A magisterial history of one of the worst ever pandemics focuses on the individuals caught up in the horror
I
n Venice, authorities tried to enforce social distancing by closing all the bars, and banning the sale of wine by merchant boats plying the canals. In Gloucester, the powers that be attempted to lock down the city by banning anyone travelling to and from Bristol, 40 miles south. But fights broke out among thirsty Italians, and Gloucester’s quarantine was broken – whether it was by people simply going on a trip to check their eyesight has, alas, gone unrecorded. In London, there was a dramatic rise in the sale of personal protective equipment, in the form of gloves.
The story of the Black Death, as historian Thomas Asbridge shows in this magisterial survey, contains many such echoes of the Covid-19 pandemic, but it also shows just how relatively lucky we were a few years ago. The plague was far more lethal, and in the areas it spread between 1346 and 1353 it killed half the population. About 100m died: it was, Asbridge remarks, “the most lethal natural disaster in human history”. If a pathogen with a similar case fatality rate were to erupt worldwide today, billions might die.
And the plague itself, Asbridge argues, was more global than has usually been thought: it was “not solely, or even primarily, a European phenomenon, but rather a catastrophe that touched almost all of the medieval world”. He takes the reader on a vivid tour: from Sicily to Egypt, where observers noted “bodies scattered under palm trees and in front of shops”, to people “coughing up blood” in Marseille, to Syria, and through Spain, Sweden and all the way to Russia. Evidence of sudden population collapses in Ghana, Nigeria and Burkina Faso suggests that the Black Death spread far into the African continent. It certainly ravaged Tunis, where the scholar Ibn Khaldun survived and went on to argue that “lethal plagues played an essential role in the rise and fall of civilizations”, long before Jared Diamond wrote Guns, Germs, and Steel.
