Malaria and Rome: A History of Malaria in Ancient Italy, Robert Sallares [reading a book TXT] 📗

The hot Dog Star is accustomed to give men’s bodies fever. | This heat tends to kill men at Rome, | and often inflicts pains through countless fevers; | now it produced more than usual. | When Rome cannot protect itself by the sword, | fever can be seen as an ally, a means of salvation: |

the soldier dies of fever, which he feared yesterday. | Those whom Rome could not destroy were annihilated by the wind, | at whose arrival the German youth were killed: | thus when Rome is silent, our imperial glory lies in ruins, | alas, because the lord [sc. Frederick] of the city and the world is vanquished and stopped | by the diseases of Romulus in a short span of time; | he whom sea and land fear groans at the heat of the fever. | All of Rome had sworn an oath at Caesar’s will. | A wind came from the southern zone with thunder and lightning, | and the storm hit the camp. | Every man was drenched as the heat of the sun decreased, and became ill with a terrifying fever following the shivering. | The soldiers ached with pain in their heads, as is to be expected, and internal organs and legs. All of them were now injured by the wounds of fever.⁵⁶

Malaria was almost certainly already playing that role in late antiquity, when Alaric died from a disease contracted during the siege of Rome in the summer of  410, while Attila’s failure to march on Rome in 452 was probably motivated at least partly by the threat of pestilence as well as famine in Italy.⁵⁷ However, that epidemiological situation had arisen long before the fifth century.

Tacitus describes an episode during the short-lived occupation of Rome by Vitellius in  69 that sounds very similar to the numerous catastrophes which befell French and German armies attacking Rome in the medieval and early modern periods, as catalogued ⁵⁶ Gotifredus Viterbiensis, de gestis domni Friderici Romanorum imperatoris, sec. 27, ll. 625–46, ed. G.H. Pertz (1870), Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Scriptores Rerum Germanicarum, xxx, 24–5: Fervida stella poli canis est coniuncta leoni, | Ordine zodiaci connectens sidera soli, | Datque calore poli corpora febre mori. | Hoc solet ardore sol perdere corpora Rome, | Febribus innumeris infligere sepe dolores; |

Nunc dedit ex more deteriora fore. | Dum nequid in gladio se maxima Roma tueri, | Febris ab auxilio poterit salvanda videri: | Miles febre perit, quem metuebat heri. | Quos non Roma potest, potuit disperdere ventus, |

Cuius in adventu cecidit Iermana iuventus: | Sic ubi Roma tacet, gloria nostra iacet. | Heu quia Romuleis modico sub tempore morbis | Vincitur et premitur dominator et Urbis et orbis; | Febre calente gemit, quem mare terra tremit. | Cesaris ad libitum iuraverat omnia Roma. | Venit ab australi ventus cum fulgure zona, | Castraque precipitant ventus et aura tonans. | Omnis homo madidus, solis fugiente calore, | Leditur orribili febri, veniente rigore. | Et caput ex more, viscera, crura dolent. | Omnia iam fuerant febrili vulnere lesa.

⁵⁷ Romer (1999); Olympiodorus ap. Photius, bibliotheca, ed. Henry (1959), i. 168–9 and Jordanes, de origine actibusque Getarum, 157–8, on Alaric’s death; novellae divi Valentiniani, 33

ed. Meyer and Mommsen (1905).

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City of Rome

by Celli, Celli-Fraentzel, and more recently Bercé. The German and Gallic troops of Vitellius, like Julius Caesar’s army after it had spent years in Gaul in the previous century (see Ch. 10 below), were not accustomed to the P. falciparum malaria of Mediterranean countries and had no acquired (or innate) immunity to it. This episode shows that the Vatican district was extremely dangerous in summer in the first century , just as it was during the papal election in 1623:⁵⁸

Finally, not even caring about life, many of them camped in the unhealthy Vatican district, as a result of which there were many deaths among the rabble. The Tiber was near by, and the Germans and Gauls, whose bodies were already liable to disease, were weakened by their lack of tolerance for the heat and their desire for the river’s water.⁵⁹

Medieval accounts of the perils of the areas of the city close to the river Tiber are more detailed. For example, Godfrey of Bouillon, the Duke of Lower Lorraine who later became one of the leaders of the First Crusade, was infected near the Tiber with quartan fever during the siege of Rome in  1083 and vowed that he would go to Jerusalem if God cured him. He survived the siege, although one strand of tradition suggests that a recrudescence of quartan fever played a role in his death in Jerusalem in  1100, but many of his colleagues were killed by malaria during the siege of Rome.

Advancing to storm Rome, he was the first to break through that part of the wall which had been allotted to his own section of the army, opening a large window to make an entry. Sweating very heavily,and panting as his blood was so hot, he entered an underground store-room which he found by chance as he moved around there: when he had satisfied his excessive thirst by drinking too much wine, he developed a quartan fever.

Some say that he was infected by poisoned Falernian wine, because the Romans, and the men of that land, are accustomed to pour poisons into ⁵⁸ Bercé (1989: 239–40); Celli (1933: 73–82, 95); Celli-Fraentzel (1932); Scheidel (1996: 128–9); Lapi (1749: 17–18) noted that foreigners such as Germans who visited Rome in the eighteenth century were particularly likely to become ill. Even a severe disease like malaria could sometimes be evaluated positively, cf. P. F. Russell (1955: 244) noting that some Africans regarded malaria as an ally against European colonists. Jarcho (1945) drew attention to a German propaganda exercise in