Ottoman History Podcast - Plague in the Ottoman World

Episode Date: March 19, 2020

Episode 455 featuring Nükhet Varlık, Yaron Ayalon, Orhan Pamuk, Lori Jones, Valentina Pugliano, and Edna Bonhomme narrated by Chris Gratien and Maryam Patton with contributions by Nir Shafir, Sam Dolbee, Tunç Şen, and Andreas Guidi The plague is caused by a bacteria called Yersinia pestis, which lives in fleas that in turn live on rodents. Coronavirus is not the plague. Nonetheless, we can find many parallels between the current pandemic and the experience of plague for people who lived centuries ago. This special episode of Ottoman History Podcast brings together lessons from our past episodes on plague and disease in the early modern Mediterranean. Our guests offer state of the art perspectives on the history of plague in the Ottoman Empire, and many of their observations may also be useful for thinking about epidemics in the present day.   « Click for More »

Okay, hit record. You hear yourself? Testing, testing. Okay, all good. We can go off video. It might be faster too. But it was great to get visual confirmation of a human being. I haven't... The genetic story is opening up new possibilities for historical inquiry. Trying to understand people on their own terms in the kind of scientific language that they had and the tools that they had is quite important for historians of science.

Certain groups of people get identified with certain diseases based on which perspective you're looking from. identified with certain diseases based on which perspective you're looking from. Plague breaks family ties. What does it mean to you to be exposed to a locality that is not your own, and over which you don't have the same control that you would have? Disasters are not unique events, but rather an opportunity to look at society as a whole. Welcome to the Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Chris Creighton. And I'm Marion Patton. This is a special episode about plague in the Ottoman

Empire. We've recorded a number of episodes about plague in the Ottoman Empire over the years, and we wanted to return to some of their lessons in light of the coronavirus pandemic, which has had a particularly large impact on schools and universities. And why are we interested in discussing Ottoman plague specifically? Well, the Ottoman Empire lasted a long time. And in fact, its relationship with plague is even a bit longer and more intense than Europe's relationship with plague. So this 500 year history allows a long stretch of time with which to evaluate plague and the Ottoman Empire's connections with the Mediterranean world offer some parallels to the global crisis we're seeing today. Mariam and I are both sort of in the middle of this crisis. I'm in Cambridge,

Massachusetts. Harvard University is shut down. Not a lot is going on here. What's it like there for you, Mariam? So I'm coming at you from Florence, Italy, sort of central Italy. And last week, the official decree came down to turn all of Italy into a red zone, basically. And then Thursday and Friday is when things really got serious and everything has totally shut down. So I'm in basically house arrest. And it's okay. Everything's shut. You can still go out for groceries. But it's a very interesting time to be here in Italy, that's for sure. Yeah, it'd be a great time to sneak out and get a picture of Il Duomo without any people around it. Sure, yeah. I mean, we're not supposed to go out unless we have a good reason. I have to carry around a self-declaration form and my passport. And I've not yet run into any police, but they're around. So, you know, I do live close

to the Duomo, so I could try that, but it's a little eerie right now. And we're just waiting it out. And I think that's one of the reasons why it's a great time to revisit the history of plague, because we're actually like in the affective state that people who experienced past epidemics were in. You know, it's not often that we actually are sort of viscerally feeling what goes on during a pandemic. Absolutely. I mean, I think it's, for the period that I study, I never thought that things would be relevant to today, if that makes sense. But they absolutely are. Looking back to 14th, 15th, 16th century, the same issues that confronted society then we are kind of confronting today and that's why

on some level it's useful as historians to draw those connections to the present day even if we admit first of all that our problems are not the same problems of the 15th century and vice versa and that's one of the things we have in mind recording this podcast we know that many courses in both high schools and universities throughout the world have been canceled or have gone to remote teaching. A lot of our colleagues out there are feeling this right now, so we hope this episode will be a valuable resource to teachers out there looking for material that speaks to our present. So for all the students out there listening, we'd like to encourage you to think about the social and cultural

context of plague in the past in light of what you're experiencing right now in 2020. So the novel coronavirus, or COVID-19, is not the plague. We have to make that clear. Coronavirus is a virus, whereas plague is caused by a bacteria called Yersinia pestis that lives in fleas. Much like the plague in certain periods of history, coronavirus is spreading extremely rapidly. Many are now predicting that the majority of people will contract it sooner or later. This was true in events such as the plague pandemic of the mid-14th century as well. And the good news is coronavirus is not proving as deadly as the plague. In many parts of Europe and the Middle East, more than half of the total population perished during the Black Death. But coronavirus is deadly, especially among older demographics, and that's part of why we're seeing widespread fear and anxiety over its spread.

Another reason is that we still don't know that much about COVID-19 in terms of how it manifests and how it spreads. And that's another parallel with the plague. In fact, it took historians a long time to figure out what the plague really was. In recent years, there have been rapid developments in our understanding of plague thanks to genetic research. Nuket Varluk, a professor of history at University of South Carolina, explains. The classic story that we all know or read in textbooks about like bubonic plague, rats and fleas, that's the older story that we knew about. And later on, there was a new understanding, a more critical understanding of re-examining the assumptions

about retrospective diagnosis, how we diagnose disease on the basis of historical sources alone. And there was a more critical perspective on these accounts, and historians started questioning this, mainly that we cannot have this retrospective diagnosis, and this could not have been plague, this could have been another disease. But one problem with this is that everyone became so skeptical that it was not the plague, that it could have been another disease, then people started feeling scared to even suggest that it could have been plague. But at the same time,

as historians were kind of shying away from making suggestions about, you know, because of the trap of retrospective diagnosis, geneticists were at this time started developing these new techniques and these new understandings by basically using human skeletal remains and mostly using dental pulp to look for evidence of ancient DNA of Yersinia pestis, the pathogen that causes the plague, as we know today. As far as we know now, the only way you can identify whether a person in the past died of plague or not is by testing dental pulp and by developing the ancient DNA pieces and whether they would test positively for Yersinia pestis or not.

And these studies developed over the last 10,15 years ago as historians were shying away from making these claims about past plagues so it was interesting how these played out and in a way I think we were almost pushed to the margins of our own field by hesitating of not making those claims as geneticists were trying to take the lead in telling us, well, actually there is plague here, and this is the way we can show it. About five, six years ago, a revolutionary attempt was made in the field of genetics in terms of plague research. The material, ancient DNA material, brought from East Smithfield excavations, a burial ground from England,

that we can date to the time of the Black Death, and we know that the human remains buried there were from the Black Death, so there's definitive evidence that those individuals died from the plague. And it was possible for the first time to sequence the entire genome of Yersinia pestis entirely from this ancient DNA. So this was a revolutionary moment in the understanding of genetic evidence, and it kind of changed our understanding of the history of the bacterium entirely. We're looking at new types of questions, and it's possible to tell a global story now,

types of questions and it's possible to tell a global story now because we were not able to ask these questions before and we were not able to integrate these little pieces before. The fact that historians and scientists knew so little about plague for so long is partly due to how the disease can transform in response to new environmental and social conditions. Varlik's groundbreaking work on plague in the Ottoman Empire studied how plague went from being a once-in-a-generation pandemic to become a somewhat less deadly but annual outbreak in Ottoman cities. And the Ottoman Empire and the Ottoman story, the Ottoman experience is really in a way unique in what it can tell us about the conquest of Constantinople, like mid-15th century. I see it as kind of the first century of the plague, of the second pandemic. And during this time period, the circulation of the disease in and out of Ottoman lands is moving according to a certain predictable epidemiological patterns.

But after the conquest of Constantinople and after human circulation and trade and all the other like expansion of the empire and other mobilities expanded, we see different patterns of circulation and reemergence of disease. And this was actually something that surprised me when I was doing my research. Looking at the recurrences of the disease, you can almost see a more or less predictable pattern of recurrence of the disease of every human generation or so. Every 10 to 15 years, you have another wave of plague. And this is not only for the Ottomans. This is the same in Egypt, in Syria, in Western Europe, more or less. And it is the

natural behavior of the disease, because the biological mechanism of this disease is in such a way that it comes to a new place. And if it finds a new environment that can sustain it in the wild rodent population, then it will recur again, affect human societies and retreat. So it has almost like a cyclical pattern of recurrences and disappearance. But when I look at the Ottoman experience, this kind of natural rhythm of the disease was developing and evolving more or less along the same lines for a century. The way natural resources were used and the way people and humans and non-humans moved in this environment must have changed dramatically in such a way that disease patterns have changed. So it's not 10 years anymore.

It is decreasing over the time, especially after the mid-15th century into the 16th century. We see that the disease is recurring constantly, almost like a seasonal event in and out every year, especially in large urban centers like Istanbul, of course, a very large population, but also in other cities, in Cairo, in Aleppo, in Salonika. In these urban centers, we see plague recurring over and over again, a sustained presence. There must be a certain number of rodents, basically rats, living close to human

populations in cities that were able to sustain this disease year-round. And of course, you need a healthy number of fleas to transmit the disease from the rats to the humans. If you have such a large number of rodents within a city living close to the humans, you don't need to reintroduce the infection. They preserve the infection in their natural habitat. So we always think that plague comes from another place. No, plague is there. Then we get, of course, to things like rodent population,

increase and decreases in rodent population like humans there are some patterns because they also get affected by the disease and humans will get the infection after the rodent die off because the fleas that normally depend on the rats as hosts will be searching for new hosts so when you look at the decline and increased patterns of populations among the rodents and the human epidemics, they are similar, but the human epidemic always comes later than the rat episodic. Plague can also be spread human to human, right? That only happens, as far as we know,

at least scientifically proven, in the pneumonic type of plague, which is when the infection gets into the lungs and it is transmitted via droplets in the air. So that's a human-to-human transmission. But it is relatively rare. I came across some instances in which it was mentioned that it was the pneumonic type, but plague is default to the bubonic type. The pneumonic is like a secondary infection that might develop or not. The urban story is something that we can put together on the basis of our historical sources that tend to tell us the human story, right? But there is also the invisible background

story that we really don't know much about or don't find out much about in the historical sources, because it is beyond the scope of historical agents or humans. So that's the story in which the spillover events happens, in which wild rodents living in faraway places from the human populations get to transmit the disease to human populations. And then from these centers, with human communication and with the movement of rodents, we see the transmission of the disease to larger urban centers. The larger the human population is, the higher the chances of the infection being introduced to the cities. So the cities, and especially large cities like capital cities, work almost like magnets attracting the infection. So in that sense, I think we can certainly say that Istanbul becomes the capital

of plague. The history of plague reveals that a disease can manifest differently in different times and places. In the next part of this episode, we'll be thinking about how plague impacted Ottoman society, how people reacted, and what it meant. Yaron Ayalon wrote a book about natural disasters in the Ottoman Empire, but fundamentally, the book is not about nature so much as humans. Coming into this book, I wanted to look at natural disasters as a way not to understand how the empire operated overall, but really trying to understand daily life, the daily experiences of Ottoman people, and what we can learn about Ottoman society. There were two reasons I felt I could do that.

One is that if you look at people who study disasters in modern contexts, sociologists and psychologists, there's agreement there that disasters are not unique events, but rather an opportunity to look at society as a whole, some sort of a magnifying glass or something. Yeah, interesting. So we can take those assumptions and use them for history. And it really works because in Ottoman history, especially before the 19th century, it was those events that generated a lot of documentation,

especially when the state decided to do something about it. So that helps us look into, you know, the different fabrics of society and trying to understand how things work. Ayalon found that when it came to natural disasters, there wasn't much difference in the experiences of Muslims and non-Muslims. But that doesn't mean that every person in the empire reacted the same way in the face of plague. The old historical narrative tells us, of course, that Muslims perceived plague as a form of punishment and something that comes from God and it's inevitable. There's no point in fleeing plague areas, for example. There was some level of popular belief, but that's where it stops because we do see Muslims fleeing plague. At the end, the division was probably economic if

you could afford to go elsewhere you would and if you couldn't you wouldn't go uh and that has nothing to do with uh religious principles surely there were some people who are very devout you know and they and they really they truly believe that the religion told them that they shouldn't go anywhere and so they wouldn't go yeah But I mean, similar debates existed in Europe. There's a whole very long and explicit letter by Martin Luther about this very question, should one flee plague areas? And there were some debates between Catholics and Protestants about this. But at the end, everyone recognizes, the Europeans did, and then the Ottomans did, that people leave plague areas.

The Ottomans in the 16th century still tried to prevent that by imposing all sorts of sanctions on people who left. But by the 17th century, you see this very clearly, they already realize that the fact that they keep adjusting taxes to certain areas is really the proof of their recognition. Yes, people left. That's why we have to readjust taxes. It wasn't very good for their economy because some of these guys just disappeared and never paid taxes again until they were, I guess, refound somewhere. But anyway, so the point is that how people perceive this.

In general, people didn't really know how to explain it. We have some reports of conversations taking place in coffee houses. This mostly comes from Arab Chronicles, people sitting in coffee houses and having those discussions and believing, you know, well, we've heard stories that in the next town, there is plague, so it's probably going to come here, or about earthquakes. Oh, there is a solar eclipse. So that's a preliminary sign of an earthquake. There were all sorts of these popular beliefs. But the way I understand it is that popular beliefs aside, people acted based on whatever judgment they had at the moment and what resources they had and what they could actually do.

I mean, if you are tied to a position, if you miss one day of work, then you don't have any money to feed your family, you're not going anywhere. And it doesn't matter if you believe that you should go or not. And if you have five houses outside of the city, then you are going, whether you believe that you should go or not. The same goes with earthquakes, of course.

Rich people had other houses they could go to. Poor people moved to live in the gardens outside the city. When your house is destroyed, what can you do, right? Ayalon touched on a major question regarding how Muslim societies have been misrepresented. European authors portrayed their Ottoman contemporaries as fatalistic and resigned in the face of calamities like plague. This trope of fatalism has been extended to a larger debate about differences in how the Ottoman state approached epidemics in comparison with contemporary European states. Whereas European

states implemented quarantines, the Ottoman Empire did not really begin to do so until the 19th century. Quarantine refers to a period of isolation for people or animals carrying or suspected to be carrying a disease. There are a lot of limitations to quarantine as a method of controlling the spread of disease, although quarantines of different sorts are critical to managing the current pandemic. At one point in history, quarantine was the main public health provision adopted by states in times of crisis. In another episode of Ottoman History Podcast, we featured excerpts from a public event at Columbia University entitled Imagining and Narrating Plague in the Ottoman World. It brought together aforementioned historian Nukhet Varlik with Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk

to talk about the challenges and possibilities of writing about plague, the subject of Pamuk's in-progress novel. So epidemiological orientalism, this is a term I use to refer to the ways in which or the discourses produced by the European travelers writing about the Ottoman experiences of plague in particular. And this is, I think, really at the heart of the matters that we really need to understand, because this epidemiological Orientalism is not only something that informed the historical scholarship produced in Europe about the Ottoman Empire, and that had lasting results into the 21st century. But at the same time, it was this body of knowledge that informed epidemiological thinking in the late 19th and early 20th century. And as Orhan suggested, 1894, we have the beginning of the third pandemic with the plague of Hong Kong and Bombay, and then these spread to the rest of

the world, making the modern global plague that we know of today. And so in that sense, there is very close associations between the epidemiological Orientalism, a body of knowledge that was drawn from Ottoman experience starting in the early modern period, and also its applications to Asian and South Asian contexts by European epidemiologists in that context. So I think I see some parallels there, how the Oriental, for example, could be conveniently applied as a category to Istanbul or to Hong Kong. In fact, when you look at the writings of those scholars, you see descriptions being very similar. But going back to the question of fatalism,

what I found in my research is looking at the writings of these European travelers and visitors to the Ottoman Empire, even though you have these multiple voices or multiple responses to plague. It seems one behavior among these many starts to be the kind of representative behavior of Muslim societies, and that is to say the behavior of the fatalistic Turk. We can see how accounts talk about how Muslims did not flee plague because they did not understand plague was contagious, how they lacked rational thinking. It's a fact that they did not show the same reaction and did not run away. That doesn't mean they're irrational but they're not afraid of that that much. To conclude from that that they're

irrational is perhaps Orientalism. I am critical of whenever the subject of plague and imposition of quarantine comes, the focus post-colonial reaction of only seeing Orientalist historians while there is an immense subject of what happened to us when there is plague. Personal histories, local histories are lacking. So how do we invent or think or imagine the past?

At a house, plague breaks family ties. This is what makes it so interesting because traditional societies are defined by the fact that family ties are so strong. You don't need government institutions. defined by the fact that family ties are so strong. You don't need government institutions. You don't need social security system. That family is protected. And a family is important. And the family tie, your relation with your mother, sisters, brothers, this is so important. But when that comes that strongly, then you can see the humanity of the person, that the whole weight of history traditional society is dang is destroyed and a person runs by himself and if you can imagine that by yourself and see how can that happen even daniel defoe is writing that ah he says he's most scared that a wife is not a wife anymore father is not a father anymore. Brother is not a brother. Everyone is. That is the end of history and ideology. And that is in itself, leave aside all the prejudices. It's

extremely interesting subject for a writer. But the question of quarantine, I would like to just open up this to thinking about why quarantine and public health efforts have become almost idealized in the scholar historical scholarship. I mean, when you look at them, of course, many books have been written about plague experience in European society in the early modern period, in the modern period, in different parts of the world. And you always see quarantine being, you know, idealized as a kind of positivity, epitome of the positivistic response of, you know, the positivistic way of thinking of a scholarship that really comes from Eurocentric narratives. Now, in that sense, I want to open up this thinking about quarantine, whether I mean, this, you know, underlying these narratives, you have the sense that it is our modern obsession with quarantine as an effective

measure against plague that really gives a value to these scholars talking about plague. You know, you want to see, of course, oh, there is quarantine in Europe. So this means they were more progressive, you know, more had scientific understanding, and you don't have the same quantum measures in the Ottoman Empire. It means there is no effective public health measure. I reject this, this argument. And in fact, I think, you know, focusing too much on quarantine does not even give us a full understanding. My point is that in the end, with quarantine, we should understand there were lots of quarantine riots. Lots of, especially, it's known in history as cholera riots in Russia.

Do we have examples in the Ottoman world for cholera or currency riots? No, that is also very interesting. There are cholera riots in Russia, Poland, and I sometimes think that perhaps there was. Why were there riots? Because the government officials were saying, don't go there, don't eat those, close your shop, I'm burning your stuff. And, ah, and these are authoritarian countries and they were using government system

to punish the people for getting sick. If you go to subaltern writings, the fifth volume of subaltern studies is about the third plague pandemic. And most of the stuff written in that there is about how colonial English mistreated Indians. Some Indians resisted the colonial British and did not pay attention to quarantina measures. For example, in my novel, I try to argue that this is not resistance. It's, in a novel, I try to argue that this is not resistance, it's in a way the suicide.

But then it's when the rhetoric of anti-colonialism takes place, it comes to the limits of not even accepting medicine. While my take on this is that in the end, you have to see what's happening locally through localized. And it's very hard to do that, really. And that's what we're working on. Can I just add something on how relevant global cholera epidemics is to the history of plague? I mean, I agree what you said. Starting in the 1830s, we have these massive cholera outbreaks spreading into the world. And this is something that really is influencing the ways in which plague was understood and also how it was studied, the scientific knowledge about plague.

And so when we have the 1894 third pandemic, these experiences are very relevant to each other. But as you suggested, of course, we cannot take plague knowledge and administrative policy and that experience outside of its colonial context is something that I very much agree with. But it's also important to keep in mind the basic mechanisms about plague as an infectious disease was not known until late 19th, early 20th century. And so as you suggested, so the bacteriological agent, the pathogen, Bacchia or Sinia pestis, as the bacterium that causes plague was not known until 1894. And also how

rats and fleas were involved in that process. This was something that became accepted in the scientific community in the early 20th century. So in the absence of that knowledge, seeking for past organization or understanding a measure that would align with our modern scientific thing in our plague is in a way anachronistic. So in that sense, I think, you know, I think we should be more open to looking at multiple ways of dealing with disease. And in that, we should perhaps bring religious belief or belief in magic and experimental medical treatments into that mix. So I wanted to emphasize that. So some historians are actually using this term healthscaping, referring to public health efforts in the in the pre-modern period

and trying to break the association between public health from its modern and euro-american context i really want to encourage our student listeners in particular to go to the website ottomanhistorypodcast.com and listen to the full conversation between pamuk and varlik it's a glimpse into how the work of historians can have a real impact on popular literature. In the last part of our podcast, we'll be going deeper into that term, epidemiological Orientalism, that Varlick used as we explore early modern knowledge about plague and how it transformed. transformed. The idea about landscapes generating disease goes back as far as 500 BC. Sure. The Greeks were really the first ones to put in writing the fact that certain landscapes, certain places

could generate disease. I'm sure the ideas existed even long before them, but just weren't put into writing. It's almost as if the Greek ideas that these hot, humid, disease-prone winds were coming from North Africa across the Mediterranean, the exact same ideas show up in English texts in the 14th, 15th century, and in French texts, and in German texts. And so it's really taking that body of knowledge and just replicating it. Anything that causes a bad smell was deemed to be something that could generate disease. So if we're looking at swamps, we're looking at enclosed spaces, we're looking at water storage that isn't flushed out continuously. So then

you've got the gutters in the streets that don't get flushed out continuously. So then you've got the gutters in the streets that don't get flushed out properly. You've got lakes that don't have a flow through in them. So anything that causes stagnation is a landscape that could create plague. The other thing is landscapes that have hills and tall trees that block the sun. So again, things that don't allow good airflow to go through.

So those types of things. In addition to that, it's knowing that certain, as I said, certain landscapes, but also certain regions of the world were more likely to generate these types of problems, especially places that had hot, humid weather. And when the winds blow from the south to the north, they bring said hot, humid weather with them. And so the idea was to keep the windows on your house closed to the south so you don't have these hot, humid weather coming into your house. Lori Jones worked for more than 20 years in the field of international health and development

on issues such as HIV AIDS. Now she studies disease and health in the medieval and early modern periods. Certainly my own research focuses primarily on what are called plague tracts, which are texts that were written to provide information about what the plague was, how to prevent it, how to treat it, largely written by physicians, but not only. Do you know what I mean? Some of them were very administrative and some of them were very religious, each targeting different kinds of audiences. But certainly if we look at folk ideas and practices, it's really looking at how did people live their lives and what might they have done to try and prevent something.

Laurie Jones studies what she and Nukat Varlik call plaguescapes. For centuries, Europeans associated disease with place. The places that generated plague seem to have shifted over time. and part of it was a shift from landscapes that we might consider to be rural because early earlier medieval europe was quite rural to recognizing that it was almost only in big cities so what was it about cities that became particularly problematic and then within cities what areas of cities became the most problematic. And that's where we started to really see the focus on the parts of the cities inhabited by the poor that became blamed for the plague. Last big plague in England was in London in 1665. The year after

that was the big fire, which burnt down much of the city. The plague didn't come back in a big way. burnt down much of the city. The plague didn't come back in a big way. So you can see the English writers starting to see maybe the fire cleaned out the plague. We have now rebuilt our city. It's much airier. The streets are much wider. It's much cleaner. But you know, those Ottoman cities, they're just like ours used to be. So maybe that's where the plague comes from. And then certainly by the time of the plague of Marseilles, you see English writers in particular very specifically writing that the plague came from the Ottoman Empire, and since it comes from the Ottoman Empire,

it must have always come from the Ottoman Empire. So there was no longer a sense that our cities were dirty and disgusting and plague generating. It must have always been brought from the outside. In one of the French tracts that I was reading this week, the plague of Marseille must have been brought in by a ship from the Levant because our city is clean and airy and spacious, so it can't possibly have been generated here. What I found really interesting in the travel writings of Europeans

is early on, say the 16th century, they are describing Turkish populations, especially in Constantinople, as exceedingly clean. The cities is very clean. The people is bathing regularly, which comes as quite a shock to the Europeans. And yet by the 1700s, they're dirty, disgusting people. So again, there's a shift. And I really think a lot of the shift comes down to changing politics in Europe, but also the changing relationship between the Europeans and the

Ottoman Empire. As Europeans increasingly located disease in regions south and east of Europe, they also did so within Europe's modern boundaries. What I find quite interesting in the English and French ones is when they want to give examples of plague outbreaks in other places, they most often make reference to ones in Italy. Often the foreign outbreaks are Italian ones, so it could be subtly putting the plague as also an Italian problem. The other thing that I find really interesting, when they talk about the wind, the southerly winds being a problem in France, or in the French tracts, they often specifically

talk about Le Midi, which I mean, as we know, is the southern half of France. So again, we have a geopolitical difference, we have a language difference. And now we have a situating a plague in that area. Like they never talk about the plague came from Germany or the plague came from the Netherlands. It always came from somewhere south and somewhere east. Underlying all of this is not just trade relationships that were going on between the various European kingdoms or empires and the Ottomans, but the battles that were going on between the various European kingdoms or empires and the Ottomans, but the battles that were going on between the Europeans themselves, especially after the Reformation. So then we've got Protestant England allying with the Ottoman Turks against the Catholic

Holy Roman Empire. So all of that is going on underneath all of these discussions about where the plague came from as well. So sometimes trying to pick those threads out is quite difficult, but I do think that it's influencing who they're saying is plague-ridden. Ultimately, the association of disease with place lasted long after modern notions of contagion and germ theory. Even right up until the germ theory, you know, the late 19th century,

and even afterwards, the idea that certain places, certain types of spaces were diseased and could be cleaned or made better always existed. I mean, we still really, I mean, if we look at sort of the Purell craze and sanitization craze, people still believe that.

So it's just, it's shifted a little bit and it's evolved. But the idea, the link between landscape, however you want to define landscape and place and disease still exists. Plague created divisions, but it also created connections. What's particularly interesting is that we didn't know this medical infrastructure existed. And it turns out from doing archival fieldwork primarily that it wasn't just a question of the 16th century, which is, if you think about it, the century of heightened connection between the Republic of Venice and the Ottoman Empire.

But it goes back much further. Valentina Pugliano did her DPhil at Oxford and is currently a researcher at MIT. She works on Venetian physicians. And when I hear the words Venetian physician, I always think of those bird-shaped plague doctor masks. And you'd be correct to think of them. The beak-like masks that became iconic symbols of Italian plague doctors came about in the 17th century, well after the height of the Black Death. The beaks were filled with a mix of herbs and spices, things like lavender, cinnamon, and other pungent things. Medical theory at the time thought that illnesses and diseases

caused an imbalance of bodily fluids known as humors, and so things like plague spread through poisoned air called miasma. The smelly spices in the masks created a perfumed air, which they thought counteracted the poisoned air and in turn protected the doctor. In Pugliano's conversation with the podcast, she didn't focus on the medical practice of Venetian doctors, but rather their relationship to politics and Mediterranean connections, exploring how Venetian doctors were part of diplomatic missions in the Ottoman and Mamluk domains. These people were individuals salaried, paid by the Venetian government, the Venetian Republic, to staff the consulates, the diplomatic bases in Eastern Mediterranean and the Levant,

where Venice had a number of diplomatic bases in commercial centres such as Damascus, Aleppo, Alexandria, Cairo. And then also in Constantinople, how they describe it, sort of Istanbul, where they kept also a resident embassy. The first evidence that I found of it was from the 1380s, so the end of the 14th century. And this individual seems to be there in the Venetian consulates until the 1670s, 1680s, after the War of Candia, so that Venice fought with the Ottoman Empire. During the War of Candia and at the end of it, Venice decided to close down its consulates in the Levant.

You know, keep the embassy in Istanbul, but close down the consulates. And this meant in practice also an end to this series of appointments of doctors, apothecaries, and surgeons to mount the consulates. So you're basically looking at a medical infrastructure that survived for three centuries. And when I talk about a medical infrastructure, I do so because we're not just talking about an isolated diplomatic base. As far as I can tell from the evidence you basically have as I mentioned the embassy in Istanbul then you have a base in Alexandria, one in Cairo, one in Damascus, one in

Aleppo, one in Tripoli, one in Beirut and for each those, you would find at least one doctor, and then probably an apothecary. Occasionally, you also have a third person in the form of a surgeon or a barber. In Istanbul, Venice tended to draw upon the Sephardic and Levantine Jews for a very specific reason, actually for more than one. The main one was for political gain, in the sense that Jewish doctors had traditionally been employed by the Ottoman elites. And in this way, Venice hoped to penetrate through them, I guess, administrative network of the empire. There's also another reason that Jewish doctors had been migrating forcefully, as we know, forcibly rather than forcefully, from the Iberian Peninsula, as well as Italy,

towards the Near East in waves from the late medieval period onwards. But they often passed through Padua, which was the main university of the Republic of Venice, and they acquired a degree in medicine. They not only acquired a degree in medicine. They not only acquired a degree in medicine but they also became familiar with the academic and intellectual culture of the Italian peninsula and particularly of the Republic of Venice. In the provinces the situation is a bit different in the sense that generally the Venetians appointed people from Venice or from the contiguous Italian regions,

particularly the north of Italy, or they appointed people from their maritime dominion, their colonies, usually Crete and Cyprus, exactly. Particularly surgeons and apothecaries came from there. But we also find locals. I'm saying locals because a lot of the time I'm dealing with anonymous individuals, you know, I'm not giving a name. In the record, I can find something that says, you know, an apothecary from Cairo, or a surgeon from Alexandria. While it was a salaried job, Venetian physicians didn't always see a post in the East as attractive, largely due to Orientalist prejudices we've already discussed. Yet in other cases, the posts were attractive,

largely because of Orientalist curiosity that grew during the early modern period. As far as I can see, this appointment as medico condotto in the Condotta Medica was seen by some as particularly undesirable because it placed them in danger in the sense that the Levant was often associated with an idea of unhealthiness. Plague was considered to be endemic.

People were afraid also of fevers of dysentery of the fact that foods there often gave the europeans stomach aches from which they died so some of them actually saw this appointment as not desirable at other times, particularly in the 16th and the early 17th century, at the height of the craze for natural history and antiquarianism in Europe, this type of appointment came to be seen as very desirable. and apothecaries who become interested in studying nature, plant specimens, but also in studying the canon of Islamic medicine. One way to access these items in a way and this traditional knowledge was to travel almost back in time, if you like, to the Near East and the Eastern Mediterranean. We know that there are certain outstanding examples, such as Alpago and Prospero Alpino.

Prospero Alpino is notable because he basically went to Egypt in the retinue of Giorgio Emo in the 1580s. He stayed there for three, four years. He talked to local doctors, local local physicians he also herborized so went to look for plants and specimens along the Nile and when he returned to Padua where he had obtained his degree he published two volumes one on the medicine of the egyptians and by egyptians he means the contemporary inhabitants of egypt and on the plants of egypt again on the plant the materia medica and the flora that you could find on his sort of coeval egypt this experience in the levant was very fruitful for him because he basically was able through it to secure a lectureship at

the University of Padua which had been previously held by Melchiorre Guilandino who also had an experience in the in the Middle East. You have fluency in Arabic particularly in the 15th century but it's an exception rather than the rule so you have individuals such as Andrea Alpago, who's a philologist at heart and who's interested in reading Avicenna in the original. And he's able to do so because he contacts a local physician, Ibn al-Makki, who tutors him in the language and tutors him also in how you read Avicenna. So he helps him with actual passages. For the last segment of this podcast,

let's fast forward to the end of the 18th century, when Europeans and Americans started showing up in the Middle East in growing numbers. Edna Bonhomme completed her PhD at Princeton University and has been a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. I'm mostly focusing on plague through the vantages of slavery, trade, and death, and how those issues were impacted by various epidemics that emerged in the 18th century. As Bonhomme explained in a conversation with the podcast, strangers and outsiders were seen as a source of plague in 18th century Egypt, not unlike what we've heard so far this episode. For the 1781 plague and the 1791 plague,

there were various accounts in which people assumed that slaves coming from Damascus, black slaves, as well as those coming from sub-Saharan Africa were contributing to this epidemic. And for me, it's not about tracing the source, but the discourse around bodies and like what you're describing, like this transnational mobile. And, you know, depending on the positionality of the person, there are times where, you know, Europeans are blamed. There are times, like I said, in the Tunisian context, where people coming from the Levant are blamed for spreading the disease. In Egypt, Westerners who didn't have experience with the plague at home

found a place of discovery and experimentation. Even if they didn't make real discoveries, their writings pointed to shifts in understandings of plague. Trying to understand people on their own terms in the kind of scientific language that they had and the tools that they had is quite important for historians of science. One person Bonhomme looked at was John Antus. So John Antus was a Moravian missionary

who had been born in colonial America in 1740s. He went to Egypt in the 1770s, mostly based in Cairo, but also spent some time in Upper Egypt, present-day Aswan, and trying to connect to Coptic Christians, et cetera, and learning Arabic during the time. So while he was in Cairo, he witnessed the 1781 plague and really tried to assess what was the origin of this, et cetera. He actually indicated that the origin of the plague

came from a Jewish merchant and two black female slaves. So this typical, yeah. Yeah, and so this wasn't verified by any of the other sources I looked at, but that was his theory on it. So that was one thing that he did. Another thing is that he walked around in his community, supposedly,

which was the merchant community in Cairo at the time, and tried to see who got it and who didn't and according to his observations and letters merchants who had kind of conducted a self quarantine that is to say staying inside their homes did not capture the plague whereas those who kind of went about the city were more susceptible another theory that he had and this was in conversation with another religious group that was based there the I guess the franciscan brotherhood that apparently drinking brandy uh was a cure or a

potential treatment for the plague and so his uh kind of theory about the disease was very much a kind of uh observational everyday life trying to get a sense of what was happening. Outside of his kind of witnessing of the plague in Cairo proper, he had theorized that the quarantine system or a kind of mass quarantine system would be the ideal situation. And that was something he was most likely drawing upon from the Italian context,

where in Italy quarantines were enacted in Marseille mostly enacted etc and so there was a way in which he was drawing upon other kind of uh locales outside of the Egyptian context to say that this works and it should be implemented uh the accounts that he has of for example this one man who was in his neighborhood who had done a self-quarantine up to a certain point and then eventually was like well i need a haircut and so he stuck his head out and asked the barber to come and like out the window and the barber like cut his hair and then sure enough within a couple days this person passed away for him yeah it wasn't he wasn't um supporting myosinothera or just like through the air but actually if you engage or if you were physically in contact especially in an intimate way with like

getting your hair cut then you are going to be um susceptible to the plague another person we talked about was george baldwin he actually claimed to have experimented with an effective plague treatment but you might not be convinced. He lived in the merchant community. He was afforded an allowance by the East India Company to have a translator who could help him navigate that space. And he witnessed the 1791 plague and spoke about that. And the way in which he kind of spoke about it and taught um i had at least uh coordinated this thing is that he he wrote his own kind of like essay on

the plague i found the essay in uh at the british library in the east india company records so this is something he had mailed to the company uh and then later the essay was published in a compendium that um like i think in the 1980s uh of most a lot of his letters but when i when i saw this handwritten kind of text it starts off with him kind of declaring oh i i think i found the cure to the plague and i you know i i think this this is gonna work and so he actually starts off by kind of describing electrochemical theory and like how plague is an acid and the way you deal with acids is by doing this other thing and and and really tries to use the language of the time that one could see from like the royal society and particularly um, um, Joseph Priestley and incorporating that in there. He didn't cite people from the Royal society or Joseph Priestley.

Um, like that language is there. And from there he kind of describes step by step how he came about finding the cure. Uh, first, um, he claims that,

uh, he experimented with, uh, mice and, uh, rats and those that were, um, given olive oil, um, that he experimented with mice and rats. And those that were given olive oil did not contract a plague. And those that were not given olive oil did contract a plague.

And so he had a control experiment whereby olive oil was the treatment. There was a control group, an experimental group and this this was the cure he suggests to people that they take it and they the ones who did you know do um when you say take it do you mean ingest it or consume like just consuming it as opposed like people cook with olive oil and so it's a bit funny um that he's describing that that's the cure. His logic is that the oil and the properties of the oil can somehow challenge and mitigate the acidic properties of the bubonic plague. And for him, ingesting it, consuming it,

or rubbing it on one's body is the way to deal with the disease. What I liked about the experiments and ideas bonhomme's research subjects dealt with was how flawed they were there's a lot more of that in the history of science than the moments of discovery we're used to hearing about that's absolutely true for history of science in general we we only focus on the successes but probably 95 of its history are what we'd consider failures. That might be a little bit unsettling idea for our listeners in this very moment, but it might be useful to think about what a good history of science of the coronavirus outbreak that's going on right now is going to look like decades down the road. With that, we conclude this exploration of the history of plague in the Ottoman Empire.

I'm Marian Patton. I'm Chris Grayton. And many thanks to Nukhet Barluk, Yaron Ayalon, Orhan Pamuk, Lori Jones, Valentina Puglidi, and Onur Engin for their work on the episodes we used in this podcast And finally, thanks to you, the listeners, for joining us in this special episode recorded in highly unusual times If you're using it in class or just want to let us know what you thought, please get in touch And that's all for this episode. Be healthy, everyone....このように、 Субтитры создавал DimaTorzok Thank you.