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May 6, 2024 · Black Death, pandemic that ravaged Europe between 1347 and 1351, taking a proportionately greater toll of life than any other known epidemic or war up to that time. The Black Death is widely thought to have been the result of plague, caused by infection with the bacterium Yersinia pestis.
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Jul 21, 2020 · Plague is an effect of civilization. The waves of sickness through human history in the past 5,000 years (and not before) attest to this, and the outbreaks often became more devastating the bigger ...
- Contributor
- Overview
- First read: preview and skimming for gist
- Second read: key ideas and understanding content
- Third read: evaluating and corroborating
- Trade Networks and the Black Death
- Spread the word, but cover your mouth
- The Pax Mongolica
- Yersinia pestis: The Black Death
- Merchants of death: A trade plague
- A specter haunting Eurasia
Disease has always plagued human communities. One of the biggest epidemics in world history was started by one of the smallest animals and spread by trade networks in the world’s largest empire.
The article below uses “Three Close Reads”. If you want to learn more about this strategy, click here.
Before you read the article, you should skim it first. The skim should be very quick and give you the gist (general idea) of what the article is about. You should be looking at the title, author, headings, pictures, and opening sentences of paragraphs for the gist.
Now that you’ve skimmed the article, you should preview the questions you will be answering. These questions will help you get a better understanding of the concepts and arguments that are presented in the article. Keep in mind that when you read the article, it is a good idea to write down any vocab you see in the article that is unfamiliar to you.
By the end of the second close read, you should be able to answer the following questions:
1.How did the success of the Mongol state help the Black Death spread?
2.How many people are estimated to have died from the plague?
3.What do gerbils have to do with plague?
4.Where was plague the worst? Why?
Finally, here are some questions that will help you focus on why this article matters and how it connects to other content you’ve studied.
At the end of the third read, you should be able to respond to these questions:
1.In the production and distribution narrative, we generally hear about expanded trade routes as a purely good thing. How does this article affect that view?
2.We have previously studied the ideas of collapse, recovery, and restructuring. What would you call the results of the Black Death collapse? What collapsed? What didn’t? What kind of recovery would you expect to see in different regions of Afro-Eurasia?
By Bennett Sherry
Disease has always plagued human communities. One of the biggest epidemics in world history was started by one of the smallest animals and spread by trade networks in the world’s largest empire.
In 2008, up to 30 million computers were infected by the Conficker worm, one of the worst computer viruses ever. It caused billions of dollars in damages and disrupted government agencies and businesses all around the world. We like to think that more connection is good, that the more people talk to each other, the better the world will be. Today though, with a global Internet that connects billions of devices, viruses like Conficker can plague millions of people in minutes. Our connections help us to communicate, but they also make us vulnerable.
The Internet of the fourteenth century was the Silk Road. The Silk Road was less of a road than it was a network. Rather than thinking of it as a single route linking China to Europe, we should think of the Silk Road as a bunch of merchants and cities, trading posts and oases, ports and paths that were connected to each other by trade. In other words, think of it as the Silk Network, not the Silk Road. And like the networked Internet of the twenty-first century, ideas, information, goods, and money all traveled along the linkages of the Silk Network. But these long-distance trade connections, like the connected devices of our digital age, also allowed diseases to spread farther and faster than ever before. The worst of these was an outbreak of bubonic plague in the fourteenth century known as the Black Death.
The Pax Mongolica was a period from the mid-thirteenth to the mid-fourteenth century. By this time the Mongol Empire had split into four areas. Each was ruled by a "khan." The Mongol Khans connected much of Europe and Asia's people and enforced a general peace ("Pax" means peace in Latin). This unusually war-free time allowed more trade connections to develop all across what are now Africa, Europe and Asia, also known as Afro-Eurasia. Earlier Mongol conquests disrupted trade routes with their violence. However, the huge empire created by those conquests later connected more people than ever before under one administrative umbrella.
Once the Mongol Khans settled down and tried to rule their vast empire, they grew increasingly concerned about tax revenue. One of the best sources of taxation came from trade. So, the Mongol Khans wanted to make trade easier and safer. For more than a century, the Mongol Empire ensured that trade networks grew and merchants prospered. The Mongols severely punished anyone who dared threaten the trade. But the flourishing of trade connections also carried the seeds of disaster.
The fourteenth-century Black Death, or bubonic plague, epidemic was caused by the Yersinia pestis bacterium. These bacteria sometimes spread to humans through contact with the fluids of an infected person, but more commonly it is spread by flea bites. The bacteria get transferred to humans when fleas vomit into our bloodstreams before feeding. The ...
Human interaction with animals and the environment also played a role in spreading the plague. For example, in Central Asia (the region west of China and south of Russia), the fleas that carried the bacteria lived on a species of rodent known as great gerbils. Just a small temperature increase, as little as 1 degree Celsius, can increase the presence of the bacteria in the gerbils by up to 50 percent. A change in climate in the middle of the fourteenth century likely helped the disease to spread out from Central Asia.
Yersinia pestis began in Central Asia's grasslands. The disease spread through flea bites. But the fleas hitched a ride out of Central Asia on the backs of both traders and camels traveling with trade caravans. From these hosts, the fleas spread to rodents traveling with the caravans and to rats that infested trading ships. Once ships carrying plague rats and merchants arrived in other trading ports, the plague spread like wildfire. The plague likely arrived in the Mediterranean onboard Italian merchant ships. The Pax Mongolica made the Italian city-states of Venice and Genoa extremely wealthy and powerful. During this period Marco Polo of Venice traveled through the Mongol Empire. Plenty of other Italian merchants traveled east, buying luxuries in Indian ports like Calicut. The unifying rule of the Mongol Empire made these remarkably diverse interactions possible. But it also meant that, after people mingled, they brought both their cargoes of luxuries and plague-infected rats back to diverse and distant lands. Had the Mongol Empire not interconnected the world through trade and conquest, it is unlikely that the Black Death would have been so deadly or so widespread.
The Black Death killed many people in the fourteenth century. As many as 100 million people across Afro-Eurasia may have died from the plague. An epidemic in the 21st century on the scale of the Black Death would kill between 1 billion and 2 billion people.
The devastation caused by the plague led to sharp declines in production and trade all over Afro-Eurasia. Even places unaffected by the epidemic suffered from disruptions to long-distance trade.
Learning Objectives. By the end of this section, you will be able to: Identify the origins and characteristics of the bubonic plague. Describe the response to the Black Death in Asia and North Africa. Describe the response to the Black Death in Europe.
Dec 10, 2020 · 15k Accesses. 8 Citations. 90 Altmetric. Metrics. Abstract. One of the most devastating environmental consequences of war is the disruption of peacetime human–microbe relationships, leading to...
