Redefining the Black Death Narrative with Monica Green // March 14 - 16, 2022

Monica Green , thanks for sharing your blog with us. I think living through COVID will help show students that pandemics don't come with clear cut start and end dates. After I teach about the Black Death, I have kids choose another disease to research. I have them create a timeline to show how our reaction to the disease changed over time, looking from a medical perspective and looking for the general public's perspective. Doing this activity last year really helped them understand the events unfolding in the current pandemic.

I'm interested in the other historical accounts that you shared and plan on reading them to broaden my understanding. Do you know of some other student friendly resources that we can use? 

Monica Green Kathy Hays Thank you for presenting the material!  This topic is great for young learners because they are quick to point out connections (comparisons or contrasts) with other "biological events," including the cholera outbreak in 1854 London (which is featured in an H2 video).  

Good morning, Hajra Saeed ! Thank you so much for reading the blog. Yes, thinking comparatively about pandemics and the experience of infectious diseases is one of the best ways we can approach the topic as historians. On the one hand, we realize how much we have to learn about individual diseases: how they are transmitted, what the "disease interval" is (the time between when one person becomes infected and resolution, or transmission to the next person), symptoms (and whether they're visible to others), etc. On the other hand, we begin to see commonalities in terms of how people take the knowledge they have and try to forge meaningful responses to disease.

In terms of finding other sources, there are several ways to answer that. For many of us in the classroom, primary sources are always our major teaching tool, because they allow us to look directly into the past and hear the voices of people experiencing past events. I have a publicly-accessible Bibliography on the Second Plague Pandemic, posted as a Google Doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1x0D_dwyAwp9xi9sMCW5UvpGfEVH5J2ZA/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=104263744463668175127&rtpof=true&sd=true. (There's also a bibliography on the First Plague Pandemic, the Justinianic Plague, starting on p. 94.) The bibliography is meant to help researchers quickly find the latest work in other fields, but I also have a Pedagogy section meant for people who want to go directly to teaching materials.

Here's an example of a newly discovered source that the person who found it shared online: http://middleagesforeducators.com/videos/early-transmission-of-the-black-death-by-hannah-barker/. Hannah Barker is the historian of Black Sea trade who recently unraveled the story of the siege of Caffa and its alleged role as the "event" that "caused" the Black Death to spread into the Mediterranean. Barker has extraordinary command of the historical records of both the Italian city-states that traded in the Black Sea, Genoa and Venice, and those of the Mamluks in Egypt. So it was out of that immense knowledge that she was able to realize that Gabriele de Mussi's commonly repeated story about plague-ridden bodies being hurled over the walls didn't make sense.

In the course of that research, she found other evidence that nobody had ever paid attention to. One of those documents was a petition from the Genoese citizens of Caffa to their home government, asking for additional resources to rebuild the city *after* the siege. Here, for the first time ever, apparently, we find reference to an "infinita pestilencia mortalitatis," an unending pestilence of death that was indeed devastating the Mongol troops. This is in fact the term for the pandemic that will become common in Latin sources: a "pestilence of death," characterized by the massive mortality it caused, rather than just a regular kind of pestilence that killed a few animals or people. But note: nothing about bodies being hurled over the walls! We thus get both a correction of the "disinformation" that de Mussi put in his chronicle, but also a better sense of the hardships and fear that were actually present in the Crimea at the time.

We need to broaden the number and availability of such sources, in order to keep up with the new things we're learning about the extent and various manifestations of the late medieval plague pandemic. A number of us are working on translations, maps, and other resources. So stay tuned for more!

Monica Green

In your blog, you argue that we should present students to understand the Black Death in a longer timeline, form the 13^th to 19^th century. This seems like a great opportunity to think about change and continuity over time. Can you give us any quick pointers about best practices for comparing responses to and effects of plague outbreaks in the 14^th, 17^th, and 19^th centuries in places as geographically diverse as China, Western Europe, Iran, and East Africa?

Wow, what a great question! I could spend all week trying to answer it! I will likely return to this in follow-up posts as thoughts come to me, but let me answer quickly with what comes immediately to mind.

First of all, as I explained, my thinking about a "unified" history of plague starts from the premise of a biological understanding of the disease. Because of developments in evolutionary genetics, we can now track the disease across continents and across centuries. So *we* know that it's all the same disease in all those times and places.

But in order to make that biological knowledge into something that we understand as HISTORY, we need to reconstruct how historical human actors perceived what they were experiencing. To take East Africa as an example, in a study I published in 2018 I collected what *might* refer to experiences of plague found in some legends about a royal figure. (Here's the link to that study, which was published open-access: https://journals.openedition.org/afriques/2125. See Paragraph 54 for the story about Kawumpuli was the name of the son of the historical kabaka (king) Kayemba (c.1670–c.1700), who came to function as a protector against plague.) Is there a way we can start to ask questions about how societies frame pandemics in mythic terms? Certainly, we have a number of sources from both Christian Europe and the Islamic world that frame plague as a judgement of God. Are there ways to ask similar questions comparatively for other times and places?

One of the questions I'm working through in my own research is the question of how "medicalized" plague is in different contexts. In the Islamic tradition, writing about plague is done both by physicians but also by religious commentators. Because it is such a swiftly moving disease (just days between infection and death), does that create a different psychic impact on societies in terms of the way they cope and respond to it?

Here is where I see great potential in bringing together many kinds of evidence to do case studies. We can expect that genetics evidence for plague will continue to become increasingly available. Plague (Yersinia pestis) is the most "successful" pathogen in terms of retrieval, because it replicates so profusely just prior to death. So could we look for instances where we have documented plague, documentary records, and a large body of contextualizing evidence to look at differing cultural responses to plague? There is excellent work being done across the whole spectrum of history in MENA (Middle East and North Africa), into the Ottoman period, so it will soon be possible to see the uninterrupted history of that region. Will comparable work soon be available for, say, China? That remains to be seen.

For now, I think there is a range of source material we can piece together from materials already available. Your query made me realize that I had forgotten to include in my general bibliography on the early centuries of the 2nd Plague Pandemic (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1x0D_dwyAwp9xi9sMCW5UvpGfEVH5J2ZA/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=104263744463668175127&rtpof=true&sd=true) this recent collection:

Bell, Dean Phillip, ed. Plague in the Early Modern World: A Documentary History (London: Routledge, 2019).

One thing we can also do in constructing comparative case studies is bringing in the hugely important question of what OTHER health conditions and social structures affect the experience of pandemic outbreaks. The present COVID pandemic has made us more acutely aware than ever before is that infectious diseases always come into societies that are fractured along various lines. Those, too, might be frameworks for developing comparative studies. I imagine there are already members of the OER Community who have experience with this.

By the way, the bibliography I referred to above only goes up to ca. 1500 in its coverage. For those looking for a quick list of studies on other periods of plague history, I prepared a bibliography for the students I was teaching this term at Stanford: https://www.academia.edu/65835378/Why_Plague_Changed_Everything_Special_Assignments_for_Week_4_Winter_2022_History_243D_343D_. How to "translate" that scholarship into classroom assignments is a big question, of course. But this is also one of the reasons I think plague is "good to teach with": plague also reached new parts of the world during the Third Plague Pandemic (dates differ--of course!--but roughly late 19th century until mid-20th century). Looking at local responses to plague in the Americas, etc., gives us other possibilities for comparative work.

Monica Green

Previously my comparison has been more narrow and focused on the scope that we asses with Investigation 8.  The resources you shared will help me to expand that scope to include a wider time frame and more locations around the world when learning about the plague with my students. 

This is such a great and timely topic, thanks for bringing your expertise and research to our community.  One of the things that I have stressed with my 6th graders over the years when examining the Black Death was the idea of how the plague spread.  While the traditional narrative has been the rat and flea connection, there have been recent theories about pneumonic plague or human parasites such as lice.  Can you discuss these ideas as being possible explanations for how rapidly the plague spread throughout populations during the late 1340s and early 1350s, as well as the later outbreaks of plague?

Thank you for sharing these sources! It is interesting that we question accounts that portray Jews as the cause for the Black Death, yet so easily accept the disinformation that the Mongols utilized bioterrorism. I look forward to adding Hannah Barker's work to my lessons next year.

That is very good to hear! I think Barker's work is masterful, both in how she marshals precise documentary sources and chronological analysis to construct a timeline of the relations of the Golden Horde with the Italian merchants, and in taking seriously the biology of plague as we now understand it. A point I make in my own work is that there seems to be increasing indication that plague terrified the Mongols themselves. Telling the other side of that story will be crucial as work in the field advances.

More than that, however, I hope we, as teachers, can open up space to talk about disease the way epidemiologists have learned to talk about it. Disease happens. It happens because we as humans interact with the world around us. And that world around us contains microorganisms, some of which are wildly beneficial to us (our gut microbiome, the yeast in bread or beer, or the bacteria in yoghurt), and some of which are harmful. Talking about plague as a function of transregional grain shipments throws new light on what human networks are. And that is always a good lesson to learn in History!

Thanks for engaging with the blog and sharing your thoughts. Good luck to you and your students!

Hello Zachary,

Thanks for this great question. Yes, it has indeed been proposed that there were other mechanisms for plague's historical spread beyond the rat-flea-bubonic plague model usually described when people talk about plague. So, let me respond in two parts: first to answer about pneumonic plague and then to address the question of whether human fleas (Pullex irritans) or lice (Pediculus humanus) can play a role in plague spread.

But first, let me quickly summarize what can and cannot be known concretely about plague transmission in the premodern past. As my blog and that by Bennett Sherry explained, we can now be 100% sure that Yersinia pestis (the bacterium that causes plague) was involved in late medieval and early modern outbreaks. That's because the complete genome of the bacterium has been retrieved. HOWEVER, while we can be certain that Y. pestis was the pathogen involved, we have no way of knowing HOW it got into people's bodies. The genome will be the same whether transmission was bubonic (via arthropod bite through the skin, and thence spreading through the lymph system), pneumonic (inhaled via the lungs and getting directly into the blood system), septicemic (entering the bloodstream via a cut or animal bite), or gastrointestinal (entering thru eating contaminated food).

Although work is underway trying to learn more about rodents that may have been involved in plague transmission, that work is very difficult because rodents' bones are very fragile and don't preserve very well. To date, only one (one!) rat has been found in an archaeological site that has been proven to be infected by plague. As for arthropods (the parasite vectors), currently we have no trace at all. So all work that has been done on this question is from inference only.

Okay, now to your main questions. How could we know whether cases were instances of bubonic vs pneumonic plague? As I said, the genome of the pathogen won't answer that question, nor will any other information that can be gleaned from a victim's skeletal remains. The main difference between modes of transmission will be the disease interval. Bubonic plague, as we understand it now, will usually kill (if no antibiotic treatment is given) within 6-10 days from the point of infection. Pneumonic plague kills much more quickly, perhaps in 2-3 days of infection. So, if we get reports of people dying "almost instantaneously", or dying having only spoken to someone who was ill, then those might have been pneumonic cases. Pneumonic cases are most common (here drawing on modern case studies) in winter conditions or in crowded conditions, or when one person is caring for a family member (continuous close contact). It is likely that in cases where there are a lot of deaths in an enclosed environment, in a very short period of time, that we are looking at peaks of pneumonic transmission. (Again, there is nothing different about the pathogen in these cases; it's simply a matter of how and where the organism enters the victim's body.)

In regard to human fleas or lice, those are both *possible* vectors for spread of plague. But were they the *normal* modes of spread? Again, we do not as yet have any archaeological evidence one way or another. We do certainly know that people of the past were parasitized by lice, and carried other diseases that are readily spread by lice (such as typhus). But do lice move around fast enough to explain the speed we see plague arriving in different locales? That hasn't been demonstrated yet. Also, plague kills the lice, too, so a viable model would have to explain how they might function as hosts. All the same questions apply to human fleas.

In short, we still have many questions!