The English Sweate

“In this same yere a newe kynde of sicknes came sodenly through the whole region eueⁿ after the first entryng of the kyng into this Isle, which was so sore, so peynfull, & sharp that the lyke was neuer harde of, to any manes remembrance before that tyme”

—Hall’s Chronicle, Edward Hall, 1542

It feels like new diseases are a modern scourge, what with HIV successfully crossing over to humans from chimps in the early 20^th century, Ebola from bats in the 1970s, and SARS from civets in the early 21^st. If you want more of them then there’s also less well-known newcomers like Nipah virus and once-famous but now nearly forgotten ones like Legionnaires’ Disease. But while it might be true that new diseases are getting more common, they’re not a new phenomenon. The Roman Empire suffered the Antonine Plague, which was likely the first major appearance of smallpox, while a few hundred years later the Byzantine Empire barely withstood the Plague of Justinian: the first pandemic of bubonic plague, one that was only ever matched by the famous Black Death of the 14^th century.

What made the difference in many of these cases was a decrease in travel times. AIDS, for example, only got going once there was quick and common travel between central Africa and the rest of the world. There were multiple cases of the disease back into the 1950s, but the necessary integration between the source and destination for a true outbreak didn’t really happen until the late 1970s—and fortunately so, as the genetic science and technology necessary to understand, fight, and eventually control a retroviral disease was only developed at that time. It doesn’t bear thinking what would have happened if AIDS had taken flight in 1959.

The older “new plagues” got themselves going for similar reasons. Modern outbreaks are depending more and more on fast, technological travel like airplanes, but easy travel in the past could sometimes come for political reasons. The Antonine Plague likely came from the far upstream regions of the Nile, and could do so because the Roman Empire had pacified Egypt and made it part of a large peaceful state with good roads.  The Plague of Justinian may have happened when it did, in the sixth century, because the Yersinia pestis bacteria had a permanent hold in Hunan Province and the sixth century was not long after the chaotic Sixteen Kingdoms period ended. China was finally integrated into Asia as a whole, driven by new state support of India’s exported Buddhism and subsequent contacts between the two regions. The bubonic plague just came along for the ride.

It also helps if there’s some unrest in the context of the larger peace. To continue with the Plague of Justinian, China may have become part of the larger world but it was also subdivided between the Northern and Southern Dynasties until 589 AD, and they warred more or less constantly. Poor harvests and population displacement make societies less able to withstand disease, which ultimately might help to explain one of the more mysterious outbreaks of new disease in history.

In 1485, England was at the tail end of a vicious series of civil wars, the Wars of the Roses. There had been more than a decade of peace under Edward IV, but the notorious Richard III had come to power and Henry Tudor was on the verge of overthrowing him at the Battle of Bosworth. Henry had landed with his army at Milford Haven in Wales, and at the same place and same time a new disease broke out and started following him. The new king had literally just arrived in London and established himself firmly when the English Sweate did the same. By the end of October, several thousand Londoners were dead, and the disease had spread to the countryside.

The Sweating Sickness became a source of particular dread, at least among the upper class, because unlike many other diseases it affected the well-fed and relatively clean nobility just as badly as the yeomanry. The fratricidal conflict of York and Lancaster had left the English nobility thin on the ground already, but the new plague took more still over the next few decades. Even worse, it came on and killed extremely quickly, to the point that its victims are often described as “merry about diner and dedde at supper”. When it struck, the patient would at first feel a sense of apprehension and chills which would quickly turn into a very high fever, heart palpitations, and the eponymous sweating. As the fever continued he would be struck with lethargy and a desire to sleep, and the consensus at the time was that if he gave in he wouldn’t wake up.

The first bout of the sickness disappeared that winter, and Henry Tudor settled in as Henry VII of England. But despite the traditional end of the Wars of the Roses, England continued to be quite tumultuous during and after Henry’s reign—there was the attempt to put Lambert Simnel on the throne in 1487, then Perkin Warbeck’s rebellion in 1491. Henry VIII’s time brought a Scottish invasion in 1513 and the Pilgrimage of Grace uprising in 1536.

During it all, the English Sweate kept burning through England (it hopped to the continent only once, in 1528), returning in 1507, 1517, 1528, and 1551, always in the summer. In between these recurrences there would be sporadic cases, and one of these may have carried off the disease’s most politically important victim: Arthur, the eldest son of Henry VII and so heir to the throne of England. In his absence Arthur’s younger brother became Henry VIII, who married Arthur’s widow Catherine of Aragon with all the consequences that would eventually have for English and European history.

Then after 1551 the Sweating Sickness vanished, with only a few isolated cases between then and 1578, and none at all after that. The final outbreak gave us our best description of the disease, as physician John Kay (AKA Dr. Caius, the inspiration for the character of the same name in The Merry Wives of Windsor) wrote down his own analysis of the plague in A Boke or Counseill Against the Disease Commonly Called the Sweate, or Sweatyng Sicknesse. Another contemporary description of note, Edward Hall’s Chronicle, is quoted in part at the top of this article. These and other similar descriptions are virtually the only clues we have as to what caused the sickness.

Even so, the identity of the English Sweate has been a topic of considerable speculation. Some start from a similar disease, usually called the Picardy Sweat, which showed up across the English Channel in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. The appearance of northern France in the equation is suggestive, as Henry VI had invaded from there and there’s a close connection between his army and the establishment of the disease in England. On the other hand the Picardy Sweat’s alternative name, the now-obsolete miliary fever, suggests otherwise: “miliary” is just a Latinate description of the tiny pimples which would break out on the skin of victims. Caius’ rather complete description of the English Sweate makes no mention of eruptions.

The current best guess is that the Sweating Sickness might have been caused by a hantavirus which lurked unnoticed in the rodent population of England, and which made an appearance in the 16^th century because of the unsettled political and military situation, or unusual weather, or simple evolution of a new strain. If so, it’s extinct: as of 2009 there are no known hantaviruses in the UK. The theory that the English Sweate was caused by one stems instead from the similarity between John Caius’ description of it and another new “mystery disease”, the outbreak of Hantavirus Cardiopulmonary Syndrome in the Four Corners region of the United States in 1993.

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The Empire of the Calabash

"Samoan Island", by Joseph Dwight Strong. Strong was the state-assigned artist for the Hawaiian Ka'imiloa expedition to Samoa in 1887, though this picture is from a few years later. Public Domain Image.

How prospered the alliance grand
Among the Chiefs of Isles of sand
By the eternal trade winds fanned:
How there among the breaker’s dash
Is planted, now with armed clash
The Empire of the Calabash!

— Anonymous anti-Hawaiian-expansionist poem published in the Hawaiian Gazette, 1887

The 1880s were not a good decade  to be a non-European country. Colonialism had entered its final push; “the good parts” of the world had been parcelled out more than a century ago, and now Europe’s attention turned to the leftovers. The Scramble for Africa got underway at the Berlin Conference in 1884. Southeast Asia was subdivided between the British, French, and Dutch. The nations of the Pacific Ocean had long resisted European control, partly from sheer distance and partly because they were so small (and so the same for any profits they’d bring). But now it was their turn.

In the central Pacific, Hawaii had a pre-eminent position. It was still independent, an internationally recognized kingdom that was larger and more populous than anything else east of the International Date Line or north of the equator. In all of Polynesia only New Zealand’s Maori had more potential strength than the Hawaiians—and the Maori had been under the control of the British since the 1840s. As it became more and more clear that the remaining unclaimed islands in the Pacific were in danger of falling under European control, some Hawaiians resolved to do something about it.

The Cascajal Block

The Cascajal Block, a recently discovered artifact that shows what may be the oldest writing in the New World. Click for another, enhanced image that shows the characters more clearly. Copyright Stephen D. Houston of Brown University.

Writing was the last of the inventions that make up the core of human civilization, and it’s one whose origins have proven a bit tricky to study. It’s almost certain that Sumerian hieroglyphics developed from scratch, simply because there’s no writing of any type from before them—though the recently discovered Dispilio Tablet is threatening to crack open the debate about Vinča signs again. If you want  to study how people came up with the idea of writing, you have to deal with a major issue: we really don’t know that the Old World’s other independent writing systems (Indus script, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and Oracle Bone Script) are totally original. Granted, they’re all very different in appearance but there’s always the possibility that the people who invented them had heard of Sumerian writing and only developed their own after being exposed to the concept of using marks to represent sounds and words. This is quite different from inventing writing from nothing.

You might have noticed that I didn’t include the alphabet you’re reading right now when I listed the Old World’s writing systems. The Latin script is derived from the Greek alphabet, which in turn is derived from the one the Phoenicians used, which in turn comes from proto-Canaanite, which eventually works its way back to Egyptian hieroglyphics (yes, ABCD…et al. are bastard versions of the inscribed ibises and hands and snakes and whatnot on Egyptian tomb walls). Next, consider that the oldest Egyptian writing known is on the Narmer Palette, which was made barely a century after the Sumerians came up with the concept. The timing of it is awfully suspicious. Borrowing of the idea of writing has even happened in the modern era, with Sequoyah and his Cherokee syllabary, so why couldn’t it have happened in the past? It’s a very difficult supposition to prove or disprove.

The only other writing we can be very sure is independent is Mesoamerican writing; the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans on either side of Mexico make it extremely unlikely that the idea of it percolated across from Mesopotamia. As a result, the development of scripts in Central America has been of considerable interest. Right now the oldest piece of evidence that might be writing is a discovery that was announced just a few years ago, the Cascajal Block.

The Voice of Memnon

The Colossi of Memnon, detail of a chromolithograph by Ernst Weidenbach made after a Prussian archaeological expedition to Egypt in 1842-45. The Vocal Memnon is the one on the right. Public domain image.

“Long ago I had a voice that could lament, which wept for Memnon’s sorrows. Now my cries are inarticulate and unclear.”

—Part of a graffito poem carved into the left leg of the statue, written by Cæcilia Trebulla some time around 100AD. Translated and published in Women’s Life in Greece and Rome, p.10.

The English-language names for many places in Egypt are actually Greek, an oddity which requires some explanation. Classical Egyptian culture hasn’t left much of a mark on our own, but the Ancient Greeks were fascinated by them and our own culture has a foundation laid down by Aristotle, Plato, and their ilk. If a Greek writer needed to add some heft and history to his work, he’d often use Egypt as a screen—for example, the whole story of Atlantis comes to us from Plato, who wanted to outline his idea of a perfect society but felt it necessary to attribute the idea to to his uncle Critias, who supposedly got it from Solon the Lawgiver, who in turn heard it from an Egyptian priest.

This whole crossing of cultures got deeper after Alexander the Great conquered Egypt and it came under the rule of his general Ptolemy I Soter. The last three hundred years of Egyptian Pharaohs were actually Greek, including the last, Cleopatra. Even the name Egypt itself is of Greek origin, though no-one knows exactly what it means; the Ancient Greeks had a folk etymology that it was a short form of Aigaiou huptiōs, “under the Aegean”, but this is almost certainly wrong. The Egyptians called their country Kemet.

A double barrel of Greco-Egyptian fusion can be found at Thebes and the Colossi of Memnon. “Thebes” is a pure borrowing from Greek—Egyptians called it Waset—taken from the city of Thebes on the Gulf of Corinth, but naming the statues for Memnon is a much more complicated story.

Proteus OX19

There are sometimes odd links between two otherwise unrelated diseases. Whether due to parallel evolution or horizontal gene transfer, two bacteria use the same technique as part of their attack on a human being, with correspondingly similar results. Probably the most famous result of this is the CCR5-Δ32 mutation, one copy of which makes people resistant to HIV-1 infection; two makes them almost immune. The peculiarity here is that the gene in question is much more common in people of Northern European descent, with somewhere between ten and fifteen percent of the population having at least one copy while it’s vanishingly rare in, say, sub-Saharan Africans or East Asians. Using a hybrid of math and genetics called coalescent theory, it’s possible to calculate that the mutation must have started to spread in the European population at least 275 years ago, with seven centuries being the likeliest figure. AIDS has been around for a lot less than that.

The theory for how the mutation became so widespread involves finding another disease that uses the same point of attack as HIV-1. The most commonly suggested culprits are smallpox and bubonic plague, both of which have been pestering people for long enough to qualify. In the particular case of plague bacteria, they attack the T-cells of a human’s immune system through the CCR5 receptor on the outside of those cells. HIV-1 does the same. Even though the two diseases act quite differently once inside the cell, they’d be similarly stymied by a change in the CCR5 receptor. The CCR5-Δ32 mutation seems to have become common because Northern Europe was repeatedly struck by epidemics of plague (or chronically infected with smallpox, if you prefer that culprit) for centuries. If you didn’t have the mutation, you died; if you did, you lived to have many children who also had the mutation. The fact that CCR5-Δ32 also confers resistance to HIV-1 is nothing more than coincidence.

The same sort of coincidence ended up saving thousands of lives during World War II.

Rangaku, or the Wonders of Samurai Science

The Perry Expedition presents technologically advanced gifts to the Japanese Emperor at Yokohama Bay in 1854. The wires of the telegraph they brought are visible in the background. Public Domain image.

One of the enduring “what-ifs” of history is China’s inward turn from the fifteenth century onwards, a policy often credited for allowing Europe to catch up and pass China technologically with tragic consequences in the 20^th century. It’s inconceivable to many of us—sitting here on the pinnacle of three centuries of industrial development—that any culture would want to cut itself off, but China set the pace for much of northeast Asia. Korea rebuilt itself as a hermit kingdom in the 16^th century (which goes a long way to explaining present-day North Korea’s bizarre and hostile stance against the rest of the world), and Tibet was the quintessential closed country until the beginning of the 20^th century.

The most important of the isolated East Asian nations outside of China was Japan. In that particular case, Japanese society was struggling simultaneously with near-constant civil war and with the introduction of Christianity—as much as two percent of the population had converted before the official backlash began in 1587. Eventually, the shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu began closing off the country entirely, looking to control the flow of ideas into Japan and culminating in the Closed Country Edict in 1635. Outsiders were permitted to come to Japan only at three points: the Ainu through Matsumae in Hokkaido, the Chinese via the subordinate kingdom of the Ryukyu Islands, and the Dutch through Nagasaki in Kyushu to the south.

The Sakoku (Japanese for “locked country”) period is generally assumed to have been a technologically stagnant time, but that’s not entirely true.

Murder on Wall Street

The aftermath of the 1920 Wall Street bombing. The statue at the upper left is of George Washington, and commemorates the spot where he was sworn in as as the first president of the US. The New York Stock Exchange is behind the camera to the right. From the New York World-Telegram & Sun archives, now in the public domain.

Before the Terrorist Menace, there was the Communist Menace. And before the Communists there were the anarchists. Well, strictly speaking it went Communists-Nazis-Communists-Anarchists thanks to the bizarre blip that was the WWII Allies’ profoundly practical “Bad ol’ Adolf and avuncular Uncle Joe” propaganda campaign, but fear of Germany wasn’t around as long as any of the other three.

Of them, its plausible to argue that the anarchists were the most problematic.

Liber Linteus, or 101 Uses for an Egyptian Mummy

The Zagreb Mummy, which has accidentally thrown light on a poorly-known culture. Photo by Wikimedia user SpeedyGonsales, used under a CC Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

“And so parted, I having there seen a mummy in a merchant’s warehouse there, all the middle of the man or woman’s body, black and hard. I never saw any before, and, therefore, it pleased me much, though an ill sight; and he did give me a little bit, and a bone of an arme.”

—The Diary of Samuel Pepys, entry for May 12, 1668

Royal burials like Tutankhamen get all the attention, but Egypt is positively lousy with mummies. That kind of burial was restricted to the noble or wealthy at first, but for about 2000 years starting in 1500 BC even average Egyptians were embalmed and wrapped after death. The best estimate is that seventy million human mummies were made, as well as a vast number of animals—over a million of those have been discovered, let alone made.

As common as they are they could support being a tradeable commodity, though the obvious question to the modern mind is “Who, apart from a museum, would want to buy a mummy?” The answer is quite a few people, over the last few hundred years.

Meeting in the Middle

“Peradventure ye do not know how very far off that region is to which ye would go? Or, perhaps ye have not the least idea in your minds, or have forgotten, how difficult it will be for you to travel over the roads, and that ye will never reach there?”

—The Monks of Kublai Khan, Rabban Bar Sauma. English translation by E. A. Wallis Budge

The Han Empire of China and Roman Empire reached their greatest territorial extents at about the same time, in the first and second century AD. When they did, East and West almost met for the first time; there are ambiguous Chinese records suggesting that Rome sent a few embassies, though there’s no sign of the opposite happening. More remarkably, there’s a distinct chance that Roman legionnaires fought Chinese soldiers in Central Asia. The smaller Parthian Empire butted up against Rome directly and also bordered on Chinese vassal states on its opposite side. After the Battle of Carrhae, something like 10,000 Roman soldiers were captured by the Parthians, and Parthian policy was to use captive soldiers to garrison places away from their homeland. The Roman writer Pliny says that the losers of Carrhae were taken to Margiana, in modern Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, and archaeology backs him up: there’s two cave inscriptions, one above another, near Surkhandarya, Uzbekistan that read “ROD/[illegible]/I M/PAN/G. REX/AP. LG”. The “I M” is taken to be an invocation of the god Mithras Invictus, who was popular with the Roman military, and “AP. LG” is the 15th Apollonian Legion, which fought against the Parthians (though not at Carrhae). That interpretation is controversial, but if it’s correct, the inscriptions are the easternmost Roman writing in the world.

The Great Epizootic

Photograph of a 19th-century urban horse hotel, used to house workhorses in cramped city conditions. Public domain image.

The flu scare of the last few weeks seems to have faded away, but before it did there were many mentions of the 1918 influenza pandemic. That’s not surprising as that was easily the most deadly one in history, but it’s overshadowed another major wave of North American influenza that hit a few decades before, in 1872-73. This is probably because its victims weren’t human, but another species that’s affected by flu: not poor maligned pigs, but horses.