The coronavirus outbreak that first began in central China is approaching pandemic status. As of this writing, the number of confirmed cases of the virus in China has topped 28,000 and has claimed the lives of at least 560 people throughout the country. Additional cases have been reported around the globe, including in Hong Kong, the Philippines, Germany, and the United States. The U.S. has closed its embassy in Wuhan, China, where the virus was first reported, and the Chinese government, after weeks of suppressing information about the disease, has resorted to quarantining a region in central China inhabited by roughly 60 million people.
Historically, East Asia has an unfortunate record when it comes to global pandemics. The Black Death that ravaged Europe and Eurasia in the middle-14th century originated in East and Central Asia, striking China, India, and Persia before making its way west. The bubonic plague arrived in Europe by ship in October 1347 and over the next five years, went on to kill a third of the continent’s population. “When all the graves were full,” Giovanni Boccaccio wrote of Florence in The Decameron, “enormous trenches were dug in the cemeteries of the churches, into which the new arrivals were put by the hundreds, stowed layer upon layer like merchandise in ships, each one covered with a little earth, until the top of the trench was reached.”
It’s commonly believed the plague was carried by rats, which is true in a way. More specifically, rats carried infected fleas and those fleas carried Yersinia pestis, a dangerous bacterium named for French biologist and physician Alexandre Yersin, who discovered the pathogen in the late 1800s.
The Black Death was the second major plague pandemic. The first, circa 541-750 A.D., is known as the Justinianic Plague, named after Byzantine Emperor Justinian I. It was also caused by an outbreak of Yersinia pestis that scholars believe to have originated in China and Central Asia.
In his History of Wars, the Byzantine historian Procopius wrote that “the whole human race came near to being annihilated” by the pestilence. Historians have long held that the plague had a substantial effect on the shaping of Europe, as the presumed death toll (anywhere from a quarter to half the population of the Mediterranean) played a crucial role in the fall of the eastern Roman Empire. Recent scholarship, however, has cast doubt on the level of devastation wrought by the plague, arguing that other contemporary evidence does not support the Byzantine’s account. Such skepticism is probably warranted — after all, Procopius also claimed, in his Secret History, that Justinian and his wife, Theodora, “were actually fiends in human form.” Then again, maybe that’s something else for historians to ponder.
