From the siege of Caffa to the marmots of the Golden Horde

The apocalyptic vision conveyed by the Justinian plague in the Middle Ages, notably through the motifs of the evil eye and the miraculous image, still permeates our conception of the arrival of the Black Death in Europe. A critical rereading of Gabrielle de Mussi's account of the siege of Caffa in 1346 allows us to distance ourselves from the contemporary haunting of bacteriological warfare, and to reconstruct the plague's routes in Eurasia from the hub of the Golden Horde, back in time and space to the middle of the 13th^century , and reconsider the animal vectors of its transmission.

Contents

• "When the plague passed from one place to another, it was like a bronze boat with black, headless men in it" (Michael the Syrian, Chronicle, IX, 28)
• Who were they? Hallucinating history, seeing the end of time
• "The end of the world is not only a prediction, it is actually happening" (Gregory^I, Dialogues, 3, 38-3)
• From Rome to the kingdom of Himyar, an eschatological koiné (Yohannes Gebre Selassie, "Plague as a possible factor for the decline and collapse of the Askumite Empire: a new interpretation", Ityopis, 2011)
• Plague in early Islamic sources: the Emmaus plague and the " hadith of the plague "
• What isadwa ? The evil eye, or dying from being seen (Mohammed Melhaoui, Peste, contagion et martyre. Histoire du fléau en Occident musulman médiéval, 2005)
• Gregory the Great, the plague of 590 and the miraculous image
• "And behold, the corrupted and infected air moved aside to make way for the image, as if it could not bear its presence. So that behind the picture remained a marvellous serenity, and the air regained all its purity" (Jacques de Voragine, La Légende dorée)
• Messina, September 1347: "the crews of twelve Genoese galleys flee the vengeance of God provoked by their scurrilous actions" (Michele da Piazza, Historia Sicula)
• The cartographic imaginary of the Black Death: from the Blitzkrieg (Bucholz, 1965) to the tsunami (Carpentier, 1964)
• Where are the blanks on the map? (David Mengel, "A Plague on Bohemia? Mapping the Black Death", Past & Present, 2011)
• The Siege of Caffa in 1346 and the trebuchets of Djanibeg: a weapon of bioterrorism? (Mark Wheelis, "Biological Warfare at the 1346 Siege of Caffa", Emergind infectious diseases, 2002)
• Contemporary terror, therefore archaic
• A single source: Gabriele de Mussi, Storia de Morbo sive Mortalitate quae fuit Anno Domini MCCCXLVIII
• How to read Gabriele de Mussi Mongols, peoples of the Apocalypse
• Possible contagion: corpse stench and miasmatic theory
• Passing behind the trebuchet of Djaniberg: the Black Sea, beating heart of Old World trade (Hannah Barker, That Most Precious Merchandise: The Mediterranean Trade in Black Sea Slaves, 1260-1500, 2019)
• The Venetian networks of Tana, vectors of the Black Death: when the epidemic is not the daughter of war, but of peace (Hannah Barker, "Laying the Corpses to Rest: Grain Embargoes and the Early Transmission of the Black Death in the Black Sea, 1346-1347", Speculum, 2021)
• Let's take a step back: in the footsteps of Russian archaeologist Daniel Chwolson at Lake Issyk-Kuhl (present-day Kyrgyzstan) in 1885
• Dying of the plague in 1338? Nestorian Christian stelae from the Chu Valley (Philip Slavin, "Death by the Lake: Mortality Crisis in Early Fourteenth-Century Central Asia", Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 2019)
• The Golden Horde, hub of the Black Death (Uli Shamiloglu, "The impact of the Black Death on the Golden Horde: Politics, Economy, Society, Civilization ", Golden Horde Review, 2017)
• Where we find our marmots. Marmotta baibacina and the genetic Big Bang of Yersinia pestis (Galina A. Eroshenko, Nikita Yu Nosov et al, "Yersiniapestis strains of ancient phylogenetic branch 0.ANT are widely spread in the high-mountain plague foci of Kyrgyzstan", PLoS ONE, 2017)
• Marmot tartar with rhubarb: Chinese pharmacopoeia and modern science (Robert Hymes, "A Hypothesis on the East Asian Beginnings of the Yersinia pestis Polytomy", The Medieval Globe, 2014)
• Going backwards again: old and new "silk roads" (Monica Green, "The Four Black Deaths", The American Historical Review, 2020)
• Les mondes de la peste: un réseau qui s'étoile (Julien Loiseau, "Les routes de la peste noire", in Patrick Boucheron, Christian Grataloup, Gilles Fumey dir., L'Atlas global, 2014)