̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - plague

‘Bone biographies’ reveal life and times of medieval England’s common people

fpjl2 — Fri, 01 Dec 2023 08:57:28 +0000

Researchers have given medieval Cambridge residents the ‘Richard III treatment’ to reveal the hard-knock lives of those who lived in the city during the ̽��ֱ��'s earliest years.

Justinianic Plague was nothing like flu and may have hit England before Constantinople

ta385 — Mon, 22 Nov 2021 08:00:00 +0000

̽��ֱ��Justinianic Plague is the first known outbreak of bubonic plague in west Eurasian history and struck the Mediterranean world at a pivotal moment in its historical development, when the Emperor Justinian was trying to restore Roman imperial power.

For decades, historians have argued about the lethality of the disease; its social and economic impact; and the routes by which it spread. In 2019-20, several studies, widely publicised in the media, argued that historians had massively exaggerated the impact of the Justinianic Plague and described it as an ‘inconsequential pandemic’. In a subsequent piece of journalism, written just before COVID-19 took hold in the West, two researchers suggested that the Justinianic Plague was ‘not unlike our flu outbreaks’.

In a new study, published in Past & Present, Cambridge historian Professor Peter Sarris argues that these studies ignored or downplayed new genetic findings, offered misleading statistical analysis and misrepresented the evidence provided by ancient texts.

Sarris says: “Some historians remain deeply hostile to regarding external factors such as disease as having a major impact on the development of human society, and ‘plague scepticism’ has had a lot of attention in recent years.”

Sarris, a Fellow of Trinity College, is critical of the way that some studies have used search engines to calculate that only a small percentage of ancient literature discusses the plague and then crudely argue that this proves the disease was considered insignificant at the time.

Sarris says: “Witnessing the plague first-hand obliged the contemporary historian Procopius to break away from his vast military narrative to write a harrowing account of the arrival of the plague in Constantinople that would leave a deep impression on subsequent generations of Byzantine readers. That is far more telling than the number of plague-related words he wrote. Different authors, writing different types of text, concentrated on different themes, and their works must be read accordingly.”

Sarris also refutes the suggestion that laws, coins and papyri provide little evidence that the plague had a significant impact on the early Byzantine state or society. He points to a major reduction in imperial law-making between the year 546, by which point the plague had taken hold, and the end of Justinian’s reign in 565. But he also argues that the flurry of significant legislation that was made between 542 and 545 reveals a series of crisis-driven measures issued in the face of plague-induced depopulation, and to limit the damage inflicted by the plague on landowning institutions.

In March 542, in a law that Justinian described as having been written amid the ‘encircling presence of death’, which had ‘spread to every region’, the emperor attempted to prop up the banking sector of the imperial economy.

In another law of 544, the emperor attempted to impose price and wage controls, as workers tried to take advantage of labour shortages. Alluding to the plague, Justinian declared that the ‘chastening which has been sent by God’s goodness’ should have made workers ‘better people’ but instead ‘they have turned to avarice’.

That bubonic plague exacerbated the East Roman Empire’s existing fiscal and administrative difficulties is also reflected in changes to coinage in this period, Sarris argues. A series of light-weight gold coins were issued, the first such reduction in the gold currency since its introduction in the 4th century and the weight of the heavy copper coinage of Constantinople was also reduced significantly around the same time as the emperor’s emergency banking legislation.

Sarris says: “ ̽��ֱ��significance of a historical pandemic should never be judged primarily on the basis of whether it leads to the ‘collapse’ of the societies concerned. Equally, the resilience of the East Roman state in the face of the plague does not signify that the challenge posed by the plague was not real.”

“What is most striking about the governmental response to the Justinianic Plague in the Byzantine or Roman world is how rational and carefully targeted it was, despite the bewilderingly unfamiliar circumstances in which the authorities found themselves.

“We have a lot to learn from how our forebears responded to epidemic disease, and how pandemics impacted on social structures, the distribution of wealth, and modes of thought.”

Bubonic plague in England

Until the early 2000s, the identification of the Justinianic Plague as ‘bubonic’ rested entirely upon ancient texts which described the appearance of buboes or swellings in the groins or armpits of victims. But then rapid advances in genomics enabled archaeologists and genetic scientists to discover traces of the ancient DNA of Yersinia pestis in Early Medieval skeletal remains. Such finds have been made in Germany, Spain, France and England.

In 2018, a study of DNA preserved in remains found in an early Anglo-Saxon burial site known as Edix Hill in Cambridgeshire revealed that many of the interred had died carrying the disease. Further analysis revealed that the strain of Y. pestis found was the earliest identified lineage of the bacterium involved in the 6th-century pandemic.

Sarris says: “We have tended to start with the literary sources, which describe the plague arriving at Pelusium in Egypt before spreading out from there, and then fitted the archaeological and genetic evidence into a framework and narrative based on those sources. That approach will no longer do. ̽��ֱ��arrival of bubonic plague in the Mediterranean around 541 and its initial arrival in England possibly somewhat earlier may have been the result of two separate but related routes, occurring some time apart.”

̽��ֱ��study suggests that the plague may have reached the Mediterranean via the Red Sea, and reached England perhaps via the Baltic and Scandanavia, and from there onto parts of the continent.

̽��ֱ��study emphasises that despite being called the ‘Justinianic Plague’, it was “never a purely or even primarily Roman phenomenon” and as recent genetic discoveries have proven, it reached remote and rural sites such as Edix Hill, as well as heavily populated cities.

It is widely accepted that the lethal and virulent strain of bubonic plague from which the Justinianic Plague and later the Black Death would descend had emerged in Central Asia by the Bronze Age before evolving further there in antiquity.

Sarris suggests that it may be significant that the advent of both the Justinianic Plague and the Black Death were preceded by the expansion of nomadic empires across Eurasia: the Huns in the 4th and 5th centuries, and the Mongols in the 13th.

Sarris says: “Increasing genetic evidence will lead in directions we can scarcely yet anticipate, and historians need to be able to respond positively and imaginatively, rather than with a defensive shrug.”

Reference
P Sarris, ‘New Approaches to the ‘Plague of Justinian’, Past & Present (2021); DOI: 10.1093/pastj/gtab024.

‘Plague sceptics’ are wrong to underestimate the devastating impact that bubonic plague had in the 6th–8th centuries CE, argues a new study based on ancient texts and recent genetic discoveries. ̽��ֱ��same study suggests that bubonic plague may have reached England before its first recorded case in the Mediterranean via a currently unknown route, possibly involving the Baltic and Scandinavia.

We have a lot to learn from how our forebears responded to epidemic disease

Peter Sarris

Petar Milošević

Detail of the mosaic of Justinianus I in the Basilica di San Vitale, Ravenna, Italy

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Plague in humans ‘twice as old’ but didn’t begin as flea-borne, ancient DNA reveals

fpjl2 — Thu, 22 Oct 2015 16:09:48 +0000

New research using ancient DNA has revealed that plague has been endemic in human populations for more than twice as long as previously thought.

̽��ֱ��study suggests that ancestral plague would have been spread by human-to-human contact – until genetic mutations allowed Yersinia pestis (Y. pestis), the bacterium that causes plague, to survive in the gut of fleas.

These mutations, which may have occurred near the turn of the 1st millennium BC, gave rise to the bubonic form of plague that spreads at terrifying speed through flea – and consequently rat – carriers. ̽��ֱ��bubonic plague caused the pandemics that decimated global populations, including the Black Death, which wiped out half the population of Europe in the 14th century.

Before its flea-borne evolution, however, researchers say that plague was in fact endemic in the human populations of Eurasia at least 3,000 years before the first plague pandemic in historical records (the Plague of Justinian in 541 AD).

They say the new evidence that Y. pestis bacterial infection in humans actually emerged around the beginning of the Bronze Age suggests that plague may have been responsible for major population declines believed to have occurred in the late 4th and early 3rd millennium BC.

̽��ֱ��work was conducted by an international team including researchers from the universities of Copenhagen, Denmark, and Cambridge, UK, and the findings are published today in the journal Cell.

“We found that the Y. pestis lineage originated and was widespread much earlier than previously thought, and we narrowed the time window as to when and how it developed,” said senior author Professor Eske Willerslev, who recently joined Cambridge ̽��ֱ��’s Department of Zoology from the ̽��ֱ�� of Copenhagen.

“ ̽��ֱ��underlying mechanisms that facilitated the evolution of Y. pestis are present even today. Learning from the past may help us understand how future pathogens may arise and evolve,” he said.

Researchers analysed ancient genomes extracted from the teeth of 101 adults dating from the Bronze Age and found across the Eurasian landmass.

They found Y. pestis bacteria in the DNA of seven of the adults, the oldest of whom died 5,783 years ago – the earliest evidence of plague. Previously, direct molecular evidence for Y. pestis had not been obtained from skeletal material older than 1,500 years.

However, six of the seven plague samples were missing two key genetic components found in most modern strains of plague: a “virulence gene” called ymt, and a mutation in an “activator gene” called pla.

̽��ֱ��ymt gene protects the bacteria from being destroyed by the toxins in flea guts, so that it multiplies, choking the flea’s digestive tract. This causes the starving flea to frantically bite anything it can, and, in doing so, spread the plague.

̽��ֱ��mutation in the pla gene allows Y. pestis bacteria to spread across different tissues, turning the localised lung infection of pneumonic plague into one of the blood and lymph nodes.

Researchers concluded these early strains of plague could not have been carried by fleas without ymt. Nor could they cause bubonic plague – which affects the lymphatic immune system, and inflicts the infamous swollen buboes of the Black Death – without the pla mutation.

Consequently, the plague that stalked populations for much of the Bronze Age must have been pneumonic, which directly affects the respiratory system and causes desperate, hacking coughing fits just before death. Breathing around infected people leads to inhalation of the bacteria, the crux of its human-to-human transmission.

Study co-author Dr Marta Mirazón-Lahr, from Cambridge’s Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies (LCHES), points out that a study earlier this year from Willerslev’s Copenhagen group showed the Bronze Age to be a highly active migratory period, which could have led to the spread of pneumonic plague.

“ ̽��ֱ��Bronze Age was a period of major metal weapon production, and it is thought increased warfare, which is compatible with emerging evidence of large population movements at the time. If pneumonic plague was carried as part of these migrations, it would have had devastating effects on small groups they encountered,” she said.

“Well-documented cases have shown the pneumonic plague’s chain of infection can go from a single hunter or herder to ravaging an entire community in two to three days.”

̽��ֱ��most recent of the seven ancient genomes to reveal Y. pestis in the new study has both of the key genetic mutations, indicating an approximate timeline for the evolution that spawned flea-borne bubonic plague.

“Among our samples, the mutated plague strain is first observed in Armenia in 951 BC, yet is absent in the next most recent sample from 1686 BC – suggesting bubonic strains evolve and become fixed in the late 2nd and very early 1st millennium BC,” said Mirazón-Lahr.

“However, the 1686 BC sample is from the Altai mountains near Mongolia. Given the distance between Armenia and Altai, it’s also possible that the Armenian strain of bubonic plague has a longer history in the Middle East, and that historical movements during the 1st millennium BC exported it elsewhere.”

̽��ֱ��Books of Samuel in the Bible describe an outbreak of plague among the Philistines in 1320 BC, complete with swellings in the groin, which the World Health Organization has argued fits the description of bubonic plague. Mirazón-Lahr suggests this may support the idea of a Middle Eastern origin for the plague’s highly lethal genetic evolution.

Co-author Professor Robert Foley, also from Cambridge’s LCHES, suggests that the lethality of bubonic plague may have required the right population demography before it could thrive.

“Every pathogen has a balance to maintain. If it kills a host before it can spread, it too reaches a ‘dead end’. Highly lethal diseases require certain demographic intensity to sustain them.

“ ̽��ֱ��endemic nature of pneumonic plague was perhaps more adapted for an earlier Bronze Age population. Then, as Eurasian societies grew in complexity and trading routes continued to open up, maybe the conditions started to favour the more lethal form of plague,” Foley said.

“ ̽��ֱ��Bronze Age is the edge of history, and ancient DNA is making what happened at this critical time more visible,” he said.

Willerslev added: “These results show that the ancient DNA has the potential not only to map our history and prehistory, but also discover how disease may have shaped it.”

Inset image: Map showing where the remains of the Bronze Age plague victims were found.

New research dates plague back to the early Bronze Age, showing it had been endemic in humans across Eurasia for millennia prior to the first recorded global outbreak, and that ancestral plague mutated into its bubonic, flea-borne form between the 2nd and 1st millennium BC.

These results show that the ancient DNA has the potential not only to map our history and prehistory, but also discover how disease may have shaped it

Eske Willerslev

Left: Natalia Shishlina. Right: Centres for Disease Control and Prevention

Left: Skull of a Yamnaya, the people who migrated to Central Asia in early Bronze Age and developed the Afanasievo culture. ̽��ֱ��Afanasievo are one of the Bronze Age groups carrying Y. pestis. Right: Scanning Electron Micrograph Of A Flea

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Visions of plague

fpjl2 — Fri, 05 Dec 2014 13:22:25 +0000

We are in the midst of the worst Ebola outbreak known in human history. Our screens are filled with nightmarish yet strangely familiar imagery. Men in space-age protective suits, lugging wrapped-up bodies over to hastily dug pits. Clinical tents in poor yet exotic locations, gleaming incongruously. Bodies in the streets.

As Ebola continues its trail of death and terror, many will be unaware that we also continue to live with another killer – plague. ̽��ֱ��most recent pandemic (the third) started in rural China in 1855 but exploded when it reached Hong Kong in 1894, sweeping the world and killing over 12 million people. Although not considered an active threat since 1959, recent cases of plague have occurred in Bolivia, China, Madagascar and the USA.

Dr Christos Lynteris is a social anthropologist based at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH). During work on plague among marmots on the Chinese–Russian border, Lynteris started to consider how plague is represented, how knowledge about plague is captured and how we interact with what we see when we see the traits of plague.

“ ̽��ֱ��third pandemic was born around the same time as modern photographic techniques, and the ability to capture and transmit images of the third plague pandemic transformed public consciousness. It opened up an era where the meaning of health emergencies is publicly negotiated, rather than predetermined by any single scientific or governmental authority.”

Last year, he was awarded a European Research Council grant to find, collate and analyse the largest database of plague imagery in history; as the only exhaustive visual record of any infectious disease epidemic and its impact on social life and thought in the modern era, it will be an invaluable resource to historians, anthropologists and epidemiologists alike.

Tracking the images down takes painstaking investigative work for Lynteris and his team (Lukas Engelmann, Nick Evans and Branwyn Poleykett), sifting through photographic remnants of the old colonial powers to pick out the diseased, the dying, the depictions of human Yersinia pestis infection. “Many of the images are not held in the places where outbreaks occurred. An archive in Alabama might hold a hundred images of the plague in North China because that’s where the missionaries were from. Foreign doctors, missionaries, reporters from across the world go to other corners of the planet to work with plague epidemics; it can be a tricky web to untangle.”

He describes the imagery as a “strange combination of journalistic war reporting, crime scene photography and medical imagery.” Some of it is so graphic and distressing that part of the grant stipulates the digital archive must be kept in a locked room at all times, the ‘plague room’ as Lynteris cheerfully refers to it. Entering anywhere with such a moniker is slightly unnerving.

“OK, this next one really isn’t very pretty,” said Lynteris, showing one of the thousands of images they have already collected. Lynteris probably says this a lot these days. ̽��ֱ��photo, taken in Madagascar in 1899, feels familiar. ̽��ֱ��tents. ̽��ֱ��pits. ̽��ֱ��suited spacemen. If not for the sepia, this could be West Africa in 2014.

“There is a clear visual paradigm of plague inherited from imperial and colonial history that is emerging as we gather more and more images, an expression of diseased environments we still live with,” explained Lynteris.

“ ̽��ֱ��visual paradigm in the Madagascar photo is replicated throughout the third pandemic and in other outbreaks since, even over a century later, despite the fact that the medical paradigm has completely shifted – we know far more about infectious diseases now than in 1899, so why are we seeing the same imagery? By taking the aesthetic regime from a hundred years ago and replicating it today you are inadvertently replicating a long surpassed medical model.”

Asked whether governments and media are propagating these portrayals because this is what people expect, even need to see, Lynteris said: “I’m not sure, but something is not right here. It’s the components and rationale behind these visual paradigms that we will explore.”

Not all the imagery is gruesome. Some resemble forensic architectural photos. “When the plague hit the USA, investigators would meticulously photograph every house in the infected area – cellars, floors, beams – looking for clues as to the conditions that facilitate plague.”

In another set of images from an outbreak in Manchuria in 1911 that killed 60,000, Lynteris highlights an imperialist propaganda war being fought out in the plague depictions. Russia and China were trying to claim providence of the area, with both determined to prove that it was they who were the most scientific and could tame the plague.

“ ̽��ֱ��Chinese were trying to present an image of high science and hygienic modernity, full of medical teams with microscopes and charts. They depicted plague as an urban planning problem that can be scoured by fire.” There are many pictures of burning houses, but not a single human body.

̽��ֱ��Russians went a different way (“it’s a horror show”). ̽��ֱ��images are entirely militaristic, as if an army invaded a land where everyone was already dead. ̽��ֱ��aim was to show that the Chinese had no control, that death was rife and unstoppable without Russian force: “it was intended to scare, show oriental barbarity with dogs eating corpses and exposed plague pits.” Images like these are why the ‘plague room’ is kept locked.

̽��ֱ��team has had to create a language of plague to make sure the database is fully searchable, and aim to have it live and open access by the time the project finishes in 2018. They are working not just with other anthropologists and medical historians but with epidemiologists. There are fundamental assumptions about plague that life scientists are starting to question, and these archives may hold clues as to what led to mistaken assumptions in the first place.

Most importantly the team is focusing on the relation between the ethics and aesthetics of plague photography. “ ̽��ֱ��implications of this in the age of social media are immense. How do we capture an outbreak like Ebola with our cameras? How does this reflect our responsibility towards the victims, but also in terms of global health?” It’s alarming, Lynteris says, that there seems to be no difference between how we depict outbreaks today and how we did 100 years ago. “In the post-colonial world epidemic photography is still stubbornly colonial.”

Many of the images mentioned in this article are too gruesome to be displayed here. All inset images credit: Wellcome Trust.

A new research project is compiling the largest database of plague imagery ever amassed, focusing on a pandemic that peaked in the early 20th century and continues to this day.

By taking the aesthetic regime from a hundred years ago and replicating it today you are inadvertently replicating a long surpassed medical model

Christos Lynteris

Harvard Medical Library in the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine

Encoffining body, Changchun, 1911

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