Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

The Black Death, as the plague pandemic that scythed through Asia, Europe, North Africa, and some regions of sub-Saharan Africa from the 1340s is known, began in a similar place to the rinderpest pandemic: with the Mongols.8 As we have already seen, plague was caused by the bacillus Yersinia pestis (or Y. pestis), which jumped to humans from steppe rodents such as rats and marmots via fleabites (see chapter 3). Eight hundred years earlier the Justinianic pandemic had ripped around sixth-century Byzantium, killing millions of people. What emerged in the fourteenth century was worse: a new, hyper-infectious mutation of the same illness, which could apparently spread between rats, cats, dogs, birds, and people with uncommon ease. Once in a human host, it caused similar, ghastly symptoms to the sixth-century pestilence: fever; swellings known as “buboes” around the groin, armpits, and neck; internal bleeding; uncontrollable vomiting; and death within a few days.9 It also developed a pneumonic strain that could be passed from human to human on the breath.