God and the Black Death, Part 2

plague pandemic. There have been three major pandemics in world history of of plague caused by the bacterium your Cineya pestis the second one of them is this big one at the in the Late Middle Ages that began in the middle of the fourteenth century and then had these recurrent waves that went on for hundreds of years after that. And so in the last episode we we talked about I guess mostly there we talked about scientific questions about what the causative agent of the plague was, how it spread,

and some of the outstanding quests about that. There's still a lot actually that is surprisingly unknown about how exactly these plague pandemics worked, or certainly the older ones before

the one in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Yeah, So in this episode we're going to look more at the contemporary response to the Black Death, the fourteenth century response to the Black Death, Well, what we know about, uh, the views on disease and illness at the time, and to what extent those were useful or useless against this

this onslaught of plague. Now, Rob, I know one of the main reasons that you got interested in doing a series of episodes on the plague was that you were interested in religious responses to the plague, like what were the religions in the affected communities saying about the plague? And so that's what we've been looking into for this episode,

and we'll probably end up doing another one after this. Uh. And this has been a really interesting subject, not only because it is inherently interesting, but actually the historiography of the subject is interesting. Like there's been interesting recent scholarship on the historical analysis of the different religious responses to the Black Plague and and how those analyzes have worked

and to what extent they're accurate. So, uh So the full disclosure, I think when we do start talking about comparative religious responses to the Black Plague, this is something that I think is probably still a matter of debate. This is also, like we were talking about in the last episode, not something that's just a settled set of facts that are a matter of the history books. Right.

And then also when we get into stuff like this, a lot of times there are some broad theories about how, okay, if you didn't have the Black Death, you wouldn't have had this, or because of the Black Death, this and this occurred, and some of these are very compelling cases. But we also have to remind ourselves that, like, you know, this is a complex game of trying to figure out how history comes together, and you know, what causes what? So you know, but butterfly wings are flapping all over

the place. Uh So you know, we have to have to remind ourselves that nothing is one certain. But some of these arguments are rather interesting. Well, let's go ahead and start here in uh In, in the world of Christian Europe at the time, and uh I thought we might begin by just looking at the broader view of illness and ultimately the divine um. Basically, how did people at this time in this region view the cause of disease, What did they think about disease, where do they think

it came from? And how did they think you should attempt to treat it? And so I thought we might run through some of the key ideas here, and some of these we've discussed on the show before, sometimes at length. So for starters, there was the idea of the four humors, and this was rooted in the work of Hippocrates, that an imbalance of the four humors of blood, flim, black bile, and yellow bile could result in disease. And this idea

had been built on by Galen and others. So it basically said, you know, to treat illness, one would need to rebalance the humors, and there were various ways of

doing this. But we know now that this was not correct, and this is in fact one of the um the main lines of thinking leading to a major treatment of the Middle Ages and and beyond, which is the treatment of blood letting, or actually not just blood letting, blood letting, various purging procedures that would try to purge people of excess fluids within the body when some when it was

thought that their humors were out of balance. So if you you know, you had too much blood in the body and maybe that's leading to uh, I don't recall exactly, maybe a fever or something like that. I could have

that wrong. What they thought led to what but you could you could alleviate that by putting, you know, punching a hole in the body and allowing excess blood to run out, right now, Next, there was the there was the idea that illness spread via bad air, and this was me asthma theory, which we've definitely discussed on the show before. Uh. This also had been advanced by Hippocrates. So again an idea rooted in in in classical thought and some of the you know what, we're considered the

best ideas concerning the natural world of the time. Um. So, as we've discussed on the show before, the notion of bad and foul air being the thing that allows disease to travel and infect. That would mean therefore the removal of bad air, or the positioning of yourself further from bad air, would be a way to prevent or combat illness. Now, interestingly enough, this approach can work accidentally in some cases.

But again, this one too is not correct. Yeah, so we've actually done at least one whole episode on miasma theory before, maybe multiple episodes, So if you go into the back catalog you can probably find that somewhere. Um. But but Yeah, miasma theory is very interesting, especially because it's it's mechanisms are not always easy to nail down. But yeah, it's generally the idea that there's something in the air, often a foul smelling air or some kind of bad air or bad vapor, that that could have

a number of proximate causes of its own. It may be air that is caused by a conjunction of the planets or something, or it might be released from deep in the earth during an earthquake, and all of these things might ultimately be something you could trace back to a supernatural cause. As many people in Christian Europe would they would say, you know, well, here are the proximate causes. It's bad air, that would say, released by the planets,

are released by an earthquake. But ultimately it's God. It's God is punishing us, and we'll come back to the theological interpretations. In a moment, I was reading a work by a historian named Michael W. Doles who lived nineteen forty two to nineteen eighty nine, who was a historian

of medicine and historian to the Middle East. He published a book called The Black Death in the Middle East in nineteen seventy seven, I think it was actually his doctoral assertation, but he's a widely cited scholar on this subject who and also I want to come back either in this episode or in the next episode with more recent scholarship that has offered some some critiques of of doles as generalizations about about religious responses to the plague. So this it's not just like what he says goes

for all time. But in an essay I was reading called the Comparative Communal Responses to the Black Death and Muslim and Christian Society is published in the seventies. Uh, he's writing before he gets into the religious responses, he's writing about the dominant mechanistic theories of plague transmission within

both Christian and Muslim societies. And he writes that both of these societies tended to have this same dominant mechanical theory of the spread of plague, so both of them were largely working from miasma theory, like you're talking about

the idea that plague is caused by bad air. And this is because communities of of both religions were largely drawing on the same medical traditions like you mentioned hippocerty ease the elaboration on Hippocrates by Galen, but then also even sina Or also known as Avicenna, and as a result of the belief in miasma theory, a common preventative to infection under this theory is what might be called

changing the air. And so this could have this could have interpretations that would actually be useful even though the theory is wrong, and could have interpretations that would be completely useless. So it might mean, say, getting out of the area where the bad air is. You know, you're changing the air by changing your location. So if everybody around you is getting infected, that probably means there's some bad air around and you need to get away from it,

so you could flee. But then also it could mean something like sweetening the air. This was a common practice of infusing the air you breathe with pleasant sense, like herbs or flowers or fresh fruits. And so when you see those plague doctor masks like we talked about in the in the previous episode, that they might have a beak or some kind of protuberance coming from where the mouth and the nose would be. That presumably the person wearing the mask is breathing through not having a journey

theory of disease. They were not thinking about trying to filter out droplets bearing viral particles. Instead, they were thinking about filtering the air coming into your mouth and nose with sweet smells. So those protuberances in the mask would often be stuffed with herbs or or something like that.

Right and then and then, I think in at least in some cases, the idea too was that there was still an opening right next to either nostril so um, so that there were a number of problems with that design, which again, to be clear, was not would not have been in in in use during this time period. It would have come centuries later, and there's still some dispute

as to house widespread they actually were. But despite the fact that they come later and they they might not have been as widespread as you might get an impression, uh, they still do reflect the dominant thinking of out the mechanistic causes of disease transmission at the time. UH. And it's understandable because you basically have a learned system here that matches up closely with some of our natural responses

to say, revolting or alarming smells. You know we like basically aligns up with some of our body's natural defenses against potentially poisonous or infectious agents, right, I mean, so we have natural disgust reactions that are almost certainly evolved to protect us from infectious disease. Like why is it that we tend to find the body fluids of of other people and animals revolting and like we want to get away from them as probably because that is an

evolved response. An animal that happens to be disgusted by body fluids and stays away from them is less likely to contract an infectious disease. So that's also an area in which even though the person who has this disgusted reaction might not understand the mechanisms that, oh, tiny organisms might get into my body and then start colonizing and infecting me. Uh, the the intuition provided by the disgusted reaction is itself protective, even though you you might you

wouldn't understand the reason why. But anyway, coming back to the other half of it, So another way of changing

the air is to change your location. Right, So if you get away from where you perceive there to be a cloud of mi asthma, you might also be getting yourself away from real vectors of disease, which could be a number of things when we talked about different theories of this in the last episode, but you could be getting yourself away from host populations of infected animals like commence al rodents which are carrying fleas which would deliver

the infectious bite, or away from infected people who could possibly be spreading the disease directly, either through droplets that they're coughing out leaving the nose and mouth if they have pneumonic plague and infection of the lungs, or getting away from infected people who are transmitting plague to other people through they're human ectoparasites, which is a finding of a recent study we we talked about, I think it was from eighteen or so that that said the the

for a number of plague outbreaks, it looks like the best explanatory model for how the plague spreads is if it's being spread person to person through things like human

lice and human fleas. But in any case, getting away from where plague is is an effective method of protecting yourself no matter which of these vectors is the dominant one than Now from this point we get into some of the more supernatural causes, and we can certainly lump these all together and just say all right, supernatural causes of the of the disease, of the plague, or we

can divide them up into a few different categories. On one hand, I think we can easily state that the supernatural is never the cause of an illness and therefore buying large supernatural solutions are not going to work. Um. But it roughly speaking, I think we can look at three different categories and we can discuss them from there. So, first of all, there's the supernatural individual level, so disease as a result of sin, like individual sin, a punishment

for sin, or a test administrated by supernatural forces. Uh, generally we're talking about God or an agent of God. Medieval thinking tended to limit the extent to which demons could actually mess with flesh. This is something that was discussed in the had been discussed in the works of Aristotle, and Thomas Aquinas had laid in on this. So there are certain limits, like the idea that that the devil could not turn you into an animal, because that would

that would be in defiance of natural law. But other things were permitted, so you can kind of it gets into kind of a messy theological area. Um. But so for the most part, when people were looking for a cause of the plague, they were not looking to Hell.

They were looking to Heaven. Yeah. From everything I've been reading, this was especially the the overwhelming, uh, supernatural explanation used throughout Christian Europe at the time was that that disease, especially plague, is in some way a punishment for sin, and it often an individual punishment for sin. Uh. And of course this could give rise to all kinds of the Odyssey type questions right where the Odyssey, of course, being the the subject of believers trying to justify the

ways of God to man. Uh. This could give rise to questions like, well, why would innocent children uh be catch this disease? You know, they're too young, um to to be culpable for sin in the same way adults are.

And and this was addressed in numerous ways. Some people might say, well, it's actually their parents are being punished for their sin or uh, you know, and the saying that the children will get to go to heaven their parents are being punished, or it might be said that the children h have disobeyed the commandments to honor thy father and mother. So there by being disobedient to their parents,

they are actually being punished. But yeah, supernatural punishment seems to have been an overwhelmingly common interpretation, especially within Christian Europe. I do want to add a caveat though about like the limited powers of of demonic forces, is that you're going to also encounter exceptions to that rule, certainly when you're dealing with individual surviving folkloric and mythological ideas. Um. But but this is just sort of by and large like what the what the how the learned members of

society would have interpreted the problem. Now, an extension of the supernatural individual category is the supernatural group category, which were already discussing a little bit here. This is the same as previously uh explained, but roughly applied to an entire city and entire people or culture, and generally limited

to you know, the judgment of divine forces. Again, so there's something something is wrong in our culture, or in our church, or in our kingdom and or in our world entirely, we've fallen at ray, and therefore the Almighty is punishing us. And then another category and this kind of gets down to a lot of the like I say, this sort of ground level folkloric um ideas, the idea

that witchcraft and magic were involved. This is something encountered in cultures around the world generally, the idea of that disease may be caused by others practicing magic against you. Um. This generates ideas concerning whiches and sorcerers, but also leads to all manner of mothering and the persecution in response to illness. Something bad is happening to us. Illness is here, someone is responsible, and we have to do something about it. Yeah. And as as you allude to, and as anyone might

guess that this particular interpretation kind of really disastrous consequences. Yeah. So again, none of these understandings of disease are are actually valid, and none of them are really going to work. Certainly some of them they seem to work, and then they seem to work in certain cases with other illnes us is. But then here comes the Black Death with

just staggering mortality rates. Uh. We got into this a bit in the last episode, but I mean, in the numbers are going to vary, but I've seen like a rough thirty to seventy five percent mortality rate for plague. I've seen bubonic with an eight percent mortality rate during this time, and I've seen uh, the other varieties of plague with you know, upwards of ninety to a hundred percent of mortality. So it's uh, you know, staggering numbers

to consider. Yeah, with pneumonic or septo semic plagues, the other two versions, and again they're they're all caused by the same bacterium. It's all your cine epestis. It's just about how the body gets infected Soneumonic is infection of the lung tissue, like if either bubonic plague progresses to a lung infection or if you inhale the bacterium directly and it gives you a primary lung infection, that'sneumonic plague. Septo semic plague is infection of the blood stream with

the your cine epestis. And either way, uh yeah, these are just absolutely devas dating like without without very quick antibiotic treatments. And and I do think it's important to stress that even in the modern world, with these versions of plague, you've got to catch it early with the antibiotics to be effective because these uh, these forms of

the disease can progress shockingly rapidly. There there are stories from the Middle Ages of uh, you know, people people going to bed seemingly okay and then just being dead by the next morning. It's a shockingly rapid progression. And uh. And yeah, the the mortality rates without early antibiotic intervention

or somewhere near a hundred percent. Now, some of the prevention and treatment practices of the day were certainly in line with the four humors and the miasma theory um on the later front, and one of the most consequence real views was that again one could just simply move from an area with bad air to one with better air. But all of this was more prevalent in the early days of the Black Death um. As it progressed, you saw more of a turning to potential religious cures and

religious treatments religious responses to the plague. Yeah, because if you are following this view in in Christian that's very common in Christian Europe, that the plague is being caused by sin and it is a punishment for sin, then you would think that the primary way of alleviating it would be doing something about the underlying cause, doing something about the state of sin that you're in, and trying to fix that in order to get God to relent

with the disaster. Yeah, and so I like the most obvious treatment here is Okay, if if God has allowed this to happen or cause this to happen, I need to get on the phone with God. And I do have a way, I have a direct line. I can pray, we can all pray. And so that was one method turned to prayer, prayer to God, and various other other

religious approaches come into play. To hear the use of ambulence and charms as a means of of aiding prayer or as as a means of hecting against plague, even as the idea that some form of contagion was taking place, like the idea that it was that that they became apparent that something was happening, it was somehow spreading from person to person. Even if you got into this view, there was still the idea, well, an amulet can stand between me and that it can be the thing that

protects me. Um And when this didn't appear to work, we can certainly understand why more extreme methods were then explored like, if prayer doesn't work and amulets are not working, then maybe I'm not trying hard enough, and therefore God is still not removing this plague from my shoulders. And here you get into some of the most interesting theological reasoning that that appeared in Christian Europe in response to the plague, which is picking up on on pre existing

ideas about the powers of the mortification of the flesh. Yes, the various flagulent groups for example, Um, you've probably seen art and uh you know, and you've seen paintings depicting these individuals before, often people in white clothing UM, going making like minor parades through the streets, whipping or flailing oneself, drawing blood from one's back, thus staining the white garments

that you're wearing. UM as an act of penance. UM. And the interesting thing about these is that these groups practicing the mortification of the flesh in public rituals as a means of of seeking penance during times of great

suffering and fear. These existed prior to the Black Death. UM. You find these during the thirteenth century, and during the thirteenth century they had already reached the point of heresy or the charge of heresy by the church, as it became a sort of grassroots means of removing one's sin effectively, or or at least to the powers that be, seeming to come dangerously close to cutting the power of the Church out of the equation, because what do you need

church for when the power to remove sins resides in your own hands and your own flails um Even more so when this idea generates that merely witnessing a progression of flagelens through the streets can remove your sins. If you're trying to picture a procession, a flagulent procession, people moving in formation through the streets punishing their own bodies

in order to enact the mortification of the flesh. And and by the way, the mortification of the flesh, I mean these people did point to sort of passages in the Bible that could be interpreted as giving them license to to enact this kind of spiritual dealing where the you know, punishing the body or denying the body pleasure and inflicting pain on the body could in some way

purify you in the eyes of God. Like there, uh, you know, there's there are passages in like the Book of Romans, where where the apostle Paul writes that for if you live after the flesh, you shall die. But if you live through the spirit, and through the spirit do mortify the deeds of your body, you will live. Yeah, and and ultimately the mortification of the flesh. Um, you know, flagulent rights and so forth. It gets kind of it

gets really complicated. I think we've looked into the some past episodes of the show, because you know, you're dealing with with with with the pain and pleasure network of the brain. Um, you're dealing with with complex you know, mythic histories of suffering and the meaning of suffering, and so we see rights of this nature in religions around the world. It's it's it's nothing that's you know, completely

isolated to these movements we're discussing here. Yeah, that's right. Oh, but I forgot sorry, I forgot to complete the thought I started a moment ago. I was going to mention. I was going to mention that flagelent groups and flagulent processions of the Middle Ages are parodied, uh, to to great effect in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Do you remember the part where the monks the brotherhood. They're walking through the streets and beating their own faces with

the wooden boards. Yep, yeah, that's that's there's a lot of I mean those guys, especially with Terry Jones. Uh, you know, they were very well read on on medieval thought, so uh yeah, it's it makes sense that we would

find such a great parody there. But certainly, yeah, to get back to the point here, like these groups who are around this line of thinking already existed, and during the fourteenth century, the Black Death stirred this reaction again for for obvious recent reasons, and so the practice surged, and the practice even peaked during this time. Um uh, you know, people were realizing these other forms of prayer and religious right, we're not working. What is the next level?

We should take things too, well, maybe we should take to the streets like this. Yeah, I do think it's interesting that the mortification of the flesh idea took on this public display. Uh. And I'm sure it wasn't always a public display, but like, why why in the cases of the people who led these procession ends in the streets, was it not enough just to mortify your flesh or punish your body in private? Why did you need to do it as a group in public? What was that

accomplishing specifically? And I don't know the answer to that question. You know, it probably gets into some of what we discussed in our Tears episodes. You know that it's it's one thing to have an emotional outpouring that is individual or in or in a case of a you know, sort of religious situation, a one on one communication with God. But if it is public and communal, then it takes

on a different power. Now, there's an important distinction to be made here between just the practice and the movement of of of the flagelence here, because just the mere practice of the mortification of the flesh was largely considered an accepted form of penance within the church. But then when we talk about the movement, we're talking about something that is sometimes described as a man that ultimately was

beyond the control of the church. And that's where we see the crackdown on groups such as these UH and also sometimes those crackdowns were rolled up in the persecution of other heresies. Yeah, that's right, because a number of things could count as supposed mortification of the flesh, and these would be all kinds of things you hear about. You know, Christians in the Middle Ages doing in a totally sanctioned way all the time, like fasting is a

friend of mortification of the flesh. You are denying yourself fleshly carnal pleasures in in terms of food or whatever, or even just um assuming poses that are uncomfortable for long periods of time as a way of turning your mind to God, like kneeling for long periods or something.

But you're making the distinction that that in the in the Middle Ages, there arose these movements that were sort of organized and highly devoted to the flagellent practice, and these were sometimes condemned and seen as troublemakers by the

church authorities. Right, and you can you know, it ultimately gets to know complex area because you can say, well, okay, if the church believes that they have the path to salvation, it's their job to keep people from altering the recipe to the point where it's no longer producing the desired results or you know, causing greater harm um. But then on the other hand, you know, it's it is also about power. You know, if if if a group has determined that it is that it has reached the point

where it is limiting the power of the church. Though then it's it becomes a threat to the church. Right. Yeah. But another thing we should, of course say is that the threats represented by these flagulent groups, it was not just a threat to the authority of the church structure.

They were also doing very bad things in some cases, like there were cases where flagellent groups were involved in, say, the persecution of minority groups within the communities, right and and yeah, and that's where we get to another huge area that comes out of the religious response to the Black Death, um, the persecution of minority groups, including the the persecution of Jewish communities. So Jewish communities were often had often been the target of let's say, blood libel

and accusations of various crimes and events. Um. And in response to the Black Death, there were vile accusations that the plague outbreaks were due to Jewish people poisoning wells. Now, certainly, well poisoning has been used as a weapon of war, had been used since in war and conflict since very ancient times. We see accounts of it being used by the Assyrians and others. But there was no well poisoning going on here, and it's it's not it's not even

how this particular illness would have readily spread. Right. Uh, there's an interesting article that I was reading about about some of this, Peter Schwarzstein's The History of Poisoning of the Well in Smithsonian, which gets into this larger trend like how far back does this go, especially in ancient you know, Mesopotamian conflict. But the author also gets into these accusations of well poisoning a little bit during the

Black Death. I also found a very good ride up on specifically the the anti Semitic activities during the Black Death on Jewish history dot org that has a has a good write up. Now, it should be stated that this was not the first time in history there had been anti Jewish persecution in Europe, but this was you know that that was a long tradition, going back in many ways to the early days of the Church. Um.

But this was a big spike in it. Yeah, absolutely, um and and and so that that line of behavior, that line of of lashing out with hatred against um, against the Jewish people and other minority communities. Uh, like, that was already established. So then comes to the Black Death. Uh, these other religious options were kind of explored and in some cases eventually exhausted, you know, asking yourself, well, why

are we being punished? Is it because of a failure in the Crusades, is it rampants sin, is it probably problems in the church, etcetera. Uh So, yeah, they end up turning them to these Jewish communities, and the idea of mass poisoning um by Jewish communities was something that had already been raised in previous persecution UH efforts, sometimes

with lepers thrown into the accusation as well. You know, so it gets into this whole conspiracy based illogical territory of like, you know, the Jewish people and and lepers working together to poison us and create disease. And as a Shortstein points out in his article, this was already happening, you know, before the Black Death, in response to a

lot of water borne illnesses, for example. But then the Black Death gave it new life, and so you saw regulations put in place and in UH cities like Vienna where Jewish people were banned from consuming food, h and drink that was intended for Christians. And this madness basically continue till the fifteenth century, and along the way we saw the persecution and the slaughter of Jews, the Roman

the Roman people, as well other minority groups. Pope Clement the six Um actually outlawed it in an attempt to protect Jewish communities, but uh, that only worked so much. I mean, the horrible acts of expulsion and genocide continued. So one of the again the really interesting things about all of this is that again none of these religion

based attempts to thwart the plague really worked. And to a large extent, the Church of the fourteenth century was just met with this terrible test um and they failed. People turned to the Church and it was unable to help. Unable to help in the larger sense of preventing the illness, but even the smaller instances of providing a framework for

the suffering. Uh. There was a lot of pessimism during this period toward the powers that be, and you can read accounts of say, churchmen not interacting with the lay people out of fear of death, and that included say, like last rites for the dying. So there was this idea that the church was for aking people, just as

people were forsaking each other. In the wake of this illness. H. Yeah, there's actually interesting debate from the time period about about what is the appropriate course of action for for Christians and for the clergy in reaction to the plague. Like, like a big question was should you flee the plague or not? Or should you stay? Should you flee or

should you stay to help your Christian brethren? And actually, like there's a whole Martin Luther essay where he talks about the this this debate, this argument about whether you should whether you have a duty to stay, or whether you should you should flee. Yeah. And now this is not to say that that everyone up just outright abandoned Christianity, but there was there was an increased turning away from the church in search of quote, a different understanding of

the Christian message and walk of faith. This according to Joshua J. Mark, who wrote about it in in These Religious Responses to the Black Death. Uh. This you also get into this argument that ultimately this kind of religious crisis uh in Europe kind of laid the groundwork for the Protestant Reformation of later centuries. Yeah. Martin Luther's famous theses were published in the early sixteenth century. I believe

like the fifteen teens at some point. And uh, and of course you know, at the time, in the centuries following the Black Death itself in the fourteenth century, there were still recurrent waves of plague popping up here and there throughout Europe. So it wasn't like the plague went away after the Black Death, as we've talked about, the plague continued to be an ongoing issue for the centuries

that followed. Yeah. Absolutely. Now I want to come back to very briefly to one of the sources I I cited last time, Uh, the Anthropology of Plague by Sharon in de Witt, published in Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World. From so, as the author points out, the Black Death initiated or accelerated social, demographic, and economic changes throughout the region. Uh. So there there are changes that were already in motion to some degree, but the Black Death arguably sped them

up and made them more urgent, more actionable, etcetera. Though again that we get into this this very difficult to m to hammer out area of trying to imagine what the future would have been like had something not occurred, Like what would what was the trajectory of of religion in Europe um and and how would an absence of plague have affected that trajectory, Because even if you took plague out of the scenario, you still had famine, you still had war, you still had people suffering and living

this um you know often you know, degraded standard of living within a feudal system. So all of those elements were still in place. All of those elements were already uh, you know, pushing some of the changes to come. So I don't know, it's it's difficult to tease it all apart and and try and figure out what would have happened had the plague not happened, and if not this plague, I mean, potentially some other plague. It's not like this was the only illness affecting the people of Europe during

these centuries. And as as we've mentioned previously, of course, it's important to keep in mind that despite the sort of Eurocentric dominance of the historical analyzes of the of the plague that exists, the the Second Plague pandemic did not only affect Christian Europe, I mean, it affected large portions of the world, affected Europe, Africa, and Asia. And so another really interesting area of study is looking at Islamic societies and and how they reacted to the plague

in their own ways. Now, as I've mentioned several times, this is an area that seems somewhat complicated, because, much like the scientific history of the plague pandemic itself, the subject of the Islamic religious response to plague has I think undergone some recent revision and re examination. Um looking at the time, I think we maybe do need to save most of this discussion for the next episode. But just as a hint of things to come, I did want to read a passage that I found really haunting.

This was cited in again that essay I mentioned earlier by Michael W. Doles from the seventies UH and so Doles is pointing out that while the majority of historical scholarship, especially at the time he was writing, but probably still the majority of scholarship on the Second Plague pandemic, has focused on its effects on Europe, it was also extremely destructive and historically significant in the Muslim world at the time, including in the Middle East, in North Africa and Andalusia

and so forth. And UH to describe this state of affairs, Dolls quotes from a fourteenth century Arab Muslim historian and philosopher named even Caldoon. Uh. Even Caldoon is a very important intellectual of the Middle Ages who did work that I think could be seen as a pre cursor to many of the social sciences. So he did work sort of examining different uh you know, things that might be considered sociology later. And he tried to do sort of political analysis of the course of empires and and and

uh in their economic histories and things like this. But he also wrote about the plague that was taking place during his own lifetime. And so I want to read a passage that's translated here by Rosenthal. Even Caldoon rights in the middle of the eighth century, and that would be the eighth century by the calendar he was working with.

We as what we've been referring to as the fourteenth century, civilization in the East and West was visited by a destructive plague which devastated nations and caused populations to vanish. It swallowed up many of the good things of civilization and wiped them out. It overtook the dynasties at the time of their sinility, when they had reached the limit of their duration. It lessened their power and curtailed their influence. It weakened their authority, their situation a pro the point

of annihilation and dissolution. Civilization decreased with the decrease of mankind. Cities and buildings were laid, waste, roads and way signs were obliterated. Settlements and mansions became empty, Dynasties and tribes grew weak. The entire inhabited world changed. The East, it seems, was similarly visited, though in accordance with and in proportion

to its civilization. The author gives a note that's, according to Caldoun's estimation, the East's more affluent civilization, and then he finishes by writing, it was as if the voice of existence in the world had called out for oblivion and restriction in the world had responded to its call. What a harrowing piece of writing. That is amazing. Yeah, that that gave me goose bumps a little bit there.

And then really it drives home so many of the points we've been we've been making, or that have been made in the sources we've been siting here. Yeah, uh, and and Doles actually fills in that even Caldoon himself, law, his parents, and a number of his teachers uh to the Black Death. He I think he was living in Tunis at the time, in modern day Tunisia, but he dwelled in North Africa at the time, and of course it was affected, just like the the other side of

the Mediterranean was. All right. Well, on that note, we're gonna go and close out this part two, but we'll be back with part three next week, I believe on Tuesday, so stay tuned for that. In the meantime, if you would like to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, you'll find him in the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed We have core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, listener Mail on Mondays, Artifact on Wednesdays. On Friday we do a little weird House Cinema. That's

our time to just mostly discuss a weird movie. And on the weekends we run a vault episode, which is a fancy way of saying we do a rerun. Huge thanks as always to our wonderful audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other to suggest to topic for the future, or just to say hello. You can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is

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