Before the Black Death

The greatest impact on European culture was not the Fall of Rome, the mass (forced) adoption of Christianity, the creation of the Holy Roman Empire, or any other event that seemed to make widespread change. The biggest event to affect European culture took place over the course of a few years.

Before we get to the changes wrought by this biological disaster, let's talk about a "pre-Plague" event.

The Black Death (which we now know was a major wave of the Bubonic Plague) arrived in Italy on 12 Genoese ships in October 1347. This event is often mentioned as the start of the Black Death. It's a completely Euro-centric approach, though, and as you know, this blog sometimes reaches eastward to discuss other events and people outside of Western Europe. We should ask ourselves: where did the 12 ships come from, and where did they get the Plague?

Genoa had extensive trade routes on the Black Sea, and built ports to serve themselves. One of these was Kaffa, on the Crimean coast (now called Feodosia or Theodosia, its original name when founded by Greek colonists 2000 years before the events we're talking about). Kaffa's part in our story begins when a Venetian (we recently discussed the hostility between Venice and Genoa, but the ultimate result allowed Venetians to use Genoese ports) killed a Mongol official in 1343. Janibek Khan, current ruler of the Golden Horde, assembled an army to bring the Venetian, who went to Kaffa, to Mongol justice.

China had been suffering from the Plague, and an outbreak of it while Janibek Khan besieged Kaffa weakened the army and diminished his ability to assault the city. He ordered one final attack:

The dying Tartars, stunned and stupefied by the immensity of the disaster brought about by the disease, and realizing that they had no hope of escape, lost interest in the siege. But they ordered corpses to be placed in catapults and lobbed into the city in the hope that the intolerable stench would kill everyone inside. What seemed like mountains of dead were thrown into the city, and the Christians could not hide or flee or escape from them, although they dumped as many of the bodies as they could in the sea. And soon the rotting corpses tainted the air and poisoned the water supply, and the stench was so overwhelming that hardly one in several thousand was in a position to flee the remains of the Tartar army. Moreover one infected man could carry the poison to others, and infect people and places with the disease by look alone. No one knew, or could discover, a means of defense.

(You can see how little they understood the spread of disease.)

Is the story true? It comes from Gabriel de Mussis, a notary from Piacenza in northern Italy not too far from Genoa, who wrote an account of the Plague as it was happening (he survived it). He could easily have got it from the Genoese.

I've talked about the Plague quite a bit. Now we've talked about"pre-Plague." Tomorrow we'll get to "post-Plague."