Guerrilla History - From the Archives - Historical Impact of the Plague

Episode Date: June 10, 2022

Guerrilla History "From the Archives" is a new series of episodes, consisting of previously patreon-exclusive episodes that we are unlocking for the general public after one year.  This From the Archives episode was originally released on Patreon on November 4, 2020, and is about the plague.  Join us in this old episode where we discussed a bit of the science of the plague, as well as the historical impact of it in the 14th century. Your hosts are immunobiologist Henry Hakamaki, Professor Adnan Husain, historian and Director of the School of Religion at Queens University, and Revolutionary Left Radio's Breht O'Shea. Follow us on social media!  Our podcast can be found on twitter @guerrilla_pod.  Your contributions make the show possible to continue and succeed!  Please encourage your comrades to join us, which will help our show grow. To follow the hosts, Henry can be found on twitter @huck1995, and also has a new Youtube show/podcast he cohosts with our friend Safie called What The Huck?!, which can be found on youtube at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCA7YUQWncZIB2nIeEunE31Q/ or major podcast apps at https://anchor.fm/what-the-huck.  Adnan can be followed on twitter @adnanahusain, and also runs The Majlis Podcast, which can be found at https://anchor.fm/the-majlis, and the Muslim Societies-Global Perspectives group at Queens University, https://www.facebook.com/MSGPQU/.   Breht is the host of Revolutionary Left Radio, which can be followed on twitter @RevLeftRadio and cohost of The Red Menace Podcast, which can be followed on twitter @Red_Menace_Pod.  Follow and support these shows on patreon, and find them at https://www.revolutionaryleftradio.com/.  Thanks to Ryan Hakamaki, who designed and created the podcast's artwork, and Kevin MacLeod, who creates royalty-free music.

Hello, guerrilla history listeners. This is Adnan Hussein, one of the co-hosts of guerrilla history. Brett, Henry, and I have some news that I hope you'll be excited to hear. More free content for you. Every month, as you know, we record a reconnaissance report, a major episode with a guest about their historical work, as well as an intelligence briefing, a shorter discussion, usually among the three of us. Occasionally we also post a dispatch from the field of contemporary left history, often with a guest about a breaking story or a recent set of events or issues and provide some historical analysis. We also typically record a second intelligence briefing as an exclusive episode for patrons, subscribers at patreon.com slash gorilla history. We have decided to unlock an intelligence briefing each month after a year has passed as, special from the archive episodes for you to enjoy. We hope you'll find these a useful resource. Of course, if you'd like to subscribe and have early access to intelligence briefings and all

the other additional content like readings and discussions of classic texts, primary sources, reviews and discussions, do become a patron at patreon.com slash gorilla history with our gratitude. We do this because we love to make history a resource in our political education as an activist global left and in our struggles for justice. So we're happy to share these older episodes with you in this series from the archive. As ever, solidarity. instruments of wafti, if they put some guerrilla action on. Hello, Patreon fans of guerrilla history. Adnan and I are here to do a little bit of a bonus episode for you right now.

Given the fact that we're in a global pandemic at the moment, we thought that this topic would be of interest to many of you. The topic is that of the plague. So we've often heard about the plague, often called the black death, commonly called the bubonic plague. And of course, the big wave of death that basically swept around to Europe in the 14th century. but we want to give you a little bit more of a historical context in regards to the plague. So me being an immunobiologist, I'm going to start off with some very basic science to help us get grounded in what the plague is. And then Adnan is going to give us the historical perspective of it. And hopefully that'll give you a little bit more of an appreciation of what was happening at the time and really the impact that the plague had on society.

And this is going to be a very short conversation. We're actually hoping to do more of an in-depth look at the effect of diseases and plagues and pandemics throughout history in the near future. Still trying to get some guests confirmed for that. So keep your eyes on the lookout for that in the future. That is something we're trying to put on. But for this, we're just going to look at the plague specifically. So Adnan, welcome. Say hello to our lovely guests.

Hi, everyone. I should say. It's great to be here. Thank you for being a patron. We're looking forward to talking with you about this other very interesting historical pandemic. Yeah, absolutely. So I'm going to start off now by talking about some real basics about the disease from a scientific background. So when we say plague, we're talking about a specific.

disease caused by specific specific bacteria. This bacteria is called Yersinia pestis. It's a bacteria that lives in the gut of fleas. Typically, those fleas oftentimes

were found on rats. This, I'm sure, most of you listeners, know. The bacteria also circulates among the rodents themselves, I should mention, but it gets transmitted originally from the rodents to people via fleas.

So when we say plague, there's really three different forms of the disease. The one that people typically think of is what we call the bubonic plague. This comes from a Greek word, the Greek word for groin is roughly equivalent to bubo, but I'm not going to attempt to pronounce it because I'll butcher it. But eventually what ended up happening is that one of the science, of the bubonic plague with swollen lymph nodes in the groin, hence why they were calling it bubos. And those swollen lymph nodes also then ended up being called boobos. So the bubonic plague is the type of plague that a person gets when they're bitten by a flea that has the

bacteria in its gut. So the flea bites the person. It ends up basically puking some blood back up out of its stomach onto the wound. I know this is a great, great conversation. I hope you're not eating at the time that you're listening, but it basically ends up puking some blood back onto the wound and the bacteria then gets into the person. Once in the person, the bacteria then go into the lymphatic system, goes to the lymph nodes, and that's why we see the swelling of the lymph nodes, the boobos, again, that give it its name. And there's a bunch of other more scientific things that I can say in terms of the pathophysiology of it, but I'm going to skip all of that because this is a history show and I'm sure that you're more interested in the history,

but just running through it briefly, there's two other forms of the plague that aren't as commonly described. So again, bubonic is where you're bitten by a flea and it basically is in the lymph nodes. If it gets more severe than that, we generate what's called the septicemic plague. So septicemia is an infection of the blood stream. And what happens here is the bacteria eventually end up draining out of the lymph nodes into the bloodstream and then travel around the body. It causes a condition that we call disseminated intravascular coagulation, which basically causes a bunch of clots all through the body. This is a very, very bad form of the disease. If you have septic plague, your chances of survival are really, really low.

Then another form of the plague, and this is the most severe type of the plague, is what we call the pneumonic plague. That is what happens when you're infected via the lungs. So when somebody is infected by the plague and if the bacteria is in their lungs, it causes coughing. And that coughing causes them to expel droplets, which have the bacteria inside those droplets. If somebody else

inhales those droplets, the other person will be infected also through the lungs and also will develop the pneumonic plague. If they don't get antibiotics and of course

historically they wouldn't have basically every single person that gets the pneumonic plague dies it kills about 100% of the people that get it and really quickly within usually just a couple days, sometimes even less than a day.

But that's roughly the three different kinds of plague that we're looking at, I should mention that a lot of people think of plague as a historical phenomenon, not existing in the current world, but that's really not true. We have cases of plague all the time.

Even in the United States, we see cases of plague out in the Rocky Mountain region every year or two. We'll see cases of plague. But particularly, the Democratic Republic of the Congo has quite a big outbreak of plague. right now. And they have cases more or less endemic there. Madagascar has a decent amount of

outbreaks of plague. Peru has some plague that sweeps through there every once in a while. But we have antibiotics now that really help with the treatment of it. So gentomycin and a flora quinolone, which don't bother looking it up. If you don't know what those are, it's just two different types of antibiotics. If you give the people those antibiotics, chances of them dying dropped to around 10%. But without the antibiotics, and again, thinking historically, the people wouldn't have had antibiotics, the likelihood of somebody dying would have been about 70% if they were infected with plague. It was really, really nasty, and that's why we saw so many people die. Adnan, is there anything else that I should add in terms of

science before we look at the historical side of things? Well, I guess that answers a lot of questions that I would have had. That was a really excellent roundup of the basic science. Some historians have questioned whether transmission from the fleas on black rats could have accounted for the very quick dispersal of the disease. And so it's very useful to have clarified that there are other types besides the bubonic plague and that it could be transmitted human to human because if you had to really track the progress of the black rats and the fleas that they carried

and then imagine contact between the fleas and human beings, those would be pretty localized, you know, I would think. Yeah, so I guess just to add on to that before we move on, the mnemonic plague would be the quickest to spread, but it wasn't nearly as common as other forms of the plague, and it's not as common these days. The most common would have been the bubonic plague, and then, of course, in the very, very most severe cases,

it would become septicic. The ways that people would get the mnemonic plague, and I think that this is worth driving home, is that you either inhale droplets from somebody who's expelling it from their lungs, Then, of course, the question rises, how did the first person get it in their lungs? The other way is that if the septicemic form of the plague, so the more of the more severe of the two varieties or flavors of plague that we have via flea transmission, when the septicemic plague becomes super severe, it can spread into the lungs and then that person will begin coughing. So they hadn't been infected through the lungs, but they begin having bacteria in the lungs. and then they can spread it from their lungs via coughing to other people,

which then the other people will get it through their lungs and have pneumonic plague. So unlike bubonic plague, which is exclusively vector-borne, which means it's only spread via fleas. This can spread person to person. So this would be a way that you could spread it through a community very quickly because if somebody's out in public hacking up a lung, you're infecting large groups of people. Whereas, as you said,

if it's only being spread by fleas, the rate of spread is going to be significantly lower. Well, one other question that I had is that historians have identified grain supplies as a major way, as a very good way to map the origin and spread of the disease because rats really like to eat, you know, grain. It's a favored food. They can eat a lot of other things, but where you have a large concentration of grain, storehouses, and groups that need

to move it like military armies, you know, so they have huge supplies that follow the progress of an army to provision them, that that would be a mechanism for their spread. And also, there was some suggestion that perhaps the grain supply itself could be infected with the fleas or other things? Do you know anything about this? Does this make any sense? Or is it really only from the fleas on the rats? So the fleas on the rats would be the primary way that this would be spread. It's not the only way. People can get it via, so of course, again, hopefully you're not eating at this time, but fecal-oral transmission. So if you have food that's contaminated, you would be able to contract it via that contaminated

food. This does result sometimes in septic plague if you get it via fecal-oral. Other times, it's just a weird gastrointactantational variety. It propagates in the body. but with it being generally that that rate is pretty high so in terms of whether or not the food itself or whether it was the fleas on the rats going along with the grain i think that it would probably be at least from a scientific side if not a historical side much more common for it to be spread by the fleas on the rats that are following the grain rather than the grain itself just because that

fecal oral route isn't nearly as common as we have with a flea-borne transmission. Okay. Interesting. So I think let's transition into the history now, because I think that that was probably more science than most of the listeners wanted, but... Well, it's important to have a sense of it so that we know when we're making historical judgments what the possible parameters are, because sometimes the sources that we use as historians are accounts, first-person accounts, or scientific, you know, for the time, scientific accounts of and observations of what happened.

And it can be difficult to judge whether these are credible or reliable without having some sense of what the actual parameters are scientifically. So that's very useful and helpful to clarify. But of course, as a historian, my main interest in the plague and I think our main interest as, you know, a global community that's suffering a major pandemic right now is to understand what kinds of responses there were and what were the consequences of a major global pandemic on society, culture, politics. You know, how did it change history? I mean, it may have been a major event that had huge mortality. In fact, sometimes the Black Death is called the Great Mortality

of the early of the middle 14th century and to understand how it affected history. So I think one of the other things to know about on a material level is that it's estimated that anywhere between 40 and 60% of population in the Mediterranean region died from this disease with estimates of about up to 100 million globally. And that's an important thing to recognize is that while most of the historical work that has been done focuses on its effect and spread in medieval Europe in 1348, essentially. The plague obviously was affecting different parts of the world even before that and then subsequently the way in which it spread after that. And it was a truly global pandemic.

Some scholars think that it may have even started in the 13th century. and associate its incubation and spread with the Mongol military forces and the conquest, the dramatic conquest that enlarged the Mongol Imperium to be the largest land-based world empire across Eurasia and the history of the world, and that these mobile encampments of troops helped spread the disease to different parts of the world. Um, it's clear that it's, not to mention Adnan, not, as you said, with the Mongols traveling, one of the perhaps apocryphal stories, uh, I believe at the siege of Kaffa and Crimea, is that the, uh, the besieging army of the Mongols would basically launch via catapult and trebusha plague infected corpses over the city's walls to spread the, the bacteria to the inside, uh, of the city. and basically allow the disease to weaken the population on the inside, as we've said, untreated and they didn't have any treatments at the time. This bacteria kills about 70% of the people that get it, and it spreads really well when sanitation is not particularly great.

So by launching these bodies over the walls and cutting off supply routes from the outside, you know, you would be creating an environment where you would really, allow the plague to spread within the city's walls, but this story may be apocryphal. I don't know if you want to comment on that before we continue to talk about the history. Well, no, I think that's often regarded as the origin point for the plague spread an introduction via the Black Sea into the Mediterranean world. There is some dispute about whether it was at this port city of Kaffan, the Black Sea, or a different port city of Tana, which was a different port city of Tana, a major granary and a shipping point for grain being harvested and collected in, you know,

the steppe, the agricultural areas north of the Black Sea, in what we would think of as Eastern Europe and so forth, and then brought by ship into the Mediterranean by Genoese traders. And the Genoese operated a trading network in the Black Sea at both Kaffa and Tana. And so we don't know which is the actual origin point historically, but these are both credible scenarios for how it was introduced through the Genoese trading network into Sicily first and then from there the Italian Peninsula and then from there also into Egypt and the Levant. So it is true that the Mongols seem to have been involved one way or the other and that the colorful story really just points to the fact that their conquests in the 13th century created a new integration of parts of the world more closely through military connections, political connections, and trading and commercial connections that become much more dense. So this is a period where, like our own day, where this global pandemic has been spread, you know, with its origin in China, but it's been spread all over the world because of the density of interconnections through air travel, commercial contact, and so on. Well, likewise, the plague was spread when there were historical conditions that brought different parts of the world into greater and more close contact because of these trading networks and the movement of people. So it spread into the Mediterranean zone.

It kills up to 100 million people globally. And after that, it continues to recur. So even after it dies down for a period, about 10 or 15 years later, it seems to, there seems to be a new wave of outbreaks. And this happens essentially for the next several centuries. So it becomes a continuing, abiding feature of Mediterranean history. that every once in a while there's going to spread this massive disease and never reached the same proportions as the 1348 to 1347 to 1351 period in the Mediterranean.

But so the real question, though, is, well, what's the effect and consequence on society? Before you get to that, Adnan, you mentioned 1348, and you've mentioned it a couple times. And I think that one of the mistakes that a lot of people make is that they take 1348 as being the extent of the bubonic plague. But that really wasn't the situation. You want to lay out any of that timeline after 1348 for us? Well, just to say that it circulates 1348 is when it really arrives to Europe and, starts spreading in a dramatic way so that the cities in the Italian Peninsula, for example, start having a massive outbreak. And we have documents and first-person narratives that testify

to the dramatic experience. So you have, for example, someone like Boccaccio writing, you know, his very famous work of literature, the Decameron, that's set in the era of the play. and involves noble young folk from Florence fleeing and escaping the city because of the outbreak of the plague and entertaining one another with stories. So the reason why 1348 is so important in the dating is because that's when it really reaches Europe and starts to have these devastating consequences. but it spreads to central northern Europe over the course of the next two or three years, and likewise it's introduced into Egypt and the Levant also in 1348 and it continues to spread

further around the eastern Mediterranean and then across North Africa and it takes a long time for it to die out really. So it spreads, you know, it's like sort of concentric circles spreading out further and further, but it takes some time months to years for it to reach parts of Northern Europe or possibly some scholars think that it may have reached sub-Saharan Africa. There's some evidence now using these techniques of bioarchiology and studying bones and remains and so on where they've sometimes identified the bacteria. So that's the circumstance for this major outbreak,

but it continues to afflict the Mediterranean world. And as Henry mentioned, as you mentioned, Henry, that there are outbreaks that continue to this day. They're controlled because we have the medical means to do so, but it's a continuing feature of history. But so the real question is, is, you know, what happens to society when you lose maybe half the people in a particular city? And some scholars have thought that, well, this was such a devastating loss of life that it

must have changed absolutely everything. And in fact, they would think that this is a major turning point in world history, certainly the history of Europe. And others have minimized its effects and said that, you know, much of what was already you know, much of what we think were the consequences were already processes well underway. So, for example, some historians, particularly Marxist historians, have suggested that the plague really was the death knell of feudalism and that it changed labor relations dramatically because workers were in a much stronger position. Labor was scarce and it allowed for greater, you know, you know, kind of worker enrichment and or at least it upended the system of control,

particularly in peasant life where serfs were tied to the land. It undermined those bonds of feudal relations because peasants could decide, you know, to go work for a different lord and leave the land that they were tied to. because they would have a better situation and receive you know to be able to keep a larger share of their crops and so on and it certainly it did seem to have some kind of an effect on the labor relations because by you know even just a year or two after the outbreak of the plague in England for example there's past a a law, the statute of laborers, that really was a draconian control on laborers that

insisted that it would be illegal for you to leave the land that you were on and put all kinds of restrictions where the state had to intervene on behalf of large landowners, those who employed workers in order to stabilize the labor situation. And what we see, one of the major. consequences of this is that even though it was legislated it was very difficult to enforce that we're not talking about a modern state system where you have documentation and people have social security numbers or things like that keeping track of people and their movement was not easy for states to do in the pre-modern period so it was a an attempt at enforcing a of shoring up the earlier labor system but it obviously did didn't work. But these draconian attempts created a lot of resentment and backlash so that in 1381 there was a major peasants revolt called the rising of 1381 that had really enormous consequences and was in response to the first poll tax in England, for example.

But some scholars suggest that this was something of a delayed response to the social effects and consequences of the black death and how it changed labor and social relations. And that these draconian attempts to enforce social control of labor led to a peasantry that eventually, after a generation or so, rose up against the state. and really dramatically changed the history of England during this period. I think it's worth underscoring that this is something that people that have, you know, looked into Marx would inherently understand, but perhaps not think about. So we're talking about the reserve army of labor here, where before the black death of Europe, there was an incredible amount of people working the land for a very small amount of land owners to the extent where there was this huge reserve army of labor, which allowed the

repression of any sort of autonomy of the workers on the land, keeping the conditions very poor for them, because there was so many people in reserve. But as you've said, we're looking at somewhere between 40 to 60% of the people in Europe dying of the plague by the end of it, which of course is going to dramatically reduce the amount of people in that reserve army of labor. And by doing so, it really increases the power of the people who are left still they're working. And that really did provide basically a springboard for the workers to try to stand up and, yeah, basically overthrow the system of oppression that was on numb. I don't know if you want to comment on that. No, I mean, I think that's exactly the, you know, exactly the

scenario from a Marxist analysis of what this major demographic change led to. What I think is very interesting as well as how many other kinds of cultural and social changes took place during this period. So it was an era where, strangely enough, there were a lot of responses about governing and regulating people's status and station in society because, you know, when workers are emboldened to be able to improve their law and have more power, it troubles the traditional social relationships and hierarchies in society. And in the pre-modern era, how you dressed and how you appeared in society was very important in marking your social status. People could tell who you were and what level of society, what class, what your profession was, where you belonged essentially by how you dressed and what you were allowed to wear.

So they had actually regulations on these sorts of things. And one thing that happens when you have, you know, people from the lower orders, as they would have been known, now being able to afford, you know, better clothing and better food and so on, is that this would undermine people's sense of their own identity and their position in society. so they tried to regulate, regulate this. And there's something, for example, from the role of Parliament in 1363, sumptuary legislation that was passed to limit lavish dress that complacent set the context in this way.

I'll quote from it. It says, since many necessaries within the kingdom have been greatly increased in price because diverse people of diverse conditions use diverse apparel not pertaining to their estate. That is to say laborers use the apparel of craftsmen, and craftsmen, the apparel of valets,

and valets the apparel of squires, and squires the apparel of knights. Therefore, the below-mentioned merchandise sells at greater prices than it was accustomed to, and the wealth of the kingdom is destroyed to the great damage of lords and commons. So you can see that in part, They were very concerned about how the social system was being opened up and also how that was causing inflation because more people had the spending power to aspire to apparel and clothing of those that were considered their betters and that this was somehow undermining both the economy and the social order of society.

And we can trace some of these social changes to the effect. of the Black Death. Yeah, I think that that's a, I know that we want to keep this episode relatively short because we don't want to give away too much in the event that we are able to bring on somebody to do a overview of pandemics and plagues and their effects on society.

But Adnan, is there anything else that you feel we should add before we wrap this up? The only thing is just to say that so often when dealing with the disease devastating pandemic there is a tendency as well on the cultural and political level to scapegoat and blame people as being responsible for the disease and this was of course very much so the case in the medieval period just as it is now where we have certain politicians trying to ascribe blame people popularly blaming people of Asian back

or appearance and demonstrating hostility towards them because they always imagine that the source and origin of the disease is somehow coming from outside and that it is strangers who are responsible or people who are different who are responsible for this scourge that is a very sad continuity that we have in some ways with the medieval period where Jews in particular were scapegoated and we see that the black death led to wide scale, Europe-wide major massacres of the Jews who are blamed for poisoning Christians and Christian society and having a desire to destroy Christendom by introducing the plague as a poison. So it was imagined as a poison that was in the water or a poison that was introduced into the food supply. We're not imagining. We do have the benefit of science, but nonetheless, we're still blaming and treating people who are different as somehow responsible collectively for this pandemic and using it.

I think political opportunists are using it to foment hostility that is of a geopolitical variety rather than anything based genuinely in public health. yeah great so thanks for tuning in to this uh basically a little bonus episode of of gorilla history you can follow us well you're already on our patreon but you can follow us on twitter at gorilla underscore pod that's g-u-e-r-r-r-i-l-l-a- underscore pod adnan how can the listeners follow you and pitch your other podcast that you're on well if you're interested in in this podcast you might be interested in The Mudgellis podcast. You can go to anchor.fm slash MSGP dash Queens, but look for the Mudge list. It's on YouTube as well as on your favorite platform, Apple or Spotify. And it focuses

mostly on Middle East, Islamic World, culture, history, religion, topics of interest to people who want to know more about the region or about Muslim diasporic experience and so forth. So find us there. And on Twitter? Adnan A. Hussein. That's H-U-S-A-I-N-Husain. And, yeah, I would definitely recommend that the listeners, check out the ones of this podcast on their platform of choice. I've listened to the first few episodes.

It's great so far. For me, you can follow me on Twitter at Huck, 19. 1995, H-U-C-K-1995. I also have my own Patreon page where I do breakdowns of science and do public health updates. You can find that at patreon.com forward slash Huck1995. Until next time, solidarity, and take care, everyone. You know, Thank you.