From the 14th to the 17th centuries, the bubonic plague repeatedly swept through Europe and North Africa, reaching up to 50 percent mortality in some regions and throwing Europeans’ social, political, and economic structures into disarray (see disease).
The bubonic plague is caused by the bacillus Yersina pestis, which lives in the bloodstream of fleas that feed on black rats, pests that were commonly found on the ships and in the cities of Europe. Once the flea contracts the bacillus, it can no longer digest the blood of the rat, and so, voraciously hungry, it goes in search of a new host, such as a human body. Humans cannot transfer bubonic plague among themselves; it takes the flea to infect human hosts and transfer the bacillus. These fleas can survive up to 50 days by hiding in grain or cloth, which were both major trade items in medieval Europe and probably major causes of the transmission of the plague. In humans the plague manifests as the swellings of the lymph nodes. In many victims of the plague in medieval Europe, these swellings, particularly in the throat and groin areas, reportedly reached the size of grapefruits.
The bubonic plague first migrated from Asia to Europe and northern Africa in the 14th century. During the winter of 1347-48, rats and fleas bearing the bubonic plague stowed away onboard European merchant ships docked along the coast of Asia. Within months, a new disease—a pestilence—had entered the ports of Europe. The Black Death, as it came to be called, spread quickly among a population whose defenses had already been lowered by poor nutrition and a harsh winter. The Black Death was actually a combination of bubonic plague (carried by rats and their fleas) and pneumonic plague (a respiratory version spread by humans). From 1348-49 the Black Death spread throughout Europe and North Africa, killing approximately one-third of the total population, with mortality rising to more than 50 percent in many crowded, unsanitary urban areas. The highest mortality rates from the plague occurred in the summer months, when the fleas bred in especially high numbers. Through the 16th and 17th centuries this devastating disease repeatedly revisited Europe.
The ravages of the bubonic plague had many different social, religious, and economic effects. Above all, the high mortality rate stunned the population and sent many communities into disarray, looking for both an explanation and an escape from this pestilence. Doctors could not explain the plague or cure it. Many people fled the disease, abandoning their homes and even shunning members of their own families. As entire artisan and commercial communities were wiped out, Europe’s economy changed as well. In Italy and Spain religious explanations for the plague were especially prevalent. Clerical and secular officials often claimed Jews caused epidemics. During the 14th century such accusations led Christians to burn many Jews alive. Because of the disease’s many recurrences, Europe’s population only began to rise again near the end of the 15th and beginning of the 16th century, despite waves of the plague and other epidemic diseases (see SMALLPOx) still attacking at times. To this day, no one is quite sure why the bubonic plague lost its potency, except to speculate that it might have finally evolved into a less virulent strain.
The Black Death was more than a threat to European populations in the 14th century. It also represented a challenge to an entire political, religious, and intellectual system. In response to the catastrophe, some individuals began to practice particular ascetic regimes, most notably self-flagellation. Yet at the same time others lost faith in Christianity and expressed their skepticism at inherited truths by violating widely held religious norms, sometimes by engaging in sexual acts in consecrated graveyards. The plague did not end the hold of the church on Europe’s population, but it was so far-ranging that it did erode long-held ideas about medical practice. During the most intense period of the crisis, some women were able to practice medicine even though the profession had long been limited to men only. In the long run, the plague facilitated changes in Europeans’ understanding of the human body.
The bubonic plague affected Europe’s colonization efforts during the 16th century as well. The loss in Europe’s population translated to severe lack of labor for reaping the resources of the New World. The need for labor at home led to the Spaniards’ efforts to enslave the indigenous peoples as well as to the European colonizers’ eventual decision to enslave Africans (see SLAVeRY).
The bubonic plague was also one of the diseases that entered the Western Hemisphere as a result of the Columbian ExcHANce. The first potential sighting of the plague in the Americas came in the late 1610s, when French sailors shipwrecked in Massachusetts Bay released the disease. However, given the ambiguity of the historical sources, this disease may have been smallpox. The bubonic plague is also suspected to be the disease that later killed Squanto, the Pawtuxet Indian who helped the Pilgrims when they landed in New England.
Further reading: David Herlihy, The Black Death and the Transformation of the West, ed. Samuel K. Cohn, Jr. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); Kenneth F. Kiple and Stephen V. Beck, eds., Biological Consequences of the European Expansion, 1450-1800, an Expanding World, vol. 6 (Aldershot, U. K.: Ashgate Publishing, 1997); Sheldon Watts, Epidemics and History: Disease, Power, and Imperialism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997).
—Maril Hazlett
Polo, Marco (1254-1324) Italian writer and traveler The son of Niccolo Polo of Venice, Marco Polo at the age of 17 accompanied his father on a trip overland through Asia to present letters of Pope Gregory X to Khubilai, the Great Khan of the Mongols in Northern China; his account of what he saw in the East shaped Europeans’ understandings of Asia for generations.
Despite Marco Polo’s widespread fame, little is known about him, his actual activities in China, or the circumstances surrounding the writing of his book. Information on
Marco is so scarce, in fact, that reputable scholars continue to argue that Marco never traveled to China at all. Virtually the only information about his famous trip comes from the book itself. (No Chinese documents have ever been found that mention him.) Scholars believe that Marco’s father and uncle, Niccolo and Maffeo, left a Venetian trading post on the Black Sea around 1260 to trade in jewels with the Mongol Khanate of the Golden Horde. Starting about 1209 the Mongols under Temuchin, or Genghis Khan, began expanding from their base in the plains of Central Asia, and in time he and his successors conquered territories ranging from the plains of Hungary in Europe to central and southern China. The Golden Horde was one of four khanates into which the vast Mongol conquests had been divided. Supreme among all the khans at this time was Khubilai, who reigned from 1260 to 1294.
Wars and other disturbances prevented Niccolo and Maffeo from returning the way they had come, so they accompanied an embassy traveling farther east to meet Khubiali at his palace in Beijing (Khanbalikh in Mongolian). They were then commissioned by the khan to carry messages to the pope in Rome and return with his reply, 100 Christian missionaries, and other items. They returned to Venice sometime around 1269, but the reigning pope had died, and it was not until 1271 that Gregory X became pontiff. The Polo brothers took papal messages and young Marco but no missionaries with them back to Beijing. They arrived around 1275, two years after Khubilai had completed his conquest of southern China. During the 17 years Marco remained in China he seems to have been used in various administrative duties. This is not so unusual as it sounds because the Mongols used foreign administrators over the conquered Chinese territories as a way to break the power of the local gentry.
The Polos supposedly returned to Europe by sea around Southeast Asia and through the Indian Ocean, escorting a Mongol princess who was to be married to a lesser khan in Persia (modern-day Iran). From there the Polos were able to make their way to Venice around 1295. Marco was then 42 years old. Sometime around 1297 Marco, in command of a ship, was captured on the high seas and imprisoned for a time in Genoa. There he met a fellow prisoner, Rustichello of Pisa, who had already gained a fair reputation as a writer. The two collaborated on a book based on Marco’s experiences. Marco was released from prison in 1299, lived quietly but comfortably as a modest trader and moneylender, and died, aged 69, on January 8, 1324.
As much uncertainty as there is about Marco Polo’s life and travels, there is even more uncertainty about his book, to the extent that scholars have difficulty even agreeing on what its title should be. No original manuscript exists, and the existing copies and later printings have important differences, omissions, and additions. Quite a bit of controversy exists over the role Rustichello played in compiling the book. Did he simply write as Marco dictated? Did he rewrite a manuscript previously written by Marco? Or did he do both? Did he also make use of documents Marco had brought back with him from China? Perhaps the best way to describe the book is as a difficult collaboration between a writer of highly stylized romantic poetry and fiction (Rustichello) and a through, impersonal, and somewhat detached Mongolian civil servant (Marco). In the end the book does not belong to any existing Western writing tradition, but it does have many things in common with official Chinese gazetteers. Marco, who spent almost all his adult life in Asia prior to writing his book, doubtless absorbed considerable Asian cultural influences.
The exact impact of the book on the science of geography and exploration in the West remains a matter of debate. A number of European traders and missionaries made journeys similar to Marco’s afterward, but with the conversion of the khans of central Asia to ISLAM and the coming of the Black Death (see PLAGUE), it became virtually impossible to recreate Marco’s journey after the 14th century. Interest in the book was spurred by the humanist movement, during which European scholars studied, translated, and distributed many previously unknown or forgotten ancient texts. Among these were works of geography against which Marco’s story could be compared. Marco’s story and others influenced a number of 15th-century mapmakers, among them Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli, who united Marco’s description of Japan with his own ideas on mapmaking. Toscanelli was among the first to advocate that voyages from Europe to Asia could be made by sailing due west, across the Atlantic. These ideas possibly inspired Columbus’s plans for his voyages of exploration.
During the 16th and 17th centuries European exploration of East and Southeast Asia served both to confirm much of what Marco’s book said as well as to engender doubts. Since the 17th century scholars—basing their arguments on items in the text that were wrong or misleading and other items that are not in the text but which, they feel, should have been—have continued to charge that Marco never actually traveled to China. In this view, his book was an elaborate hoax. Some scholars continue to level such charges today. For instance, doubters ask, why doesn’t the book contain any mention of the Great Wall of China or the practice of binding young women’s feet or almost anything about Chinese culture? Supporters of Marco’s journey note that these omissions can be accounted for by the fact that the Great Wall, in its present form, was not built until 200 years later and that the practice of foot binding did not become general among women until about 100 years later. Marco’s inability to speak or read Chinese, a matter on which virtually all scholars agree, also explains his general lack of knowledge of Chinese culture. His position as a functionary of the Mongol overlords helps explain his lack of interest. The exaggerations in published versions of the account could also have come from Rustichello, who might have felt compelled to add adventure and chivalrous deeds to what is otherwise a dull accounting of Marco’s alleged journey.
During the 19th century, when European, particularly British and Russian, imperialists began to open up and colonize the areas of Central, South, and East Asia that Marco described, interest in the book once again peaked. This was partly because Marco’s account remained virtually the only one generally known in the West. Today, by contrast, Marco’s book is something that far more people are likely to know about than ever to have actually read, although the book will continue to hold an honored place as an original work of geography and a remarkable, if sometimes annoyingly laconic, epic traveler’s tale.
Further reading: John Critchley, Marco Polo’s Book (Aldershot, U. K.: Variorum, 1992); John Earner, Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999); Frances Wood, Did Marco Polo Go to China? (London: Secker & Warburg, 1995); Henry Yule, ed., The Book of Ser Marco Polo the Venetian, 3rd ed., rev. ed. by Henri Cordier (London: J. Murray, 1929).
—Paul Dunscomb
Ponce de Leon, Juan (ca. 1460-1521) conquistador, colonial official
A Spaniard who accompanied CHRISTOPHER CoLUMBUS on the expedition of 1493 and who remained in the Western Hemisphere as a Spanish official, Juan Ponce de Eeon is best known for his search for the fountain of youth in FLORIDA.
Born in Spain around 1460, Ponce de Eeon had become known in CASTILE before Columbus made his first voyage to the west. He joined the 1493 journey, and in 1502 he enrolled on a mission led by Nicolas Ovando to HISPANIOLA. Ponce de Eeon soon became governor of the western portion of the island. Enthralled by the kinds of tales of riches and fame that frequently enticed CONQUIS-TADORes, Ponce de Eeon sailed to PUERTO RICO in 1508; three years later he became governor of the island. While in Puerto Rico, Ponce de Eeon enriched himself by drawing profits from GOLD mining carried out by the indigenous residents of the island.
But success did not satisfy his desire for gain. In 1511 he sought permission to establish a settlement in the Bahamas, where he hoped to find more gold and use Indian slaves (see slavery) to mine it. In 1513 he led an expedition of three ships to, as he asked King Ferdinand (see Ferdinand
AND Isabella), “discover and settle” this new territory. But he continued beyond the northwest tip of the Bahamas, apparently to find another island that local Natives in the islands had told him had a magical spring where those who drank the water would remain forever young; there was also gold rumored to be in the region. Ponce de Eeon’s search for that fountain of youth and other riches took him to the North American mainland, where he arrived, possibly near modern-day Daytona Beach, on April 2, 1513, and claimed this previously uncharted land for the Spanish monarchy. Eater the Spanish would build Saint Augustine nearby. Ponce de Eeon named this land “Tierra Ea Florida” after Pascua Florida, the Spanish name for Easter Sunday. Although John Cabot and Sebastian Cabot, as well as an unknown number of NoRSE sailors had earlier reached North America, Ponce de Eeon was the first from his country to land along the east coast of the continent.
While in Florida, Ponce de Eeon and his companions sailed along the coast, a journey that eventually took them through the Florida Keys (which he called Eos Martyres) and into the Gulf of Mexico. No one now can determine the northernmost point he reached, though it seems likely that the expedition went as far as Pensacola Bay or Charlotte Harbor before turning back and sailing toward CUBA before their return to Puerto Rico, which they reached about six months after their initial departure. He returned to Spain in 1514, concerned in part with the fate of his daughters because his wife had died.
Ponce de Eeon never found the fountain of youth, but his exploits nonetheless earned him a knighthood in Spain and the opportunity to return to the Western Hemisphere with the right to colonize Florida and Bimini. He left Spain again in 1521, and after a stop in Puerto Rico he returned to Florida and attempted to settle an area near modern-day Sanibel Island. Injured in a battle with local CALUSA Indians, he sailed back to Havana, where he died of his wounds in July, 1521.
Ponce de Eeon’s failed quest was not an unusual occurrence in the 16th century. Other Spanish conquistadores, notably FRANCISCO de Coronado and Hernando de SoTO, had also been inspired by rumors of the fabulous treasures to be found in North America. There were, of course, riches to be found in the Americas, as the Spanish conquerors of the AzTECS and INCA discovered. But no fountain of youth could ever be found, despite Ponce de Eeon’s obsessive search for it. Still, as the first Spaniard to wield power as adelantado, he had an enduring legacy in the Caribbean basin. He died without learning that the island of Florida he had found was actually a peninsula attached to the modern-day United States.
Further reading: Angus Konstam, Historical Atlas of Exploration, 1492-1600 (New York: Facts On File, 2000);
David Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992).
World History
