Ed West looks at what we know of the spread of the worst plague to hit western Europe in the 1300s:
Map showing the spread of the Black Death in Europe between 1346 and 1353.
Map by Flappiefh via Wikimedia Commons.
There had never been a terror like it, and the “Great Mortality” as it was known — and much later, the “Black Death” — has seared itself in the European imagination. It changed the culture and tested the institutions of the time, and as we anxiously await the arrival of another — thankfully far less deadly — contagion from Italy its legacy and impact are worth remembering.
Epidemics have been around as long as civilization. Plaga — from the Greek for “strike” or “hit” — devastated classical Athens in the 5th century BC, when the historian Thucydides nursed sufferers; the Antonine Plague — probably smallpox or measles — killed as many as five million Romans at the empire’s peak. Far more deadly was the Plague of Justinian in the sixth century, which had a toll of 25 million and emptied whole regions of the eastern (Byzantine) Empire. Only in the 21st century did researchers confirm that this was the same illness that would appear eight centuries later — the Bubonic Plague.
Empires were particularly affected by these horrific epidemics, because empires are a form of globalisation — bringing different people into contact with each other and, more dangerously, into contact with other mammals, who act as disease vectors.
Another danger is climate change, which might turn a mild virus into a deadly one, or cause disease-carrying animals to migrate. This is what happened during the 14th century when the northern hemisphere became considerably cooler, soon after the Mongols had created the largest contiguous empire in history.
Genghis Khan’s people have generally received a historical bad press — people are more likely to recall the pyramid of skulls and the Tigris flowing black and red — yet their rule had opened up trade routes, allowing goods and people to cross Asia. Whether brought at the point of a sword or a trade deal, globalisation always brings the new: new cultures, new ideas, new languages and new pathogens.
Yersinia pestis had been living on gerbils and other rodents in central Asia, but unstable climate conditions in 1330s caused the disease to jump onto the rat flea. It was killing people by 1339, and in the mid-1340s Christians first heard of a disease raging in the Islamic world, which some at least took as divine punishment for the crusades.
After two centuries of Holy War this was understandable, yet hatred was not universal and during these conflicts Italian merchants had continually done business with Muslims, much to the Church’s fury. Now this trade, once the source of prosperity and peace, proved deadly: plague reached Europe via the Genovese colony of Caffa on the Black Sea (now Feodosiya, in the Ukraine). In October 1347, four ships escaping the diseased city had turned up in Sicily, condemning Italy to its fate.
