Fifteen Eighty Four

“If it bleeds, it leads” – the cynical motto of the modern media, which uses fear and sensationalism to drive up ratings and sell advertising. But were medieval and Byzantine narratives sources much better? They also tend to focus on unusual events and personalities, on political strife rather than peaceful business as usual, and on spectacular catastrophes, miracles, and omens. They report extensively on earthquakes, tsunamis, fires, floods, and plagues. As for pandemics, they prefer those with gruesome symptoms and high mortality rates, such as the bubonic plague. Would they have reported an outbreak of the flu or a coronavirus, whose symptoms were banal, similar to those from which people died all the time? Come to think of it, would society have even registered that such an outbreak was happening?

Its transmission would, of course, have been invisible and the time-lag between infection and the display of symptoms would have made it impossible to identify the patterns of its movement. Unlike the bubonic plague, it would also not have been easy to link deaths from, say, pneumonia in one region or household to those in another. Premodern societies had far fewer elderly members than ours do, so the mortality stemming from that age group would have been less, but their younger members enjoyed lower levels of health than ours, so perhaps the overall levels of vulnerability were comparable. Let us assume a mortality rate of 2%. Would anyone have noticed the uptick? There were no statistical services. There were hospitals, but they did not function in the same way as ours; it is unlikely that their capacity would have triggered awareness of a pandemic. Yet the Byzantines regularly sought medical help before turning to the saints for miracles, so it is possible that doctors and priests would have noticed a sudden increase in demand. So would those who helped families with the burial of the dead, which was largely a private matter, and the bakers who prepared the bread that was freely given by the state to the people of Constantinople on a daily basis. On the other hand, premodern cities were so full of disease that they lost 1-3% of their population per year to infection: an additional 2% might just have been deemed a bad year, rather than the result of a pandemic crisis. Even if the virus had a higher mortality rate than 2%, due to the lack of effective hospital treatment its signal would still have been lost against the background noise of a much higher disease-mortality; malaria, for example, killed thousands every year, with similar symptoms.

There was not much the government could have done other than help with burial; this is all the emperor Justinian did during the outbreak of bubonic plague in AD 542. No preventative measures could have been taken because no one knew the method of transmission, or that transmission was even taking place. Some might have stayed at home, fearing the “bad winds” or “miasma” that was thought to cause illness. But doctors fearlessly made house calls during the bubonic plague. Prokopios notes that they were not infected by proximity to their patients, which accurately reflects the epidemiology of that disease, but the same would not have been true with our coronavirus: sadly, the latter would have been more fatal to doctors and caregivers than the bubonic plague.

Why has a disease, which might even have passed unnoticed in past times, brought our civilization to its knees? It is because we have the data and understand the science of disease; because better health and the prolongation of life are among the foundational promises of modernity; and because we believe that problems are fixable. In short, we know more and we have set higher standards for success.

Modern media and politicians sometimes generate ratings by blaming disasters – whether subtly or not – on vulnerable minority groups. This was done in antiquity too. Christians had often been targeted when disaster struck in the Roman empire, and the emperor Justinian blamed earthquakes and plagues on homosexual activity. Yet during outbreaks of the bubonic plague Byzantine society remarkably refrained from blaming heretics, pagans, and Jews. Perhaps we can formulate this as a kind of lesson from them: if you can’t do anything to help, at least don’t try to make it worse.

Modern media and politicians sometimes generate ratings by blaming disasters – whether subtly or not – on vulnerable minority groups. This was done in antiquity too. Christians had often been targeted when disaster struck in the Roman empire, and the emperor Justinian blamed earthquakes and plagues on homosexual activity. Yet during outbreaks of the bubonic plague Byzantine society remarkably refrained from blaming heretics, pagans, and Jews. Perhaps we can formulate this as a kind of lesson from them: if you can’t do anything to help, at least don’t try to make it worse.