Tatars and Saracens suddenly fell victim to an unknown disease. The entire Tatar army was struck by a disease, thousands died every day. Juices thickened in the groin, then they rotted, a fever developed, death came, the advice and help of doctors did not help …”.
Not knowing what to do to protect his soldiers from the general illness, Kipchak decided to take out his anger on the inhabitants of Kafa. He forced local prisoners to load the bodies of the dead on carts, take them to the city and dump them there. Moreover, he ordered to load the corpses of the deceased patients with guns and fire them at the besieged city.
But the number of deaths in his army did not decrease. Soon Kipchak could not count even half of his soldiers. When the corpses covered the entire coast, they began to be dumped into the sea. Sailors from ships that arrived from Genoa and docked at the port of Kafa, impatiently watched all these events. Sometimes the Genoese dared to go out into the city to find out the situation. They really did not want to return home with the goods, and they waited for this strange war to end, the city would remove the corpses and start trading. However, having become infected in the Cafe, they themselves unwittingly transferred the infection to their ships, and besides, city rats climbed onto the ships along the anchor chains.
From Kafa, the infected and unloaded ships sailed back to Italy. And there, of course, hordes of black rats landed ashore together with the sailors. Then the ships went to the ports of Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica, spreading the infection on these islands.
About a year later, all of Italy - from north to south and from west to east (including the islands) - was covered by a plague epidemic. The disease was especially rampant in Florence, the plight of which was described by the short story writer Giovanni Boccaccio in his famous novel "The Decameron". According to him, people were falling dead in the streets, lonely men and women died in separate houses, whose death no one knew. The decaying corpses stank, poisoning the air. And only by this terrible smell of death, people could determine where the dead were. It was scary to touch the decomposed corpses, and under pain of imprisonment, the authorities forced ordinary people to do this, who, taking this opportunity, engaged in looting along the way.
Over time, in order to protect themselves from infection, doctors began to put on specially sewn long gowns, put gloves on their hands, and special masks with a long beak, in which there were fragrant plants and roots, on their faces. Tied to their hands were plates filled with smoking incense. Sometimes it helped, but they themselves became like some monstrous birds carrying misfortune. Their appearance was so terrifying that when they appeared, people scattered and hid.
And the number of victims increased. There were not enough graves in the city cemeteries, and then the authorities decided to bury all the dead outside the city, dumping the corpses into one mass grave. And in a short time, several dozen such mass graves appeared.
Within six months, nearly half of Florence's population died out. Entire neighborhoods in the city stood lifeless, and the wind roamed the empty houses. Soon, even thieves and looters began to fear entering the premises from where the plague patients were taken out.
In Parma, the poet Petrarch mourned the death of his friend, whose whole family passed away within three days.
After Italy, the disease spread to France. In Marseille, 56,000 people died in a few months. Of the eight doctors in Perpignan, only one survived; in Avignon, seven thousand houses turned out to be empty, and the local curés, out of fear, came up with the idea that they consecrated the Rhone River and began to throw all the corpses into it, which made the river water contaminated. The plague, which for some time suspended the Hundred Years War between France and England, claimed much more lives than open clashes between troops.
At the end of 1348, the plague penetrated the territory of today's Germany and Austria. In Germany, a third of the clergy died, many churches and temples were closed, and there was no one to read sermons and celebrate church services. In Vienna, already on the first day of the epidemic, 960 people died, and then every day a thousand of the dead were taken out of town.
In 1349, as if full on the mainland, the plague spread across the strait to England, where a general pestilence began. More than half of its inhabitants died in London alone.
Then the plague reached Norway, where it was carried (as they say) by a sailing ship, the crew of which all died of illness. As soon as the unguided ship washed ashore, several people were found who climbed aboard to take advantage of the free booty. However, on deck they saw only half-decayed corpses and rats running over them. Inspection of the empty ship led to the fact that all the curious were infected, and from them the sailors working in the Norwegian port became infected.
The Catholic Church could not remain indifferent to such a formidable and terrible phenomenon. She strove to give her explanation for deaths, in sermons she demanded repentance and prayers. Christians saw this epidemic as a punishment for their sins and prayed for forgiveness day and night. Whole processions of people praying and repenting were organized. Crowds of barefoot and half-naked penitent sinners roamed the streets of Rome, who hung ropes and stones around their necks, lashed themselves with leather whips, and sprinkled ashes on their heads. Then they crawled to the steps of the Church of Santa Maria and asked the holy virgin for forgiveness and mercy.
This madness, which engulfed the most vulnerable part of the population, led to the degradation of society, religious feelings turned into dark madness. Actually, during this period, many people really went crazy. It got to the point that Pope Clement VI banned such processions and all kinds of flagellantism. Those "sinners" who did not want to obey the papal decree and called for physical punishment of each other, soon began to be thrown into prisons, tortured and even executed.
In small European cities, they did not know at all how to fight against the plague, and it was considered that its main distributors were incurable patients (for example, with leprosy), the disabled and other weak people who suffered from various kinds of ailments. The established opinion: "It was they who spread the plague!" - so took possession of people that merciless popular anger turned to the unfortunate (mostly homeless vagabonds). They were expelled from cities, not given food, and in some cases they were simply killed and buried in the ground.
Other rumors circulated later. As it turned out, the plague is the revenge of the Jews for their eviction from Palestine, for the pogroms, they, the Antichrists, drank the blood of babies and poisoned the water in the wells. And masses of people took up arms against the Jews with renewed vigor. In November 1348, a wave of pogroms swept across Germany; Jews were literally hunted for. The most ridiculous accusations were made against them. If several Jews gathered in the houses, they were no longer allowed to leave. Houses were set on fire and waited for these innocent people to burn down. They were hammered into barrels of wine and lowered into the Rhine, imprisoned, rafted down the river. However, this did not diminish the scale of the epidemic.
In 1351, the persecution of the Jews subsided. And in a strange way, as if on cue, the plague began to recede. People seemed to come to their senses from madness and gradually began to come to their senses. During the entire period of the plague procession through the cities of Europe, a total of a third of its population died.
But at this time, the epidemic spread to Poland and Russia. Suffice it to recall the Vagankovskoye cemetery in Moscow, which, in fact, was formed near the village of Vagankovo for the burial of plague patients. The dead were taken there from all corners of the white stone and buried in a mass grave. But, fortunately, the harsh climatic conditions of Russia did not give a wide spread of this disease.
Plague Doctor
Plague cemeteries from time immemorial were considered a cursed place, because it was assumed that the infection was practically immortal. Archaeologists find tight wallets in the clothes of the corpses, and on the skeletons themselves there are intact jewelry: neither relatives, nor gravediggers, nor even robbers have ever dared to touch the victims of the epidemic. And yet, the main interest that makes scientists take risks is not the search for artifacts of a bygone era - it is very important to understand what kind of bacteria caused the Black Death.
It seems that a number of facts testify against combining the "great plague" of the 14th century with the pandemics of the 6th century in Byzantium and the end of the 19th century in port cities around the world (USA, China, India, South Africa, etc.). The bacterium Yersinia pestis, isolated during the fight against this latest outbreak, is by all accounts responsible for the first, as it is sometimes called, "Justinian's plague." But the "black death" had a number of specific features. First, the scale: from 1346 to 1353, it mowed down 60% of the population of Europe. Neither before nor after did the disease lead to such a complete breakdown of economic ties and the collapse of social mechanisms, when people even tried not to look into each other's eyes (it was believed that the disease is transmitted through a glance).
Secondly, the area. Pandemics of the 6th and 19th centuries raged only in the warm regions of Eurasia, and the “black death” captured all of Europe up to its northernmost reaches - Pskov, Trondheim in Norway and the Faroe Islands. Moreover, the pestilence did not subside at all even in winter. For example, in London, the death rate peaked between December 1348 and April 1349, when 200 people died a day. Third, the focus of the plague in the 14th century is controversial. It is well known that the first to fall ill were the Tatars, who besieged the Crimean Kafa (modern Feodosia). Its inhabitants fled to Constantinople and brought the infection with them, and from there it spread across the Mediterranean and further across Europe. But where did the plague come from in Crimea? According to one version - from the east, according to another - from the north. The Russian chronicle testifiesthat already in 1346, "the pestilence was very strong under the eastern country: both in Sarai, and in other cities of those countries … and as if there was no time for anyone to bury them."
Fourthly, the descriptions and drawings of the buboes of the "black death" left to us do not seem to be very similar to those that occur with the bubonic plague: they are small and scattered throughout the patient's body, but should be large and concentrated mainly in the groin.
Since 1984, various groups of researchers, relying on the above facts and a number of others, have argued that the "great plague" was not caused by the bacillus Yersinia pestis, and, strictly speaking, it was not a plague at all, but was an acute viral disease, like hemorrhagic fever Ebola, now raging in Africa. It was possible to reliably establish what happened in Europe in the XIV century only by isolating characteristic bacterial DNA fragments from the remains of victims of the "black death". Such attempts have been carried out since the 1990s, when the teeth of some victims were examined, but the results still gave in to different interpretations. And now a group of anthropologists led by Barbara Bramanti and Stephanie Hensch analyzed biological material collected in a number of plague cemeteries in Europe and,Having isolated fragments of DNA and proteins from it, I came to important, and in some ways completely unexpected conclusions.
First, the "great plague" is still caused by Yersinia pestis, as it was traditionally believed.
Secondly, not one, but at least two different subspecies of this bacillus raged in Europe. One spread from Marseilles northward and captured England. Surely it was the same infection that came through Constantinople, and everything is clear here. Much more surprising is that the Dutch plague burial grounds contain a different strain that came from Norway. How he ended up in Northern Europe is still a mystery. By the way, the plague came to Russia not from the Golden Horde and not at the beginning of the epidemic, as it would be logical to assume, but, on the contrary, under its very curtain, and from the north-west, through the Hansa. But in general, to determine the routes of infection, much more detailed paleoepidemiological studies will be needed.
Vienna, the plague column (aka the column of the Holy Trinity), built in 1682-1692 by the architect Matthias Rauchmüller to commemorate the deliverance of Vienna from the epidemic
Another group of biologists led by Mark Akhtman (Ireland) managed to build a "family tree" of Yersinia pestis: comparing its modern strains with those found by archaeologists, scientists concluded that the roots of all three pandemics, in the VI, XIV and XIX centuries, grow from the same region of the Far East. But in the epidemic that broke out in the 5th century BC. e. in Athens and led to the decline of Athenian civilization, Yersinia pestis is indeed innocent: it was not a plague, but typhus. Until now, scholars have been misled by the similarity between Thucydides' description of the Athenian epidemic and the report of the Constantinople pestilence of 541 by Procopius of Caesarea. It is now clear that the latter was too zealous to imitate the former.
Yes, but what, then, are the causes of the unheard-of mortality caused by the XIV century pandemic? After all, it slowed down progress in Europe for centuries. Perhaps the root of the troubles must be sought in the civilizational change that happened then? Cities developed rapidly, the population grew, commercial ties intensified unheard of, merchants traveled great distances (for example, it took the plague only 7.5 months to get from the sources of the Rhine to its mouth - and how many borders had to be overcome!). But with all this, sanitary concepts were still deeply medieval. People lived in mud, often slept among rats, and they carried deadly fleas Xenopsylla cheopis in their fur. When the rats died, hungry fleas jumped to people who were always nearby.
But this is a general consideration, it is applicable to many eras. Speaking specifically about the "black death", the reason for its unheard-of "effectiveness" can be seen in the chain of crop failures in 1315-1319. Another unexpected conclusion that can be drawn by analyzing skeletons from plague cemeteries concerns the age structure of victims: most of them were not children, as is often the case during epidemics, but people of mature age, whose childhood fell on that great crop failure at the beginning of the 14th century. Social and biological intertwined in human history is more whimsical than it seems. These studies are of great importance. Let us recall how Camus's famous book ends: “… the plague germ never dies, never disappears, it can sleep for decades somewhere in the curls of furniture or in a stack of linen, it patiently waits in the bedroom for its hour,in the basement, in a suitcase, in handkerchiefs and in papers, and, perhaps, a day will come to the mountain and to teach people when the plague will awaken the rats and send them to die on the streets of the happy city."