Did the black death rampage across the world a century earlier than we thought? | Hacker News Reader

Did the black death rampage across the world a century earlier than we thought?

smithsonianmag.com

95 pointsbenbreen25 comments

The Smithsonian article is based on the paper The Four Black Deaths [1] by Monica H. Green:

> The Mongols, whose empire emerged in 1206, unwittingly moved plague through Central Eurasia in the thirteenth, not the fourteenth, century. Grain shipments that the Mongols brought with them to several sieges, including the siege of Baghdad, were the most likely mechanism of transmission. The fourteenth century plague outbreaks represent local spillover events out of the new plague reservoirs seeded by the military campaigns of the thirteenth century.

[1] https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/125/5/1601/604...

There's a really good Reddit thread on his there's little evidence the plague started in East Asia at all (though it definitely got there later)

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8lkygx/why_c...

Just a note that’s super interesting: one of the comments points to a 50% reduction in China’s population in the 13th Century census which could potentially line up with this author’s theory of it starting there a century earlier. That said, it could also be part of what led her down that road.

The 13th century was a tumultuous time in China. The region was divided into Song and Jin dynasties, with constant warfare between them and against rebelling vassal states even before Genghis Khan appeared on the scene.

When the Mongols arrived, Song formed an alliance with them and participated in a joint campaign that led to the collapse of Jin. But the Mongols didn't stop there, so what followed was an exhausting 40-year war between Song and the Mongols for control of Southern China. Nearly every other country in the region was involved in this war at one point or another, from Vietnam to Korea to Japan. Yunnan province, where the Plague is/was often said to have originated, was its own country back then and was an important Mongol ally as well.

There's no doubt that all this warfare laid a fertile ground for pestilence to spread. But a lot of people would have either died or went into hiding just because of the war. This makes it very difficult to say how many people died of the Plague versus the war.

so the census chroniclers, being part of the communities they were surveying, just went with a hunch? that half the population that was here last time we did this whole census thing is probably just hiding, and we're not sure where they are, so we just won't count them, or make a note of the (weird) fact that every second person just is playing hide-and-seek reallllllly well, and i guess we didn't invent ollyollyoxenfree yet, so we'll just not count them, and not note that on all of our records. at all.

gee that's weird, we won't mention that it's just people hiding.

is that a more reasonable explanation than 50% of everyone dying? really?

I think the parent’s point was there are other explanations for how folks could’ve died, not that people were hiding from census counters.

I've always wondered if there was a link between "The Mongolian invasion wipes out ~25% of Asia" that happened shortly before "the Black Plague wipes out ~25% of Europe."

While I don't doubt the Mongol brutality, the death tolls just seem so much higher than similar events that an additional factor seemed plausible.

Well, war, famine and pestilence has been an unholy trinity since forever, with direct military actions having actually the smallest body count of the three.

IIRC - the First World War (1914-1918) was the first big conflict that killed more people with bombs and guns than through hunger and disease.

Our ancestors would count disease deaths that happened during the war towards the total death toll.

The end of WW1 overlaps the beginning of the 1918 flu pandemic which killed far more people. Hard to believe the close quarters of trench warfare didn’t contribute.

It’s not just the trenches, it’s the the massive movement of people that also contributed.

Exporting hundreds of thousands or even millions of healthy young soldiers around the world with a dose of an infectious disease is a perfect recipe.

They last a long time and give diseases lots of time to spread in the close quarters of ships and barracks and then their homes.

I saw a video that claimed it started with some British Chinese troops being moved through Canada like cattle in railway cars. There was already an outbreak in China the year before. From there it spread to all the army bases in the U.S. who then took it to Europe.

"troops being moved through Canada like cattle in railway cars"

Interestingly, Austrian-Hungarian soldiers were also transported to the front in cattle cars (8 Pferde oder 48 Mann = 8 horses or 48 men in a car) and were very jealous of the Germans whose military bureaucracy tried to provide normal passenger railway cars to their troops if possible. The difference was very obvious in the places where the two armies fought side by side, such as Galicia.

Btw, here is were I heard it, not sure how true it is: https://youtu.be/XQ9WX4qVxEo

I believe the first war with more deaths from battle than disease was the second world war.

I don’t think anybody died from hunger or disease in the Anglo-Zanzibar War from 1896 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Zanzibar_War)

There may be other short small wars in which arms killed the majority of victims.

I previously read in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Baghdad_(1258)#Destru...

> Some modern historians have cast some doubt on the vehemently anti-Mongol medieval sources.[46] George Lane (SOAS), for example, doubts the Grand Library was destroyed as the learned members of the Mongol command such as Nasir al-Din Tusi would not have allowed it, and that disease was the major cause of death.[47] Primary sources state that Tusi saved thousands of volumes and installed them into a building in Marāgheh.

Well, the plague being the plague certainly lends credence to this.

It is interesting to consider that the Mongol conquests in Asia, much like the Spanish conquests in America, were facilitated by a weapon they did not know they had.

It’s also interesting in that is the opposite of the book “Guns, germs and steel” likes to tell. Apparently China is the place where the disease come from due to being more urbanized early with more interactions with domesticated animals. Europe just had enough interactions with Asia to have all the disease exported to them and were the first to do real exploration.

If I remember correctly, the thesis of that booked talked about the Old World more broadly. This would include Europe, China, and the North coast of Africa as the disease producing centers.

Here's a twitter thread by the historian summarising her paper. I mainly link it because it has a very clarifying diagram of the polytomy which would otherwise be hidden in the paywalled paper.

https://twitter.com/monicaMedHist/status/1343890884094357504

The diagram (Asian Black Death is the Big Bang according to genetics)

https://twitter.com/monicaMedHist/status/1343894776978915328...

> Her discipline of philology, the study of the development of texts over time, requires comparing manuscripts to each other, building a stemma, or genealogy of texts, from a parent or original manuscript. She tells me that this is precisely the same skill one needs to read phylogenetic trees of mutating bacteria in order to trace the history of the disease.

There are some algorithmical similarities, but bioinformaticians have a lot of concerns that linguists don't, so I very much doubt that these are the same; and I also doubt that a historian without professional training in bioinformatics could perform such research on her own.

I'm not sure why this is news. Yersinia pestis (the plague) first showed up in the 540s AD in the form of the Plague of Justinian. In fact the plague occurred just as Justinian's armies were over extended reconquering the western portion of the empire, essentially dooming the empire in the long run due to its diminished demographics.

Wikipedia says it became particularly virulent 4000 years ago, so the question isn't "was the plague around before the 14th century", which it clearly was, but "was the 14th century plague which decimated Europe the tail end of a longer-running chain of destruction", which apparently is not what was generally believed.

reminded me of h this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_time_hypothesis

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