Learning from our past — what can previous pandemics teach us about Covid-19?

It’s a story which might sound familiar to us in 2020. The disease first passed from an animal to humans in China. From there it quickly dispersed to infect much of the country, before spreading along travel routes to reach the Middle East, Africa and Europe.

The Black Death expanded via camel caravans along the Silk Route travelling west. It had reached the Genovese port of Caffa (Feodosiya) in the Crimea by 1346, which was being besieged by the Mongol armies. Fleeing from the disease, the Genovese brought the virus to the port of Messina and from there it spread like wildfire across Europe — killing between 50 to 60 million people in the next 6 years. It reached Denmark via a Norwegian ship which had run aground off the coast of northern Jutland, after returning from an English port. According to the story, the crew were all dead, so the Danish locals took everything of value from the boat — including the plague-carrying fleas.

Once present, the damage was devastating. By the end of 1350, more than half the population of Denmark had died.

The purpose of this text is not to be a scare story of the terrors of a pandemic, or to draw too many comparisons between the current Covid-19 outbreak and the Black Death. Instead, I want to try and be thankful for living in the age we do and to try and imagine what it would be like for us to face a viral outbreak nearly 700 years ago.

The role of leaders during pandemics

The original outbreak of plague in Denmark was seen by the ruling monarch, Valdemar IV, not as a time of strife for his people, but as an opportunity to gain more power.

He remained unaffected by the plague and took advantage of the deaths of his enemies to add to his growing lands and properties. He refused to reduce the taxes the following year, though far fewer peasants farmed less land. Valdemar IV’s nobles, too, felt their incomes shrink and the high tax burdens fell heavier on them as well. Uprisings and civil unrest flared up in the following years.

Peter Christensen, who has researched the spread of plague in Denmark during the Middle Ages, compares Valdemar’s attempts to stop the spread of the plague to that of smoking:

“Some basic regulations were issued. It’s just like today where you can easily make anti-smoking campaigns, it just doesn’t mean people stop smoking. The problem was that in most places there were no institutions to enforce laws and take care of the plague.”

It wasn’t for another 300 years, when Christian IV of Denmark passed a Plague Law (1629) which forcibly separated the sick and healthy at major ports like Nyhavn in Copenhagen, that the disease was able to be controlled effectively.

The fallout

Being in 14th century Denmark at the time of the outbreak would have been a truly terrifying experience. Unlike the instant support we have at our fingertips today, there was no guidance, no shared knowledge among states and countries, and no understanding of what was spreading the disease.

During this time, the Danish church had a system whereby priests could pay to pray for one’s soul after death at a so-called ‘soul fair’. The registration of the number of ‘soul fairs’ in Danish cathedrals is one of the best source groups for the scale of the plague in Denmark. In 1350, the number of recorded soul fairs (and thus death notes) increased dramatically. For example, the number of soul fairs at the Ribe cathedral grew from approximately 1 a year to 17 a year. In this same diocese, twelve parishes simply ceased to exist from one year to the next as no one was left alive.

Inspired by the Black Death, The Dance of Death or Danse Macabre, an allegory on the universality of death, is a common painting motif in the medieval period.

From a modern perspective, it’s hard to grasp what the damage to Denmark must have been like throughout the remainder of the 14th century. All we have to go on are a few written accounts like the ‘soul fairs’ mentioned above. The Roskilde official records tell us that in 1370, 20 years after the outbreak, 98 farms and 71 houses were still completely deserted in the region. When Valdemar IV built a castle in Randers in 1357, it was made of materials from 11 broken-down churches from depopulated parishes which had been left completely derelict.

In cities, too, the plague hit hard. Several letters make it clear that religious institutions in the cities suffered from the plague. For example, a letter from 1355 states that a monastery in Odense had no monks remaining after the ravages of plague.

In cities such as Copenhagen, Roskilde and Ribe, the sources say that there were hundreds of deserted houses and land, probably because there were no people to fill them out. As the photo below shows, the Black Death remained endemic across Europe, reappearing at regular intervals throughout the later middle ages.

A Latin inscription in Aarhus Cathedral testifies to the outbreak of the plague in the 1480s. The inscription reads in Danish translation: “After Christ’s birth of the pure virgin 1487 years, the famous bishop Ejler of Aarhus completed this work when the violent plague raged.”

In fact, the plague seems to have been so severe a blow to the Danish cities that the urbanization the country had experienced earlier in the Middle Ages stopped — at least for a time. It hit particularly hard in the cities that were part of international networks in which the disease spread and where people lived close to each other.

Trying to understand the pandemic

The Black Death was a complete mystery at the time, there was no consensus on the cause and no expert recommendations on what should be done. The explanations across the regions affected were as diverse as they were incorrect. They can be divided into theological explanations, “scientific” explanations and conspiracy theories.

The prevailing theological explanation in Europe was that the plague was God’s punishment against man for his sinfulness . For example, the Bishop of Würzburg believed that the epidemic was due to blasphemy and swearing specifically.

In general, there was a sudden movement towards extreme religiosity, leading in many places (including Denmark) to flagellants’ processions, as an expression of dissatisfaction with the clergy and a display of religious fanaticism.

Flagellants at Doornik, Netherlands (present day Belgium) in 1349. These processions, sometimes numbering thousands, would show their religious fervour by vigorously whipping themselves in public displays of penance. This approach to achieving redemption appeared time and again in Europe during times of plague, hunger and drought.

One of the leading ‘scientific’ explanations at the time was put forward by the Faculty of Medicine of Paris. Based on astrological observations they proposed that an unfavourable constellation in 1345 was the primary cause of the Black Death.

One of the most widespread conspiracy explanations for the plague, and one that would rear its ugly head time and time again during difficult times, was to blame the Jewish community.
Following accusations that they were intentionally poisoning the public drinking water, there was severe persecution of Jewish inhabitants throughout Europe during the mid-14th century. In Easter of 1348, the Jewish communities in Toulon, Dauphine and Strasbourg in France were tortured and massacred under accusations of spreading the plague — in some instances before the pandemic had even reached the city.

Isolation

It was a time of immense uncertainty, with the church and state not providing answers or solutions to desperate people, but pointing fingers of blame and capitalizing on opportunities to claim more power.

The original outbreak of the Black Death in Europe was so devastating because no preventative measures were effectively put in place. Turning to religious extremism was actually a means of spreading the disease faster, as congregations of townspeople in close proximity could more easily pass the plague from one to another. Valdemar IV had tried to ban large assemblies in markets and keep those already affected in remote houses, but the impact was limited and control over rural towns and settlements was weak.

The solution of self-isolation was not used in Europe until 1374, when Visconte Bernabo of Reggio in Italy ordered the plague-stricken to be banished from the city. This idea of quarantine arose three years later in 1377 in Dubrovnik, Croatia, then in Ragusa on Sicily, when the city councils decided that people coming from plague-affected areas had to be in solitary confinement for a month before they could enter the city.

Quarantine houses (Lazarettos) from 1377, built outside the medieval walled city of Dubrovnik.

From Dubrovnik, the quarantine rule spread to Marseille, Venice , Pisa and Genoa over the next 80 years, and the isolation period was extended to 40 days. Gradually, the effects of the plague were lessened following further outbreaks throughout the later Medieval and Early Modern period.

Playing the blame game

Trying to take some lessons from history, it’s clear that now is not the time to capitalize on fear and pain. Pointing fingers and blaming minority groups for bringing a ‘Chinese virus’ without taking effective actions is a strategy which failed 7 centuries ago and is failing for Trump today.

We have the scientific knowledge to understand the virus, with an administrative system that is able to support us, monitor the virus and disseminate information quickly throughout the media. This Covid-19 pandemic, as bad as it is, only requires us to stay home and distance ourselves as much as possible.

So although these ongoing weeks of isolation may be challenging for everyone, we can be grateful for the age we live in and the knowledge we can share.