The Black Death

De Mussis stated that the plague settled in the Tartar lands of Asia Minor in 1346. According to Vernadsky it left eighty-five thousand dead in the Crimea alone.^{9} Whether coincidentally or because they made the conventional medieval assumption that some human agency, preferably in the form of an already unpopular minority group, must be responsible for their sufferings, the Tartars decided to attack the Christian merchants in the vicinity. A street brawl, in which one of the locals was killed, seems to have provided the excuse for what was probably a premeditated campaign. The Tartars set on a Genoese trading station in the city of Tana and chased the merchants to their redoubt at Caffa, now Feodosia, a town on the Crimean coast which the Genoese had built and fortified as a base from which to trade with the Eastern hinterland. The Tartar army settled down outside the walls and prepared to bombard the city into submission.^{10}

Their plans were disastrously disturbed by the plague which was soon taking heavy toll of the besiegers. ‘Fatigued, stupefied and amazed’, they decided to call off the operation. First, however, they felt it was only fair that the Christians should be given a taste of the agony which the investing force had been suffering. They used their giant catapults to lob over the walls the corpses of the victims in the hope that this would spread the disease within the city. As fast as the rotting bodies arrived in their midst the Genoese carried them through the town and dropped them in the sea. But few places are so vulnerable to disease as a besieged city and it was not long before the plague was as active within the city as without. Such inhabitants as did not rapidly succumb realized that, even if they survived the plague, they would be far too few to resist a fresh Tartar onslaught. They took to their galleys and fled from the Black Sea towards the Mediterranean. With them travelled the plague.

Though it is certain that this can not have been the only, and probable that it was not even the earliest route by which the plague arrived in Europe there is no reason to doubt that de Mussis’s story is true in essentials. One of the main trade routes by which the spices and silks from the East reached the European market was by way of Baghdad and thence along the Tigris and through Armenia to the entrepôt stations of the Italian merchants in the Crimea. Nothing is more likely than that the plague should travel with the great caravans and spread itself among the Tartars of the Crimea, the ‘hyperborean Scythians’ who, in the opinion of the Byzantine Emperor, John Cantacuzenos, were the first victims of the epidemic.^{11}

According to one chronicler: ‘This plague on these accursed galleys was a punishment from God, since these same galleys had helped the Turks and Saracens to take the city of Romanais which belonged to the Christians and broke down the walls and slew the Christians as though they were cattle or worse; and the Genoese wrought far more slaughter and cruelty on the Christians than even the Saracens had done.’ As with other instances of Divine retribution, the punishment seems to have been strikingly promiscuous. For even though it is not necessary to believe, with the Chronicler of Este, that these ill-fated galleys, with the crews dying at their oars, somehow contrived to spread the plague to ‘Constantinople, Messina, Sicily, Sardinia, Genoa, Marseilles and many other places,’ it is likely that infection was carried at least to Genoa, Venice and Messina by galleys from Eastern ports.^{12}

The inhabitants reacted violently when they realized the cargo that their visitors were bringing with them. They sought to drive the danger away and, in so doing, ensured that it spread more rapidly. ‘In January of the year 1348,’ wrote a Flemish chronicler,

three galleys put in at Genoa, driven by a fierce wind from the East, horribly infected and laden with a variety of spices and other valuable goods. When the inhabitants of Genoa learnt this, and saw how suddenly and irremediably they infected other people, they were driven forth from that port by burning arrows and divers engines of war; for no man dared touch them; nor was any man able to trade with them, for if he did he would be sure to die forthwith. Thus, they were scattered from port to port…^{13}