THE PLAGUE IN NORTH AFRICA – Corsairs & Captives

Since this is the last blog post of 2020, and since, thanks to COVID-19, this year has been a sort of plague year, I thought it would be appropriate to end with a post on the Plague in North Africa.

We’ve all heard of the Plague—the Black Death—that ravaged Europe in the late 1340s. It was a serious disease with a sickeningly high mortality rate: in the crowded and (by modern standards) unsanitary cities of the time, over half the population could be wiped out in a few short weeks. In total, somewhere between a third and a half (possibly even more) of the entire population of Europe died in that great outbreak.

COVID-19 is a respiratory ailment, which is why somebody with a bad case ends up on a ventilator. The Plague was an altogether different sort of disease.

We have descriptions of it from the time, like that found in Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron. Composed in the very late 1340s and early 1350s, the Decameron consists of a collection of tales told by a fictional group of young women and men sheltering from the Plague in the relative safety of a rural villa.

The Introduction contains the following description of the disease:

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The infection begins, either under the armpits or in the groin, by certain swellings, in some to the bigness of an apple, in others like an egg, which in the vulgar language are called a Byle. In a very short time, those two infected areas grow and spread to all parts of the body, whereupon, such is the quality of the disease, it proceeds to reveal itself by black or blue spots, which appear on the arms of many, others on their thighs, or any other part of the body: in some, large and few; in others, small and many. Since the Byle (at the beginning) is a sure sign of the near approach of death, the spots prove likewise to such as have them.

No physician’s counsel, nor the virtue of any medicines, nor anything else can provide a remedy for this sickness, and it plainly appears that either the nature of the disease will not endure it, or the ignorance in the physicians prevents them from comprehending from whence the cause proceeds, and so no resolution is to be found.

Moreover, this pestilence has a great power, for not only do healthy persons speaking to the sick or coming to see them become infected, but simply touching their garments, or any food whereon the sick person has fed, or anything else used in his service, seems to transfer the disease from the sick to the healthy in a very rare and miraculous manner.

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What Boccaccio and others of his time didn’t know, of course, was that the Plague is a bacterial infection (the bacterium is known as Yersinia pestis, named after Alexandre Yersin, the nineteenth century French scientist who discovered it). The bacteria are hosted by fleas, which in turn are hosted by rats. In crowded and unsanitary living conditions, rats flourish—and so do their fleas. The infected fleas fed on people, and the people got infected with Plague.

As can be seen in the excerpt from the Decameron, even without any concept of bacterial infection, Europeans of the time understood clearly enough that the disease could be easily transmitted from person to person. The belief then was that infection occurred via miasmic vapors, invisible vapors emanating from sick people or people who had died of the disease (represented by the little worm-like thing in the illustration above).

There was a simple, low-tech solution to the problem of infection by miasmic vapors: quarantine.

(The term “quarantine “derives from the word for “forty” in Italian; in Venice, mariners from the East were kept isolated for forty days (“quaranta giorni”) to ensure they were disease free.)

When Reverend Ólafur Egilsson, an Icelandic pastor who was captured by corsairs from Algiers, taken to that city, and then sent across Europe to negotiate ransoms for his family and the other Icelanders captured with him (see The Travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilsson: The Story of the Barbary Corsair Raid on Iceland in 1627), first entered Livorno, the ship he had traveled from Algiers in was placed under quarantine:

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When we made harbor at Livorno, everybody had to wait on the ship for six days, for no one could set foot on land until he had been examined by the Master Surgeon in charge. The wives of the crew, who lived there, could see their husbands and talk with them, but could not come close to them.

Eventually, we people aboard the ship were called to land. Each and every person was brought into a long house, some distance from the town, which had been built to provide a place to inspect people to see whether they were pestilence free, and to determine if they had any other diseases.

When we arrived there, the Master Surgeon of this place came and ordered us to take our clothes off. When we had done this, he examined everyone under the arms and down to the groin, women as well as men. Only after this inspection was complete could people then enter the town.

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The Livorno authorities of the time quarantined all arriving ships, but they were especially careful about ships coming from North Africa. Such fears of infection were well founded. In 1629 – 31, northern and central Italy suffered a major outbreak of Plague in which nearly 300,000 people perished.

It’s not clear what the source of that outbreak might have been, but it very likely was North Africa, especially Algiers.

Remember the description of Algiers from last week’s blog post:

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“The streets are so extremely narrow that in some of them three persons can scarcely walk abreast, and when you meet a person on horseback, you are obliged to stand close by the houses to escape from being trampled underfoot.”

and

“This barbaric metropolis does not correspond to the impression made upon the eye of a voyager who approaches it from the sea. In fact, everything is contrary to its fine appearance from a distance. The narrow streets are dirty and dark, and full of rubbish.”

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The population of Algiers was about 100,000. By modern standards, this doesn’t seem like much, but at the time it made Algiers one of the largest cities on the Mediterranean. As you can see from the description above, this large population was tightly packed into a small, relatively unsanitary space—perfect conditions to facilitate the spread of infection.

Indeed, Algiers suffered multiple devastating outbreaks of Plague. An outbreak in 1620 – 21 killed somewhere between 30,000 -50,000 people—a third to a half of the city’s population. Equally deadly outbreaks occurred at regular intervals: 1654 – 57, 1665, 1691.

As in Europe, the bouts of Plague in Algiers (and other North African cities) were a consequent of unsanitary, crowded living conditions and the lack of any effective medical treatment.

There seems to have been another contributing factor, though.

Muslim North Africans cultivated a certain pious fatalism. After all, the Arabic origin of the word “Islam” means “submission, humbling oneself, and obeying commands and heeding prohibitions without objection.”

Laugier de Tassy, who served in the French Consulate in Algiers in the first quarter of the eighteenth century, left us the following description of North African attitudes in his Histoire du Royaume d’Alger (History of the Kingdom of Algiers):

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The authorities of the Kingdom of Algiers do not to take any precautions to prevent the spread of the Plague. The feel they would be opposing the eternal decrees of God & the dogma of absolute predestination if they were to do so.

I saw an English ship arrive, which had loaded at Alexandria, where the plague was violent. The Captain of this ship had died of the disease on the way in, as well as some Mahometan merchants. Notwithstanding the fervent representations which were made to the Dey by the European Consuls, the crew were permitted ashore and the cargo of silks & cottons was unloaded the very same day of the ship’s arrival.

There are no doctors in Algiers, nor in any other part of the Kingdom. The use of medicines is condemned. The people say that it is to tempt God to want to take remedies at random for internal diseases. I saw Baba Hali Dey die of a violent fever without wanting to take any remedy at all, no matter that he had a French surgeon for his slave who was a clever man and who promised to restore his health. The Dey rejected this offer, saying that the number of his days was marked from all eternity.

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De Tassy seems to be indulging in over-generalization here. He also, for example, mentions a different Algerian Dey who took stringent precautions against infection:

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“The plague in 1720 had spread such terror everywhere that in Algiers the doctrine of predestination was forgotten, and Mehemed Dey not only refused entry to ships that came from Marseilles, but he even refused to receive any letters that came from those ships.”

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There was, nevertheless, a strain of pious fatalism—a belief in divine predestination—that informed the Algerian (and North African) response to the Plague.

The combination of this fatalism, crowded and unsanitary conditions, and lack of effective medical practice made Algiers, and indeed much of North Africa, particularly prone to devastating eruptions of Plague. Europeans enslaved there, overworked and undernourished as they were, seem to have been especially susceptible, and many of them died.

Somehow, though, Algiers (and the other North African corsair cities) always managed to bounce back. Squadrons of corsair ships were sent out to scour the seas for new captives to replenish the diminished slave ranks, empty houses were repopulated, and life went on—until the next outbreak.

ADDENDUM

After reading the above, a colleague of mine made sent me the following comment on Laugier de Tassy’s claim about the resistance of the residents of Algiers to medicine and remedies. I thought I would share it here:

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This is contrary of what Islam teaches. There are many texts in Islam in which people are incited to seek remedies. One of them is a saying of the prophet Mohamed: “Make use of medical treatment, for Allah has not made a disease without appointing a remedy for it, with the exception of one disease, namely death.”

It is important to know that Algiers was not known to be a city of knowledge (materialistic or religious). In fact, its people (as others in many in the Islamic world) even went astray in the very core of Islam, which is Monotheism. As you know, there were many “Saints” in the city venerated beside God Almighty, and that is the ultimate sin in Islam. That is because the first order of God is to worship Him alone without making any associate with Him, be it an Angel or a Messenger or whatever else.

So if that was their case, then no wonder in what you have reported