Justinian's Flea: The First Great Plague and the End of the Roman Empire by William Rosen

Author:William Rosen [Rosen, William]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781101202425
Publisher: Penguin Group
Published: 2007-05-02T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

“From So Simple a Beginning”

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

—Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species

IT IS A PERVERSITY of language that one of the deadliest diseases in mankind’s history—so feared that it has become virtually a metaphor for epidemic illness—isn’t even directly contagious between humans, at least in its most common form. Bubonic plague is a zoonosis, a disease that makes its home in a population of animals, sometimes marmots, or prairie dogs, or gerbils, where it remains chronic to this day.* But the historical importance of every other plague carrier combined is dwarfed by the impact of the rat.

Europe is home to two different rat species. Today, the brown rat, Rattus norvegicus, is by far the most numerous and the dominant species of rat. In the port cities of the sixth-century Mediterranean littoral, only rarely traveling as far as a mile inland, it was R. rattus: the Mediterranean black rat.1 It had been so ever since it arrived from southwest India (where it first shows up in the fossil record), probably on the ships that carried black pepper to the empire from the great entrepôt of Goa. The pepper ships certainly carried this sedentary creature as far as the Horn of Africa, and from there they could have been carried by sea north to the Mediterranean via the canal connecting the Red Sea with the Nile built, in successive pieces, by Darius, Ptolemy, and Trajan.2

However the black rat arrived, archaeologists have found evidence of its presence during Roman times throughout Europe. In Corsica, barn owls have left evidence of their taste for rat babies in middens all over the island, dating from the Roman conquest during the Punic Wars. Rat bones from the first century have been found near Amsterdam, in England, on the Rhine, throughout Italy, Spain, France—everywhere that the legions carried Rome’s eagles, they also carried her rats.3

Rats are not travelers by choice. The two-hundred-meter limit that generally describes the farthest a normal rat journeys during a single life span (typically two years or so) means that, on their own, the eight-inch-long rats can spread less than fifteen miles in a century. So long as there are people, however, rats don’t have to travel on their own, and as a result, they live, literally, everywhere humans do. And they do so in densities that make Hong Kong look like the Australian Outback: During an explosion of the rat population on a single Iowa farm, densities of more than one thousand per acre were reported, and rat populations in East Africa regularly exceed eight hundred per acre.4 This is not the sort of population growth that occurs among fastidious eaters, and rats are as omnivorous as goats.

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