In 1198, Time Patrol milieu HQ moves from Mainz in the Holy Roman Empire to Rome.
In 1137, Herr Freiagent Manson Everard visits the handsome, well-furnished, wainscotted office of milieu director Otto Koch in Mainz.
Through an unglazed window, three senses are assaulted:
summer daylight;
rumblimg;
groaning;
creaking;
clopping;
chattering;
whistling;
buzzing;
odors of hearths, manure, privies and graveyards (!);
sight of -
"...a narrow, filthy, bustling street...a beautiful half-timbered facade..." (p. 312)
- and majestic cathedral towers.
This is still the history guarded by the Patrol although a change will occur later in 1137.
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Those odors of "manure, privies, and graveyards" brings up why most cities were such pits of disease till at least the later 19th century: inadequate knowledge of hygiene and of how diseases were spread.
Well, the Romans did have higher standards of hygiene, but that kind of experience or knowledge was lost after the Empire fell.
Ad astra! Sean
Yup.
Demographically, the healthiest large city in the world before 1800 was Edo (our Tokyo), in Japan -- also probably the largest city in the world (about 1m people), and certainly among the top 3.
Edo had almost exactly as many births as deaths among its native-born population.(*)
London in the same period varied between 3x and 5x as many deaths as births, which was far more typical.
Preindustrial cities ate human beings; they were parasitic on the countryside to sustain themselves.
(*) Japan had a roughly static population after 1700, going up and down a little year-by-year, after the rapid growth of the early Tokugawa period. It was a very advanced country by preindustrial standards, and kept itself above the Malthusian level by rigorous population control, careful forestry practices, advanced handicrafts, an agriculture that recycled -everything- (even forest litter was a commodity, bought and sold as fertilizer), and by an ethos of restraint and frugality.
Edo was extremely clean because every scrap of human and animal waste was collected and shipped out to the countryside to be composted and put on the fields.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And the cleanliness and efficiency of Tokugawa Japan was only possible due to both a hard and dictatorial gov't imposing a rigorous code of law and behavior and to deliberately isolating Japan from the outside world.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: yeah, London, cesspit that it was, was a much more open and laissez-faire place.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And that was practically true of all other major Western cities as well, cesspits tho THEY were too!
Ad astra! Sean
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