Covid-19's long heritage

“There was not enough ground to bury the great multitude of corpses arriving at every church every day, they were stowed there, one on top of another, like merchandise in the hold of a ship.”  

This was not a recent report from Brazil’s Corona-hit city of Manaus, where coffins were stacked up in trenches for burial.  It was an account of the Black Death some 650 years ago by Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio in his masterpiece The Decameron. 

Clearly, notwithstanding breathless reports of “unprecedented” Covid-19 devastation, today’s tragedy is often a replay of scenes witnessed for over two millennia. A quick dip into four books on the histories of global pandemics helps put the current one in perspective. The biggest difference is that unlike others, Covid-19 had long been predicted. The books under review help us understand the origins of pandemic, the extent of their ravages, search for cures and their social, economic and political impact.

William H. McNeill’s 1977 book Plagues and Peoples  situates the disease in the broad biological world. He sees human lives as “caught in a precarious equilibrium between the microparasitism of disease organisms and the macroparasitism of large-bodied predators, chief among which have been other human beings.” Humans, omnivorous diners themselves, sometimes become lunch for larger predators. But more often they fall prey to invisible microbes who feast on human cells and tissues. From that perspective the Covid-19 is the latest in a long series of microparasites engaged in mortal combat with man – the chief  macroparasite. 

Starting from Greek historian Thucydides’ graphic account of plague in Athens (431 BCE) when “the bodies of dying men lay upon one another” to Boccaccio, sudden mass death was a mystery.  We now know that the Athenian epidemic was caused by smallpox and the Black Death by bubonic plague.  For the better part of history microparasites have attacked and cohabited with humans without their being aware. Pathogens started spreading as long-distance trade developed. Of the two major plague pandemics to hit Europe the first (middle of the 6th century) has been called “Justinian’s Plague” named after the Byzantine emperor.

In just four months the plague killed 40 per cent of Constantinople’s population. In the mid-14th century, a second major wave of pandemics hit Europe -- the bubonic plague carried by rat-borne fleas via traders’ caravans and vessels.  Before reaching Europe via Central Asia, the Black Death had devastated China.  Between 1330 and 1346 the movement of flea-bearing rodent colonies from central Asia, and the elaborate trade networks connecting Asia to Europe brought plague to the Mediterranean ports. When hungry fleas jumped from a dead rat on to a human, they infected the individual and the bacteria began its journey through new human hosts. McNeill writes that at some point the disease might have taken a deadly turn to become a respiratory ailment and began to be transmitted through droplets put in circulation by coughing and sneezing. Not unlike Covid-19. Some 60 million were killed between 1346 and 1353. It was only in 1894 that the bacteria responsible for Black Death was identified.

The next major calamity – the Great Influenza of 1918 or Spanish Flu -- crept in while Europe was in the throes of the First World War. Gina Kolata’s riveting 1999 book on that pandemic, which killed between 20 and 100 million people worldwide, offers the best account. Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus that Caused It  describes the frantic effort to retrieve fragments of the virus from frozen burial grounds from Alaska and Norway. It would not be till late 1990s that the gene of the 1918 Great Influenza virus would be sequenced -- a necessary course to develop vaccines. Her account of the frustration in developing an effective vaccine against the flu is a cautionary tale for those counting on a magic cure for Covid-19 today.

The debate over where the Spanish Flu virus originated is unresolved. A theory advanced by virologist Kennedy Shortridge seems credible in the light of more recent examples of the 1957 Asian Flu, the 2002 SARS and now the Covid-19 virus, all originating in China. “Influenza epidemics always seem to start in Asia — in southern China in particular, exactly the place where the rice-duck-pig system is in place,” he says referring to bird flu jumping to humans via pigs. He postulates that during World War I, Chinese labourers engaged in digging trenches for the Allies may have taken the flu with them before its outbreak in 1918.

Things were very different before the invention of microscopes and the rise of the germ theory of disease. The most common explanation was god’s curse for human sin, while bigots found scapegoats among the minorities .

They turned against Jews accusing them of poisoning wells  to eliminate Christians. Despite the Pope’s admonition not to harm them, Don Nardo writes in  The Back Death  (1999), “Huge numbers of Jews were horribly brutalized and massacred by angry mobs between 1348 and 1350.” To use McNeill’s analogy, unable to find cures,  macroparasites turned against their own kind.  The massacre of the Jews turned out to be the precursor of the Holocaust some 600 years later.

The massive depopulation brought by the pandemics has had serious political, economic and social consequences, changing the course of history. The smallpox epidemic that raged through Athens, locked down against advancing Spartan troops, killed tens of thousands, including the leader Pericles, and contributed to the city’s fall. It altered the course of Greek history. The Justinian plague “dealt crippling blow to Byzantine plans to conquer the western Mediterranean, and perhaps so weakened Byzantium as to set up its defeat by the Arabs a few generations later.”

The Black Death had the most long-lasting consequence, which Robert S Gottfried’s  The Black Death: Natural and Human Disaster in Medieval Europe  (1983) traces in some detail. The death of over a third of the population meant large tracts of land remained fallow, farm workers’ wages shot up, striking a mortal blow to manorial economy with landowners becoming more dependent on fewer people, leading to the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381. European art, so long focused on angels and divinity, turned to the reality of death that gripped and portrayal of common people. Literature, too, turned to featuring common people and their struggles and adopted vernacular rather than high Latin to express itself.

The Black Death introduced new vocabulary – quarantine – the Italian word for 40, the number of days ship carrying diseased passengers were kept away from dock. It also produced the first instance of biological warfare. Mongol troops were afflicted by the plague but were unable to get the besieged Genoese colony of Caffa to surrender. They hurled bodies of plague victims by giant catapults over the walls, forcing the Genoese to flee. Robert Gottfried writes, “They took to their ships, sailed back to Italy, and introduced the Black Death into the Mediterranean Basin.”

Nayan Chanda is founding editor of Yale Global and author of Bound Together: How Traders, Preachers, Adventurers and Warriors Shaped Globalization

(Pandemic Perusing is an occasional column on books and reading by our writers and reviewers)