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The Black Death 1346-1353: The Complete History, by Ole J. Benedictow
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Unique, sensational and shocking, this revelatory book provides, for the first time, a complete Europe-wide history of the Black Death. The author's painstakingly comprehensive research throws fresh light on the nature of the disease, its origin, its spread, on an almost day-to-day basis, across Europe, Asia Minor, the Middle East and North Africa, its mortality rate and its impact on history. These latter two aspects are of central importance here, for it is demonstrated that the plague's death rates have consistently been under-estimated and that they were in fact much higher, making the disease's long-term effects on history even more profound.
- Sales Rank: #710837 in Books
- Published on: 2012-12-07
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.18" h x 1.19" w x 6.34" l, 1.88 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 454 pages
From The New England Journal of Medicine
Two theses form the structure of this book: that the Black Death was the bubonic form of the rodent disease Yersinia pestis and was spread by fleas, and that it killed 60 percent or more of Europe's population with its first strike alone. To sustain these theses, the author has divided the book into 34 chapters that chart the spread of the plague country by country, even to places where few, if any, sources survive. But in places without sources or where the appearance of the Black Death was not reported, Benedictow nonetheless asserts that the plague struck and, except for a few tiny, isolated islands of population, killed 60 percent or more. In his argument that the plague was caused by Y. pestis, Benedictow relies heavily on the reports of the Indian Plague Research Commission, which were published during the first two decades of the 20th century. However, he has read these reports selectively. For instance, he maintains that the black rat (Rattus rattus) was responsible for plague in the years 1346 through 1353 as well as during the 20th century, but the Indian plague researchers found as many dead brown rats as black ones in dwellings where infection was active. In other, subtropical, zones such as northern Africa, scientists found that the black rat was the least important rat in the spread of plague to human populations; the brown rat and others such as Mus alexandrinus proved more deadly. Benedictow claims that "plague normally arrived with persons unwittingly carrying infective rat fleas in their clothing or luggage." But from studies of the clothing and luggage of tens of thousands of people migrating from plague-stricken regions, the plague commissioners concluded overwhelmingly that Y. pestis was not transmitted by these means. Benedictow argues that the Black Death and Y. pestis were both specific to households in terms of mortality -- if one member of a household contracted plague, the others soon became infected. The plague commissioners found the opposite to be true: in less than 4 percent of households was more than one person per household infected. Benedictow maintains that people in well-built stone housing were protected against plague because rats could not enter these dwellings. The plague commissioners again discovered the opposite: that rats penetrated stone and brick houses, even those with cement floors, inflicting some of the highest rates of death in these residences, whereas often some of the poorest people, living in bamboo huts, fared much better. Benedictow claims that during both plagues hospital workers were more susceptible than others. Yet in study after study, the plague commissioners reported that "the safest place to be in plague time is the plague ward." To their surprise, and in contrast to the experience during the Black Death, Y. pestis is hardly contagious even in its pneumonic form. Historians have realized since the work of Graham Twigg, in 1984, that the Black Death and the subtropical Y. pestis traveled at vastly different speeds. Even with the railway and the steamship, the 20th-century plague, because of its dependence on the homebound rat, spread overland at about 8 miles per year, whereas the contagious Black Death almost equaled that speed per day. Nonetheless, Benedictow tries to bring the two time frames closer together. He speeds up the 20th-century plague by reporting infection times only for California, where the disease is carried by the prairie dog, not the homebound rat, and has been known to move as fast as 15 miles per year. Benedictow devotes considerably more space to the slowing of the Black Death. For instance, he makes claims for earlier dates of departure of the plague at a given place, arguing that chroniclers or wills recorded the disease only after it had struck the elite members of a population; but then he does not use the same rules when discussing the plague's arrival at a second place. More often, however, Benedictow casts aside any rate of disease spread that was faster than he likes: at these junctures, the Black Death made "metastatic leaps." But even with his various stratagems, his results still show the medieval plague traveling 30 times as fast as the modern one -- a discrepancy he does not explain or even admit to. Casuistic sleights of hand plague Benedictow's demography almost as much as they do his epidemiology. When the data do not cooperate, he questions or rejects them outright. For instance, statistics from Mallorca show mortality rates of only 23 percent, but Benedictow brushes them aside, claiming that they are "infested with major problems of demography, sociology and source criticism both with respect to the level of total mortality" -- that is, Benedictow's thesis that the Black Death everywhere killed off 60 percent or more of populations -- "and to the distribution of mortality between town and countryside." Benedictow claims that the distribution of mortality rates for the Black Death shows the patterns of Y. pestis infection in 20th-century India -- that the larger the population of a given place, the lower its rate of mortality. To make the data from the two plagues fit, he not only argues that the mortality rate from the Black Death was greater than the records say, he also argues the opposite, asserting that the most authoritative population statistics for Florence, Italy, for instance -- those of Herlihy and Klapisch -- are wrong, simply because they do not square with the Y. pestis deaths distributed over city and countryside. But, again, ultimately even his manipulation of the figures fails: his doctored mortality rates for the midsize town of Prato, in Italy, and the smaller villages of its countryside (contado), for instance, were the same (42.5 to 45 percent), and both were considerably lower than the rates for its much larger regional center, Florence. Benedictow's two overarching theses collide in the end. The mortality figures for Y. pestis, even in India -- where 95 percent of deaths from plague have been recorded since the discovery of the bacillus in 1894 -- accounted for less than 1 percent of India's population even during the years of highest mortality from plague. One must compare this with Benedictow's claim that 60 percent or more of Europe died from the Black Death in a single strike of the disease. Samuel K. Cohn, Jr., Ph.D.
Copyright © 2005 Massachusetts Medical Society. All rights reserved. The New England Journal of Medicine is a registered trademark of the MMS.
Review
Benedictow's book is highly recommended. It is well written and accompanied by many helpful maps and tables of data. STUDIES IN MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE TEACHINGThe thoroughness and precision of (Benedictow's) research are admirable. (...) Opens a treasure trove of correct information. There is no doubt that (the book) should be acquired by all university libraries. FIFTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIESEvery library that covers population studies, epistemology, or medieval history should have a copy of Benedictow's book. POPULATION STUDIES & DEVELOPMENTA book which should be on every Late-Medievalist's bookshelf. It is packed with valuable and well-considered accounts. ... A wonderful compilation of data which will be widely used for many years to come. MEDIEVAL ARCHAEOLOGY(This) remarkable, engrossing and controversial study is the first to assemble and synthesize historical data from every region in which the Black Death wrought havoc. (...) An immense and entirely breathtaking feat of scholarship...and a moving quest to account for a cruel phenomenon. TLS(This) magisterial account mixes demographic research, meticulous reading of the chronicles and modern bacteriology. THE GUARDIAN The author...has achieved a Herculean task in reviewing a very large part of the literature on the pestilential disease or set of diseases that afflicted Europe from 1346 to 1353. THE MEDIEVAL REVIEW A valuable addition to the historiography of the Black Death. Highly recommended. CHOICEAmbitious and contentious. ENGLISH HISTORICAL REVIEWThose looking for a vast compendium of local data will not be disappointed. SPECULUM
About the Author
OLE J. BENEDICTOW is Professor of History at the University of Oslo.
Most helpful customer reviews
27 of 29 people found the following review helpful.
A suggestion for the microbiologist reviewer
By E'beth B
Please rethink your conclusions about this work. The authors whom you prefer have been shown to have used poor research methods and were at the further disadvantage (in the 1980s)of not having access to the DNA in the dental pulp extracted from known plague victims from both the second and third pandemics of plague. The pathogens causing modern diseases may actually be less "fragile" or likely to have acquired gene sequences from coexisting microbes than those of the Middle Ages, and yet we are certainly seeing rapid and unpredictable mutations in potentially lethal modern pathogens (H5N1) which may be the cause of the next pandemic. The Black Death no doubt owes some of its extreme lethality to its mutations within short spans of time and geography. The role of the HUMAN flea (P. irritans) and the common body louse, with which medieval person was rife, may have been more effective vectors of transmission than we might expect with our modern experiences with them. In fact, the human flea (not the rat flea) was further altered in its ability to tranfer the pathogen into the human bloodstream by the time of the 19th century plague episode. Conditions in Europe at the time of the 14th c.Black Death were more conducive to the human to human transmission of plague, no doubt, at least in its pneumonic form. As we see modern diseases mutate, so must the early Y. Pestis have mutated into extreme lethality. I suggest you read the conclusions of Michel Drancourt and Didier Raoult and their work on the extraction of Y. pestis DNA from the dental pulp of known plague victims. Your skepticism about Y. pestis may be put to rest. Yersinia pestis was the cause of the medieval plague, even if other diseases were active contemporaries! John Kelly also has a very cogent argument as to how the deadly disease gained a foothold in first the Asian Steppe and rapidly spread across Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, even Greenland.
18 of 21 people found the following review helpful.
Shaky history
By E. N. Anderson
Possibly I can inject a moderate voice into the rather polarized reviews so far. Benedictow certainly demonstrates, and so have many others, that bubonic plague was involved and could spread faster than we thought. On the other hand, he overgeneralizes local extreme kill rates, and he writes as if no other diseases were involved in the great death peak of 1346-1353. This would mean that all the other diseases that constantly afflicted medieval Europe somehow took a holiday! In fact, we have known since at least Han Zinsser's RATS, LICE AND HISTORY in 1937, to say nothing of the more up-to-date, careful work of Graham Twigg, that other diseases must have taken full advantage of the opportunity caused by social breakdown. And, as Benedictow says, that breakdown caused many to die of sheer starvation and lack of care. Infants who lost parents almost always died, sick or no. We must assume that _Yersinia pestis_ killed only some of the many victims.
We can, however, assume it killed far more than it would in modern India or Africa, because in most of Europe it was a virgin-soil epidemic. People had no evolved or acquired immunity. They were sitting ducks. As to its being there: As Eliz B notes in her review, plenty of plague DNA has been found in the victims, quite apart from perfectly sober and convincing contemporary accounts, which DO include plenty of notes on dying rats.
I have to say, I am annoyed by modern "scholarship" on the plague. There is some good work (David Herlihy, etc.), but too many people take undefensible, extreme positions--maintaining that it was all plague, or that no plague was involved at all. One recent book even proposes an Ebola-like virus, in spite of the obvious fact that Ebola puts itself out of business by killing or immunizing everyone in a village it strikes. We are better off with the classic works of Zinsser, Shrewsbury, Twigg, and Cipolla--they're out of date, but better out of date than rhetorically exaggerating and noncredible. I wish that more historians, with fewer axes to grind, would look at this epidemic.
29 of 39 people found the following review helpful.
Too many gaps for this microbiologist
By Micro Man
I am a research scientist and I have given much study to the nature of the Black Death and its recurring epidemics through the late 17th Century. After reading this book I am left with several pages of criticisms I have noted as I progressed from chapter to chapter. On innumerable instances very firm statements of fact are made regarding any number of subjects and absolutely no sources are provided. In some instances, even when referring to advanced concepts such as evolution of host:parasite interactions over time this is explained as common knowledge ("It was well known that...") with zero sources provided. Within the past 20 years a sizeable body of highly compelling research into the true identity of the causative agent of the Black Death has been conducted. Any serious student of the Black Death, microbiology/bacteriology, epidemiology or medieval history is doing themselves a disservice if they fail to examine at least one publication from this body of research. These include "Biology of Plagues" and "Return of the Black Death" by Susan Scott & Christopher Duncan; "The Black Death: a Biological Reappraisal" by Graham Twigg; "The Black Death Transformed" by Samuel K. Cohn; and "The Black Death and the Transformation of the West" by David Herlihy. The book reviewed here was published in 2004 and it takes the position that Yersinia pestis was the causative agent of the Black Death. Although this theory is certainly not new and has been advanced countless times before, this book fails to address the large body of evidence that counters this theory. While this is an understandable shortcoming of publications from over twenty years ago, it is not unreasonable to expect a current publication on the subject to at the very least acknowledge the existence of such evidence. To further strengthen the argument for Y. pestis, when contemporary sources describing the Black Death make assertions that are irreconcilable with modern data regarding Y. pestis the original sources are explained away as exaggerations and "tall tales". This book had great potential to address poorly studied aspects of the Black Death. Unfortunately, the poor documentation of sources and one-sided approach to data analysis of this book casts a shadow over its data and its conclusions.
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