Rats

 Modern cities have rats.  So did medieval cities.  The typical rats of European and now American cities are the black rat and the brown rat, the latter the so-called Norway rat (not to be confused with the Norway spruce). In spite of the evocation of Scandinavia, rats actually originated in eastern Asia, but they have spread around the world, now being found on every continent except Antarctica.

(The above photo is by Nikolett Emmert.)

Rats have adopted very well to humans.  In fact, although their ancestors lived in the wild, rats do not do well unless closely associated with humans.  They can survive in very cold climates by staying inside with the humans.  Their favorite food is whatever their local humans have left over and dump in the trash.  Italian rats, for example, favor spaghetti.

Cities are always trying to get rid of rats, but it's an uphill battle.  For one thing, rats are smart.  They can evade traps, hide so they won't be spotted, fight back against cats and terriers. They have large litters of pups at regular intervals, so even if sizeable numbers of rats are killed, they can quickly come back.

New York City thought they had kept rats out of residential neighborhoods more or less successfully until the Covid-19 pandemic. Then the restaurants closed down, and suddenly the rats found their favorite dumpsters empty.  Being resourceful, they headed out to the residential neighborhoods, which now had more food waste with more people eating at home. As restaurants reopened, the city was able to declare fewer rats in people's back yards.

One of the few places that I know that has successfully beaten back rat populations for good is in the Galapagos Islands, out in the Pacific on the equator.  There are a number of unique species there, not only the famous Galapagos tortoises, and those species had few natural enemies until the whaling ships showed up, complete with rats. In subsequent years, the rats were very harmful to the nests of ground-nesting birds and other creatures. However, recent vigorous trapping efforts have eradicated them from some of the islands where no humans live.

Because rats are intelligent and adaptable, they have been used in scientific research since the end of the nineteenth century (think of the expression, "like a rat in a maze").  They can be used for studying behavior and also digestion, since they eat the same range of foods that humans do.  Lab rats are generally white, descendants of an albino strain, and have become quite tame after generations of living directly with humans, rather than hidden in their walls.  Such rats are also sometimes kept as pets. Medieval people would be appalled.

The story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, a man who lures all the rats out of the city of Hamelin  with his magical pipe playing, has its origins in thirteenth-century Germany.  It has appeared in many guises over the centuries—I used a version of it myself in my novel Daughter of Magic. Most versions of the story take on a darker tone when the piper is not properly paid for ridding the city of rats. But for medieval people, the underlying premise was obvious:  their cities needed fewer rats (people in New York City today would understand).

Rats were considered to spread disease in the closely-packed late medieval cities. They were accused, accurately, for helping spread the Black Death in the fourteenth century.  They carried the fleas who transmitted the disease to humans.  People killed their cats and dogs to try to get rid of the fleas, but the fleas just jumped onto humans, and the rats, carrying fleas, eluded efforts to eliminate them.

Even when they weren't spreading disease, rats were a major problem for medieval people because they would eat the grain. Keeping the grain away from rats and mice is always important, especially as it represents both this year's food and next year's seed, and it was an especially critical concern for a society in which bread was the principal food. Cats were valued as rodent-hunters more than as pets.  There's a reason even now that farms have barn cats.

 

© C. Dale Brittain 2026

For more on various aspects of life in the Middle Ages, see my ebook, Positively Medieval, available from Amazon and other major ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback! 

Barbarians and Romans

 As I discussed back when I started this blog, the idea of Rome falling to hordes of barbarians, like a tsunami sweeping up the beach and inland, used to be a standard part of history.  In recent decades it has been rejected, because it is unsupported by the evidence.  Yes, there were major changes between the fourth and seventh centuries, but a process that takes three centuries is hard to characterize as a "fall."

The only place where Germanic peoples and their culture essentially overran the Romanized Celtic peoples of the Roman Empire was England, where Roman cities disappeared and Christianity moved to the margins.  But even there a great deal of melding between Roman and Anglo-Saxon culture occurred, and British scholars named the following centuries the Dark Ages not because they were evil but because we know so little about them.

And England of course is not the model for all of Europe and the Mediterranean basin, as much as the English would like you to believe it.  In fact on the European Continent in the fourth and fifth centuries a lot of Germanic people were welcomed into the Empire, serving in the Roman armies, settling in various territories.  There was friction of course and the occasional sacking of a city, like Rome itself in 410, but the Empire continued on.

The biggest changes to the Empire were the disasters of the sixth century, several "years without a summer" which broke down trade routes and nearly emptied the cities, as lack of harvests meant no food for the cities to buy, coupled with the first outbreak of the Black Death.  Then in the seventh century the rise of Islam meant that Mediterranean basin, the Middle East, and North Africa became Arabic-speaking and predominantly Muslim, rather than Greek and Latin speaking and predominantly Christian, and no longer answered to the Emperor.

But how did Romanized populations react to the Germanic people settling among them in western Europe?  The Romans were not impressed with those they called barbarians, a term they coined because they said those who didn't speak Latin just said "Ba bar ba barg" or the equivalent.  But the Germanic peoples were impressed by Roman culture and, on the Continent, jettisoned their religion and language like a hot potato.  That's why Spanish, Italian, and French are all descended from Latin, in spite of the Visigoths, the Ostrogoths, and the Franks.  Even Romanian is a Latin-derived language.  East of the Rhine and in Scandinavia, however, where the Empire had never extended, and in Anglo-Saxon England, Germanic languages persisted (as they still do).

In practice, Romans and Germanic peoples quickly started to intermarry, meaning their descendants had a shared ethnic identity.  Archaeologists who have tried to determine whether a burial represents a Gallo-Roman or a Frank, for example, have been confused by both Roman and Germanic artifacts in the same grave.  Names still had cultural overtones, but parents might name a son Siegfried who they hoped would rise to power as a warleader, while naming a different son Peter who they hoped would end up as a bishop.

The so-called barbarian kings, who established kingdoms within the old Empire with the favor of the Emperor (now in Constantinople), kept much of the old imperial governance structure.  The Empire had been divided into administrative units, each called a pagus, centered on a city.  The pagi became first Christian dioceses (by the fourth or fifth century) and then (by the sixth or seventh century) the counties into which the kingdoms were divided.  Even some of the old Roman taxation system remained, although the collected money went not to Rome or Constantinople but rather to the king.

Interestingly, the Germanic people settled in the old Empire all wanted to assert their own thnic identity.  The Franks were the first to start writing down their old, traditional laws, writing them in Latin, in imitation of Roman law.  These so-called Salic Laws inspired similar written lawcodes from other Germanic peoples, including laws written for the Goths, the Bavarians, the Burgundians, and so on.  This is an indication that even as "German" and "Roman" were in the process of being fused into what would become a (sort of) general medieval culture, the "barbarians" were proud of their heritage and didn't want to forget it.

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

For more on medieval social and political history, see my book, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages, available on Amazon and other e-tailers, either as an ebook or in print.

The Common Cold

One often hears some version of, "If they can send a man to the moon, why can't they cure the common cold?"  Well, for starters there are probably 200 or so different versions of "the" common cold, so you'd need 200 cures.  They are all viruses, which scientists put into several groups, including the Rhinoviruses (the most common), and Coronaviruses, also known as Covid.

Symptoms vary but all include sniffling and aching and maybe running a fever.  One's body does build up immunity, so by the time a person has been around for a while they don't catch nearly as many colds, as they've already had and recovered from a large proportion of them.  Children, as every daycare knows, catch lots of colds, because their immune system is still developing and is meeting colds for the first time.  Influenza is another viral disease, again with a number of different strains, potentially more deadly than a cold and usually not involving sniffles, though it can make a person feel terrible otherwise.

In spite of the name, you won't "catch cold" by going outdoors without a sweater.  But the  cells in your nose that fight off foreign invaders (like viruses) may be less effective when they're chilly, making colds spread more readily, especially when people are mostly indoors during the winter months, breathing each others' air.

(Don't try to treat viral diseases with antibiotics.  Antibiotics are effective against living creatures like bacteria, which viruses are not, and overuse of antibiotics helps antibiotic-resistant bacteria to develop.  This health tip brought to you courtesy of this blog.)

Wait, you say, didn't you just mention Covid a couple paragraphs back?  What's with that?  Yes indeed, I did, because Covid-19 is a Coronovirus, related to though a lot more serious than the "common cold" versions.  It's called "19" because it was first identified in 2019.  (The number has nothing to do with the number of pounds you gained in 2020, staying home, getting no exercise, but filling your time baking sourdough bread and cinnamon rolls.)

But what, you say, does this have to do with the Middle Ages?  You're about to find out.

Some version of "the common cold" has been around for a long time, the sniffles being described by physicians in ancient Egypt.  But there is emerging evidence that one of the Coronovirus versions of the cold first appeared in humans in the thirteenth century.  Like many viruses (including Covid-19), it probably developed first in animals and then made the jump to humans.

It was a killer.  A lot of people got very sick and died.  It was not nearly as bad as the Black Death in the fourteenth century, but it was bad.  Without modern vaccines, people had to rely on their own immune systems and on friends and family keeping them warm and fed.  This is when it became a great act of charity to endow a hospital, to care for the sick and the indigent.

This disease was probably comparable in effect to modern Covid-19, and like Covid-19 it mutated readily, each iteration being somewhat less deadly but somewhat more infectious.  It seems most likely that this medieval form of Covid, now just starting to be studied seriously by historians of medicine, is still with us.  We know we still have a version of Covid that killed a lot of people in Russia in the 1890s, before becoming less deadly.  So it seems Covid-19 is going to be with us permanently, in some form.

By the way, there are a number of "just so stories" about medieval people, some of which involve colds and are clearly untrue.  No medieval priest taught that your soul would escape as you sneezed or coughed, or that the devil would zip into the vacancy your soul left behind.  So stories that people said "Bless you" to encourage your soul to stay put, or that they coughed into a handkerchief to keep the soul from escaping, are just untrue.  People have doubtless said some version of "Bless you" or "Gesundheit" (meaning Good Health) as long as people have sneezed, because sniffles are an illness you hope the person recovers from.  And they coughed into handkerchiefs because, even without knowing about viruses, no one likes a sick person spraying on them.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

For more on medieval health and disease and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.

The sixth century

 As I have discussed before, the term "fall of the Roman Empire" is a misnomer.  No one thought the Roman Empire had fallen until close to a thousand years after it had supposedly done so.  There were still Roman emperors (in Constantinople and, in the west after 800, in Germany), Roman cities, Roman religion (Christianity), Roman language, Roman roads, Roman monuments, and so on.

The seat of Empire had shifted from Rome to Constantinople (in Byzantium) in the fourth century, under the emperor Constantine (guess how Constantinople got its name), so in many ways you could say the Empire did not fall until 1453, with the fall of Constantinople to the Turks.  (It was at this point that the church of Hagia Sophia, seen below, became a mosque.)  From the fourth century to the late fifth, there were sometimes two emperors, one in Constantinople and one in Rome, until the last separate western one was assassinated at the orders of the Byzantine one.

And yet a whole lot indubitably changed during the "long" sixth century, from the late fifth century to the early seventh century.  This is one of the least well documented periods of the history of western Europe in the last two millennia, which is why British scholars have sometimes called it the Dark Ages.  But this term has unfortunate negative undertones (you mean the sun never came up?) which is why the term Late Antiquity is now mostly used instead for the fifth through seventh centuries.  (For one thing, the term recognizes that the Empire of antiquity was still around.)

The "long" sixth century is bracketed by the disappearance of separate Roman emperors in the West after the 470s or so, although there continued of course to be Byzantine Roman emperors who sometimes visited the West, like Justinian, and by the rise and spread of Islam in the first half of the seventh century, which radically changed the culture of the Mediterranean, which had been known as a "Roman lake."

The sixth century was also an awful time in many ways, marked by the first outbreak of the Black Death, and by several very cold years of disastrous harvests, probably caused by a volcanic eruption.  The pandemic and breakdown of trade and communication meant that cities, which had been central to Roman civilization, radically shrank.  After all, people could recognize that infection was a lot higher in a crowded city even without knowing about bacteria, and a city can't survive if the countryside isn't producing enough surplus food to sell to city-dwellers.

The cities persisted, however, as religious and governmental centers, even if with much smaller populations.  In some old Roman cities, like Nîmes, people retreated inside the amphitheater, treating its outer walls like the new city walls.  The city of Rome itself shrank into a new, smaller area with its own walls, leaving the area between the old and new walls, that had once had a large population, dotted with orchards, villas, and monasteries.

Constantinople had the same problems as the West with disease and famine, and orders stopped coming from Byzantium.  But a lot of the governmental structures stayed in place.  As provincial governors stopped ruling cities, bishops took over the role.  New kingdoms, such as those of the Franks in what is now France and the Visigoths in what is now Spain, became established, using Roman laws and Roman taxation systems as they replaced Roman regional administrators.  They dropped their original Germanic languages like hot potatoes in favor of Latin.  Urban populations continued to be literate, writing on papyrus, with city archives recording important events in people's lives.

The Franks, Visigoths, and many other so-called Germanic people were once described as invaders, destroying Roman civilization, but in fact they had been neighbors to the Empire for several centuries, traded with them, and were often recruited into the Roman armies.  The only part of the Empire where Germanic people could be said to have radically changed the culture was what was now England, with the arrival of the Angles and Saxons.

Elsewhere the new arrivals clearly wanted to be Roman, adopting the culture as well as the language.  A lot of the new arrivals kept their traditional names, however.  Yet the same family might include a Theoderic, who served the king as a regional lord (a count), and an Anthony, who entered the church.  The first was a "Germanic" name, the second a "Roman" name, indicating sons destined for different functions.

In the cities, people went to church, scribes kept records, and merchants sold goods, some of which continued to come from some distance away in spite of all the trade disruptions.  Kings and counts went to war with each other and collected booty.  In the countryside, people farmed, tended vines, and raised their animals.  One crucial sixth-century development was the end of agricultural slavery, as the legions were no longer bringing home huge numbers of people to be worked to death, then replaced.  Peasants became serfs instead of slaves, legally unfree but with their own families, houses, and plots of land.  People of whatever status recognized the need to work together in dangerous times.

A good book about the movement of so-called Germanic peoples into the Roman Empire, refuting the notion that they somehow destroyed it, is by Walter Goffart, Barbarian Tides (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

For more on Rome and the Middle Ages, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

Pandemic

 The Middle Ages was marked by two great outbreaks of the Black Death, also known as bubonic plague, also known by the scientific name of the bacteria that causes it, Yersinia pestis.  The second is well known, breaking out in 1346 in the eastern Mediterranean, becoming established in western Europe in 1347, and spreading and killing people for the next several years.  The first, much less well documented, had multiple outbreaks in western Europe in the second half of the sixth century.  That it was the same disease has been proven by the analysis of DNA from mass burial sites from the sixth century, where Y. pestis is clearly found.

The fourteenth-century plague killed at least a third of the medieval European population, maybe half in some areas.  Probably everybody caught at least a mild case.  It was spread by fleas, that would bite an infected rat, then bite a person, passing on the bacteria.  There was of course no vaccine.  The medieval population developed "herd immunity," that is with everybody infected and either dying or recovering with enough natural immunity to fight it off, the disease more or less disappeared after five or six years.

But it was not gone for good.  Over the next several centuries, it came back again (though never in such force) every generation or so, when a new generation had been born that had never been exposed.  The best known of these outbreaks was the Great Plague of 1666 in southern England.  In London it was stopped by the Great Fire, which by burning up a lot of rats and fleas slowed the disease way down.  The last major outbreak was in 1894 and affected people globally for close to twenty years.  As I have discussed earlier, the Black Death is still endemic in rodents (mostly ground squirrels) in the American southwest.  Fortunately it can now be cured with antibiotics if caught early.

Some people now advocate just letting everybody catch Covid-19 to develop "herd immunity" rather than striving for a vaccine.  Thinking about losing a third or more of the population in the process may change their minds.

It is not clear what proportion of the population of late antiquity was wiped out by the plague, but the records that do survive speak of a devastating impact.  Along with three or four outbreaks of the plague in fifty years or so, there was a smallpox epidemic.  Ah, good times.  It is however clear that the plague spread along trade routes and from the cities to the countryside as people fled from the urban centers where the infection rate was extremely high, not realizing they were spreading the disease in the process.

One indication of how devastating the sixth-century plague was is the evidence, from things like tree rings and pollen analysis, that the seventh and eighth centuries saw much smaller rural populations in Europe than in previous centuries.  And the cities shrank even more; in Arles for example the whole city moved into the old Roman amphitheater, building their houses on the rows of seats, and they all fit.

One might consider that the sixth-century plague really ended the Roman Empire (helped along by the seventh-century rise of Islam).  The fourteenth-century plague changed a lot of aspects of society as well as killing off people.  The basic optimism that had marked much of the Middle Ages was gone, and there was a new fixation on morbidity, taking the form in some cases of extreme piety, in other cases a careless "live for today" attitude.

What changes will come from the Covid-19 pandemic?  One assumes there will be more than an increased willingness of companies to have white-collar workers "work from home."

© C. Dale Brittain 2021

For more on disease and health and other aspects of life in the Middle Ages, see my ebook, Positively Medieval, available from Amazon.  Also available in paperback1

Medieval disease

Until the era of Covid-19, Americans didn't worry too much about disease.  Some diseases that had been real killers, like smallpox, have been eradicated, and others, like polio, have been nearly eradicated, due to vaccines.  Some so-called childhood diseases, like measles and mumps, are unlikely if parents get their children vaccinated.  There are vaccines for seasonal flu and for pneumonia.

These are all viral diseases, where the best bet is to build up the body's own immunity (through vaccines).  For bacterial diseases, including even nasty diseases like Lyme disease or bubonic plague, there are antibiotics.  Antibiotics are also very helpful in fighting off any kind of infection.

There were neither vaccines nor antibiotics in the Middle Ages.  For that matter, vaccines were invented in the nineteenth century and antibiotics in the mid-twentieth.  Thus medieval people had to worry about disease a lot more than modern westerners have done in recent generations.  A nasty infection could be a death sentence.  So could polluted water.

There's a reason that child mortality was a lot higher then than it is now, and that the average life expectancy, which is now in the 80s for people in the US, was more like the 50s.  People got worn out, and something or other might sicken and kill you.

(Of course, as I have discussed earlier, some people lived a very long life then, but a lot fewer than now.)

 You might ask, how could people cope with all that death?  In fact one could ask that very question now.  As I write, the Covid-19 death toll in the US is at 200,000 in seven months, or the equivalent of three jumbo jets falling out of the sky and killing everyone on board every day for that period.  And yet people have grown numb.  Families that have lost someone are of course devastated, but for many of the rest the raw terror has long since worn off, and getting together with friends or going to a show seems "worth the risk."  Medieval people would also have been devastated when a family member died, especially a child, but they went about their daily affairs without thinking too much about disease.

There were of course exceptions, most notably the Black Death (bubonic plague), especially its two big outbreaks in the sixth century and the fourteenth (but not in between).  This really was scary, because it spread and killed so fast.  Like Covid, it was easily spread by people who had not yet developed symptoms, so someone trying to escape it could infect those in the place to which they fled.  Strict quarantine measures were put in place, but they were of only limited success, given how close everyone lived to each other in an urban environment.  A city might seem fine one day, and two weeks later three-quarters of the inhabitants would be dead.  They couldn't bury them fast enough.

The plague retreated once "herd immunity" had developed, that is enough people had caught a mild case and recovered that it wasn't being spread any more, but in the meantime probably a third of Europe's population had died.  This is why waiting for herd immunity to save us from Covid is not a viable option.

And the plague's aftermath disrupted Europe's economy for a century, as I have discussed earlier.

Besides the plague, the Middle Ages had most of the same diseases we do, except they didn't have syphilis, which originated in the Americas, and some believe they didn't have our "common cold."  The second most terrifying disease, after the plague, was leprosy.  Lepers, whose skin and eventually toes and fingers shriveled and fell off, were shunned, treated essentially as AIDS patients were when that disease first emerged toward the end of the twentieth century.

Sick people either got well at home or, increasingly, in hospitals.  A hospital was closer to what we would call a hospice, a place where the sick person was kept warm and clean and treated with chicken soup and saint's dust.  The wealthy would endow such hospitals as an act of charity.  (Lepers weren't allowed in hospitals but had to go to their own leper-houses.)  Above are the beds in the medieval hospital of Beaune.

© C. Dale Brittain 2020

For more on medieval health and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.

After the plague

As I have posted before, the Middle Ages certainly had epidemics, most notably the Black Death, usually known now as the bubonic plague (it also had a variant, the pneumonic plague, even more virulent).  I used to have trouble explaining to my students how serious the plague was in the fourteenth century and how much it disrupted what one might think of as normal.  Some would say, Is it like AIDS?  No, because AIDS is not particularly contagious, and people can live with it for years.  In the future it may be easier to explain the plague:  it's more like COVID-19.

Now the plague was far more deadly than our current epidemic.   Estimates are that maybe a third of Europe's population was wiped out within a year or two.  We are nowhere near that figure yet, but there's still time.

Part of Europe's problem in the fourteenth century was that it was impossible to practice "social distancing."  Houses were small and close together, so for most people "self-quarantining" away from everyone else was just not possible.  The same problem, that one cannot put distance between oneself and other people, is why the current disease has spread so rapidly in places like cruise ships, prisons, and Mediterranean countries where houses are still small and close together.  In the case of the plague, the disease could be spread by fleas, so staying 6 (or 12) feet apart was not going to be enough anyway.

Without modern medical treatments and sanitizers, medieval people could try to flee (often taking the disease with them), but the overall response was by necessity something close to what is now described as "ride it out," keep on trying to act normal, and figure that after a while everyone who was going to die is dead, and the rest either are immune or have recovered.

Well, the problem with that approach then (as it would be now) is that an awful lot of people die, and whatever health care facilities you have are overwhelmed, so a lot of those who die might have had a chance to recover in better circumstances.

And what happens then?  Well, in spite of happy hopes one sometimes hears expressed, you can't just restart an economy devastated by a pandemic.  In fourteenth-century Europe, trade routes had been completely disrupted, cities (the centers of economic exchange) decimated, churches and law courts emptied, and any sense of optimism for the future dealt a pretty significant blow.  You can't just put an economy back together when a lot of the people on whom the economy depends are dead.

Europe's cities shrank and did not return to their pre-plague size for at least another century.  Italian merchants who survived stopped putting their money into commerce, which looked decidedly iffy, and started patronizing art instead, kick-starting the Italian Renaissance.  Religious expression became far more morbid, with "dance of death" a common artistic scene:  Death is portrayed dancing across the countryside, bringing everyone with him, rich and poor, young and old, men and women.

Many started creating what might be considered double-decker tombstones, two depictions of the deceased carved in stone, one above the other like bunk beds.  In one the deceased would be seen dressed and peacefully sleeping, as seen in elite tombs for generations.  In the other, the deceased would be depicted as partially decayed, complete with worms carved in stone.

The only ones to come out of the plague better off (besides the Italian artists) were the peasants, if one can put "better off" and "many friends and family members dead" in the same sentence.  Europe had been overpopulated, without enough land (using fourteenth-century techniques and crops) to adequately feed the population.  Losing a third to a half of the population certainly solved that pesky problem!  Peasant families could start farming more land, because a lot of their neighbors were gone.  Landlords who relied on peasant rents and labor had to lower rents or pay more for labor if they didn't want to have to grow their own food themselves, because there was competition for the surviving peasant workers.

In some places landlords fought back.  England for example passed laws trying to keep peasants from demanding higher wages or lower rents.  These were not nearly as successful as hoped.  The peasants in turn fought back, becoming aware, really for the first time, that they had common cause with peasants around the country, resulting in the great Peasants Revolt of 1381.  But that's a story for another time.

© C. Dale Brittain 2020

For more on medieval disease and other aspects of medieval history, see my book Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook  and on-line platforms.

End of the World

Every time there's a great disaster, like a hurricane or a massive drought or the current COVID-19 pandemic, many people interpret it as a sign of the coming end of the world.  Since the early days of Christianity, people have been looking for signs of the end.  When John of Patmos wrote the book we now know as Revelations (maybe around the year 100), it provided a partial list of signs to look for.

(John was responding to a persistent issue in the first couple generations of Christianity:  why, when Jesus had said He was coming back, hadn't He done so yet? Wasn't the sacking of Jerusalem by the Romans in the year 70, accompanied by destruction of the Temple, enough to get the Second Coming underway?  By the year 100 the Second Coming was moved well into the future and was moving into the spiritual rather than material realm.)

In the Merovingian era (fifth through eighth centuries), the standard template-book on how to write a good letter suggested starting with something like, "We who live in the final days of the world...."  The disasters of the sixth century, the outbreak of the Black Death coupled with "years without a summer" (caused by volcanic dust blocking the sun), certainly had an end-of-the-world look to them.

But the world kept stubbornly on.  Interestingly, in spite of what they might have told you back in the year 2000, no one worried about the end of the world in 1000.  The "millennium" anniversary that got mentioned a lot instead was 1033, the anniversary of the Crucifixion, and here the hope was for a spiritual awakening, not the world ending.

The Albigensian heretics of southern France in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries were expecting the end of the world.  They got a Crusade preached against them and were thoroughly beaten by the northern French, but the world overall kept right on.

The big "world ending" moment for the Middle Ages was 1260, as I have discussed previously.  The theologian Joachim of Fiore (who died before 1260) had added up the generations in the Old Testament and had come up with the number 1260 as years from Creation to Christ's birth.  This was the "age of the Father," to be succeeded for the next 1260 years by the "age of the Son" and then by the "age of the Holy Spirit."  People became very upset, and bands of penitents wandered across Europe, whipping themselves and waiting for the end.  You can probably guess that they were mistaken.

Medieval Europe's second big outbreak of the Black Death, in 1346-48, was another apocalyptic event.  The world didn't end, but it sure got messed up, with maybe a third of the population dead, cities deserted, trade routes abandoned, and society (unsurprisingly) becoming much more morbid.

Fears of the world ending did not stop with the end of the Middle Ages.  The year 1666 was approached with trepidation, as it included the number 666, which the book of Revelations called "the number of the Beast."  When England experienced first another outbreak of the Black Death and then the great London fire that year, it sure looked apocalyptic.  Nonetheless, the world stubbornly persisted.

Apocalyptic predictions continue.  Remember how supposedly the ancient Mayans predicted the world would end in 2012?  A psychic now getting a lot of attention predicted the outbreak of a pandemic in 2020 (though when she predicted her own death she was off by 11 years).

The response to a failed apocalypse varies.  The most common reaction is to laugh it off and say one never believed it in the first place.  For true believers, disappointed not to have been caught up in the Rapture or whatever (note: the idea of a Rapture first appeared in the nineteenth century and has nothing to do with John of Patmos), the response is trickier.  One can say that the prophecy was right but the date was off (Who forgot to carry the 2?), but then it's hard to be believed next time.  One can argue that the prayers of the faithful averted the disaster that would have taken place without them.

Or, best of all, one can assert the world really did end, but only those in the Select Group are spiritual and insightful enough to have noticed.  This works within the Select Group but not outside it.

© C. Dale Brittain 2020

For more on medieval society and religion, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

Medieval epidemics

As (justifiable) panic over Covid-19 spreads around the globe. some may be wondering:  did they have epidemics in the Middle Ages?  And what did they do about them?

Of course they had epidemics.  Any time you have a contagious disease and people living close together an epidemic is possible, that is infection spreading faster through a population than the population can handle it, accompanied by fear and despair.

The worst medieval epidemics were the two big outbreaks of the Black Death, the first in the sixth century, the second in the fourteenth.  The Black Death, now known as bubonic plague, killed maybe a third (or more) of Europe's population both times, having horrible ramifications for both economy and society for those who survived.  It's a bacterial disease so it can (now) be treated with antibiotics, unknown until the mid-twentieth century, but there was no good treatment then.  Covid-19 (which is viral, not bacterial, antibiotics won't touch it) is not nearly as serious, even though it's definitely serious (maybe a 4% fatality rate not 35%, though still far above the fatality rate of seasonal flu, which is well below 1%).

Although medieval people did not know about viruses and bacteria, they certainly could recognize contagion.  People fled the cities where disease spread much more rapidly, not appreciating that they might already be infected and were thus spreading rather than escaping disease--the same is the case today.  Medieval people understood about quarantine, and those not infected would try to stay well away from those who were infected.  Boccaccio's Decameron, now considered the first work of Renaissance literature, is a story of ten people self-quarantining and telling each other tales to pass the time.

Although the Black Death was the most serious medieval epidemic, others, like smallpox, came through periodically.  So did measles.  Both of these, especially smallpox, would leave disfiguring marks on your skin but would not (necessarily) kill.  Both of these, however, became devastating epidemics in the New World in the sixteenth century, killing a great number of indigenous people before the Europeans even had a chance to kill them themselves.

Medieval Europe certainly had a health care system, hospitals where sick people would be kept warm and dry and fed in the hope that their immune system would kick in soon, and barber-surgeons who could cut off infected limbs, but obviously these were ineffective against epidemics.  The image below is the interior of a medieval hospital at Beaune.

Patients would each have a curtained bed, and nuns would bring them chicken soup and saint dust.  Hospitals like this were overwhelmed in epidemics.


© C. Dale Brittain 2020

For more on medieval health and disease, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

Sixth-Century Disasters

There have been plenty of low points in European history (think, the first half of the twentieth century).  But one of the definite low points was the sixth century.

As I have discussed previously, one cannot really speak of a “fall” of the Roman Empire.  But the empire certainly lost its power and authority, with economic slowdown evident from the third century on, and an end to expansion and even winning by the fourth and fifth. The disasters of the sixth century broke down the empire's urban structure and communication networks.  The rise of Islam in the seventh century, leading to major loss of Roman territory in North Africa and the Middle East, pretty much finished it off.

Historians and scientists have identified two especially bad years in the sixth century, the volcano of 536 and the plague of 542.  There have been plenty of studies, based on pollen deposits and tree rings, showing a chilling of Europe’s climate in the first half of the sixth century, and now scientists studying particulate matter deposited in glaciers in the Swiss Alps have been able to pinpoint a volcano in 536 that sent so much dust and debris into the air that sunlight was blocked, and there were several “years without a summer.”  Debris in the glaciers indicates the volcano was in Iceland, then uninhabited (the Vikings came later).

(For those who think hopefully that maybe we can stop global warming with a volcano, be careful what you wish for.)

As a result of the volcano, there were massive crop failures and famines.  Urban culture disintegrated, because cities can’t survive without food imports, which means the countryside has to be producing a surplus, which it wasn’t.  Then the weakened population (the parts that had survived so far) was hit six years later by an outbreak of the bubonic plague (Black Death).  It reached Europe from Byzantium (and eventually central Asia).  Justinian was emperor then (headquartered in Constantinople, although he sometimes visited western Europe), and the devastating plague was sometimes referred to as “Justinian’s flea.”

Having killed off a sizeable chunk of the population (maybe half?), the Black Death did not return to Europe for 800 years, when the plague returned, marking both economic collapse and the beginning of the Renaissance.

Somehow sixth-century Europe staggered on after its back-to-back disasters, although with a much smaller population and seriously disrupted trade and communication.  Long-distance luxury trade continued, even if at a reduced level.  Once the volcano settled down it began to be possible to grow crops reliably again.  The economic collapse began to turn around in the first half of the seventh century, after a hundred years or so of very hard times.  One of the markers of the improved economy, also found in the Swiss glaciers, is particles of lead.  Lead is used in smelting silver, in making coins, a clear indication that trade within Europe had picked up, though the urban economy did not fully recover until the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

© C. Dale Brittain 2018

For more on medieval society and economy, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

Famine

It's Easter, the end of Lent, of six-plus weeks of giving up excess luxuries.  For medieval people, Lent was almost a famine period, because last fall's stored food would be about gone, but the spring crops hadn't produced yet.  Some people certainly go hungry in the US, but unlike some other parts of the world, it's been an awful long time since we've had widespread famine.  Medieval people would say we're lucky.  Let's feel some sympathy for our ancestors while we munch those chocolate bunnies.

Famine, in the past as now, comes about through a combination of overpopulation and failure to produce enough food.  The modern world actually grows enough food to feed everybody, due to improvements in crop genetics and fertilizers (though the planet’s current warming may make many areas less and less suitable for crop growing).  Our problem is distribution.

In the US, for example, farmers produce at least 4000 calories a day for every man, woman, and child.  That is about twice what an adult needs (on average), unless they are an elite athlete training heavily.  So what happens to the rest?  A lot is exported to other countries, a lot goes to explain why, shall we say, the American population is a tad plumper than it was fifty years ago, and a lot is wasted.

Unless you plan your shopping carefully, so you never have to throw out spoiled food, and unless you clean up everything on your plate every meal, you’re throwing out food that could have fed someone.  Grocery stores throw out fruits and vegetables that look malshapen and cans with dents or even just torn labels.  Restaurants fill up their dumpsters every night.

So a lot of the modern world’s problem is getting food to people who need it.  If we have a distribution problem in the US, where grocery stores throw out perfectly edible food that looks funky, where many have refrigerators stuffed with food they will never eat even though others in the same community do not have enough, then just imagine the problem in the Middle Ages, when it was very difficult to move food around from one place to another.  And they didn’t just have distribution issues.  They had genuine shortages.

Even though today less than 5% of the US population lives on a working farm, that tiny group still manages to feed everybody.  In the Middle Ages however almost everyone had to be engaged in farming to produce enough food. The breakdown of trade routes and the cooling of the climate that started in the sixth century brought genuine food shortages in the early Middle Ages.  An inopportune hail storm that wiped out a crop in one area would lead to local famine, because other areas would not have enough extra food to feed anyone but themselves, even aside from the difficulty of transporting the food.

But in the eleventh through thirteenth centuries, a period where the climate had warmed up just enough to improve the likelihood of getting in the crop, and when farmers had adopted new technology like the carruca, there were long stretches without famine.  City councils stockpiled grain in good years to be prepared for future shortages.  Count Charles the Good of Flanders was called “the good” in part because he took the lead in distributing stockpiled grain in a bad year and keeping hoarders from jacking up prices.

Periodic famines still happened, and there were always stories told of the horrors (usually involving cannibalism) that the famine led to—in the next county over, never in the immediate vicinity of the person telling about.  But overall most people, most of the time, got enough to eat.

Not surprisingly, the population grew.  By the late thirteenth century western Europe’s rural population was probably about what it is now (though not of course the urban or suburban population).  With more mouths to feed, more and more land had to be cultivated to grow food.  Even the lower slopes of the Alps were growing grain.

Then, in the early fourteenth century, Europe became overpopulated.  “Over” populated is a relative term; it doesn’t mean actual numbers of people but rather too many people for the food supply.  More marginal cultivated areas started giving out just as the climate grew worse, going into what has been called a mini ice age, when even rich, productive lands might see crop failures.

Then there were several years in a row of really awful weather, “years without a summer” as they were called.  Crops failed miserably.  Europe had been able to deal with local famines, but nothing on this scale.  Starving people took off in bands, trying desperately to find food, stealing anything they could get their hands on that was edible.  With weakened conditions, the population was not prepared for a major outbreak of a pandemic, the Black Death.  Let's just say the fourteenth century was a difficult time.  It's also when the Hundred Years War got underway, but that's a story for another day.

© C. Dale Brittain 2018 

For more about feast and famine during the Middle Ages, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

Medieval brothels

Prostitution is often called "the world's oldest profession."  Although rarely found in rural settings, there have been women selling their bodies for money in the relative anonymity of cities for probably as long as there have been cities.  Mary Magdalene, who appears in the New Testament, is generally assumed to have been a prostitute (though the Bible is a bit vague on the topic).

In the early Middle Ages, after the breakdown of Roman urban civilization, there is very little sign of prostitution, probably because the culture was so overwhelmingly rural.  However, when medieval cities began to grow in the eleventh century, prostitution grew with them.

The organized church of course frowned on it, but many a city council, deciding it was better to regulate the practice than to drive it underground, established municipal brothels.  In late medieval cities, young women (generally from the countryside) who found no other way to support themselves might go into a brothel.

The house was supposed to be kept clean and free of disease and the prostitutes properly housed and fed.  In many cities the women would be regularly inspected to make sure they did not have infections.  (A lot of what we think of as STDs have New World origins, so there were fewer diseases to fear, and AIDS was centuries in the future.)  As deplorable as modern feminists rightly find prostitution, at least in an organized medieval brothel the women did not have to worry about maltreatment from their pimps.

Many "Magdalene houses" were founded to urge women to "give up their life of sin" and come away from the brothel.  The assumption was then that women had gone into the profession out of unrestrained lust, even though now it sure looks more like economic desperation.  Churches sponsored these Magdalene houses, which in practice provided a useful half-way house for young women who had saved up enough from their "life of sin" that they wanted to separate themselves from it and, with luck, get married with their savings as dowry.

Saint Nicholas societies provided money for dowries to poor-but-honest working girls so that they could get decently married without having to sell themselves.  These were particularly common in late medieval/Renaissance Italy, where dowries were essentially obligatory.

Often municipal brothels were connected with the municipal bath houses.  People would bathe, and while all warm and naked would start to have other thoughts as well, which could be satisfied right nearby.  In modern Britain brothels are still sometimes referred to as "stews," because of their association with bath houses.

In fact, when the Black Death showed up in western Europe in the fourteenth century, one of the immediate results was closing down the municipal bath houses, because it was assumed (correctly) that disease would spread easily there.  However, the municipal brothels just became even more closely regulated.  City councils recognized that people will, if frightened of dying, give up bathing, but they won't give up sex.

Incidentally, until the fourteenth century most people had believed in the weekly bath (on which see more here).  After that, aristocrats, who did not get all dirty and sweaty in their daily activities, prided themselves on not bathing.  Sponge baths and hand-washing were about the limit.  (Peasants, not having much choice, continued bathing if they could.)

Medieval municipal brothels continued until the sixteenth century, when the religious ferment of the Reformation finally led to their demise.

© C. Dale Brittain 2015

For more on medieval brothels and other aspects of live in the Middle Ages, see the ebook, Positively Medieval, available on Amazon.

The Black Death

Everyone has heard of the Black Death, which sounds very scary, and so it should.  It's often associated  with the Middle Ages, but in fact there were only two medieval outbreaks, one in the sixth century and one in the fourteenth, that is at the beginning and end of the Middle Ages.

In both cases, the Black Death came out of central Asia (it also devastated China).  It's a bacterial disease, spread especially by fleas.  In both of its medieval manifestations, the bacteria seem to have mutated into a particularly virulent form, that then spread rapidly, especially in an urban environment where people lived close together, and where rats could serve as hosts for the fleas.  A city could be fine one day, and two weeks later three-quarters of the population would be dead.

In the sixth century, this disease broke down Roman urban culture, which did not recover until the eleventh and twelfth centuries (see my post on the medieval city).  In the fourteenth century, the Black Death marks the beginning of the Renaissance, a time when people turned to art because the economy had tanked.  (The first work of Renaissance art was a piece of literature, Boccaccio's Decameron, about people fleeing the plague.)

In both cases, the impact was devastating.  We know more about the fourteenth century than the sixth, and it's quite horrifying.  An infected ship from the Middle East came into Genoa harbor in 1346, with almost all the sailors dead, and from there one can map the spread of the disease like ripples on a pond.  Probably between a quarter and half of Europe's population died, especially in the cities.

People fled to try to escape, not realizing they were probably already infected and were carrying the disease with them.  Realizing that the disease was carried on fleas, people killed cats and dogs—whose fleas just jumped on humans.

Sometimes you'll see the Black Death compared to AIDS, but it's really not comparable.  It was easy to catch, whereas AIDS is quite hard to catch, and it killed you very quickly, whereas many people now live with AIDS for years.  In practice, probably everyone in the fourteenth century caught at least a mild form of the plague, so one could survive, but at least a third of the population did not.

The worst passed off in a few years, but it tended to keep coming back every generation or so, as children were born who had not been exposed and thus had not developed immunity.  There was a very serious outbreak in England in 1666 (well after the end of the Middle Ages), which ended only with the Great London Fire, which burned up the rats and fleas along with much of the city.

In reaction to the Black Death, some people in the fourteenth century became very pious, multiplying prayers and rituals.  Others however adopted a hedonistic, live-for-today mentality, pointing out that priests had fled from the plague just as fast as anyone else.  Art became much more morbid, and many an expensive tomb featured stone carvings on two levels (almost like bunk beds)—on one level the deceased lay clothed, looking peacefully asleep, whereas on the other the deceased was carved as naked and half decayed.

There has been some debate among scholars about whether the Black Death was the same as the bubonic plague that is still found in the American Southwest and the Sierras.  The current consensus is that it was.  Fortunately, because it's a bacterial disease (and not nearly as virulent as in the fourteenth century), it can be cured with antibiotics.

The chipmunks in the Sierras (actually golden-mantled ground squirrels, but they look like big chipmunks as you can see from the picture) carry the plague today.  No matter how cute they look, do not pat them.  And if you've been camping there and get home feeling funky, tell your doctor you have the plague (otherwise she'll probably test you for AIDS before thinking of the plague).

Click here for more on medieval views on death.

© C. Dale Brittain 2014

For more on medieval health and disease and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.