Contents

Document 1

Oh God Save us... from the attacks of the plague and give us shelter. The plague frightened and killed. It began in the land of darkness [northern Asia].

China was not preserved from it, nor could the strongest fortress hinder it. The plague afflicted... India. It weighed upon... [modern-day Pakistan]. It seized... ensnared even the lands of the Uzbeks. How many backs did it break in… [central Asia]! The plague increased and spread further. It attacked the Persians... The plague destroyed... Cairo... It stilled all movement in Alexandria… Have patience with the fate of the plague, which leaves of seventy men only seven...

We ask God’s forgiveness for our souls’ bad inclination; the plague is surely part of His punishment... They said: the air’s corruption kills; I said: the love of corruption kills. How many sins and how many offenses does the crier call our attention to?... This plague is for the Muslims a martyrdom and a reward, and for the disbelievers a punishment and a rebuke. It has been established by our Prophet, God bless him and give him peace, that the plague-stricken are martyrs... If someone says it causes infection and destruction, say: God creates and recreates. If the liar disputes the matter of infection and tries to find an explanation, I say that the Prophet, on him be peace, said: who infected the first?

Document 2

In the year 1349, there occurred the greatest epidemic... and it was greater among the [Arabs] than among the Christians. In some lands everyone died... In other kingdoms and cities so many people perished... And for what this epidemic came, all wise teachers and physicians could only say that it was God’s will...

In the matter of this plague the Jews throughout the world were reviled and accused... of having caused it through the poison which they are said to have put into the water and the wells... and for this reason the Jews were burnt all the way from the Mediterranean into Germany...

Nevertheless, they tortured a number of Jews in Berne and Zofingen who then admitted that they had put poison into many wells, and they also found the poison in the wells. Thereupon, they burnt the Jews in many towns and wrote of this affair to Strasbourg, Freiburg, and Basel in order that they too should burn their Jews... in Basel the citizens marched to the city-hall and compelled the council to take an oath that they would burn the Jews and that they would allow no Jew to enter the city for the next two hundred years. Thereupon the Jews were arrested in all these places... So finally, the Bishop and the lords and the Imperial Cities agreed to do away with the Jews. The result was that they were burnt in many cities, and wherever they were expelled they were caught by the peasants and stabbed to death or drowned.

Document 3

In Florence the cleansing of the city from many impurities, the refusal of entrance to all sick folk, and the adoption of many precautions for the preservation of health; ... also... supplications addressed to God, and often repeated... in public procession and otherwise by the devout; towards the beginning of the spring of the said year the doleful effects of the pestilence began to be horribly apparent by symptoms that showed as if miraculous. Not such were they as in the East, where an issue of blood from the nose was a manifest sign of inevitable death; but in men and women alike it first betrayed itself by the emergence of certain tumors in the groin or the armpits... From the two said parts of the body this deadly [lump] soon began to... spread itself in all directions...; after which the form of the malady began to change, black spots or [purple] making their appearance in many cases on the arm or the thigh... And as the [lump] had been... infallible token of approaching death, such also were these spots on whomsoever they [showed] themselves.

whether it was that the disorder was of a nature to [able to] defy... treatment, or that the physicians were at fault—... in either case, not merely were those that covered few, but almost all within three days from the appearance of said symptoms, sooner or later, died, and in most cases without any fever or other attendant malady...

Document 4

If one asks “How can you admit the assertion, there is infection, when the revealed word [from Islamic teachings] denies this?” we answer that infection exists... confirmed by experience, research, insight and observation...

These are the elements of proof. For him who has treated or recognized this case... the man who has had contact with a patient infected with this disease must die, and that, on the other hand, the man who has had no contact remains healthy. So it is with the appearance of the illness in a house or quarter because of a garment or a vessel. Even an earring can destroy him who puts it in his ear, and all the inhabitants of his house... There is... the prison camp of the Muslims... in the Arsenal of Seville: there were thousands but the plague did not touch them although it practically destroyed the town itself. The report is also true that the itinerant nomads living in tents in North Africa and elsewhere remained healthy because there the air is not shut in and the corruption proceeding from it could only gain a slight hold...

But it belongs to principles which one may not ignore that a proof taken from tradition (Hadith), if observation and inspection are contrary, must be interpreted allegorically. In this matter it is essential that it should be interpreted in accordance with those who hold the theory of contagion.

Document 5

Plague is... caused by a specific organism (Bacillus pestis)... known in three forms… pneumonic (the lungs), bubonic (the lymph glands) and septicemic (the blood).

The disease is transmitted... by fleas, mainly from black rats and certain other rodents, ... It produces high fever, agonizing pain... and it is usually fatal within five or six days... [T]he 14th-century pandemic clearly began in 1348 in the ports of Italy... brought in by merchant ships from Black Sea ports. It gradually spread through Italy and in the next two years swept across Spain, France, England, central Europe and Scandinavia.

It advanced slowly... with deadliest effect in the crowded, unsanitary towns. Each year the epidemic rose to a peak in the late summer, when the fleas were most abundant, and subsided during the winter, only to break out anew in the spring.

The pandemic of 1348–1350 was followed by a long series of recurrent outbreaks all over Europe, coming at intervals of 10 years or less... It was long supposed... that an invasion of Europe early in the 18th century by brown rats, which killed off the smaller black rats, was responsible for the decline of the disease. More probably the answer must be sought in something that happened to the flea, the bacillus or the living conditions of the human host.

Document 6

The “Black Death” [refers to the] pandemic of plague that ravaged parts of Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe in the middle of the fourteenth century... [it] recurred in waves... through the eighteenth century…, on the basis of contemporary descriptions of its symptoms, that the Black Death should be identified as a massive epidemic of plague, a disease of rodents, caused by the bacillus Yersinia pestis, that can be transmitted to human beings by fleas.

The earliest indisputable evidence locates it in 1346 in the cities... of the Golden Horde, north and west of the Caspian Sea. Until recently, most historians have claimed, based on Arabic sources, that the epidemic originated somewhere to the east of the Caspian, in eastern Mongolia or Yunnan or Tibet, where plague is enzootic in various populations of wild rodents. From there it was supposed to have spread along the Mongol trade routes east to China, south to India, and west to the Kipchak Khanate, the Crimea, and Mediterranean.

Recently, however, John Norris (1977) has contested this account... Although Norris’s own theory that the Black Death originated to the south of the Caspian in Kurdistan or Iraq is highly speculative..., he is certainly correct that much more work needs to be done with Chinese and Mongol sources before we can say anything definite about the course of the Black Death before 1346 and its eastern geography and chronology after that date.

The epidemic’s westward trajectory, however, is well established. It reached the Crimea in the winter of 1346–7 and Constantinople shortly afterward. From there it followed two great, roughly circular paths. The first swirled counterclockwise south and east through the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East. The second circle described by the plague was greater in length and duration and moved clockwise, west and north and finally east again, through the western Mediterranean and Europe.

Document 7

… And what I found was this amazing new document that was discovered in 2007... published in its original Persian... this is a writer... working at the Ilkhanate court with the Mongols, and these are apparently his notes... And he describes the siege of Baghdad, which happened just a year after the siege of Lambasar [1257] and he says, in no uncertain terms, there was a massive outbreak of an epidemic at Baghdad... [the writer] also gave me a hint about what the mechanism of transmission was. the hint that al-Shirazi gave me is that right next to the Tian Shan Mountains there’s incredibly fertile land from which a very precious kind of millet is grown. The Mongols were importing that millet on their campaigns with them all the way into Central AsiaThat was the key, and that was my proposition is that that’s the mechanism by which the plague is actually moving.

So plague is... moving into new places, probably moving into new rodent hosts. And then getting transmitted a minimum of 1000 kilometers away and in some cases, very far distances. And then that’s the story of the Black Death that we usually tell as the western story that and that’s the gist of what I’m saying is the Black Death phenomenon started a century, almost a century and a half earlier than we previously believed it spread farther than we previously believed. And that we have probably had a lot of evidence already under our noses that we didn’t know how to read. Because nobody prior to the 19th century knew that Yersinia pestis existed. So if this is the story, we’re telling of the Black Death, that it starts in the 1340s, but the genetics is telling us a story that well, it started before the 1340s, how do we get those stories to sync? And what I realized is the way you get them to sync is expand your geography, expand your chronology, and then start to work on different levels. The Black Death comes in but then it didn’t just magically disappear. It didn’t disappear. It lasted for another 400 years in Europe and lasted for another, well, I’m suggesting 600 years in the Middle East.

Document 8

Researchers believe they have solved the nearly 700-year-old mystery of the origins of the Black Death, ...

The international team came together to work on the puzzle when Dr Philip Slavin, a historian at the University of Stirling, discovered evidence for a sudden surge in deaths in the late 1330s at two cemeteries near Lake Issyk-Kul in the north of modern-day Kyrgyzstan.

Among 467 tombstones dated between 1248 and 1345, Slavin traced a huge increase in deaths, with 118 stones dated 1338 or 1339. Inscriptions on some of the tombstones mentioned the cause of death as “mawtānā”, the Syriac language term for “pestilence”.

...

The investigation then passed over to specialists on ancient DNA... They extracted genetic material from the teeth of seven individuals who were buried at the cemeteries. Three of them contained DNA from Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes bubonic plague.

Full analysis of the bacterium’s genome found that it was a direct ancestor of the strain that caused the Black Death in Europe eight years later and, as a result, was probably the cause of death for more than half the population on the continent in the next decade or so.