THE BLACK PLAGUE

"In the middle of the 14th century, ... the entire inhabited world changed.... It was as if the voice of existence in the world called for oblivion ... and the world had responded to its call...." Thus did the celebrated Moroccan historian Ibn Khaldun describe in 1400 the impact of what Europeans of later centuries called the Black Death. Ibn Khaldun's Description of the Black Death The label is an apt one. Even the least virulent form of the disease, the bubonic plague, killed most who contracted it. Bubonic plague was not new to Eurasia in the 14th century. It had ravaged Arabia, Egypt, Justinian’s Roman Empire, and Ireland between 542 and 664 CE. When it again became active in the Old World during the mid-1300s, however, the bacillus Pasteurella pestis produced two additional disease variants even deadlier and more contagious than the bubonic plague. The pneumonic and septicaemic plagues, spread through air-born contact, killed within days or hours, and left no survivors. Together, the three plagues decimated the communities they touched, killing altogether perhaps a third of the Old World’s population. Mapping the spread of this "Black Death" across the Eurasian landscape is like drawing a macabre facsimile of the Old World’s 14th century trade routes. Sometime between the late 1320s and 1338, the disease appeared amongst nomadic Mongol horsemen who controlled the ancient Silk Road through the Gobi Desert. Moving out from the central Asian steppes with cargoes of silks and furs, the pestilence travelled along the old caravans roads into China, India, and the West. Astrakhan, on the Volga River, succumbed to the plague in 1345.   Map depicting the spread of the Black Plague in Asia Minor and Europe Picture of skeletons By 1346, the disease had arrived in the Crimea, where it spread quickly through a Tartar army that was busy besieging a Genoese trading post on the Black Sea. According to one Italian writer, the dying soldiers used their catapults to lob plague-ridden corpses into the Genoese stronghold. As their comrades began to die, the terrified Genoese fled homeward. In January 1348, the Black Plague entered Genoa. A few weeks later, it infiltrated Pisa, and then moved inland to Rome and Tuscany. By this time, the malady had been rampant in Sicily for a year, and was quickly advancing northward up the Italian peninsula, and east and south to Tunis, Corsica, Sardinia, and the Iberian peninsula. Borne by rats, unescorted fleas, and infected sailors, it soon reached the docks of France’s Atlantic trading ports. In early summer of 1348, it crossed the English Channel with a shipment of Bordeaux wines. Within a year, it had reached the Norwegian coast, and the Hanseatic towns of Germany, and was sweeping inland through Northern Africa, Scotland, and the European mainland. By 1352, the dreaded symptoms of the Plague were appearing in the streets of Moscow. Boccaccio’s commentary on the city of Florence during the height of the plague epidemic offers grim testimony to the psychological and physical impacts of the disease in communities throughout Eurasia and Northern Africa. Boccaccio's Account of the Black Plague in Florence As Ibn Khaldun observed, the Old World had changed considerably by the end of the 1300s. The changes he noted, however, did not flow exclusively from the carnage inflicted by the Black Death of the mid-14th century. Modern historians would argue that the Plague merely hastened, and helped to direct political, social and cultural transformations already in progress in Europe, the Islamic Middle East, Greater India, and China. As the Black Death cast its first dark shadows across Eurasia, communities turned inward. Contacts within and between the Old World’s cultural areas briefly contracted geographically and slowed in intensity. Epidemics of plague continued to disrupt various regions of the Old World until the mid-17th century. However, by the late 1300s, countries from Europe to China had begun to recover from the disease’s savage initial onslaught.

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