Talk:Spanish Scourge (Papatlaca)

Some Musings on The Effect on Europe

 * Almost certainly the Almohads, with Ottoman support, would have re-taken Spain.


 * Spanish gold and the power of Phillip I and II propped up the Habsburgs, who were the tyrant family of Europe from the early sixteenth century until the Thirty Years War. In ATL, the Habsburgs would have remained one noble family among many.  There would not have been a Thirty Years War.


 * If mortality rates declined as the disease spread (does anyone know if this is realistic?), it would have left Skandanavia, the Ottomans and Persia a lot less damaged than Western Europe. Given the timing, this would probably have resulted in a real Swedish Empire which had some durability and might have lasted a century or more.  Overall, Europe would have been dominated by the East rather than the West well into the Eighteenth Century.  However, I'm not sure that this assumption of a spread gradient is realistic, see below.


 * I would expect the Dutch, with their close commercial ties to Spain (leading to conquest in the early sixteenth century OTL) and high population densities would be among the most devastated.

--Josh

How Plagues Spread: Unevenly?
Looking at some historical plagues, such as the Wikipedia articles on the Spanish FluSpanish Flu and SmallpoxSmallpox shows that in real history pandemics spread unevenly. Particularly, this quote on the Spanish Flu is telling:

"While it usually only infected less than 1/3 of the population in most places and killed only a fraction of those infected, there were a number of towns in several countries where the entire population was wiped out."

One would expect the spread of Papatlaca in Europe to follow a similar "randomness". We could hypothesize that:

The large Southern and Western port cities would be hit first. So, Madrid and the other Spanish ports, followed by London, Amsterdam, Nice, Venice, Genoa, Cadiz, Naples, etc. The disease would have spread inland from there and made odd leaps as it was spread by single carriers to new locations (ironically the black death was sometimes spread by messengers warning of the disease; we'd expect the same here). The last port cities to be affected would be those in the ectreme North (Copenhagen, Trondheim, Wend, etc.) and East (Odessa, Istanbul, Acre, Alexandria) which did not have a lot of direct sea trade with the Southern ports. It would be largely a matter of chance, for example, whether Papatlaca reached Odessa first by sea or overland, although sea is more likely.

The date of arrival of the disease would have no direct bearing on its lethality. Instead, we'd expect a random distribution based on genetic predisposition, reactions, environment, and timing. Given that the first factor would be far more localized in medieval times than modern, we could expect odd circumstances like, say, the entirety of West Flanders being wiped out while Antwerp suffers only minority casualties. These differences would re-draw Europe as mostly unharmed principalities invaded their devastated neighbors.

For example, if Polish casualties were high and Swedish not, Sweden would probably have conquered Poland. At opposites, if Papatlaca wiped out most of the Swedish royalty, then Poland could have successfully pressed its claim to Swedish inheritance. And so on.

The only way in which areas hit by the disease later would have suffered lower casualties would be if knowledge of treatment had spread first. However, given medieval European approaches to medicine in general, I find it far more likely that the disease would have greatly outpaced any effective treatment plans.

Arab knowledge of medicine was far superior to European, as was Arab hygene. So it is possible that casualties in the Ottoman Empire, Persia and the Almohads might have been significantly lower than in Europe. This would certainly have changed the balance of power. For example, we might expect in this timeline that the Ottomans successfully conquered Vienna. Of course, if middle eastern peoples turned out to be especially vulnerable to the disease, all bets are off.

--Josh