Plagues and Peoples by William McNeill

Author:William McNeill [McNeill, William]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9780385121224
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-10-27T04:00:00+00:00

And again:

He who dies of epidemic disease is a martyr.

And still again:

It is a punishment that God inflicts on whom he wills, but He has granted a modicum of clemency with respect to Believers.71

The effect of such traditions was to inhibit organized efforts to cope with plague, though the word here translated as “epidemic disease” presumably applied to other forms of pestilential disease in Muhammad’s own time—smallpox, perhaps, in particular, outbreaks of which seem to have preceded and accompanied the first Moslem conquests of Byzantine and Sassanian territories.72

By the sixteenth century, when Christian rules of quarantine and other prophylactic measures against plague had attained firm definition, Moslem views hardened against efforts to escape the will of Allah. This is well illustrated by the Ottoman Sultan’s response to a request from the imperial ambassador to Constantinople for permission to change his residence because plague had broken out in the house assigned to him: “Is not the plague in my own palace, yet I do not think of moving?”73 Moslems regarded Christian health measures with amused disdain, and thereby exposed themselves to heavier losses from plague than prevailed among their Christian neighbors.

In the Balkans and nearly all of India, where Moslems constituted a ruling class and lived by preference in towns, this turned into a demographic handicap. After all, exposure to most infectious diseases was intensified in towns. Only a steady stream of converts from the subject populations could countervail Moslem losses from plague and other infections. When in the Balkans (though not in India) conversion slowed almost to a halt in the eighteenth century, the human basis for Moslem dominion speedily began to wear thin in regions where the rural, peasant population remained of a different faith. National liberation movements among Balkan Christian peoples could not have succeeded as they did in the nineteenth century without this underlying demographic impetus.

As for China, from the fourteenth century onward that vast country possessed two frontiers vulnerable to plague: one to the northwest, abutting on the steppe reservoir, and one to the southwest, abutting on the Himalayan reservoir. Available records, however, do not make it possible to distinguish bubonic plague from other lethal epidemic diseases until the nineteenth century, when outbreaks in Yunnan, connected with the Himalayan reservoir, eventually broke through to the coast in 1894, with world-wide consequences already described. Before 1855, lethal infections were common enough in China; and many outbreaks were probably bubonic. But available information does not allow more definite statement. All the same, the halving of China’s population between 1200 and 1393 is better explained by plague than by Mongol barbarity, even though traditional Chinese historiography preferred to emphasize the latter.74

Nor can China have been the only part of Asia to suffer from plague losses. Throughout the lands north of the Himalayas, it is reasonable to suppose that significant population decay occurred in the fourteenth century, when the steppe exposure to bubonic infection was still new, and local human adjustments to the risk of mortal infection had not yet had time to work themselves out.

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