A masterful review from Monica Green at Inference Magazine:
Bruce Campbell’s The Great Transition
chronicles an important and gloomy historical moment. The two centuries
between the 1260s and 1470s witnessed the collapse of international
networks of exchange, multiple wars, economic contraction, repeated
famines, and demographic decline. The single most profound event was
what is still considered the most devastating pandemic of human history:
the Black Death of the middle of the fourteenth century. In Europe and
around the Mediterranean basin, mortality levels have been estimated at
between forty and sixty percent. The 1470s were only a period of
stabilization. The new world that the Great Transition ushered in was
colder, wetter, and more disease ridden than any humans had ever known
before. Historians of the early modern period have recognized the
climatic period known as the Little Ice Age (LIA) for some time.
For the history of medicine, no agreed-upon term has arisen for this
regime of intense infectious diseases, which were in full global
circulation after 1492. For plague in particular, it is now recognized
that instead of seeing the Black Death as a singular event, we should
instead recognize the 500-year period of plague infestation that it
initiated in Eurasia and Africa as the Second Plague Pandemic.
The Great Transition
Campbell’s book has
twelve tables, seventy-eight figures, most of them graphs, and a
bibliography running forty-six pages. Campbell has always favored
data-heavy analyses; his many decades of study on English agriculture
were based on massive compilations of data on crop yields, and he has
recently coauthored a comprehensive survey of the British economy from
the thirteenth to nineteenth centuries.
Agriculture is always dependent on weather, which in turn depends on
climate cycles; this explains Campbell’s movement into climate history
about ten years ago. The devastating effects of the Black Death on
England, where population loss was accompanied by a massive decline in
wealth, explain his interest in the pandemic. Campbell’s efforts in
attempting to master the emerging fields of paleoscience that deal with
climate and infectious disease will repay the dedicated reader.
The Black Death was not the only catastrophe Europe suffered in the
fourteenth century. A whole generation of readers has the title and
imagery of Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century seared into their conceptions of life in the late Middle Ages.
Famines, the Hundred Years’ War, economic disruptions, and all manner
of hardship made life in Europe, at least, distinctly unpleasant.
Campbell looks at this same long fourteenth century, arguing that this
200-year period should be carved out from the previous periodization in
climate history, which saw the warm period of the Medieval Climate
Anomaly (MCA) leading straight into the LIA. For Campbell, a variety of
climate-forcing factors and economic shifts argue for designating the
Great Transition as its own separate period, with four distinct phases.
- 1260s to 1330s: This period saw the end of the MCA, a prolonged,
mostly warm period that began around 900 CE which, with one exception in
the first half of the eleventh century, was likely due to a high solar
irradiance. In the MCA, not only Europe but much of Eurasia flourished.
Rising populations, increasing urbanization, an economy growing by leaps
and bounds: never had the world seen so much sustained growth and
cultural flourishing. The onset of the Wolf solar minimum signaled the
end of this prolonged period.
Combined with changing weather, many years in this period experienced
pronounced rainfall at levels that had not occurred since the 1250s and
would not occur again until the 1980s. The late thirteenth and early
fourteenth centuries saw repeated catastrophes, including a sheep-scab
epizootic in the 1270s and 1280s, the Great Northern European Famine of
1315–17, and a cattle panzootic of 1319–20. This period also saw a
marked reduction of international trade, with severe shortages of
bullion.
- 1340s to 1370s: The 1340s and early 1350s were, as Campbell remarks,
“an almost uniquely disturbed and climatically unstable period when
long-established atmospheric circulation patterns were on the cusp of
lasting change.”
The period was distinctly cold, and tree rings show a collective growth
minimum. Extreme weather events stand out, such as the devastating
Saint Mary Magdalene’s flood in central Germany in July 1342, which
raised the Main to levels higher than have ever been documented since,
and washed away the better part of topsoil in the region. Warfare,
harvest failures, and famine all struck, virtually at once, followed by
the great Black Death pandemic, 1346–1353. Despite a few years of
climatic and economic alleviation in the 1350s, the plague’s return in
the early 1360s ensured that population levels remained depressed.
Campbell ventures an estimate of plague mortality of twenty-five million
people in Europe, with figures in England indicating that at least
one-third of the population perished, and, in certain regions, almost
forty percent.
The plague returned again around 1360, this time having a particularly
pronounced effect on children born since the Black Death. It would
return at least three more times before the century ended, and would, in
fact, haunt most of Europe and the Mediterranean for the next three
centuries. By the 1380s, Europe’s population had been reduced by half.
- 1370s to 1470s: During this period, climate conditions continued to
deteriorate. The LIA followed a brief period of solar irradiance in the
late fourteenth century, the so-called Chaucerian maximum. The Spörer
minimum, ca. 1416–1534, had effects on the Indian Ocean monsoon, the
Nile flood, and the North Atlantic oscillation, resulting in global
temperature drops of 0.4–0.8°. The aerosols produced by the eruption of
Mount Kuwae off the coast of Vanuatu around 1458 reinforced these
trends. Europe remained in a demographic spiral, burdened by infectious
disease, a depressed economy, and war.
- 1470s on: The Spörer solar minimum finally eased, and there was a
slight alleviation of the intense cold. Campbell notes a demographic
shift in Europe around 1500, when, even without any apparent cessation
of the disease regime, population recovery, at least in northern Europe,
led to levels approaching those before the Black Death. By this point,
Portugal, allied with Genoa, had circumvented the trans-Saharan trade in
gold and ivory and established its own direct ties with West Africa. It
also began its expansion into the Atlantic, as did the Spanish and then
the English. The Dutch, however, came out most successfully as Europe’s
new economic power. This newly configured Europe, one where northern
countries took over the economic power formerly wielded by Italy, had
now adjusted to the new world the previous two centuries had made. In
other words, the Great Transition was completed and the Old World had
adjusted to the new climatic and economic balance.
The late medieval period is well-worn territory for Europeanist
historians, and many of the political, economic, and cultural ruptures
of the period are well-known. Yet the commonly cited signposts that
medievalists and early modernists usually use to stake out their
respective terrain now stand as just items in long lists of
interconnected shifts, declines, and catastrophes in Campbell’s account.
The fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, for example,
signaling the end of Roman Byzantium, the last vestige of the Empire, is
here nothing more than another falling domino. The majority of the book
keeps its focus on England and the economic evidence Campbell knows
best; when it ventures beyond, Europe still serves as its point of view.
This narrow focus has its costs. Overall, Campbell presents a tight
chronological narrative, moving between global forces that shift monsoon
patterns and tree growth, and changes in the silver supply and the
spice market, down to the level of microbes. Campbell often uses
dramatic language: “the Rubicon had been crossed,” and, the “climatic
regime had already passed the point of no return.” The transition Campbell is chronicling is, “big, complex, multi-faceted.” It was a transition, not a cycle.
The buildup is long, and the identification of the consequences must be
extended, too, because societies had to establish new socio-ecological
equilibria to deal with a world that had been transformed.
The story, then, is complex and justifies the 200-year span that
Campbell stakes out. But there is a climax, a tipping point, and it
falls in the 1340s. Save for the eruption of the Samalas volcano in
1257, whose effects turn out to be less dramatic than initial
assessments had predicted, all the changes leading up to the 1340s were
gradual or iterative. Only one change seemed to be unique, and
horrifically sudden, in that crucial fifth decade of the fourteenth
century, and that was the arrival of plague.
The Plague
It seems a
strange coincidence that the Middle Ages are bookended by two plague
pandemics: the Justinianic plague, from ca. 541 to ca. 750, and the
Black Death, which we usually date from 1347 to 1353 but which should
now be seen as the beginning of the much longer Second Plague Pandemic.
Historical periods are conventions we create, and the transition from
antiquity to the Middle Ages, on the one hand, and then the Middle Ages
to the early modern period, on the other, were fixed in historiography
long before questions about the environment or history of disease loomed
large. Yet both pandemics share more similarities than could have been
imagined even a decade ago, which suggest why they should have been
implicated in two of the greatest turning points in Afro-Eurasian
history. Not simply were both caused by the same organism, Yersinia pestis,
but climate science confirms that both emerged in periods of
pronounced, and quite sudden, global cooling. Molecular genetics
suggests that both issued out small pockets of long-term animal
infestation in the central Eurasian steppe, or perhaps a region at the
edge of the deserts of the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau, areas now part of
western China and eastern Kyrgyzstan. The assumption that plague emerged
out of arid central Asia is at the core of Campbell’s analysis, since
he ties its emergence to a sudden period of drought in the 1250s, which
followed several decades of exceptionally high moisture. Alternatively,
he suggests that plague erupted during a subsequent drought in the
1290s, which in turn was reinforced by a subsequent pluvial period in
the 1310s.
The important point to note here is Campbell’s willingness to ascribe
the initiation of the most devastating pandemic in history to two
different points in time.
The issue is not that Campbell hasn’t been able to settle on a
specific date; that would be difficult in the extreme, since we are
talking about events transpiring between fleas and rodents in the wild.
The issue is that, since he wishes to place these events in central
Asia, it matters considerably whether they had a hundred, fifty, or only
as little as thirty years to generate effects 4,500 kilometers away in
the region of the Black Sea. And whether the interval was long or short,
there is also the question of why the path of spread would have been
unidirectional, when we would expect a radiating pattern out of a
central focus. Since he believes that the spreading outbreak covered the
longest part of its journey, the 3,300 miles from Kyrgyzstan to the
Black Sea, in between eight and twelve years,
both the speed and the unidirectionality become problematic. How does
plague move across a landscape? How much time does it take? And how much
genetic change should we expect to have occurred in relation to time
elapsed? The first questions have been asked repeatedly in
historiography about the Black Death; the third is one we have only been
able to pose in the past few years. Clearly, the wet environment of
much of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, which Campbell has
documented persuasively for Asia and Europe and which was reinforced by
the sudden cold of the 1340s, is well suited for sustaining continued
plague outbreaks, and for allowing plague to focalize in adjacent areas,
finding new pockets of burrowing rodents to afflict in slow-burning
enzootics. But sustaining plague as a local enzootic, and accounting for
locally radiating epizootics, is different from igniting a pandemic
4,500 kilometers away. The genetics is what Campbell is using to place
the Black Death’s origin in central Asia. But the genetics is also what complicates his scenario....MUCH MORE
And some of the correspondence regarding the review:
by Daniel Curtis and Joris Roosen, reply by Monica Green
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by John Brooke, reply by Monica Green
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by Christof Paulus, reply by Monica Green
