SUPPLEMENT V: MEMENTO MORI
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The West, as a whole, never quite had to deal with Mongols. The Poles and Hungarians who spent much of the 13th and 14th centuries being raided and dominated by the Russified Mongols in Tver would disagree, but the major core of Western Europe was never really affected negatively by the Mongol invasions.
Whereas the invasions of Guyuk Khan would be the seminal event for the self-perception and internal dynamics of the Sunni Arab cultural world for the next few centuries, the West's main transformative event came not as war, but rather as plague. The Black Death, as it came to be known two centuries after the first outbreaks, would, in sync with climate change, economic breakdowns and major politicking in the Church, completely shatter the medieval world order.
Although feudalism's main institutions took centuries to finally wither away, the economic centrality of the feudal system was essentially undone by the Black Death. The severe labor shortage and breakdown in social order put paid to the days of absolute serfdom in Western Europe; that same feudal order would survive in Eastern Europe, becoming increasingly central to the social order as time went on.
As a cultural event, the Black Death became central to the European experience. The old cultural styles, of romances and songs and high medieval culture, began to fall away. In Italy, the aftermath of the plague and the wars it inspired fed directly into the Renaissance, as did the flow of texts out of the Crusader state into Italy and the rest of Europe.
Some of these works predate the plague period; the legendary Florentine-Sicilian writer Nardo Mazarini would die well before the coming of the plague, for example. But the first great flowering of the cultural revival in Italy would come only after the shock of plague crushed the medieval worldview.
The greatest "plague work" comes, however, not from Italy but rather from the city of Tyre. Benedict ibn Ebbon, or Benebon as he has come to be known, was a Levantine in the truest sense, firmly acculturated to the Arabic world while still retaining a firm Christian faith and a connection to the European cultural sphere. The Crusader state was the first place to be struck with the plague, and was also the place to transmit it to the rest of Europe.
Ibn Ebbon, or Benebon, as he has come to be known, traveled to Europe as a merchant and doctor in the midst of their plague epidemic, and notably survived the Roman riots and the formation of the Second Roman Commune during the Cahors Papacy. His return from Italy would give him time to start his great work on the plague, one which has lived on in the Euro-Mediterranean cultural memory in both Latin and Arabic.
Benebon, as a fluent speaker of Arabic and Greek, had access to references that would only reach Italy in the century after the plague. Benebon's work was largely based in human affairs, unlike Mazarin's Divine Comedy; it focused on the societal collapse and great suffering of the plague itself, through the lense of both his experiences and the referential lenses of Muslim literature and Thucydides' accounts of the Peloponessian War.
It was in his work that Yaqub Khan was compared to Pericles, that medieval Rome was compared to Corcyra and Athens, and that the overall social decay under plague was compared to the previously-praised brutality of Guyuk Khan. Benebon had visited Cairo before writing about Yaqub Khan; the breakdown in order after his death is what inspired the comparison.
The first portion of Benebon's magnum opus was a description of the plague, in explicit detail, and an accurate hypothesis on how the plague left Acre and Tyre and reached Europe. Benebon did not make it farther than Rome; he left Europe early due to the exacerbation of the Guelph-Ghibelline conflict by the plague, and due to fears that he himself might also catch the illness.
Guyuk Khan, who had barely been present in the Comedy, was fully and totally condemned. Benebon largely adopted the Sunni perspective on the conqueror, attacking Khan for his ruination of the cities, his desecration of holy places, his burning of knowledge and the omnicidal viciousness which marked his campaigns. Benebon compared the plague to Khan; as a source of divine wrath and as a source of great suffering for the afflicted. The image of Khan also proved very powerful; he was seen as a sort of apocalyptic horsemen delivering death to the settled world, via war and plague. This image of Khan-as-plague would prove to be the dominant depiction in the Middle East, Italy, and Spain; northern Europe used other images, and the use of skeletons or death in general as a motif was also common.
Benebon also offered full accounts, from other Arabic sources, of exactly what had been destroyed by Guyuk Khan. The work would play well into the apocalyptic mood of Europe at the time: that both civilizations were facing world-ending travails, and that society and religion were under siege because of it. Benebon also presaged the later theory that the state allows for society to exist; he condemns the Cahors Popes and the Plantagenets more than he does Guyuk Khan, for leaving Rome and allowing it to devolve into the riots and hedonism that he saw during his visit there as a young physician.
Benebon also described the apocalypticism sweeping Europe. He wrote of the flagellants and Muslim rigorists with almost a bemused eye, as death consumed society around them. Benebon would finish the work in 1345; his other works are of a more poetic stripe, combining the Arabic poetic tradition with that of the medieval troubadours.
Benebon's work would reach Europe in the 1350s; his Muslim-derived explanations for plague helped avert some of the malpractice and Jew-killing in southern Europe. Northern Europe remained largely in the dark, and pogroms in Germany, France and infamously in Poland continued.
The common literary and visual tropes of the mid-to-late 14th century all revolved around death. Death became a much more omnipresent force as Europe's major and minor population centers all lost the majority of their populations to plague. Rural peasants flooded the cities, drastically affecting the labor market but also reinforcing the collective memory of death via plague.
The major cultural trope was, of course, death and the skeleton. Ossuaries and the skeletal motif became popular to emphasize the universal nature of death. There was a perverse sort of fatal equality in the plague; few Europeans had access to proper medicine (and even then, that medicine was administered mainly by Muslims and Jews). Although the royals of Europe were mostly spared (only two kings died), the nobility and clergy which were drawn from their stock and class were completely ravaged, dying along with the the burghers and the peasants in mostly equal number.
The Danse Macabre became a popular visual trope in the late 14th and early 15th centuries, as skeletons dancing with all sorts and leading people, from beggars and whores to kings and popes, into Hell. The death motif had two major trends: towards hedonism and civil dissolution, as seen in Paris, Rome and a few other cities, or more commonly towards religiosity and the promise of life after Earth. That latter trend also played into the apocalypticism of the times; religiously-inspired rioting engulfed southern England in 1339, and flagellants became a common sight during what people thought was the End of Days. People were sure that the apocalypse was nigh: war, famine and pestilence were all omnipresent, and so four horsemen motifs, often mounted by four skeletons, also became common during the period, most famously in the surreal painting of the Greco-Portuguese artist Jeronimo Contoblagas The Four Horsemen. That painting set the four skeletal horsemen amid a feverish, almost hallucinatory backdrop of fire.
Another common religious trend was the revival of reformism and heresy. Although both trends had more to do with the institutional corruption of the Cahors Papacy and the subjugation of Papal supremacy to the whims of their Plantagenet hosts, the visceral imagery and personal experiences of plague did influence the proto-reformers of Europe.
The Waldensians were among the most vibrant; dating from the late 12th century themselves, they exploded across the religious scene in southern Germany. When the Plantagenets brutally exterminated them in their territories in the late 14th century, most of them removed themselves to the Schwarzwald, where they largely lived a secret Waldensian life until the Reformation proper allowed them to re-emerge. Their beliefs began to deviate more and more during the plague; it is at this time that their sola scriptura beliefs, and most importantly their replacement of the Holy Spirit with Mary within the Trinity, began to take shape. Unlike later reformers, they also rejected most of the Old Testament as a "book of the Jews", in part due to the intense anti-Semitism circulating in Europe at the same time.
Other reformers across Europe, from the partners Chester and Bulloch in the British Isles to Wotjyla in Poland and Bohemia, would also pick up on the plague as a God-delivered event. This would give their institutional and religious critiques of the Church a fire-and-brimstone edge; that the Papacy was steeped itself in sin, and that reform, and the end of Popes, was necessary to save Christianity from itself. These heresies would not survive long enough, even in secret, to reach the Reformation proper; the cultural folk memory, however, endured. Much of the early 15th century was occupied with exterminating and extirpating these heretics, while also dealing with the lingering aftershocks of the Cahors period.
The idea of death, beyond its imminent imagery and its centrality to religion, also became a potent cultural concept due to the coming of the Black Death. The idea of the Good Death, and of "memento mori", both evolved into their popular form around the time the plague began in 1337. The transience of human life, and of all material achievements, in the face of Death and God became an obsession for artists and writers.
Death did not stay the sole pre-occupation for long; it tended to become popular as a theme during years of recurring plague, before ceding ground to religious motifs and the neoclassical and humanist trends of the coming rebirth.
In the new, urbanizing European world, plague would continue to recur and recur, a constant pain for its peoples, a constant reminder that, in the words of Horace, "Pallida mors aequo pulsat pede pauperum tabernas regumque turres".