Long Ago When the World Was Ending

These days, it is hard to escape the end times predictions and their prognosticators.  The most recent is of course, the end of the Mayan calendar this month.  Cable news and websites, always eager to grab public attention with frightening headlines, have been quick to trumpet the coming cataclysm.  History tells us that end of the world stories are common in every age, but one event stands out as a point when such dark imaginings had roots in some very scary current events.

The frightful stories began as rumors.  Ships washed up on shore with the entire crew dead at their posts.  Some made it into port with sailors dead and dying, telling stories of whole towns wiped out, of empty cities in the east, thousands of bodies dead and left to rot in the streets.  Survivors reported strange, hooded and cloaked figures roaming the fields, some carrying scythes.  They walked through the grain, ripened and ready for harvest, swinging their blades, yet no stalks fell.  Within the month, the dreaded sickness came.  The hooded figures also walked, silent and menacing, through the streets of towns and villages at night.  There were reports of foul-smelling mists, earthquakes, floods, famine, swarms of locusts and other earthly natural disasters.  The sky filled with shooting stars arcing across the heavens.  On other nights, there were strange constellations, blinking lights, globes of fire.  And again, the dreaded sickness came.  Many believed it was the end of the world as foretold in the Book of Revelation.  Death walked the earth, and the sickness was retribution for human sin and decadence, as certain as the floods of Noah or the burning of Sodom and Gomorrah.

The Pestilence, or the Great Mortality, as it was called at the time, arrived in Europe from Asia in 1347, although there were rumored smaller outbreaks before, but those could just as well have been typhus.  In fact, there is little hard evidence of the plague’s origins other than secondhand sources and accounts.  Many of the best known stories were written years later, like Daniel Defoe’s fictionalized A Journal of the Plague Year, or Samuel Pepys’ diary.  Pepys’ work described an outbreak of the plague in the 1600s, but Pepys himself was removed from most of the danger due to his position as an administrator and Member of Parliament.  However, the devastation and terror brought about by the Yersinia pestis is clear in the accounts of the time.  The plague crippled trade across the region, and Europe faced cataclysmic destruction of critical infrastructure and trade practices, as well as a death toll in the millions.

The Bubonic Plague, as it came to be known, took three forms:  a lymph infection causing buboes, apple-sized swellings that became purple or black in the armpits and groin; a blood infection resulting in deep purple bruising and skin discolorations all over the body; and a pneumonic form causing the coughing up of blood and respiratory failure.  In the first form, these swellings would appear and multiply quickly.  The masses were hard and painful, and would sometimes rupture, spewing bloody pus.  The infected person suffered relentless pain, and doctors vacillated in their prescribed treatments between lancing the boils or packing them with poultices with dubious results.  The second form turned the patient’s trunk and extremities black, seemingly indicating the body was rotting while still alive.  Often the darkened skin and high fever were accompanied by bloody urine and excrement.  The third manifestation was the most puzzling for medieval doctors and patients; as an airborne infectious agent, people in the same room or even house as a sick patient would be taken sick even without skin to skin contact.  No one at the time knew or understood a contagion that spread through the air.  In all its manifestations, the disease ended in painful death, and only a very few inexplicably survived.  The plague was decisive and amazingly fast in its virulent, deadly work.

There were stories of people going to bed well and dying before they woke up the next morning.  Others died within twenty-four hours of first symptoms.  Whole households perished, while others would be untouched, or have only a few family members die.  Entire monasteries were obliterated, and in a few cases, a surviving monk might leave the only written record of the disease’s progress.  Priests disappeared, either dying in their ministries to the ill or fleeing the cities and towns to avoid infection.  Doctors, too, fell victim at an alarming rate, leaving a dearth of medical aid for those who remained and became ill.  Husbands abandoned sick wives and children.  Children left their parents, or were forced to fend for themselves once their parents died.  The plague destroyed the very structure of family and communal life in cities, towns and villages.

The actual death toll varies, but most scholars believe between 75 and 200 million people perished.  The losses piled up in the Middle East as well, near where the plague may have originated.  Pope Clement VI put the death toll at 23,840,000 from his seat at Avignon.  Whatever the actual number, the losses were staggering.

We know now that the plague can be cured, and that it is carried by fleas and rats, as well as other rodents.  To the people of the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance, finding the cause of the sickness and avoiding the deepening cataclysm was of utmost importance.  Obviously, they were not successful.  In some years, the plague died down in winter, and increased in spring and summer.  In hindsight, this makes sense.  Rats and fleas were more active in warmer weather.  When the pattern reversed itself, was it because people stayed indoors more and therefore, the disease could be spread quickly from person to person in the closed up rooms?  Often, the disease would decimate one household, but skip others whose members had contact with the sick.  In a single household, the plague might take the life of the father, but not the mother.  There were a few commonalities in the cases:  mere contact with a dead body almost always brought death; there were rumors of contagion by breathing, although with primitive medical understanding, nothing could be proven.

Cleanliness might also have been an issue.  Sewage often flowed through the streets, and trash piled up in alleys and lots.  People did not bathe regularly because water had to be heated, and some carried oranges studded with cloves in their pockets and drenched themselves in perfumes to cover the stench of body odor.

Home remedies multiplied.  Burning fragrant wood like cedar or eucalyptus was thought to ward of the germs, so even in summer, people burned fires.  Pope Clement VI kept huge fires burning in the papal apartments during the dead heat of summer, and sat between them, sweltering, in an effort to avoid becoming infected.

 

Many who died in their homes would not be discovered until the stench hit the street.  Others were stacked like cord wood by the side of the road.  With the near certain knowledge that the disease was spread by the dead, cities like Florence formed brigades to pick up the human remains that clogged the streets.  This group was called the Campagnia della Misericordia.  The members wore red or black hooded cloaks that hid their faces.  They moved quietly through the streets, often late at night, gathering the bodies and hauling them off to the boneyard or charnel house.  In the Misericordia we find the roots of the Grim Reaper, the hooded figure carrying a large scythe who travels the world gathering the souls of the newly dead.  Often in art, the death figure carried a sword; this is apparent in the Danse Macabre images of Hans Holbein.  The sword changed into a scythe is understandable in an agrarian society.

Documentary evidence of the plague’s destruction tells of 400 dead per day in Avignon.  Homes were left vacant, and pets and livestock roamed the streets unattended.  One cemetery received 11,000 bodies in six weeks.  To dispose of so much human detritus meant burning the bodies in massive fires, layering corpses in trenches and burying them, or simply leaving them to rot in the fields.  Death was everywhere, as was the smell of putrefying flesh.

One military leader found an interesting way to dispose of his dead soldiers, and may also have inadvertently stumbled on an early method of biological warfare.  The Mongol army besieging the city of Caffa, gathered their dead and hurled them by catapult over the city walls, hoping to infect the citizens inside.  The citizens, not to be outdone, shoveled the remains over another wall into the ocean.

Many believed the disease was spread through the water supply, and the likely suspects, they erroneously believed, were Jews.  Charges that the wells were poisoned and that the disease was a deliberate attempt to kill Christians multiplied throughout the region.  This led to Jews being rounded up, beaten, tortured, and murdered.  Pope Clement VI tried to stop the carnage, but was unsuccessful.  Jewish people were victims of homicidal fury as well as the plague, and the death toll continued to rise.

Clement VI had another problem added to his already full plate:  because the plague was seen as punishment for sin, people walked the streets in macabre parades, whipping themselves in a bloody frenzy to make amends for the evil of mankind.  The pope desperately tried to stop the horrific display, because all along the route, cases of the disease spiked after the bloodshed.

In the end, the idea that plague was carried by rats and fleas escaped the attention of physician, saint and sinner in these times, although both vermin were mentioned in plague accounts.  Many preferred to believe their loved ones were struck down by the flaming sword of an angel, or were made sick by incubi or succubi, demons that attacked men and women in their beds.  Europe was decimated, destabilized, and crushed.  It would take years for order to be restored, infrastructure to be rebuilt, and society to be reestablished.  The twentieth century saw several outbreaks of plague in America, most significantly in San Francisco, California.  Every year, a handful of people across the nation become infected with Bubonic Plague, but the mortality rate is near zero.  According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (C.D.C.), “significantly more cases occur in parts of Africa and Asia.  The biggest fear among biological researchers is that a strain will appear one day that is resistant to modern antibiotics, or that a version of the disease will be manufactured in a lab somewhere and unleashed on the world, impervious to all drugs and remedies, a microscopic killer bringing death and destruction once again to the world.

It is unlikely the world will end in a single day, a month, or a year.  More likely, we will face a slow demise due to climate change, deadly pollution, or as a result of the rippling effects from a weapon of mass destruction.  There is always the possibility of meteors and comets colliding with earth, a scenario fit for a special effects-laden movie.  The date, December 21, 2012, will probably pass without swaths of destruction and human carnage, leaving all of us in fine shape to resume our hedonistic materialism at the after-Christmas sales on the 26^th.  People of the future will see that as the plague of our particular time.

Barbara Tuchman Practices History

The late historian Barbara Tuchman makes a convincing case for what she calls factual storytelling over academic writing.  She is calloused against charges that she lacks credentials to be an historian and is instead, simply a writer.  Never, she tells us, did she want to write for academics.  “Too often,” she writes, “scholarly history is written in terms of ideas rather than acts.”  She cites no less an authority than George Macaulay Trevelyan, distinguished professor of modern history at Cambridge, who “stressed writing for the general reader as opposed to writing just for fellow scholars because he knew that when you write for the public you have to be clear and you have to be interesting and these are the two criteria which make for good writing.”  As for her critics, she uses the tart retort for which she is known:  “My own form is narrative, which is not every historian’s, I may say—indeed, it is rather looked down on now by the advanced academics, but I don’t mind because no one could possibly persuade me that telling a story is not the most desirable thing a writer can do.”

Tuchman’s goals as a writer and historian are clear:  the writing has to be real and has to interest a wide audience.  The reader must feel compelled to turn the page.  The best writer-historians do this.  They are not historians or scientists first, but storytellers.  If she were alive today, Tuchman might single out the work of Robert Caro, William Manchester, John McPhee, and Gary Wills as examples of storytellers and historians.  This desire to write for common people is a thread running through her book, Practicing History:  Selected Essays (Ballantine Books, 1982).

I found Tuchman’s work at an opportune moment.  For the last few months, I have been involved with writing longer research pieces for a graduate program in which I am involved, and after four or five “academic” papers, I am finding that the writing takes a backseat to the credentials of the academics I quote from and list in my bibliography.  There is a tone in the work from the “ivory tower” that I, on other occasions, would strenuously avoid in my writing.  I don’t want to write for the ten other academics interested in some esoteric subject.  My work experience is in factual writing appealing to an audience of common readers, everyday people who look to books, magazines, newspapers, and online sources to inform and explain.  I am firmly convinced that good writing that appeals to the intellect and the human need for a story is not some sort of lesser animal to the obtuse and often incestuous academic paper.  In Tuchman, I find much validation and a kindred soul.  So I have been reading everything I could find, in print and out of, from her and others like her.

Barbara Tuchman was born on January 30, 1912 in New York City, and died on February 6, 1989 at the age of 77.  She lacked an academic title or a graduate degree, and was, in fact, a housewife when she picked up her pen and began to research and write history.  Over the years, she came to believe that an academic background might actually inhibit her writing ability.  She wrote for The Nation, which her father at one point owned, and traveled extensively before settling down to marry physician Lester R. Tuchman in 1940.  Two of her books won Pulitzer Prizes:  The Guns of August (Presidio Press, 1962) and Stilwell and the American Experience in China 1911-1945 (Grove Press, 1971).  Her death resulted from complications of a stroke.

Practicing History is about writing, although there is plenty of history in it.  Tuchman states her position for this book clearly:  “I am a writer first whose subject is history, and whose purpose is communication.  I am very conscious of the reader as a listener whose attention must be held if he is not to wander away.”  She defends herself as a woman writer in a male-dominated field:  “Women are a particularly good source for physical detail.  They seem to notice it more than men or at any rate to consider it more worth reporting.”  This book collects together shorter pieces of history, lectures, and Tuchman’s ruminations about writing history.  She avoids what she calls “political passions of the moment” in favor of stories with a hard or factual subject matter.  Books written by journalists often fall into these political passions, but Tuchman is an advocate for pure history as story, the compelling narrative of the world and its people often in moments of tension and great importance.  Her books took time to germinate—six or seven years of on-and-off work to produce her first book, Bible and Sword:  England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour (Ballantine Books, 1956).

Practicing History is divided up into sections:  “The Craft,” “The Yield,” and “Learning from History.”  In the first section, the essay “In Search of History,” contains valuable advice for the young historian, whom she hopes will write only about a subject that is dear to him or her.  The essay is drawn from a Phi Beta Kappa Address at Radcliffe College in 1963.  Students must write about imagery and fact for which they care passionately, and not “because your department has suggested it as an original subject.”  In Tuchman’s view, a writer of history must be fascinated by his subject and follow it wherever it leads.  She speaks of her own struggles against the parameters of her writing ability.  On the mechanics of writing, she councils that “short words are always preferable to long ones; fewer syllables the better, and monosyllables, beautiful and pure like ‘bread’ and ‘sun’ and ‘grass’ are best of all.”  Of particular interest is her research technique of making notes on index cards because this keeps the writer from being tied down to a desk.  She could take her cards and work anywhere.  A good researcher must also know when to stop because research is “endlessly seductive; writing is hard work.”  She goes on to say in another essay that “Research provides the material, and theory a pattern of thought, but it is through communication that history is heard and understood.”  This circles back to her theme that to write is to instruct, but to also tell a compelling story.

Tuchman believes that creative writing is not just poetry and fiction, but factual writing as well.  She provides an artist’s laundry list of necessities for fiction and nonfiction forms:  “first, the extra vision with which the artist perceives a truth and conveys it by suggestion.  Second, medium of expression:  language for writers, paint for painters, clay or stone for sculptors, sound expressed in musical notes for composers.  Third, design or structure.”  These aspects are what’s needed for art, and therefore they are imperatives for the historical writer.

“The Yield” contains Tuchman’s shorter historical pieces, many first published in The Nation.  She also includes some book reviews from The New York Review of Books.  Her writing in this section on Israel illuminates and identifies the roots of the continuing conflict in that region today.  Her grandfather was Henry Morgenthau Sr., and she provides an especially insightful profile of him in this section, as she also does with Henry Kissinger, of whom she was not related.

In “Learning from History,” she affirms history’s subject as humanity.  “History is the record of human behavior,” she writes, “the most fascinating subject of all, but illogical and so crammed with an unlimited number of variables that it is not susceptible of the scientific method nor of systematizing.”  Of the cliché of one who does not remember history is doomed to repeat it, she says:  there are “two ways of applying past experience:  one is to enable us to avoid past mistakes and to manage better in similar circumstances next time; the other is to enable us to anticipate a future course of events.”  She believes fervently in history as illumination of the present, but it requires a 25-50 year perspective because history cannot be written as it happens.  That is better left to diary, memoir and journalism.  The past tells us what the present and the future are all about.

Barbara Tuchman in her time was a force to be reckoned with, and her work stands up today almost as well as it did when first published.  She is the historian for common folk, eschewing the trappings of academia.  Her work is a testament to craft, and indeed inspires us to turn the page, book after book.  Practicing History contains the added bonus of her writing about writing.  Many of her generation have passed, and we are at a loss to replace them.  Few writers, from the academy or elsewhere, are writing history for people today.  Howard Zinn—gone; William Manchester—gone; Stephen Ambrose—gone; William Shirer—gone; John Toland—gone.  A woman-historian is a rarer creature in the crowd of 20^th century factual storytellers.  So Barbara Tuchman is a gem.  Her stories are rooted in time and place, but her style is timeless.