John Kelly\'s the Great Mortality

John Kellys "the great mortality"

The bacillus Yesinia Pestis made two continents pay intolerably high life prices both in human and animal lives. Along a few decades in the first half of the thirteenth century, it engulfed Eurasia and kept the world under its terror, making many think its end was near (The Great Mortality).

The Great Plague has carved in the history of humanity signs that will never fade with the passing of time because of its enormous toll on human lives. John Kelly's book "The great mortality" places the plague in a historic context and tackles the topic of Black Death from the perspective of the twentieth century. The word is not free from the deadly attack of infectious diseases, viruses are still threatening animals and human beings alike. John Kelly points out in the introduction to his book that in spite of the numerous victories reported by medicine in the fight against infectious diseases, like the small pox, for example, people are today almost as vulnerable and powerless when confronted with a new virus as they were during the thirteenth century.

By the end of the first half of the thirteenth century, the first wave of globalization had started to bring worlds through closer together. The fastest terrestrial vehicle available to people was still the horse, but trade was regulating the way new regions were developing. As Kelly point out, medieval Europe was a place where people as well as animals were living under the most precarious conditions, subject to the dangers of overpopulation, bad water and an unsanitary life style. Although the industrial era was still a few centuries away, the environment was also affected in the fight between humans and nature. The natural resources available to Europeans and Asian alike, were becoming scarce compared to the birth rate. The response nature gave to the savage exploitation of its resources was: draft, locusts' invasions, tempests etc. (The Great Mortality, p. 4).

Kelly blames the spread of the plague throughout Asia and Europe on the fact that the Mongols had unified most of Asia under what became the most powerful empire of the medieval world. The clash between the Genoese merchants, the representatives of the European world and the Mongols and therefore the first contact with the mortal virus of the plague happened according to Kelly in Caffa, small port town at the Black Sea on the eastern cost of Crimea that meteorically rose from the status of a tranquil isolated maritime village to that of an important trading post, a place where east and west met in order to exchange goods, people, cultures etc.

By 1346, Europe had already heard of the terrible consequences of an illness that was sweeping across Asia. Kelly brings evidence to support the fact that Europeans were already aware of the plague's ravaging in Asia by indicating two sources: Gabriel de' Mussins, from Piacenza and Louis Heyligen, a musician from Avignon. Both of them wrote of the "mysterious illness" (The Great Mortality, p.6). The writings of the musician are quite precise in their description of the way the illness spread and the regions affected by it: "the terrible events" in India culminated in an outbreak of the pestilence that infected "all neighboring countries…by means of the stinking breath"(The great Mortality, p.6, quotes from Heyligen). Kelly brings evidence to support the idea that it took over a decade for the epidemic to spread out in the west from the testimonies and writings of Muslims as well as Asian historians, found in Mongols and Chinese records from the time.

Warfare is something humanity is very good at and natural disasters, environmental instability, unsanitary living conditions, overpopulation and ignorance due to medical science that was still in the dark ages contributed to the spread of the epidemic and its victorious arrival in Europe. The Genoese who were attacked by the Mongols in the port town of Caffe found themselves under siege. The tartars were carrying along what was to become the seeds of the deadliest enemy of our human race in history: infected people. The Genoese were ineffective in their response to the Mongol attack and they were according to the evidence used by Kelly the first in human history to experience a biological warfare. The notary from Piacenza writes about the attack with human corpses that were thrown by the Mongols lead by Khan Janibeg, cadavers that were bringing the virus to the healthy people in the town. Their response was to pray and hope that God will punish the infidels and keep them safe. Kelly further explains that even if de'Mussins' accounts of the Mongol attack on the Geneoese were fabricated, the epidemic might have had different means of spreading, like the rats who were traveling easily throughout the town and making the contamination a matter of days. Hazard made Caffa to be the town where hell broke loose upon the attack of the Monglos and the Europens who fled in horror brought hell along to Europe. Kelly underlines that what the European historians called the Black Death "has killed an estimated two hundred million people, and no outbreak of plague has claimed as man victims or caused as much anguish and sorrow as the Black Death" (The Great Mortality, p. 11). How this might have happened is what Kelly is attempting to find out, by closely examining the conditions that converged toward the spread of the bacillus in such a short time on such a huge scale.

Kelly examines the historic records from the times associated with the spread of the pest along the century and indicates a pattern: violent manifestations of the environment appear to accompany the epochs when the pest attacked regions in Europe or in Asia. There is not enough evidence though to conclude that the bacillus causing the pest is fond of environmental instability, but the historic records are often describing natural calamities close to the key moment of the spread of the bubonic disease in both Asia and Europe.