Pandemics of history show how human resilience can beat coronavirus crisis
“In many places in Siena great pits were dug and piled deep with the multitude of the dead. And they died by the hundreds, both day and night, and all were thrown in those ditches and covered with earth. And as soon all those ditches were filled, more were dug. I, Agnolo di Tura, buried my five children with my own hands. And so many died that all believed it was the end of the world.”
So Agnolo, the chronicler of Siena, recorded the arrival of the Black Death in Siena. Equally graphic scenes were recorded in Florence by Bocaccio and his friends. The Plague from 1337 to 1351 is one of the greatest pandemics of recorded history. Covering Europe and much of Asia, it killed between 75 and 200 million – a colossal proportion of the population of the day. In central Europe over the half the population died from what is now through to be a mixture of bubonic plague, from fleas infesting rats, and very likely a parallel outbreak of anthrax.
It was a very different order from the current Coronavirus Covid-19 outbreak, and even the so-called Spanish Influenza outbreak which killed between 50 million and 100 million worldwide between 1917 and 1922. But these earlier episodes do raise the questions now rightly posed by the headlines about the global spread of disease, disruption to commerce, prevention, community cooperation, and resilience.
Premature death was the common condition of the Mediterranean world of the past two millennia. “It was a world grazed thin by death,” declared the great 4th century Patriarch St John Chrysostom. In his day, and that of his great contemporary St Augustine of Hippo, a woman capable of childbearing could not expect to live beyond the age of 26.
A pandemic of scale has been expected for some time by medics and epidemiologists. The concern is when diseases like the Coronavirus jump species. The SARS outbreak – another coronavirus – is believed to have spread from civets and horseshoe bats in Yunnan Province in China. Between 2002 and 2003, it spread to 17 countries, causing some 774 deaths. The outbreak of Swine Fever, an H1N1 virus – similar to the one in the Spanish Flu pandemic – killed 12,000 in America between 2009 and 2010.
Resilience and reaction and responsibility are being heaped largely on the shoulders of professional paramedics, doctors and nurses and the National Health Service in general in the present media frenzy. Ingenuity and improvisation at the local community level should be at equal premium. St John Chrysostom admonished, “There is nothing colder than a Christian who does not seek to save others.”
The ingenious leaders of the city republic of Ragusa, today’s Dubrovnik, in the wake of repeated plagues following the Black Death decreed a regime of self-isolation in the 1370s. It was for forty days – and the term “quarantine” entered the medical lexicon.
Agnolo di Tura’s Siena is one of the most eloquent witnesses to the effect of a plague pandemic as the great disruptor. Outside the Liquorice-Allsort striped cathedral, the Duomo, there is a soaring brick arch, laced with elegant Gothic tracery – a stand-alone attached to a remote wall. It was to be the end of the transept of a newer, bigger and better, cathedral. But plague killed the masons, and none have resumed the work since.
In the townhall, Ambrogio Lorinzetti laid out in a brilliant allegory a new scheme for governance “Il Buon Governo”, an extraordinary Gothic pictograph with more than a hint of new republicanism about it. Ambrogio and his brother Pietro, also a painter and a magistrate of the city, disappeared without trace in the Black Death.
In Florence, in France, in England, the plague was to have its effect on power and politics. In England feudal ties were strained and a new labour law, the Statute of Labourers was imposed in 1351. Though it seemed tough on the labourer, it did raise wages to above pre-plague levels. But revolt was in the air. Plague, successive bad harvests, and the capture of the French king at the battle of Poitiers in 1356 triggered the rising of the jacquerie, a spontaneous revolt of the underclass across the Île de France, led by a gallic Robin Hood, with the moniker of Jacques Bonhomme.
The Jacques were proto-anarcho-syndicalists, forebears, maybe, of the gilets jaunes. They are no quaint outliers of historical mythology; and they arrived from the disruption of the Great Plague. So too did the men of Kent and Essex in the so-called Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. “When Adam delved, and Eve span, who was then the Gentle-man,” preached John Ball, one of the late Tony Benn’s early English socialist heroes.
Following the Black Death, Florence would not recover the same level of population as at the beginning of the 14th century, the era of Dante Alighieri, until well into the 19th Century. The aftermath of the plague disruption also brought insurrection and revolt to the city. In 1378 the wool workers, the Ciompi, (literally comb makers) plotted and rose against the corrupt rulers of the city, the senior guildsmen and aristocrats. It is thought to be the first instance of orchestrated industrial action in early-modern Europe.
Plague, pestilence, famine, flood as much as war and the other offerings of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, are a continuing theme of our history, in Europe as much as anywhere. Reporting the chaos in the Western Balkans, the great Allan Little, the BBC correspondent with the most refined grasp of the impact of history’s DNA on the present, always used to laugh at colleagues referring to “the ancient hatreds” of the different peoples of the former Yugoslavia. “What hatreds? Most of the people in Croatia and Serbia were wiped out in the 17th and 18th centuries by plague and famine.” So it was. The famines of the mid 17th and 18th century which ravaged much of central Italy as well as the Balkans at the time are forgotten.
A century ago Britain, Europe, America and beyond were in the midst of the Spanish influenza pandemic – a huge disruption out of the colossal disruption of the conflict of the Great War. It called more people than died from combat and battle – at least 50 million, possibly as much as 100 million according to some estimates.
In the early stages it grew among the fighting armies, their prisoners of war and their wounded. It lay concealed, or misunderstood, for almost a year after it first showed in an allied military hospital at Étaples in France. By the concluding offensives in 1918, all major armies were infected. The gun crews of American artillery units moving on Sedan in August 1918 were dropping like flies from their horses and limbers according to eyewitnesses.
Why it took so long to mitigate, particularly in the hospitals and sanitoria of northern England, and exactly why it burned out, are mysteries to this day.
The effect of such a pandemic on a debilitated population – such as the soldiers and survivors of the Great War – resonates today. The possibility, and likelihood maybe, of Covid-19 spreading among the millions of refugees from Syria and the Middle East, doesn’t bear thinking about.
The concern and caution over the coronavirus outbreak by Boris Johnson and his advisers are more than justified. Though nothing like the scale of the Black Death and Spanish Flu in 1918, the context is infinitely more complex. The world has nearly four times the humans it had in 1918, and we are all more connected, in travel, transport, commerce, communication and rumour by app.
This calls for resilience – which means people doing things for themselves. In discussion future security plans in the new Integrated Review on Security and Defence, which Boris Johnson has just announced, the resilience piece of the argument is strangely absent. Public services, in and out of uniform, will have to empower local, largely voluntary, action and initiative. There are now two horsemen of the postmodern Apocalypse abroad in Boris’s Britain – flood and pestilence – and they’re galloping to Downing Street.
The only way to deal with them is ingenuity, and robust involvement, and innovative action from our leaders and from us. And loads of that rare commodity, common sense.