The Plagues of the Middle Ages

The following material was originally compiled as research for the ‘Two Witnesses’ series. Unfortunately the planned installment was never finished, but the material here is as relevant to Biblical truth as ever. I am not the author of this material, and no longer have any information as to its original source.

It is interesting to note that this author admits that the inhabitants of the Roman world during the dark ages understood that the chaos and calamity of those times were as a result of the direct judgment of God. The author however hints that this was done in ignorance instead of attributing the rampant death and disease to their real causes; ie poor sanitation, etc.

But the court which is without the temple leave out, and measure it not; for it is given unto the Gentiles: and the holy city shall they tread under foot forty and two months. And I will give power unto my two witnesses, and they shall prophesy a thousand two hundred and threescore days, clothed in sackcloth. These are the two olive trees, and the two candlesticks standing before the God of the earth. And if any man will hurt them, fire proceedeth out of their mouth, and devoureth their enemies: and if any man will hurt them, he must in this manner be killed. These have power to shut heaven, that it rain not in the days of their prophecy: and have power over waters to turn them to blood, and to smite the earth with all plagues, as often as they will. (Rev 11:2-6)

Surely Christianity rejects history to its own peril…

At the peak of his reign, after accomplishing major political, judicial, and military successes, Justinian, emperor of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire, suddenly faced an old, ferocious enemy of mankind: pestilence. The bubonic plague, which struck in A.D. 540, is justifiably the worst recorded pandemic to ever afflict humanity. Any hopes of reestablishing the Roman Empire were dashed. Records regarding the dimensions of the devastation and the untold suffering and death were carefully kept by Justinian's chief archivist and secretary, the celebrated court historian, Procopius.

If one considers the dimensions of the devastation of the bubonic plague of the 6th Century in the midst of the Dark Ages --- the savage imperial wars waged against the barbarian hordes, the terrible famines, the ubiquity of death and destruction, and finally the unleashing of this cataclysmic epidemic --- it should not be difficult to imagine that the people at the time believed that they were being scorched and ravaged by the dreaded Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, as described in the biblical book of Revelation 6:8, "And I looked, and behold, a pale horse; and his name that sat on him was Death."

The Emperor Justinian, defeated by the cataclysm of the bubonic plague, saw with horror the disease demolishing his once invincible armies and killing his generals and soldiery alike faster than the wounds inflicted on the battlefield. Entire villages and towns were obliterated; the apocalyptic visitations were considered divine retribution from God as punishment for worldly sins. Demoralized and disheartened, he returned to his capital, Constantinople, only to find that there, too, the terrifying pestilence was relentlessly killing his people, rich and poor, regardless of kinship or station in life. The mortality in the city at this time was approaching 5000 deaths a day and would eventually reach an all-time high of 10,000 deaths daily. In despair and in need to fill the void, Justinian sought solitude, and the comfort and solace of religion.

The learned physicians of Justinian's day, who at the time followed the precepts of Graeco-Roman medicine, were discredited because their nostrums proved useless at the time of the cataclysm. Instead, the people turned for consolation to monastic medicine and the teachings of Christianity. The Christian church did rush in and, as best it could, tried to fill in the medical void. The monks in the monasteries quickly became the spiritual as well as corporeal healers by tending both to the needs of the soul and the requirements of the body. They used prayer and only the rudiments of physical or herbal medicine to console and heal the sick.

The humbling of the medical profession because of its impotence to control the plague of the 6th Century, essentially halted the advancement of medical knowledge for centuries. Medicine regressed, and disease in general was equated with vice and sin, rather than with filth, poor hygiene, and natural causes.

Yet, medicine was not the only profession in abeyance to disease. Other ancient professions, such as law, engineering, and the natural sciences (not to mention the liberal arts of the Greeks and Romans), were largely erased from the collective memory of humanity. All areas of human endeavor were doomed to intellectual dormancy. Progress stopped. The turning wheels of Western culture and civilization had ground to a shrilling halt as humanity became fully immersed in the Dark Ages. New hordes of barbarians were marauding and ravaging the West, while the plague was humbling the East.(2)

The great pestilence of the medieval period was the Black Death (1346-1361), the bubonic plague caused by the then highly virulent bacterium, Pasteurella pestis and transmitted generally by the black rat, Rattus rattus. The plague is passed from rat to rat by fleas. Man becomes infected when he unwittingly interrupts the infectious cycle by being bitten by an infected flea. Once the infection takes place, Pasteurella pestis causes disease by septicemia or by invasion of the lymphatics, spreading in the body with two types of presentations. The pneumonic form of the plague is most ominous. In this highly contagious acute form, the disease may also be transmitted directly from person to person via the pulmonary route (i.e., aerosol droplets), and death takes place rapidly. It was said that one day a person would cough-up phlegm and then be dead by the fifth day.

The predominant form of the disease, though, was the subacute bubonic form, characterized by severe involvement of the lymphatic system with the formation of buboes (from which the disease takes its name). The buboes are swollen, infected lymph nodes, most commonly involving the inguinal and/or the axillary lymph node chains. The buboes may grow to a significant size to erode through the skin and spontaneously burst, draining infectious purulent material. Death came in a slower and more agonizing way. Very few so afflicted lived beyond 10 days, and the affliction still carried a mortality of 90 percent.

The epidemics of bubonic plague were veritably history's greatest scourges. In the case of the Plague of Justinian, the epidemic ravaged the populace for five decades between A.D. 540 and 590 and, although precise figures are not possible to ascertain, it may have caused the death of one-third of the population. The Black Death, which peaked in 1347-1348, also inflicted morbid devastation and rampant desolation and death in medieval Europe and exacted a death toll of perhaps 27 million lives and lasted 15 to 20 years. The Black Death seriously disrupted the social and economic fabrics of Western society. In Europe, the people began to question religion and faith and looked instead for answers in the emerging science of the medieval universities sprouting up throughout Europe, the reverse of what took place after the Plague of Justinian. Moreover in England, large tracts of land were left uncultivated because of the lack of a work force. Suddenly, labor because precious. Workers demanded higher wages and poor peasants disappeared, at least for a time, and were replaced by more prosperous farmers and landowners, threatening the very structure of feudal society.

The Great Plague of London, which assailed England from 1665 to 1666, at its peak killed 2000 Londoners a week but mercifully only lasted several months, coincidentally ending with the Great Fire of London.

The literary nascence of this period was first voiced by Flavio Biondo of Forli (1388-1463) when he published Historiarum ab Inclinatione Romanorum Imperii Decades (Decades of History from the Deterioration of the Roman Empire) around 1483. Forli describes this historical period as "a suspension of progress - a period of cultural stagnation....as the Dark Ages, between the glory of classical antiquity and the rebirth of that glory in the beginnings of the modern world." His key words are "suspension, stagnation, dark" and each term appropriately describes a general populace devoid of academic motivation.