The Great Transition: Climate, Disease and Society in the Late Medieval World (2013 Ellen Mcarthur Lectures) by Bruce Campbell

Author:Bruce Campbell [Campbell, Bruce]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2016-06-29T21:00:00+00:00

3.03.2c The central Asian origin of Y. pestis

It was the founding father of medical history, J. F. C. Hecker, who in 1832 proposed that the Second Pandemic originated in China and thence spread west across Eurasia.443 The idea has lingered ever since and in 1977 was powerfully re-enunciated by William H. McNeill in his influential Plagues and peoples.444 McNeill speculated that the Yunnan province of southwest China (origin, in 1855, of the Third Pandemic), located in the eastern foothills of the Himalayas between China, Burma and India, was one of plague's natural foci. From here, sometime in the thirteenth or early fourteenth century, he proposed that humans inadvertently spread the bacillus north until Y. pestis became established among the ground-burrowing mammals of the Eurasian steppe lands, between Manchuria and southern Russia. He identified a deadly but unspecified pandemic in the Hopei province of eastern China in c.1331–2 as the earliest recorded major outbreak of the Black Death and proposed that over the next fifteen years plague made the journey of almost 6,500 kilometres west via the interior caravan routes that traversed the Pax Mongolica until in 1346 it emerged among the Mongol troops besieging the Black Sea port of Kaffa.

Not all have been convinced by this thesis. From a careful review of the published evidence at that time available to European scholars John Norris (1977) reported that ‘historical records are such as to cast strong doubt on the various attributions to China, India or Central Asia as the source of the Black Death in the fourteenth century’.445 George Sussman (2011), in a more recent comprehensive review of the literature, failed to find any Chinese description of disease symptoms consistent with a diagnosis of plague and therefore concluded that the Black Death ‘never reached China’.446 Sinologist Paul D. Buell (2012) concurs. In his view there is neither convincing medical evidence of plague in the Chinese sources, nor anything in the historical record to suggest that China ‘suffered the enormous plague epidemics that the West or the Middle East experienced’.447 In fact, all three of these scholars believe that the Black Death is more likely to have originated in western than eastern Asia.448

Instead of China, Norris located the critical biological event which initiated the Black Death, namely the spillover of Y. pestis from sylvatic to commensal rodent hosts, somewhere in the Caspian Basin. This semi-arid continental region of cold winters and very hot summers, dependent upon a westerly air-stream for such moisture as it receives, has long been one of plague's natural foci. Its steppe grasslands are home to hibernating ground-burrowing marmots and susliks which continue to act as sylvatic hosts of the plague bacillus and whose contaminated burrows serve as reservoirs of infection. On Norris's analysis, the infection spread west from the Caspian Basin through the lands of the Kipchak Khanate to the Crimea, east into what is now Kazakhstan, and south into Kurdistan and Iraq. Benedictow (2004) agrees and believes that it is necessary to look no further than the

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