Plagues and Peoples
William McNeill
Number of quotes: 12
Book ID: 178 Page: 104
Section: 4B
Definite population estimates are possible only for the Roman world and for Han China. Beloch’s guess of 54 million for the Roman empire at the time of Augustus’ death . . .
Quote ID: 3922
Time Periods: 1
Book ID: 178 Page: 107
Section: 4B
movement by sea could, with favoring winds, attain an average of well over 100 miles per day.
Quote ID: 3924
Time Periods: 01
Book ID: 178 Page: 113
Section: 4B
The development of this vast, if loosely reticulated, trade net across the southern seas was signalized by the arrival in China of “Roman” merchants in A.D. 166. They styled themselves ambassadors from Marcus Aurelius, . . .
Quote ID: 3925
Time Periods: 2
Book ID: 178 Page: 114
Section: 4B
Roman merchants established a trade base there in the age of Augustus (d. A.D. 14), and seem to have occupied the site until about A.D. 200.
Quote ID: 3926
Time Periods: 1
Book ID: 178 Page: 116
Section: 4B
Another epidemic struck the city of Rome in A.D. 65, {54} but these experiences paled before the disease that began spreading through the Roman empire in A.D. 165. It was brought to the Mediterranean initially by troops that had been campaigning in Mesopotamia . . .What mattered even more was the fact that this episode inaugurated a process of continued decay of the population of Mediterranean lands that lasted, despite some local recoveries, for more than half a millennium. {57}
[Footnote 54] Suetonius, Lives of the Caesars, “Nero” 39:1, says 30,000 persons died in the city of Rome in the autumn of that year.
[Footnote 57] Scholarly opinion is now pretty well agreed that decay of Roman population began under the Antonine emperors. Cf. A. E. R. Boak, Manpower Shortage and the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West (Ann Arbor, 1955), pp. 15-21; J. F. Gilliam, “The Plague under Marcus Aurelius,” American Journal of Philology, 82 (1961), 225-51.
Quote ID: 3927
Time Periods: 12345
Book ID: 178 Page: 116
Section: 3B
A new round of a magnitude fully comparable to the Antonine plague of 165-80 hit the Roman world in 251-66. This time, reported mortality in the city of Rome was even greater: five thousand a day are said to have died at the height of the epidemic, . . .
Quote ID: 3928
Time Periods: 3
Book ID: 178 Page: 119
Section: 4B
The Roman imperial system collected tax moneys from lands close to the sea and transferred spare cash to the armies stationed at the frontiers. This remained a viable arrangement (though Augustus and other emperors often found it difficult to meet the military payroll) until the heavy blow of unfamiliar disease seriously eroded the wealth of the Mediterranean heartlands between A.D. 165 and 266. Thereupon, rapid die-off of large proportions of the urban populations at the most active centers of Mediterranean commerce diminished the flow of cash to the imperial fisc. As a result, pay for the soldiers at accustomed rates could no longer be found, and mutinous troops turned upon civil society to extract what they could by main force from the undefended landscapes which the Roman peace had created throughout the empire’s Mediterranean heartlands. Further economic decay, depopulation, and human disaster resulted.Military uprisings and civil wars of the third century A.D. quickly destroyed one set of landlords - the curiales - whose rents had sustained the outward trappings of Greco-Roman high culture in the empire’s provincial towns.
Quote ID: 3929
Time Periods: 123
Book ID: 178 Page: 121
Section: 3A3B
Simultaneously, the rise and consolidation of Christianity altered older world views fundamentally. One advantage Christians had over their pagan contemporaries was that care of the sick, even in time of pestilence, was for them a recognized religious duty. When all normal services break down, quite elementary nursing will greatly reduce mortality. Simple provision of food and water, for instance, will allow persons who are temporarily too weak to cope for themselves to recover instead of perishing miserably. Moreover, those who survived with the help of such nursing were likely to feel gratitude and a warm sense of solidarity with those who had saved their lives. The effect of disastrous epidemic, therefore, was to strengthen Christian churches at a time when most other institutions were being discredited. Christian writers were well aware of this source of strength, and sometimes boasted of the way in which Christians offered each other mutual help in time of pestilence whereas pagans fled from the sick and heartlessly abandoned them. {63}[Footnote 63] For example, Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, VIII, 21-22.
Quote ID: 3932
Time Periods: 3
Book ID: 178 Page: 122
Section: 3B
Christianity was, therefore, a system of thought and feeling thoroughly adapted to a time of troubles in which hardship, disease, and violent death commonly prevailed.
Quote ID: 3933
Time Periods: 3
Book ID: 178 Page: 127
Section: 4B
Precision is, of course, quite impossible; but Procopius reports that at the peak of its first visitation the plague killed 10,000 persons daily in Constantinople, where it raged for four months. {72}(The plagues of the sixth and seventh centuries had an importance for Mediterranean peoples fully analogues to that of the more famous Black Death of the fourteenth century.)
As in the case of the earlier great pestilences of 165-180 and of 251-266, the political effects of this plague were far-reaching. Indeed, the failure of Justinian’s efforts to restore imperial unity to the Mediterranean can be attributed in good part to the diminution of imperial resources stemming from the plague. Equally, the failure of Roman and Persian forces to offer more than token resistance to the Moslem armies that swarmed out of Arabia so suddenly in 634 becomes easier to understand in the light of the demographic disasters that repeatedly visited the Mediterranean coastlands from 542 onward . . .
[Footnote 72] Procopius, Persian Wars, 23:1.
Quote ID: 3934
Time Periods: 236
Book ID: 178 Page: 136
Section: 4B
Religious history also offers another striking parallel between Rome and China. The Buddhist faith began to penetrate the Han empire in the first century A.D., and soon won converts in high places. Its period of official dominance in court circles extended from the third to the ninth centuries A.D. This obviously parallels the success that came to Christianity in the Roman empire during the same period. Like Christianity, Buddhism explained suffering.
Quote ID: 3935
Time Periods: 47
Book ID: 178 Page: 142
Section: 4B
As for Great Britain, comparable estimates are only available for England {89}:Period Millions
1086 1.1
1348 3.7
1377 2.2
1430 2.1
1603 3.8
1690 4.1
[In this book on page 167, you wanted to make a copy of the map of the spread of Black Death in Europe.]
[Footnote 89] Josiah Cox Russell, British Medieval Population (Albuquerque, 1948), pp. 54, 146, 246, 269, 270.
Quote ID: 3936
Time Periods: 7
End of quotes