Supping with their forefathers in the other world

The Year of the Plague #8

Part One: The Worst Year Ever
Part Two: Rats
Part Three: Rome’s Miserable Fate
Part Four: Crop rotation in the 14th century
Part Five: ‘We live in an age where illness and deformity are commonplace’
Part Six: The Scum of England
Part Six: The globalisation of germs

From the Golden Horde the plague spread south, to Constantinople, Cyprus, Baghdad, Anatolia, Arabia and north Africa. Constantinople, a shadow of its former self after its sack by the Latins in 1204, was almost entirely surrounded by the Ottomans, and to make matters worse had just survived a civil war. Its current emperor, John VI, who had emerged victorious, would go on to retire to write an account of the Plague. In it he recalled how ‘sputum suffused with blood was brought up and disgusting and stinking breath from within. The throat and tongue, parched from the heat, were black and congested with blood.’

John VI believed that the plague came from the ‘Hyperborean Scythians’, in what is now Ukraine – not that not far off. Similarly, Arab historian Ibn al-Wardi, having spoken to merchants in Syria who had been to Crimea, thought it had started in the ‘Land of Darkness’, the nicely descriptive term by which Russia was known.

A plague survivor and historian from the city, Nikephoros Gregoras, wrote that. ‘The calamity did not destroy men only but many animals living with and domesticated by man. I speak of dogs and horses and all species of birds, even the rats that happened to live within the walls.’ Curiously, he’s one of very few chroniclers to mention rates, although his recollection is disputed by some historians, many believing that horses were largely unaffected by the illness, their odour repulsing the fleas which carried it.

In November 1347 a ship from Rhodes landed in Cyprus and found the port mysteriously deserted. The ship soon left, but not before some rats and their fleas had managed to jump on board, taking the plague onto Antioch from where it infected Syria.