Gone Medieval - How to Survive Plague and War in the Middle Ages

Episode Date: July 25, 2023

Throughout history, there have been plenty of hugely destructive, catastrophic moments. And yet somehow the human race managed to live on until today. So how did people in the Medieval period find ways to survive, for example, a siege of their city, or a natural disaster, or plague?In this episode of Gone Medieval, Matt Lewis talks to Cody Cassidy, author of How to Survive History, to explore how we might cope with, and get through, some of the greatest existential threats to human life and plan our survival, should they ever occur again.This episode was produced by Rob Weinberg.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians including Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Matt Lewis, Tristan Hughes and more. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code MEDIEVAL. Download the app on your smart TV or in the app store or sign up here >You can take part in our listener survey here. If you’re enjoying this podcast and are looking for more fascinating Medieval content then subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world,

to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. We've survived a pandemic recently. There's been hugely destructive, catastrophic moments throughout human history though. So far, there's been survivors of all of them. Cody Cassidy's new book, How to Survive History, takes a look at some of those moments from history and how you might survive them. And some of them are right in our medieval sweet spot. Could you survive war? pestilence and natural disasters. If not, like me, you're probably in the right place for a bit of self-improvement. So welcome, Cody. I'm looking forward to getting some tips on how to survive history.

Thanks so much for having me. First off, why did you decide to write a book about how to survive historical disasters? Is this a good way to look at those kind of disasters in history? Well, I think the original idea actually started when I was reading a book on How to Survive the Zombie Apocalypse, which is obviously not really related to history, but I found it a fascinating way to bring the first person in to an event by really giving practical advice. And I think that way you can really get in the shoes a little bit of ancient people. And these events that happened so long ago that were inclined to use vague numbers and statistics and rob these people of their humanity. So I thought it was an interesting way to get into an event in that way. And I also just found it

entertaining. I thought it would be an entertaining way to learn about history and learn about the practicalities of these particular events. I think it's spot on that this really helps to humanise the idea because it's easy to see. The more catastrophic something is, the more we just deal in numbers and we forget that that was impacting real people's lives. And I guess as people who've just gone through a pandemic, we've had a small taste of what that kind of thing is like. And I guess for everybody who's in that moment, it's all about how do I survive this? That's what humans want to know, isn't it? How do I live through this? Did you find that approaching it in this way changed your understanding of any of those historical moments?

did it bring them home a bit more for you? Absolutely. I think in some of these really ancient events, there's very little written evidence or very little contemporary writing about what occurred and what is there can sometimes be dismissed as overly dramatic

or when they say these catastrophes wiped out so much of the city, we think they're being a little dramatic, I think often. And as more and more hard evidence, like DNA and archaeological digs on cover, we've discovered that evidence such as like the Black Death,

actually may have even been more dramatic and more devastating than we initially believed when just reading these writings. So I think it absolutely increased the sort of impact of these ancient disasters. So in terms of the medieval parts that your book cover said, there's lots before the medieval period, there's some after the medieval period as well. But in a kind of gone medieval sweet spot, the first one that crops up is a title called the darkest year of the dark ages. So when was that and why was it so dark? This is an event that occurred in March of 536. There's a Byzantine writer named Procopias who wrote that the sun shone with the power of a moon for a full year.

This was also dismissed by historians for a long time as being, again, an over-dramidization of what happened. And then beginning in the 1990s, evidence from tree rings. These are archaeologists who go through ancient old growth, usually in the northern hemisphere. these old growth forests and can replicate the environment, can see what the environment was like by looking at the pattern of tree rings and seeing how much growth occurred in each given year. And they started to realize that right around 536, there was a horrible growing seasons. These tree rings showed very little growth and sometimes even frosts during the summer. And then this was further confirmed by ice cores taken out of Greenland in Antarctica.

And a massive volcanic eruption occurred somewhere on the island of Iceland, although interestingly they don't actually know exactly where. And it resulted in a huge volcanic cloud that just darken the skies and led to mass famine. I was just going to ask what made that year particularly challenging, but I guess famine is going to be a big player in all of that. If no food grows, everyone's in trouble. Yeah, the frost in the summer, of course, killed crops, but also the dramatic cooling led to severe droughts as well,

with less evaporation leads to less rain. So we have particularly in the northern hemisphere, and in the north of the northern hemisphere, such as Scandinavia, Iceland, much of England, we see farming villages basically completely abandoned. In Sweden, we see something like 75% of occupied sites were just simply abandoned around this time

with people just returning to hunting and gathering as crops failed, and that was really the only way to survive. And so what might someone have done to survive that year? How do you survive a year in which it's freezing cold and no food is growing? Returning to hunting and gathering is a good choice. because there's so little contemporary writing on this particular famine, I relied a little bit on a later famine in 1315, the Great Famine in Europe to try to decide

and give proper survival advice. The first thing is what happened in that famine, and probably in this one, is that farmers moved into the cities, the fort cities, where kings would often store grains for bad growing seasons. But I would suggest this is a bad idea, actually, because cities are death traps and famines. With such of high density of people, it's very difficult to live off of the land. And in fact, one historian calls what happens in cities during these famines called it the strange diet of medieval famine, which is this sort of slow dissension of food where you first eat the sort of milking cows and animals that aren't normally eaten going all the way to rats. And then citizens started eating rotten food, such as rotten meat or rotten grain. You might even do this unintentionally because in Paris the bakers would cut their product with pig droppings or wine grain to try to stretch their bread.

And if you were there at this time, I would suggest against doing this because those bakers were tortuously. after they were discovered. I mean, fair enough, it's fairly torturous putting pig droppings in the bread. I'd imagine people wanted revenge. Yeah, it gets extremely desperate. And eating rotten food is, of course, extremely dangerous. In these famines, most people died, actually not from a lack of food per se, but from dysentery and diseases from eating rotten grain,

getting diseases like ergot, which is just a horrible way to go. And then finally, the final stage of this sort of strange diet was people simply just eating organic inedibles, such as grass and such. And so I would suggest abandoning the cities entirely, moving back to the farms when the farmers moved to the cities and growing cold-resistant crops, don't grow wheat, try to grow barley or rye, and it turned back to hunting and fishing. A lot of the archaeological evidence suggests, particularly in Ireland, that these farming communities and cities simply abandon them and return to these ancient fishing and hunting

and gathering areas that hadn't been occupied for centuries. So those are the people that seem to have survived. But the reason it's the worst year, famines have happened before. The cold actually sparked the first pandemic, too. The plague is often sparked by droughts because cold leads to mass dieoffs of rats. And when the rats die, their fleas go searching for other victims. And in this case, the rats probably jumped out of the Tibetan plateau. And by 541, the plague arrived in the Egyptian port of pellucium.

It spread throughout the Mediterranean. And there's just recent evidence that it certainly does. did arrive in England. They see this in the DNA of a few burials there that the plague arrived, probably because the Britons were shipping their medals over to the Byzantine Empire, and the Byzantines were shipping fine wines and other Roman-made goods. And so the plague probably carried stowed away on rats just like it did later in the Black Death and kicked the final leg that maybe the Britons were standing on. Yeah, a bit of a double whammy, a fairly horrendous year to be alive. And I guess we're living in an age where the climate is becoming a problem

again now. There's perhaps a salutary warning there that it can lead to all kinds of other things going wrong in the world as well. Yeah, it's surprising these effects that drought can have that you wouldn't necessarily intuitively think. The Black Death is another one of your chapters. So again, we're a slightly uncomfortable modern parallels in this particular realm. I guess we might have been quite lucky in our modern age. We were more prepared. We knew this was coming. We have medicines that can counterat this. How do you plan to survive a pandemic that no one understood how to fight? In this scenario, if you're traveling backward, you would certainly have some advantage if you knew how it was being spread, of course, in that time they did not. And when the Black

Peg arrived in sort of June of 1348, a Black Death, it had an absolutely devastating effect. Interestingly, as you say, because there was a basic ignorance about how it was being spread, there was very little advantage between elites and common folk in the initial outbreak, because there was no real knowledge of how it was transmitted. And in later outbreaks, the elites would retreat. They're rat-free manners, but in the initial one, nobody knew what to do. So if you were there, I would suggest actually staying within the city this time. Unless you have a rat-free manner and you're an elite, it would be better to stay in London

because actually some of the farms in this case suffered risk rates of the plague than in the cities because if they were rat-infested, it really matters how many rats there are to humans, more than human density because often when massive amounts of rats would die often, there were very few humans, the odds that you would be bitten by a plague-inflected fleet would be actually higher. So in this case, if you were in London, you should stay in London, again, unless you knew a rat-free manner or some sort of wealthy castle out in the outskirts of town. And then also some areas of London suffered worse than others because some areas were more rat-infested than others.

In this case, wealthier districts were probably with the cleaners would do a little better. but I've seen some people suggest that you would want to kill the rats in your area or get rat traps or maybe even a cat, but that would actually be a bad idea as well because the only worse thing than a rat is a dead one, because the dead one means its fleas have to find a new host. So that would either be you or your cat potentially. And during the Black Death, do we see people doing things that were working to fend off the Black Death, even if they didn't understand germ theory and how it was spread? Do we see any measures that actually did work, even if accidentally?

Okay. Well, later the elites realized that it would be better to go to their chateaus if they had a place to retreat from than staying in London. So they discovered that later. Curiously, some of the doctors wore masks. We see this. And that might have worked. The primary means in which the plague transmitted was through flea bite. But there is some scenarios in which if it infects the lungs, I think this occurs in about 10% of cases, it can be transmitted through the air. And it's called pneumonic. plague. It's the worst form of plague. The death rate is 100% if you breathe in the plague. The masks actually would help. The pneumonic plague only occurs if you get from something who's very sick. There's a sort of no such thing as walking pneumonic plague. So if you're caring for somebody who's very ill, you could get it. And so doctors, we're wearing these masks and that may have helped. Yeah, it's interesting when people try things and even if they don't know why it works, somehow it does, that, you know, humans have this strange way of finding out how to survive. Yeah. Even if they don't know what they're trying to.

to survive from? Certainly. There were some mistakes too. The doctors often advised against bathing because they thought you could catch it through anything that opened spores. But that's obviously exactly wrong. You would be better to bathe all the time and check yourself for lease. So they didn't get everything right. Do we see signs of people and populations preparing and making plans for the pandemic as it approached? I mean, I guess word arrives that this plague is sweeping across Europe. Do we see people making the kind of preparations to survive, even if they got it wrong? Were people making plans to survive this? A lot of the plans were a little more grim.

There's some evidence that they would start to dig mass graves in preparation. Not very hopeful plan. No, I suppose it's practical, but not terribly hopeful. No, they certainly did see the plague that was traveling across Europe for more than a year before it arrived in England, but there weren't any sort of quarantines taken to an effect during this particular outbreak or anything like that. The strong evidence I saw was these mass graves. graves. And then in later outbreaks, as I said, if people could, they would try to leave the city or leave areas that were infested. But in the initial one, it was really just what one person called a

catastrophic mortality profile when they looked at the graves. It's just meant that sort of just killed everybody with equal impunity. It sounds like it boils down to a lot of luck whether you survive the first wave, but then there's an element of trying to learn and make plans to survive the plague as it comes back. So kind of build on that initial luck and make a plan for how to survive it if it comes back. Exactly. One interesting thing about the plague is once it passed, there was actually a dramatic recovery in the economics of London and England, and actually much of Europe, which was quite surprising to me, is even though it killed, by some estimates, 40% of London, which you would think would be economically devastating. In fact, it had the opposite effect. It caused a

shortage in labor that led to rising wages, and more than half the country was in serfdom, almost slavery, basically. And it led to a dramatic decline in serfdom, just. the sort of mass die-off led to this sort of giving the workers a lot more power within the economy. Yeah, and I guess if you're the one who's survived and you've got lots of relatives who weren't so fortunate, you've got close family, perhaps slightly more distant family who've all died and potentially left you bits of land, bits of money, the unexpected side effect of this could be that you've suddenly become far more wealthy than you were before the pandemic. Yeah, it was at the time more of a, what they called a Malthusian economy.

It was one pie and the more people who are alive, smaller and smaller slices. And so in this case, when there were fewer people got bigger slices, the sort of no longer farmed areas land that wasn't particularly productive, they could focus on the more productive lands and each person did slightly better. And there's a lot of evidence that certainly the elites, the landowners really fought back against this. They tried to institute wage caps and all sorts of laws to try to hold back the new power of the peasant, but in most cases, that failed. I think in sort of Russia and Eastern Europe, these efforts were more effective by the landowners to hold down the peasants, but in Western Europe and England, certainly the peasants had a lot

more power and led to an increased quality of life. On American history hit, we ride the Wild Oregon Trail, delve deep beneath Central Park and fight the forgotten war of 1812. Join me, Don Wildman, and my expert guests, as we uncover the stories that have shaped America in all its endless complexity. We'll follow John Wilkes Booth as he shoots President Lincoln and goes on the run. And we'll walk under the stars with Harriet Tubman as she finds her way to freedom. Follow America's story from the first native people to footprints on the moon. On American History Hit, a podcast by History Hit.

with new episodes every Monday and Thursday. Follow us wherever you get your podcasts. The other kind of medieval episode in your book is the fall of Constantinople, which comes kind of towards the end of our medieval period for gone medieval. Why was that a big moment in history and why was it tricky to survive? Well, it was tricky to survive because sacks in the medieval period were absolutely devastating. Everybody in the city was considered a combatant, man, woman, child, old or young. It didn't matter.

So if a city fell, as in Constantinople, whether you were fighting or not, it didn't really matter. Everybody was at risk. It was important because it was the final death blow to the Byzantine Empire. They even still called themselves Romans, although what had once been a mighty empire that ruled around the Mediterranean, had by that time shriveled to basically just the peninsula of what was then called Constantinople, now Istanbul. And when the Ottomans arrived, led by this 21-year-old, Emmett II, he brought 80,000 Ottoman soldiers, a sort of group of mercenaries and Ottomans.

He brought cannons. He brought some of the biggest cannons ever constructed at the time. And he marched them to Constantinople, which only had about 7,000 soldiers in its defense. So it would appear to be quite lopsided, but Constantinople had fended off a lot of sieges before, even won by Mehmet II's father, because they had massive defensive structures

called the Theodesian Walls, which are mind-boggingly complex. It was a 30-foot moat, followed by three separate walls, the tallest of which reached between 60 and 90 feet. There were towers streaming the entire land access to the peninsula that blockaded, and they almost survived. They took off six weeks and had a final desperate attempt by Mamet to finally break through. And when he did, it ended the Byzantine Empire and once and for all. And some say started their Renaissance, or at least that suit uses the demarcation for when the Renaissance began, which was partly because the flood of Greek refugees out of Constantinople and into,

Italy, and they're bringing all this ancient Greek knowledge and books from the ancient Greek sort of sparked a desire to revisit the past and what we call the Renaissance. Because the fall of Constantinople comes in 1453, and I think it is often seen as a big watershed, because Constantinople was seen as undefeatable, those walls couldn't be broken down, and because it was the borderline between Christianity and Islam, and it was the last outpost of this idea of the Roman Empire. So its fall was viewed as the end of so much stuff. But as you mentioned, it's also the beginning of a lot of things as well. Yeah, the church was certainly very afraid of the fall of Constantinople being of falling. They thought that once it fell, Ottomans would sweep through Europe. And so they tried to

raise a army, like as they always done, raise another crusade. Gutenberg's very first printings were actually basically advertisements from the church to try to get people to rally to the offense of Constantinople. Unfortunately for the church, these fell on deaf ears. The first advertising campaign was a complete flop. By this time, the Europeans had tired of going on crusades. It felt that the church had led them astray. They'd been going on crusades for centuries. And this time there was just no appetite for it.

So basically no European aid went to Constantinople, and they were on their own. And what plan did you come up with for readers for how to survive a violent siege like this? Well, there's a lot of contemporary accounts of Constantinople. So on this one, I could give the reader quite a lot of very practical. advice. We know exactly where the battles occurred, which was in the Likas Valley of the Theodian walls. They were the weak point. So I would suggest avoiding that particular area where the fiercest fighting occurred. And then there's a couple of accounts that suggest that the reason Constantopal actually fell was that the defenders were going to win. It was a last stand all night battle that

Mab had launched and three wave attack. At about 6 a.m. was beginning to falter when they say that Kirkoperto was a gate that defenders used to attack into the lines of the attackers. And according to these accounts, someone left it open, and the Ottomans were able to rush through, and that's when Constantinople fell. Fortunately, if you were part of this defense, there's a sort of moment of greed from the Ottomans that a lot of the soldiers were paid, basically, in booty. The reward for attacking Constantinople was that there was going to be three days of basically robbery and all sorts of murder and awfulness that the attackers would get to engage in.

And if you were there, you could use this as a moment to escape. Because right after the city fell, a lot of the ships were able to leave the port of Constantinople when basically all of the Ottomans rushed in to grab the riches of the city. So if you're quick, you could have made it to the port and escaped. There is an alternative. If you missed that, that seems to have been shut down around 10 in the morning. there was a sort of an incredible group of Crete warriors who were there who were managed to hole up in a couple of towers and blockaded the stairways and fought until later that afternoon

and were able to inflict so much damage that they negotiated a truce and were allowed to sail away. So I would suggest once the city falls you would have to be quick but if you made it to the port or into one of these towers you could still survive. So keep the gate shut but if anyone leaves it open chuck some gold and get out in a hurry. And if worse comes to worse, find yourself somewhere, you think you can hold up till you can negotiate safe passage out.

Yeah. Doesn't sound easy, but people did survive even after the fall. So you got a chance. I think that's a really solid plan because there's nice fallbacks there. If you miss one, it's not the end. You've got more options that you can follow all the way through. So in compiling this book, and it looks at, like I say, all sorts of different periods of history who've just touched on the medieval ones,

Did you come up with any kind of top tips from across history for how to survive these moments of crisis? Certainly the best advice I think is to think ahead or plan ahead. Often a lot of these sacks and disasters occurred similarly across history and the sack of Rome, which I discuss as well as a similar thing. And in the immediate fall of the city, all of the attackers rushed to the gold. And so if you're quick, that's the time to escape. studying history, studying the ancient disasters, those who knew their way out did seem to do the best, and that's often the best advice is to maybe read a book on ancient disasters and look how they happen before, and then you can see if things repeat themselves.

It sounds like the best advice is simply to learn history. Listen to gone medieval and remember, never forget. Yes. I'll give you something I never give to anyone on Gone Medieval. I'll give you license to talk about any other period if you want to. What was the worst moment that you really wouldn't want to be involved in that you cover in the book? That's actually quite a difficult question. Well, the very first one I discuss is I had to discuss it because it was so spectacular, but it was the day the asteroid struck Earth, which was the Chickaxaloo asteroid, which killed the dinosaurs and almost all mammals.

Fortunately, not all mammals, but almost all of them. And it's such a spectacular event because some call it the most expected day in history. The asteroid hit with sort of a hundred million times the power of a thermonuclear devices. The blast wave was from basically New York to Buenos Aires. And I say it's the most difficult because it was the one disaster in which I really had to push the experts that I spoke with into saying that you had any chance at all. And so that was probably the most difficult one. I did found one who said that maybe you could have survived if you had found a deep cave in sort of the other side of the world, perhaps in Indonesia, where you could have survived the tsunamis and the global chill and. the rain of fire that occurred after all of the ejecta that the asteroid knocked out came back to

earth. And then there were some mammals that survived, including our ancestors, which looked like an animal similar to a shrew. Don't eat that one, but there are other animals to survive upon. So I ended up coming away thinking that it was pretty unlikely, but maybe possible. And I guess after writing this book, then my last question would be, do you feel more prepared for the coming zombie apocalypse? I don't know. Are there plans that we can take away and be ready for next time something hits? Well, I suppose think ahead.

There's certainly not too much we can do with the asteroid, although I guess maybe NASA can have something to say about that, but as individuals, I'm not so sure. I personally came away thinking that I would struggle. I don't think I would do very well in these situations. But one disaster I looked at was the 9-106 earthquake in San Francisco, which is where I live. That one actually did provide some comfort.

There's some areas of San Francisco which are built on silt and not on bedrock, and that's a particularly dangerous place to be during an earthquake. Learning about that helped me think that perhaps that I don't know if I would survive, but at least I would know where not to be. Yeah, you know how to give yourself the best chance. Exactly. If I could keep my wits about me, which I'm somewhat dubious about. Well, thank you so much for joining us to talk about all of that, Cody.

It's been fascinating to go through some of those moments of crisis and disaster and think about how we might have survived any of those. It's been great to talk through them. So thank you very much. And I think the takeaway is learn your history. Listen to Gone Medieval and read Cody's book. Absolutely. Cody's brand new book, How to Survive History, is out now from Penguin Books

if you want to make sure you're prepared for whatever the future brings. There are new episodes of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please join us next time for more on the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us wherever you get your podcast from and to tell your friends and family that you've gone medieval. If you get a moment, please drop us a review or rate us anywhere that you listen to your podcasts. it really does help new listeners to find us. And if you're enjoying this

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