From the Tian Shan to Crimea: Dynamics of Plague Spread during the Early Stages of the Black Death, 1338-46

Abstract

The present paper aims to reconstruct tentative ways, in which the Black Death (the first wave of the Second Plague Pandemic) spread from its now-established home in the Tian Shan region to Western Eurasia between c.1338/41 and 1346. On the basis of all the available evidence-textual, palaeogenetic, archaeological, topographic, numismatic and palaeoclimatalogical-the article argues for two phases of the plague spread: (1) the slow phase of c.1338/41-45, hindered by political and commercial crises in the Mongol Empire, but especially the Chaghadaid khanate, as well as by local environmental conditions and (2) the fast phase of 1345-6, once the plague reached the territories of the Golden Horde. As it will be argued, commercial networks, both long-distance and local, across long-distance trade routes (so-called 'Silk Roads') played a paramount role in facilitating the spread of the plague. Although not claiming to have solved the mystery of the westbound plague spread, the paper aims to provide a first full-scale study of this kind, raising new research questions and forming a starting point for future research.