Forget the dog.
Man's most loyal companion during the second millenium has been the street rat -- a wily, promiscuous crature that seems perfectly content to live in the dank bowels of humanity and thrive off civilization's waste.
While revolting to most people, the street rat must be admired for its evolutionary efficiency, its ability to eat and to breed while constantly under attack by the inhabitants of civlization. In ideal conditions a street rat can produce 200 offspring a year, each an incredibly destructive animal, with a constant need to chew to keep in check teeth that can grow up to five inches a year.
It's a midnight cruiser, emerging when most of civilizstion sleeps. It's a creature of habit, never traveling more than 150 yards from where it was born and rarely willing to try new foods, making poison "iffy" at best.
Perhaps most amazing, the rat is at once contortionist and acrobat, with a skeletal structure that allows it to squeeze into any space that it can fit its tiny head. (The urban legend is true: rats can easily swim against the stream of effluence and pop out of someone's toilet.)
If not admired, the rat at least earns grudging respect and must be accorded its due for doing somethng that few other people or creatures have ever come close to doing: bringing humankind to its knees and nearly destroying civilization.
In 1346, the world was firmly entrenched in the Middle Ages when word of a terrifying disease that was overwhelming China began filtering into ports and trading cities throughout Europe.The Pestilence, it was being called. The Great Mortality, Black Death, The Bubonic Plague.
Within five years, 25 million Europeans were dead -- one third of Europe's entire population. Another 5 million Chinese were dead. Inhabitants of India and along the Great Silk trading route were wiped out.
Somewhere in China, in the early 1330's a bacteria associated with the plague that had benignly been living in the blood ofblack rats (or roof rats) for centuries inexplicably became active. The rat's blood was sucked into flea stomachs and like a medieval hypodermic needle, the deadly contagion was injected into humans by the regurgitating fleas. (One theory about the plague has it that fleas normally don't like human blood but were forced to imbibe it because of a shortage of creatures more to flea's taste.)
No one in the 1300's knew this, of course. All they knew was fear. Theories about how the plague spread ranged from a foul wind cause be a recent earthquake to a new alignment of the planets. One doctor, it was said, put forth a theory that would become a modern-day cliche "Looks could kill," he postulated.
Old World-wide panic was fueled by the plague's amazingly quick and mysterious onset. Historians believe the disease got its foothold in Eurpe in 1346, when Asian Tartars retaliated against Westerners for bringing them the plague by laying siege to the Genoese city of Kaffa.
The Tartars tried to strangle life from the city by cutting off its supplies. Then, to the delight of those under siege, the Tartars began to die. No one knew then that the plague had arrived. His army now besieged itself, the Tartar commander decided to withdraw, but not before he committed the first recorded act of germ warfare in history: He began catapulting the diseased carcasses of his army into the city.
Plague victims elicited little sympathy from the healthy, particularly because the plague caused such a nasty death. Egg-sized swelling began near where the fleas initially burrowed in the skin. Some suffered symptoms of pneumonia. Others had rashes. But common to all was a putrid smell coming from a victim's wounds, sweat glands -- even from a person's breath.
The world fell to ghosts. Historians wrote of church bells that stopped tolling because there were too many dead to toll for, of empty castles and empty fields. Of ships foundering crewless along the coasts.
As inexplicably as it started, it stopped in 1350. While minor outbreaks continued, the world had survived. A new world emerged. It was one more skeptical of religon, because the church had no explanation for what had happened. And historians say the near total loss of scholars left a fear that education itself had almost died, and spurred a building boom of new universities -- jump-starting the Renaissance.
All of this, compliments of the rat.
