The Black Death, often called the largest pandemic in human history, is conventionally defined as the massive plague outbreak of 1346 to 1353 c.e. that struck the Black Sea and Mediterranean, extended into the Middle East, North Africa, and western Europe, and killed as much as half the total population of those regions. Yet genetic approaches to plague’s history have established that Yersinia pestis, the causative organism of plague, suddenly diverged in Central Asia at some point before the Black Death, splitting into four new branches—a divergence geneticists have called the “Big Bang.” Drawing on a “biological archive” of genetic evidence, I trace the bacterial descendants of the Big Bang proliferation, comparing that data to historical human activities in and around the area of plague’s emergence. The Mongols, whose empire emerged in 1206, unwittingly moved plague through Central Eurasia in the thirteenth, not the fourteenth, century. Grain shipments that the Mongols brought with them to several sieges, including the siege of Baghdad, were the most likely mechanism of transmission. The fourteenth century plague outbreaks represent local spillover events out of the new plague reservoirs seeded by the military campaigns of the thirteenth century.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Article
Monica Green;
(2021)
Global Health in a Semi-Globalized World: History of Infectious Diseases in the Medieval Period
(/isis/citation/CBB478133012/)
Article
Merle Eisenberg;
Lee Mordechai;
(2020)
The Justinianic Plague and Global Pandemics: The Making of the Plague Concept
(/isis/citation/CBB917568301/)
Book
Koch, Tom;
(2011)
Disease Maps: Epidemics on the Ground
(/isis/citation/CBB001250403/)
Book
Byrne, Joseph Patrick;
(2012)
Encyclopedia of the Black Death
(/isis/citation/CBB001251684/)
Article
Mischa Meier;
(2020)
The ‘Justinianic Plague’: An “Inconsequential Pandemic”? A Reply
(/isis/citation/CBB636142556/)
Article
Monica H. Green;
(2022)
A New Definition of the Black Death: Genetic Findings and Historical Interpretations
(/isis/citation/CBB997380355/)
Book
Lester K. Little;
(2008)
Plague and the End of Antiquity: The Pandemic of 541-750
(/isis/citation/CBB393953172/)
Book
Carol Symes;
Monica H. Green;
(2015)
Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World: Rethinking the Black Death
(/isis/citation/CBB034189025/)
Book
Mormando, Franco;
Worcester, Thomas W.;
(2007)
Piety and Plague: From Byzantium to the Baroque
(/isis/citation/CBB001023376/)
Thesis
Grigsby, Bryon Lee;
(2000)
“The doctour maketh this descriptioun”: The moral and social meanings of leprosy and bubonic plague in literary, theological, and medical texts of the English Middle Ages and Renaissance
(/isis/citation/CBB001560944/)
Article
Mauro Rubini;
Nunzia Libianchi;
Alessandro Gozzi;
Paola Zaio;
Elena Dellù;
(2021)
Infectious diseases in paleopathology: a methodological approach to epidemiological situations
(/isis/citation/CBB750208808/)
Article
Clark Spencer Larsen;
Fabian Crespo;
(2022)
Paleosyndemics: A Bioarchaeological and Biosocial Approach to Study Infectious Diseases in the Past
(/isis/citation/CBB022705043/)
Chapter
Mitchell, Piers D.;
(2011)
The Spread of Disease with the Crusades
(/isis/citation/CBB001251757/)
Chapter
Francesco M. Galassi;
Elena Percivaldi;
Luigi Ingaliso;
Veronica Papa;
Elena Varotto;
(2022)
Plague: from palæopathology to wax modelling
(/isis/citation/CBB607752752/)
Article
James Stark;
(2023)
Making Microbes: Theorizing the Invisible in Historical Scholarship
(/isis/citation/CBB108538466/)
Article
Sioban Nelson;
(2020)
Nursing infectious disease: a history with three lessons
(/isis/citation/CBB140801105/)
Article
Wesley Shrum;
John Aggrey;
Andre Campos;
Janaina Pamplona da Costa;
Jan Joseph;
Pablo Kreimer;
Rhiannon Kroeger;
Leandro Rodriguez Medina;
Paige Miller;
Antony Palackal;
Ana Pandal de la Peza;
Abou Traore;
(October 2020)
Who’s afraid of Ebola? Epidemic fires and locative fears in the Information Age
(/isis/citation/CBB307916719/)
Article
Brian Dolan;
(2020)
It Wasn't Supposed to Be a Coronavirus: The Quest for an Influenza A(h5n1)-Derived Vaccine and the Limits of Pandemic Preparedness
(/isis/citation/CBB603005256/)
Article
Anne-Emanuelle Birn;
(2020)
How to Have Narrative-Flipping History in a Pandemic: Views of/from Latin America
(/isis/citation/CBB573683614/)
Article
Abeysinghe, Sudeepa;
(2014)
An Uncertain Risk: The World Health Organization's Account of H1N1
(/isis/citation/CBB001420418/)
Be the first to comment!