Since the Accounting: A Chronicle of the Roman Khanate

Chapter 666: Coexistence with the Black Death
After completing the confiscation work, Guo Kang began to organize people and restore order in the nearby streets with familiarity.

As he expected, after the operation began, some locals ran into the streets, set fires and shouted, preparing to rob. However, Guo Kang was prepared for this, and the Mamluks and members of the Knights quickly defeated these gangs that appeared everywhere. The legionnaires guarding the important roads also began to block them and soon captured a large number of thieves.

After cleaning up this block, Guo Kang and his team headed for the next target. They were busy until the next morning, but the work was not finished. When everything was finished, it was already afternoon.

This operation not only obtained a lot of supplies, but also gained a lot of valuable information. Therefore, Guo Kang met with Tuo Huan and others and began to sort out the information at hand.

After comparison, Guo Kang soon discovered that the current food shortage was not only due to excessive plundering, but also because grain production had indeed decreased.

According to the tax account books of merchants, the flooding of the Nile River has become unstable since five or six years ago. The water level sometimes rises sharply and floods the surrounding land; sometimes it is too low, making it difficult to get water. These situations have interfered with agricultural production and have greatly affected food output.

Guo Kang had noticed this matter when he was visiting and collecting information a few days before the operation. He attached great importance to it and specially found an old battalion officer in the army, gave him the information, and asked him to make a plan first. When the manpower was gathered, he would immediately start to build and repair the water conservancy.

However, the battalion officer told him that if it was to cope with the current situation, there was no need to build new facilities. Because the current water level change of the Nile River was completely within the normal range, it was not a "disaster" at all. I don't know why the Egyptians made such a fuss, as if the sky had fallen...

Guo Kang believed that even so, we should not underestimate the enemy, so he insisted that everyone should go for exploration. However, from the results of observations over the past few days, the situation was indeed not as serious as he thought.

Some dams and canals were built around the Nile River for irrigation. Baibars and his successors also carried out a series of expansion projects. But later, due to the continuous civil strife among the Mamluks, no one was willing to manage it. Especially after the Burji Mamluks came to power, they did not pay much attention to the maintenance of water conservancy projects, which led to serious siltation of many facilities and almost lost their function.

Some of the cultivated land on both sides of the Nile River is located in the river valley. After the water conservancy project was abandoned, it was more vulnerable to the rise and fall of the river. Once the degree of flooding changes, there is no resistance. It happened that the Nile River was unstable in the past two years, and the impact of the disaster was even more serious.

However, after actually surveying several locations, the engineers in the corps believed that this was not a problem for the Sudanese and Diwan governments. Because these so-called water conservancy projects were not very large in scale. Someone simply told Guo Kang that if it were in his hometown in Henan, such dams and ditches would only be built by the village itself.

Even if no one came to organize, since everyone is farming here, they have to take care of it themselves, right? As a result, the Egyptians can just lie down and cry whether it is flooded or dry, and no one takes care of the water conservancy. I don't know what they are thinking...

Moreover, the investigation also found that in addition to the problem of not being able to repair water conservancy projects, the technical level of Egyptian farmers is also shockingly low.

Farming is not just physical labor, but a labor that requires agricultural knowledge and professional skills. Farmers who plow the fields need to have basic common sense and literacy; at the same time, the village also needs professionals with a certain level of knowledge and experience to develop and teach agricultural skills.

However, in Egypt, neither condition is met.

As a result, the Egyptians' farming skills were not very high, and they had no resistance to various disasters. Every now and then, they would encounter various floods, droughts, insect plagues, and frost damage. Reduced production became a common occurrence.

Hearing this, Guo Kang had a headache. Obviously, if he wanted to solve these problems, he really had to start from the most basic organization.

The good thing is that he already has experience in recruiting Russians, and knows how to do this, at least he knows how to get started; the bad thing is that he will probably have to go through all the humiliation he suffered when he led the Russians before. And it may be a completely different version, and he will have to be tortured from a different angle again. I don’t know how the Egyptians, with thousands of years of civilization, managed to sit at the same table with the Russians...

Of course, the disasters in recent years have not led to a decrease in population - because a lot of people have already died.

Over the years, the biggest disaster in Egypt was not the climate problems, nor the greedy tax farmers and careless Mamluks, but the plague. Its impact on Egypt even exceeded Guo Kang's stereotype of the "Black Death".

Starting from the great plague in 1347, the plague lasted for 170 years in Egypt and Syria under the rule of the Mamluks. There were 20 major outbreaks, about once every eight or nine years. As for small outbreaks, there were more, resulting in 170 years of plague in these years. Basically, it has become a local endemic disease.

Every time the Black Death breaks out, it will cause a large number of deaths. Guo Kang is not unfamiliar with this information. Because the impact of the Black Death in 1347 was so great, everyone knows more or less about it. Even the emergence and development of the Purple Tent Khanate is somewhat related to this great plague.

The situation in Europe is relatively well known. As for Egypt and Syria, the Purple Horde also knew some of the situation. At that time, the traveler Ibn Battuta passed through Syria and recorded a lot of plague outbreaks. Later, he traveled to the Golden Horde and met Guo Gai, Bayan Timur and others, and let them know the news.

According to Battuta, the plague began in Alexandria. The source was probably Italian merchants, possibly from Sicily, or perhaps ships carrying slaves from the steppes. Soon, the disease spread throughout Egypt.

It is said that hundreds to a thousand people died in Cairo every day. During the most severe month of the epidemic, as many as 21,000 people died every day. However, Battuta's statement may not be accurate. Because at that time, due to the large number of deaths, the Diwan government could no longer keep accurate records.

Afterwards, the plague spread to Upper Egypt and entered Nubia; eastward, it entered the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza region. As many as a thousand people died in Gaza every day, and the market was forced to close. The situation outside the city was also very bad, and many farmers died of the disease in the fields. The local emir said that although it was harvest season, he was unable to organize people to harvest the grain because the farmers had all died.

Many settlements were destroyed by the plague. In Jenin by the Jordan River, only an old woman survived. The Bedouin tribes were also attacked by the Black Death. In some places, people in tents, even their cattle, sheep, and dogs, all died of the disease.

Battuta tried to avoid the plague, but found that Damascus had also been hit. The people in the city had no way to deal with it, so they held a fast. When he arrived, the epidemic had eased, with only 2,400 deaths per day. The plague also spread north to Manbij and entered Asia Minor. The entire Mamluk sphere of influence was severely hit.

It was not until several years later that the Purple Tent Khanate learned of this news.

At that time, they had learned from various channels that a serious plague had broken out throughout Europe. The situation in Eastern Europe was relatively better, but in Italy and the West, the situation was said to be extremely serious. Adding the news from Egypt and Syria, it was clear that the entire Mediterranean world had been attacked by this deadly plague.

The Purple Tent Khanate was not very big at that time, and its territory was all remote and poor, and had long been destroyed by warlords. Transportation had not yet been restored, and the local nobles fought all day long, so merchants did not dare to come. Therefore, it was not seriously affected. But these news still caused a great shock.

Guo Gai and others believed that barbarians were rampant, propriety and justice were abandoned, and rulers did not cultivate virtue, so the harmony between heaven and earth was lost, and the five virtues lost their order. Therefore, evil spirits were rampant everywhere, causing this large-scale plague.

Later, as the ruling area expanded, people continued to see the tragic conditions caused by famine, plague and tyranny in the barbarian countries. Therefore, this concept not only did not fade away with the passage of time, but was further strengthened and improved, and even entered the orthodox narrative of the Purple Tent Khanate, and became a common propaganda slogan along with "educate the barbarians" and "comfort the people and punish the criminals".

In the era of Guo Kang, the King of Wu led some people from the Ming Dynasty to Dadu. When they were seeking refuge, they also brought some stories from there and new ideas popular in the Central Plains. The Romans in the country especially liked the Ming Taizu's manifesto he brought. Among them, the sentence "expel the barbarians, restore China, establish rules and regulations, and save the people" was widely circulated.

Perhaps because Zhu Yuanzhang's deeds were so inspiring, this saying is often used by people who change a few words, saying that we should learn from the deeds of Zhu Yuanzhang, the "restorer of the world", to drive out the barbarians and restore Rome. These ideas are all integrated.

Moreover, unlike some later impressions, the Black Death did not occur only once, nor did it suddenly disappear after raging for a few years. Europe, like Egypt, also experienced frequent outbreaks.

The bureaucratic system in Europe was far less sophisticated than that in the Muslim world, and records were often incomplete, but even so, it can be concluded that there were at least 17 serious outbreaks in Europe during this period. On average, the Black Death would return on a large scale every eleven years. As for small-scale outbreaks, they are also no longer recorded.

Therefore, Guo Kang and others are actually very familiar with the phenomenon of plague and its subsequent impact. However, due to the lack of information, it is unknown how much damage these plagues have caused.

Various Egyptian data, especially the demographic and tax records of the Diwan government, can directly supplement this part of the knowledge.

According to the data, the blow to Egypt's economy can be said to be devastating. In 1389, the Black Death broke out in Upper Egypt. Of the 24000 feddans of land in the Luxor area, only 2200 were under normal cultivation. Ten years later, the plague broke out again. Of Egypt's 40 villages, 462 were completely abandoned and had reduced tax revenues. Farmers either died of the disease or fled in panic, making it impossible to collect food normally.

In the city, the normal price of wheat was 60 to 90 dirhams, but it rose to 360 after the plague broke out. Ten years later, a few years before Guo Kang and his men launched their expedition, the same disease broke out again. This time, not only did the price of grain rise, but the merchants also colluded to make money from the national disaster. The administrative managers in Cairo not only did not crack down on them, but also deliberately protected the grain merchants and restricted others from transporting grain into the city, causing the ration to rise to more than a thousand dirhams. After the Sheikh learned the news, he dismissed the governor of Cairo and urgently distributed cakes to the citizens, pushing the price of grain down to around 600. However, neither the merchant group nor the Black Death could be contended with by him, so he could not save the entire situation.

The loss of population and economy was relatively indirect to the Mamluk regime. The most direct blow was the death of elite groups such as Mamluks and jurists.

Compared with Europe, the elites of the Muslim world were generally more responsible when facing the plague. Sultans and emirs generally stayed in their local areas. Those who abandoned their management responsibilities and fled to avoid the plague were often regarded as cowards and despised by the people. Some were even forced to return to their posts. Mamluks were also often sent to the front line to maintain law and order and organize the people to restore order.

Religious scholars and clergy who managed the grassroots were also very responsible during the plague. According to written records, during these large-scale plagues, the Ulema class always insisted on fulfilling their duties, organizing people to pray, holding compulsory funerals for the dead, and comforting the panicked people.

Therefore, after the plague, there was no situation like in Europe, where the church was widely questioned because of its incompetent performance in the face of the Black Death, and even the various ugly behaviors of the clergy. On the contrary, people have more trust in religion and clergy, after all, they really go to help when there is a problem... But it is hard to say whether this result is a good thing or not.

According to statistics, the death rate of Mamluks is higher than that of ordinary civilians. In fact, the first Black Death almost completely destroyed the Mamluk class. Sultan Nasir Qarawein had 1001 Mamluks. After his death, his sons fell into civil war, and the Black Death broke out at this time, causing the number of Mamluks to drop sharply. After the epidemic, only people were left.

Subsequent sultans made many attempts to restore the order, but few succeeded. Throughout the Burji dynasty, the number of royal Mamluks rarely exceeded one thousand.

What's more serious is that the Black Death was more lethal to children. In the early 15th century, during the time of Guo Kang, scholar Ibn Birdi conducted statistics based on the data of the Diwan household register. He found that in a 75-day epidemic, 1065 men, 669 women, and 3969 children were killed.

To the general public, this could only be considered one of the many tragedies of our time, but to the Mamluk regime, it was fatal.

The object of the Mamluks' loyalty is the lord himself, not the entire dynasty or country. According to tradition, after the old sultan's death, his Mamluks are difficult to continue to use, because the new sultan often does not trust them very much, but trusts the young confidants he has purchased and trained himself.

Moreover, according to the characteristics of the Mamluk regime, the new Sultan is most likely not the offspring of the old Sultan, but other military leaders who have risen up to seize the throne. Therefore, the Mamluks who were the previous Sultan were the objects of suspicion and supervision.

However, after the outbreak of the Black Death, young and adolescent Mamluk schoolchildren suffered the most deaths; however, the Mamluks of the previous sultan were all people who had survived the plague and had relatively strong resistance, so the death rate was not too high. This resulted in the new sultan being unable to train his own new generation of people. This problem even affected the balance of power within the Mamluk regime.

The last outbreak of the Black Death was in 1410. The plague started in Syria and killed people in Damascus, leaving many villages empty and large tracts of farmland abandoned. The situation in Egypt was equally serious, with hundreds of apprentices dying in the Sheikh's Mamluk school, and almost all the talent that had been purchased and trained at great expense was lost.

In order to deal with possible foreign enemies, they could only pay high prices and go through the Turkmen merchants to urgently purchase slaves to supplement. However, these newcomers were inferior to the previous ones in terms of quality and quantity, and their training was also very poor. Local scholars recorded that even if all the Royal Mamluk and Khalqa Legions were assembled, there would only be 5,000 people, and only 1,000 of them were capable of fighting.

Under such circumstances, the Sheikh tried his best to gather a large number of troops, but the quality was very worrying, and most of them were just temporary. Even when the war broke out, the Royal Mamluks he sent to the battlefield as the general reserve had uneven quality. In order to make up for the serious shortage of numbers, the Sheikh could only let new apprentices join the formation. As a result, many so-called elites were actually a group of half-grown children, and the training time might be slightly longer than that of ordinary conscripted legionnaires. Their actual combat performance was naturally not guaranteed.

After knowing this, Guo Kang finally understood why the enemy behaved so strangely at that time.

Economic and military problems further shook the Mamluks' rule. In the plague of 1410, the Palestinian countryside was not greatly affected, but the Sultan wanted to impose the tax losses in the city on the surviving villagers to ensure that military spending would not decrease. As a result, people fled the villages to avoid taxes. The former farming areas even began to become nomadic.

When the Purple Tent Khanate and the Syrian warlords were preparing to move south, Egypt had no intention of moving north, and the locals were completely in a lying-down mentality, probably because they had been tormented so badly before. Both the local lords and the ordinary people really didn't want to fight anymore.

If we look into the future, this trend will not stop, but will continue for another hundred years until the Mamluk regime falls, because the Black Death will continue to break out in the future.

In 1460, the Black Death killed 1400 Royal Mamluks; an outbreak in 1476 killed 2000; and in 1497, another 1000 Royal Mamluks died of the plague. Sultan Qaitbay, the longest-serving Sultan of the Burji dynasty, once tried to restore the economy and military, but more than of his Mamluks died in the plague. Historians bluntly recorded that "the castles of the Royal Mamluks were empty because they were all dead." All efforts ultimately failed.

In the international situation, the Mamluk regime has also been in a passive position for a long time.

The remaining forces in Andalusia had been seeking help from all directions for decades. Originally, the Mamluks, as the most powerful Muslim regime in the area, were their main target for help. The Sultan at the time did have the idea of ​​sending troops to support and interrupt the Crusader "reconquest" movement.

However, the loss of soldiers caused by the Black Death made the Mamluk army lose the ability to cross the sea for an expedition, and the plan was ultimately abandoned, failing to stop the enemy from continuing to advance southward. The Andalusians were desperate and tried all kinds of treatment, and eventually they all found their way to Dadu, which led to what happened next.

In history, the Mamluks never recovered until their demise. Due to economic collapse and insufficient military spending, the Mamluks did not even have large-scale firearms for a long time. The Ottomans recorded that in the early years, the Mamluks had sufficient military pay and excellent weapons, and they always had the upper hand in their battles with the Mamluks. But in the 16th century, the Ottomans were facing a group of dull, frustrated, unpaid and outdated thugs.

By 1516, when the Ottomans and Mamluks fought a decisive battle, the Mamluks' tactics were still the traditional all-cavalry charge. Although these Mamluks still defeated the cannon fodder recruited by the Ottomans in one fell swoop, forcing the Janissaries into a tough battle and performing better than the Persian cavalry, they actually had no possibility of winning strategically.

If we want to avoid this situation and truly digest Egypt, rather than just use it as a cash machine like the Mamluks or the Ottomans who replaced them, we must first face this problem. According to previous world history, there will be another small-scale outbreak of the Black Death in the summer and autumn of 1414, which is not long. Guo Kang and others can certainly lead their troops to flee, but escaping alone will probably not solve the problem.

Therefore, Guo Kang also stepped up his efforts to sort out what resources were available, including materials, organizations, and even ideas, and he had to study and utilize them.

To be fair, the Muslim world of this era still has some advantages over the European Crusaders. Their medicine is more advanced and their organization is more complete. Both sides actually acknowledge this. But just like the Mamluks' overly conscientious execution of orders, which harmed everyone, this advantage also brought huge side effects.

During the first few attacks of the Black Death, the Egyptians had enough confidence in their doctors and priests. So after the plague broke out, unlike the Europeans who fled the cities, the Egyptians flocked to the cities because there were more abundant medical resources, more temples and clergy in the cities - in everyone's impression, the medical skills and prayers here should be able to save themselves.

However, the Black Death was still too advanced for the medical science of the time. This behavior not only failed to save the lives of the refugees, but also led to an increase in the population density in the city and a more serious infection.

Doctors and scholars had some vague understanding of the plague itself, knowing that the disease could be transmitted between people and between people and animals, but most of them believed that the route of transmission was polluted air.

The master of Old Sea Urchin and Idris, the historian Ibn Khaldun who summarized the periodic law, discovered that rats always behaved abnormally before the plague. However, this discovery was just based on intuition, and he himself could not find any direct connection between rat infestation and plague. As for how to deal with it, no one could come up with an effective solution.

Since medical measures have no effect, everyone from Sudanese to ordinary people can only turn to religion. But even modern people have found that religious efforts are also ineffective.

There are some items about plague in the Hadith. For example, believers are required not to go to the place where the plague breaks out; if the plague breaks out in their place, they should not flee in a hurry. The old prophet also told everyone that the plague is also a sign of becoming a martyr, and believers who died in the plague are also considered martyrs. Therefore, when the plague occurs, Muslim believers are better managed than the Franks. Some pious people are also willing to stay at risk and actively participate in prevention and control activities.

Many of these rules are summaries of the survival experience of old prophets, and they are very valuable for people at that time to deal with various disasters. However, after hundreds of years, many places are still relying on their old advantages. Those places with advantages often fail to continue to develop, and even go in an abstract direction.

When the Black Death broke out, the helpless Sultan turned to the jurists for help, asking them whether this was really Huda's punishment for the people. After analysis, the jurists believed that this was because the people were committing adultery, especially Egyptian women, who even flirted and committed adultery in the streets during the day.

The Sultan then issued an order that all women, except the elderly, were forbidden to go out, and patrols were organized to beat up any women they saw on the street. In addition, drinking and gambling were strictly prohibited in an attempt to appease Huda.

However, the plague did not stop there. In fact, the death toll of women was much lower than that of men. The Sultan was very confused about this, and the jurists could not explain why.

In addition, they have tried various strange methods. In addition to restricting and discriminating against women, they have also formulated discriminatory policies, requiring pagans of the Dhimmi class to wear strange clothes and wear clear signs.

These measures also did not achieve clear results. However, compared with their European counterparts, the Mamluks were generally more... simple. Finding that discrimination was useless, they stopped discriminating. Therefore, these policies did not last long and gradually fell into disuse...

In this environment, it will probably take some effort to do a good job of prevention and control.

According to later descriptions, it seemed that as long as everyone lay down and waited for death, and let the Black Death take away those unlucky people, the plague would soon disappear on its own, leaving behind a world that was more suitable for the development of industry and capitalism.

But judging from the current information, this certainly cannot be the case.

Whether in Europe or the Middle East, the Black Death did not suddenly disappear, but continued to bleed society. The situation in Egypt was already serious enough, and the conditions in Europe were even worse. Guo Kang would not believe that there was not much loss. It could only be that there were no records in many places, so no records meant no deaths, and everyone successfully coexisted with the Black Death.

The Black Death did kill a large number of craftsmen, leading to a sharp increase in the wages of skilled workers. However, the same thing happened in Egypt, but the sudden increase in the status and wages of craftsmen did not lead to technological progress, but disrupted the market order and destroyed production. Because many people became more lazy and no longer studied how to improve technology and increase efficiency - anyway, employers had no other choice.

This inevitably made Guo Kang wonder whether the statement he had heard before was also a success myth that only proved the process after knowing the result. The actual situation is probably that the plague has no positive effect, and we must try our best to fight it. I guess making up this kind of joke is just to save face for ourselves.

Therefore, many things need to be started now.

(End of this chapter)