Читать книгу The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity - Roy Porter - Страница 13

Though the Black Death ebbed away from Europe, war and the movements of migrants ensured that epidemic disease did not go away, and Spain, as one of the great crossroads, formed a flashpoint of disease. Late in 1489, in its assault on Granada, Islam’s last Iberian stronghold, Spain hired some mercenaries who had lately been in Cyprus fighting the Ottomans. Soon after their arrival, Spanish troops began to go down with a disease never before encountered and possessing the brute virulence typical of new infections: typhus. It had probably emerged in the Near East during the Crusades before entering Europe where Christian and Muslim armies clashed.

It began with headache, rash and high fever, swelling and darkening of the face; next came delirium and the stupor giving the disease its name – typhos is Greek for ‘smoke’. Inflammation led to gangrene that rotted fingers and toes, causing a hideous stench. Spain lost 3,000 soldiers in the siege but six times as many to typhus.

Having smuggled itself into Spain, typhus filtered into France and beyond. In 1528, with the Valois (French) and Habsburg (Spanish) dynasties vying for European mastery, it struck the French army encircling Naples; half the 28,000 troops died within a month, and the siege collapsed. As a result, Emperor Charles V of Spain was left master of Italy, controlling Pope Clement VII – with important implications for Henry VIII’s marital troubles and the Reformation in England.

With the Holy Roman Empire fighting the Turks in the Balkans, typhus gained a second bridgehead into Europe. In 1542, the disease killed 30,000 Christian soldiers on the eastern front; four years later, it struck the Ottomans, terminating their siege of Belgrade; while by 1566 the Emperor Maximilian II had so many typhus victims that he was driven to an armistice. His disbanded troops relayed the disease back to western Europe, and so to the New World, where it joined measles and smallpox in ravaging Mexico and Peru. Typhus subsequently smote Europe during the Thirty Years War (1618–48), and remained widespread, devastating armies as ‘camp fever’, dogging beggars (road fever), depleting jails (jail fever) and ships (ship fever).

It was typhus which joined General Winter to turn Napoleon’s Russian invasion into a rout. The French crossed into Russia in June 1812. Sickness set in after the fall of Smolensk. Napoleon reached Moscow in September to find the city abandoned. During the next five weeks, the grande armée suffered a major typhus epidemic. By the time Moscow was evacuated, tens of thousands had fallen sick, and those unfit to travel were abandoned. Thirty thousand cases were left to die in Vilna alone, and only a trickle finally reached Warsaw. Of the 600,000 men in Napoleon’s army, few returned, and typhus was a major reason.

Smallpox, plague and typhus indicate, how war and conquest paved the way for the progress of pathogens. A later addition, at least as far as the West was concerned, was cholera, the most spectacular ‘new’ disease of the nineteenth century.