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.