Read Online Plagues in World History by John Aberth - Free Book Online

a social, rather than religious, point of view. Paul the Deacon, in his eighth-century History of the Lombards , recalls how, during a plague in Italy in 565, even close family members abandoned each other, as allegedly “sons fled, leaving the corpses of their parents unburied; parents forgetful of their duty abandoned their children in raging fever.” This might seem to be a clear condemnation of those who abrogated their social obligations in order to save their own skins, yet the moral of Paul’s story is rather ambiguous, since he also tells us that even those who stayed behind out of “longstanding affection” to bury relatives were themselves unburied and unmourned. What is incontestable is that people believed plague was contagious and therefore were faced with a stark choice, to either run away or face death. This, at least, seems to have been the general consensus of the population according to Paul, for “common report had it that those who fled would avoid the plague,” with the result that “dwellings were left deserted by their inhabitants, and the dogs only kept house.”58
    Paul was not the only one who observed the fragile social fabric in the face of plague; the East Syrian Orthodox monk John bar Penkāyē alleged that, during a plague in North Mesopotamia in 686–687, “No brother had any pity on his brother, or father on his son; a mother’s compassion for her children was cut off.”
    John certainly disapproved of this behavior, for he noted that, when Christians 32 y Chapter 1
    failed to bury their dead and simply fled, their behavior descended to the level of pagans (in this case the Persian Zoroastrians) or else of “dogs and wild animals.” Further proof of their ungodliness was how they responded if reminded that “no one can escape from God, except by means of repentance and conversion to Him.” According to John, they replied with blasphemous rebukes such as, “Get out; we know very well that escape is much more profitable to us than supplication.” This indicates that the rational response noted by Anastasius of Sinai was alive and well among the population at large. If not pursued by the plague itself, such sinful refugees were “harvested” by looters or dogs and wild animals. A more practical consideration was that abandoned exposed corpses, strewn about like “manure on the earth,” then contaminated water sources such as springs and rivers, which would only help perpetuate the disease.59 On both moral and medical grounds, John informs us, flight had its drawbacks, even if it seemed to be dictated by self-preservation. These issues will necessarily be raised again during the Second Pandemic.
    Scholarly consensus is inclined to be cautious in assessing the long-term impact of the First Pandemic of plague. There seems to be a desire to attribute neither too much impact to the disease nor too little.60 This is in contrast to the cataclysmic upheaval almost universally accorded to the Black Death of the late Middle Ages. Yet, the case has been made that the First Pandemic of plague did no less than usher in the Middle Ages by sweeping away classical civilizations in Byzantium and Persia, thus clearing the way for the rise of peoples formerly on the periphery of the empire, such as the northern “barbarians” of Europe or the nomadic tribesmen in Arabia, both of whom allegedly suffered far less from the plague’s ravages.61 This thesis is easily refuted if one but remembers that the Roman Empire, at least in the West, declined and fell well before the plague first struck in 541, or that Muslim armies had to contend with plague, particularly in their conquest of Syria, no less than Byzantine or Persian ones. In fact, the Umayyad dynasty was to reach its greatest extent at the very time when its power base in Syria was heavily targeted by plague, buffeting it with depopulations, agricultural contraction, and urban and rural dislocations; curiously, however, the dynasty came to