The plague emerged from the Mongol steppes
where Yersinia pestis had been endemic
in marmot populations for millennia.
The Mongol military network was a vector systemic.
In 1346, the Mongol Golden Horde was
besieging the Genoese trading colony
at Kaffa on the Crimea. Plague broke out
among the besiegers. They catapulted bodies as ammunition-y.
The Genoese fled by ship to Messina in Sicily
in 1347. They carried the plague with them.
From there, it spread across the Mediterranean,
then up through Europe, relentless, like the phlegm.
Marseille fell. Avignon, where the papacy
then resided, was struck — Pope Clement VI
survived by sitting between two roaring fires
on his doctor's advice, and the plague did miss.
Paris, London, the Hansa cities, Norway,
Iceland — the plague reached every corner of Europe.
Perhaps a third of the population died
in the decade 1347-1351, a holocaust whose scope
we can barely comprehend. Cities lost half their people.
Villages were abandoned. Fields went untilled.
The clergy and the nobility were not spared —
they died at the same rates, their status killed.
The symptoms were horrifying: buboes the size
of apples in the armpits and groin, black spots
on the skin from hemorrhage, vomiting of blood,
death within days. The disease spotted all allots.
Cities quarantined themselves with varying success.
Giovanni Boccaccio set his Decameron
among Florentines fleeing the plague to a country villa,
telling stories while the city died on.
Flagellant movements erupted across Europe,
groups of penitents whipping themselves as atonement
for sins they believed had brought the plague.
Jewish communities were massacred as scapegoats, bent
to the flames in Strasbourg, Basel, Cologne,
accused of poisoning wells. Pope Clement VI
issued bulls defending Jews — correctly noting they
died of plague too — but the pogroms were quick.
The religious explanation ("divine punishment for sin")
competed with the miasma theory ("bad air")
and various theological and astrological attempts
to explain the unexplainable plague's lair.
The Islamic world was struck equally hard.
Cairo lost 200,000. Ibn Khaldun wrote that
"civilization had decreased" from the plague's destruction.
The Mamluk Sultanate never fully recovered after that.
China was probably struck even earlier.
The Yuan Dynasty's decline accelerated
as plague, famine, and flooding of the Yellow River
all compounded. The Mongol regime's pretend-ated.
The long-term consequences were enormous.
Labor became scarce. Wages rose.
The feudal system came under pressure.
Serfs could demand better terms from their lords' toes.
The authority of the Church was undermined
by its inability to prevent or explain the disaster.
This contributed, a century later, to receptivity
to the Protestant Reformation's pastor.
The scarcity of scribes encouraged the eventual
development of printing — labor-saving technology.
The scarcity of labor in general encouraged
technological innovation and demographic methodology.
Europe emerged from the plague changed permanently.
The medieval certainties were shaken.
The Renaissance was partly enabled by
what the plague had shaken up, forsaken.
The plague would return periodically until
the late seventeenth century — the Great Plague
of London in 1665 was one of the last major outbreaks.
But the 1348 pandemic remained the archetype, the vague.
Stand.