Although it is not clear precisely where the ultimate origin of the disease of the mid-Fourteenth Century lay, plague spread rapidly in the 1340s as the outbreak moved out of the steppes through Europe, Iran, the Middle East, Egypt, and the Arabian peninsula.[1] It really took hold in 1346, when what an Italian contemporary described as “a mysterious illness that brought sudden death” began to sweep through the Golden Horde by the Black Sea. A Mongol army laying siege to the Genoese trading post of Caffa following a dispute about trade terms was annihilated by illness that killed “thousands and thousands every day,” according to one commentator. Before withdrawing, however, “they ordered corpses to be placed in catapults and lobbed into the city in the hope that the intolerable stench would kill everyone inside.” Rather than being overwhelmed by the smell, it was the highly contagious disease that caught hold. Unknowingly, the Mongols had turned to biological warfare to defeat their enemy.[2]

From Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2016 (first published in 2015), p. 188.

Footnotes

1. Some scholars suggest the earliest identification may come from tombstones in a cemetery in eastern Kyrgyzstan dating from the 1330s (see S. Berry and N. Gulade, “La Peste noire dans l’Occident chrétien et musulman, 1347-1353,” Canadian Bulletin of Medical History, Vol. 25, No. 2, 2008, p. 466). However, this is based on a misunderstanding (see J. Norris, “East or West? The Geographic Origin of the Black Death,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Vol. 51, 1977, pp. 1-24).

2. G. de Mussis, The Black Death, Manchester: 2001, pp. 14-17; M. Wheelis, “Biological Warfare at the 1346 Siege of Caffa,” Emerging Infectious Diseases, Vol. 8, No. 9, 2002, pp. 971-975.