9 Connected with this great difference in the speed of transmission, a second discrepancy arises: the bubonic plague of the “third pandemic” was a rodent disease. Thus modern plague, even with the advantage of railways, automobiles, and much higher population densities, would have needed twenty-five years to cover the distance this early medieval plague travelled in a mere three months.
#Polymath program p8 18i.pol update
This is because Yersinia pestis is a disease of rats in which humans participate, to use Robert Koch's succinct definition of 1900 (now we should update it by substituting rodents for rats), 8 and rats are homebound creatures. At various places during the early twentieth century, such as New Orleans and South Africa, Yersinia pestis was shown to be a slow mover, travelling overland at only 12 to 15 kilometres a year. In 664, the plague took only ninety-one days to travel 385 kilometres (as the crow flies) from Dover to Lastingham 7 (4.23 km a day)-a far faster overland spread of any plague ever seen for Yersinia pestis since its discovery in 1894. It extended rapidly, not only with its first appearance in 541 but also with subsequent waves. These narratives, as well as the archaeological evidence, provide certain clues about the epidemiology of the “first pandemic”. Like later chroniclers of the Black Death, Procopius also observed that black pustules covered victims’ bodies. But several-Procopius of Caesarea, John of Ephesus, Gregory of Tours, the Antiochene lawyer Evagrius “Scholasticus”, the Chronicle of Zuqnīn, and Paul the Deacon-report swellings in the groin, armpits, or on the neck just below the ear. Instead of millions killed, as happened with the previous two pandemics and as Europe feared at the beginning of the twentieth century, death counts of this third pandemic in temperate zones rarely exceeded one hundred.įew quantitative records such as burials or last wills and testaments or narrative sources that describe the signs or symptoms of plague survive for the first pandemic. However, except for China and India and a few other subtropical regions, its spread (unlike that of the other two pandemics) was limited in epidemic force to coastal cities and even there hardly penetrated beyond docklands.
From there, steamship commerce carried it across much of the world. The “third pandemic” began in the mid-nineteenth century and crept slowly through the Yunnan peninsula until it reached Hong Kong in 1894. 4 In 1743, 48,000 perished from plague in Messina in 1770–1 over 100,000 in Moscow and in the Balkans, Egypt, Asia Minor and Russia this Black-Death-type of contagious plague may have persisted as late as 1879. Despite repeated claims in textbooks, the plague of Marseilles in 1720–1 was not this pandemic's European finale.
Its cycles, however, lengthened from a hit about every ten years for any locale during the latter half of the fourteenth century to absences of 120 years or more for major cities at least in Italy by the seventeenth century. Its last attack in Italy was at Noja (Noicattaro), near Bari, in 1815, 3 but it persisted longer in eastern Europe and Russia. While the first lasted just over two centuries and the third a mere twenty-five years in pandemic form, this second wave returned periodically for nearly five hundred years in western Europe. 2 The second pandemic originated in India, China, or the steppes of Russia, touched the shores of western Europe (Messina) in the autumn of 1347, circumnavigated most of continental Europe in less than three years and eventually struck places as remote as Greenland. 1 Historians have counted eighteen waves of this plague through Europe and the Near East that endured until ad 750, if not longer.
The first, the plague of Justinian, erupted in the Egyptian port city of Pelusium in the summer of ad 541 and quickly spread, devastating cities and countryside in and around Constantinople, Syria, Anatolia, Greece, Italy, Gaul, Iberia, and North Africa: “none of the lands bordering the Mediterranean escaped it”, and it reached as far east as Persia and as far north as Ireland in less than two years and spread through their hinterlands. Open any textbook on infectious diseases and its chapter on plague will describe three pandemics of bubonic plague.
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