After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - Black Death: The Origin Story

Episode Date: March 10, 2025

The myth goes thus: the Black Death reached Christendom at the Siege of Caffa when Mongols catapulted diseased bodies over the walls. Where did we get this story? What actually happened at Caffa? And how did the Black Death really enter Europe?Maddy Pelling and Anthony Delaney are joined by Professor Hannah Barker, medieval historian from Arizona State University. She's the author of That Most Precious Merchandise: The Mediterranean Trade in Black Sea Slaves, 1260-1500 and "Laying the Corpses to Rest: Grain Embargoes and the Early Transmission of the Black Death in the Black Sea, 1346-1347".Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal is a History Hit podcast.

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Join me for an immersive deep dive into some of the most thought provoking crimes in the country I now call home. From the case of headley lead singer Jacob Hogard to the bizarre naked kidnappings in Alberta to infamous cases like Colonel Russell Williams. Go beyond the headlines and get the full story. Find Canadian true crime wherever you listen to podcasts. Acast helps creators launch, grow and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast.com. It's 1346 and the port city of Caffa in modern day Crimea is under siege. Inside its walls are Italians, Genoans and Venetians.

For three long years they've hardly drawn breath, but watched from their walls as their enemies, the great Mongol army, bombards them again and again. For now, their defenses hold. But beyond the battlements of Kaffa, a new enemy has entered the fray. The Mongol army, the great golden horde, has become overrun, not by weapons or a superior force, but by disease. The sickness has already killed thousands, with more dying every day. Each soldier struck down as though pierced with arrows. Stunned and stupefied by the disaster, the dying Mongols are losing interest in the siege. But they have one last hand to play before they leave.

Gathering their dead, they load them into catapults and fire them at the city. Rotting corpses rain down, spiralling over the walls, filling the streets behind the battlements with their malodorous stench. The disease, whatever it is, unstoppably, it begins to spread. Pustules and swellings leap from victim to victim, claiming lives and darkening doorways as this invisible enemy destroys all in its path. The scale of the mortality is overwhelming. Those left alive, those who can, flee, clambering into ships and sailing back to Genoa and Venice. The only problem is this sickness,

this plague cannot be left behind. The Black Death, as it will become known, has followed them. Now it will wreak havoc across Christendom. INTRO Hello and welcome to After Dark. My name's Anthony. And I'm Maddie. And this is the first of four episodes that we are going to be covering in the next month that hope to uncover a little bit more of the true history of the Black Death, a terrible disease, as you may know, that ravaged Europe between 1347 and 1351. I think one of the things we're going to discover in these conversations over the next four weeks is that this is a history that has always been told in a very, I suppose, in a very Eurocentric way.

The story we've just heard that Maddie read out at the top of the episode is a really good example of that. And it's based on an account written during this period by an Italian notary called De Moussi, which records its spread, the spread of the disease, into Christianised Europe. But this story has been told again and again. However, recent scholarship, particularly by our guest today, which is why we're so excited about this chat, has upended these thoughts. Today we're going to tell the real story of the Siege of Caffa and the part it did or perhaps did not play in the introduction of the Black Death to Europe. Spoiler, this is after dark after all. It's not what you might have been told before. So we'll be building up a picture of the reality of the politics and commerce of the medieval Black Sea,

getting a global perspective and trying to get closer to the truth. So joining us in this episode to try to get to that truth is Professor Hannah Barker, who is a medieval historian who has looked at the connections between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. So you can see why she is a key person to have during this discussion. We're so glad to have her. She is the author of That Most precious merchandise, the Mediterranean trade in Black Sea slaves, 1260 to 1500. Hannah, thank you so much for joining us on After Dark. Thank you for having me. We're so excited to have you, Hannah. Now, we're going to get to the real truth of this history, but let's start with the myth, this version that we've heard at the beginning that we have been handed down.

There really was a siege of Caffa. Let's start there. Where is Caffa? What is it? Right. Caffa is a port on the coast of Crimea on the Black Sea. During the time period that we're talking about, the 14th century, this is a major trading hub. It's actually one of the biggest ports, I would say one of the biggest ports in the world We don't normally think of Crimea as being a major center of mediterranean trade, but actually it is So there's all kinds of people there the italians the genoese the venetians We've been talking about also people coming from egypt people armenians People from constantinople. There's all kinds of people coming and going through this port all the time. It's very busy.

People are coming from as far away as China with things like silk and jewels and silver. People are also coming from Western Europe with things like wine, wool cloth, textiles, and they're trading with each other in Cathet. This is where they meet, right? This is not the only important port in that network, but it's one of the important ports. The other reason why Cathet is very important is for the grain trade.

The area that's now Ukraine was a major grain producing region. And so anyone who needed to import grain, places like Venice, which is in the water and therefore it doesn't have grain fields immediately around it, right, needs to import grain, places like Venice, which is in the water and therefore doesn't have grain fields immediately around it, right, needs to import food. And this is one of the places a person would go to import food. I'm going to ask the stupid question, if such a thing exists, and for those of us,

including myself, before I saw the brief of this episode, it had a map placed in front of me. Can you help people by describing literally where on the map that this is taking place? What are the countries that surround it? What are the parts of the world that people might be familiar with that are in this region? Just so that we have a really good understanding of exactly where we're located in the world. Right. So this is on the north side of the Black Sea. The area to the north of that during this period is controlled by the Mongols. So this is well after the lifetime of Genghis

Khan. These are descendants of Genghis Khan who are ruling this. There's more than one Mongol state, but the one we're going to focus on is this one that's right north of the Black Sea and it's called the Golden Horn. Sometimes it's called the Jochi Khanate and this is after Jochi, who was the first ruler of this particular state. When you look at the south side of the Black Sea, there's a strip along the coast, including Constantinople, that is Byzantine territory. So you've probably heard of the Byzantine Empire at some point. At this period of time in the 14th century, the amount of territory that it controls is pretty small, but it's very important because they control the Bosporus,

which gives access between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. So because they have control over that, they still have some influence even though they don't have a huge territorial empire at this point. And then you have these Italians, merchants, who are coming into trade. They also don't control large amounts of territory, but they are the mediators of this. They're the ones who are shipping, right? And so they have this very important presence in Caffa, which they control with the permission of the Golden Horde, which controls all the

land around it. But the port itself is controlled by Genoa. So we talk about it as a colony. It has administrators who are sent from Genoa every year. They run the colony at the end of the year, they go home, new administrators are sent. But they exist in this relationship with the Golden Horde, which controls all the land around them. It's a real melting pot then, Hannah, is what you're saying, I suppose, that there's all these different types of people, these people who practice different religions, who have these different ideas about the world. We're talking about this history typically being Eurocentric. I suppose one of the things to say here is that the people who are converging on Caffa,

presumably have quite literally a different world map in their head. They have a different sense of perspective of the land that they are occupying, of where they're coming from as well as going to, where their empires are expanding. I think this is really interesting that Kaffir sits at the heart of this. You mentioned that it's a colony, but the Mongols around Kaffir sort of allow this to exist. What is the political landscape like? Is this a fruitful hub of trade that is beneficial to all and therefore everyone tolerates it? Are there tensions? I can imagine that this isn't a smooth operation all of the time. And presumably there is going to be a break in that piece,

given that we're talking about a siege. Sarah Yes. So the answer is both, right? This exists because it is advantageous to the Mongols that they benefit from trade just as much as the Italians do. The government benefits from taxing trade. There's a town inland called Solgat, which is the regional Mongol capital, and there's a lot of traffic between Kaffa and Solgat. And so they are willing to allow the Italians to have this port because this also benefits their own merchants, the Mongol merchants. So the period right before when we're talking about, you know, the 1330s was a period where this is kind of a mutually beneficial, everyone is profiting from the trade, you know, relations are fairly good. beneficial, everyone is profiting from the trade, relations are fairly good. What happens in the 1340s is that the Khan dies, a new Khan takes over, who would like a bigger piece of the pie?

And he wants to renegotiate his relationship with the Italians. And I've been talking about the Italians collectively, but in fact, Genoa and Venice are in competition with each other. There are two independent states at this period of time. They each have their own merchant network. They have their own shipping network. They're in competition with each other all around the Mediterranean.

They're fighting with each other all around the Mediterranean for access to the best trading ports and for control over shipping. And so what the Khan would like to do is play them off against each other and get a better deal. In terms of Kaffa, there's another port he's also interested in, Tana, that's a little bit further north that's more under Venetian control. So he wants to renegotiate the balance of power in favor of the Mongols in this relationship. This is why Kaffa is so important and why even though Madi was talking about there being

myths involved in this particular story, that there is actually a truth behind this. And we will unravel that truth as we keep going. But you mentioned there, Hannah, the Italians. So I want to know a little bit more about Gabriel de Mussi. Who is this person? And what is he saying happened at the siege of Caffa initially? And then we'll delve into whether or not we can trust him. But I'd really like to know who he is first and then what specifically he's saying about this particular moment in time. Right. So the summary that Maddie gave at the beginning was pretty good.

I mean, that is the story that Gabriella de Mussi is telling, right? Gabriella de Mussi was a notary. So, this is a person with legal training who is qualified to draw up legal documents. So, if you need to make a will, you go to a notary. If you're going to sell your house, you go to a notary. So, they're very important for the legal side of life, basically, in medieval Italy. So he's an educated person. He knows how to write not only in Italian, but also in Latin. He has legal training. He lived in Piacenza, which is another city in Italy a little bit further south. And he, during the plague outbreak, wrote a treatise describing the plague outbreak. For a description of what

happened during the plague outbreak in Italy, this is a pretty good description. He was there, he experienced it, he's an educated person writing about it in great detail. But he wanted to tell this as a narrative, and the narrative needs to have a beginning. The beginning of his story is about how plague came to Italy through Caffa, through this siege.

And the problem is that he never went to Caffa. And we know this for sure because he's a notary. His job is to write legal documents, and every legal document has a date on it. So we can see that he was in Piacenza for the entire duration of the 1340s, essentially. The entire period that we're talking about. He was definitely not in the Black Sea. He was definitely in Piacenza because he was there writing documents for people and putting dates in his name on them. So this is just not the best source for trying to understand

what's going on in the Black Sea because he was never actually in the Black Sea and there's lots of other people that were. Nevertheless, he tells us this really dramatic story about corpses and catapults and this horrible stench and everyone is terrified. As a storyteller, he did a fantastic job. We have the story that he gives us, which we heard at the beginning, that the Mongols are overrun by this plague and that they start to hurl the bodies into the city where the Italians, specifically the Venetians and the Genoans, and we have established they are

two separate groups, but where broadly speaking the Italians then catch the disease and they inadvertently bring it back to mainland Italy. Now what's fascinating to me, Hannah, and what you're saying is that Domusii is a notary. He's telling us that we can place him in Italy during this period and that in all likelihood, in fact, it's almost impossible for him to have gone to Caffa. Therefore, my question is, what's his motivation in telling this story? Because it is a story, not a historical account, therefore. It's a fictionalised version that he has made up for some reason, maybe written down that he's heard from other people. I mean, how do we get to the motivation behind this? Because it seems to me

do we get to the motivation behind this? Because it seems to me slightly strange that a notary living in Italy, admittedly living through the plague that has made its way to Europe, so this is a moment in time that he is being affected by personally and in terms of the society around him, but how do we get to the point where, assumingly a quite random person, is writing what becomes a foundational piece of history, having never been there. Why would he do that, do you think? LW. Well, he's not the only one. This was a major event. Lots of people died all around not just the Mediterranean, but Eurasia. So he's not the only one to record a description, right? This is something that other people wrote descriptions of as well. And I think it's a natural question for him to want to know why. Like, why is

this happening to us? And different descriptions give different explanations of why. On a more detailed level than that, it's hard to say, right? We can't ask him. He didn't write, you know, this is the reason why I'm telling this story. But in the context, he's not the only one who feels like this is an event that should be recorded. He's not the only one who wants some kind of explanation, right? The interesting thing is why we read his account and not anybody else's. How has this become the dominant story that everyone reads that's in all the textbooks when in fact, he doesn't actually know what he's talking about, at least for this

why it happened part of the story? So I'd like to, if you don't mind, centre you for a second, Hannah. And I want to know because, you know, as historians, we're often reading primary source material or, you know, things that are supposedly accounts of incidences that have occurred in the past. And when it's your own period that you're really, really familiar with and you know the wider world, you will read something and something in that passage will make you go, I need to look further into this because this doesn't sound or this doesn't feel authentic. I'd be really curious to know what you and other experts of this time period in this geographical area at this time, and I know you've already said, look, the date is conclusive and we know he wasn't there, but were there aspects that made you go, hold on now, this sounds a little bit too narrative or a little bit too flowery or a little bit too perfect to ring true,

I'm going to have to look further into this. So there are three problems, right? One problem is the medical side of this. We know about plague, right? The disease plague, it is still present in the world today. If you're worried about it, don't worry. Antibiotics are great against plague, right? But they did not have antibiotics.

So we can study plague and it's caused by a bacterium called Yersinia pestis. And one of the things we know about Yersinia pestis is it really is not transmitted from corpses to living people. It's transmitted among the living. We call it enzootic. It mostly lives in animal populations. It can be passed into human populations, but that's between living animals and living people. So the idea that corpses would be the source of a plague outbreak that just biologically doesn't add up. That's one problem. Another problem is actually a military history problem. So the idea that people would catapult corpses over a wall, people who have died

of disease, right, catapult their corpses over the wall in order to cause a disease someplace else. First of all, that's not how medieval people think about disease. They didn't know about your sin neopestas. But when they think about disease, they talk about it either in terms of sin, so that's God's will. Catapulting bodies have nothing to do with it, right? Or it has to do with humoral theory and the idea that what causes illness is an imbalance of the four humors in your body. So the reference of Dumusi to the stench causing illness, that's actually a humoral theory reference that if people are breathing polluted air. But we've just never seen this happen in any other siege ever.

Not a Mongol siege, not a siege in Europe, none of the crusade sieges. People have looked to try to find another siege where people moved bodies from one place to another in order to spread disease and they just can't find it. If people are trying to spread disease, what they would tend to do is poison or pollute the water supply. If they're throwing body parts, it tends to be heads. And in that case, the goal is psychological to terrorize the defenders, but it's not conceived of in terms of spreading disease. So this doesn't make any biological sense. It also doesn't make any sense from a medieval medical or military perspective. We can't find anything that looks like this anywhere.

Then when I teach this, because this is an important part of medieval history, when I teach my undergraduates, I always ask them for every primary source, who wrote it, where, and when? And then we talk about, you know, how do we use this historical information given the context from which it comes. And when you look at DeMousses and you ask those questions, who wrote it, where, and when, it's this notary guy in Piacenza, which is thousands of miles away from the Black Sea. It is the right time period, so that's good. But as someone who studies the Black Sea, I'm looking at this and thinking, we can do better. This is not an adequate source. There are actually lots of people running

around the Black Sea in the 1340s who wrote a lot, why are we not reading what they wrote instead of this guy from Piacenza? So that's when the sort of the light bulb went off that perhaps this is something I should look further into. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why history is so great, not just the events of the past. Oh my god, I love it. That's excited me. Yeah, exactly. History is not just putting a timeline together of things that happen, but delving deeply in the practice of doing history. This is what it's all about. It's so exciting. Okay, so we've established the myth, and we've established that the myth is a myth, that it is unreliable

and that there were no bodies flying in catacombs. It's time for a little break and when we come back, we're going to be building a very different version of events. If you're like me and you love history, but in particular you love the smutty, salacious, gossipy history, then do I have the perfect podcast for you. If you fancy finding out about the slippery origins of lube, or how Vikings linked sex and magic together, then listen no further. Join me, Kate Lister, on Betwixt the Sheets where I delve into the most outrageous, the most taboo and the downright sexiest parts of our history. It's the kind of history that you probably wouldn't bring up at a family

lunch, but you might bring it up down the pub. From the history of swear words to answering important questions like just how incestuous were Neanderthals? And so much more. Listen every Tuesday and Friday wherever it is that you get your podcasts. A podcast by History Hit. Okay, welcome back to After Dark. We, in part one of this episode, have talked about the mythology of the Siege of Caffa, which was a real event, but happens in the history books in a slightly different way to perhaps the reality of it. We've talked about why it was being besieged and some of the political and practical tensions on the ground there. We've also talked about D'Amoussi's version, his story of how the Black Death is transferred from Caffer itself to Europe. But we are so excited to have our guest back with us because Professor

Hanna-Barker has spent a lot of time not only debunking primary sources like that written by Demusie, but also searching for new sources, sources that are going to give us a different angle here. And Anthony and I have in front of us a letter, a source from this time period that I'm going to now force Anthony to read out whether or not he knew this was coming. I assumed it might, I'll be honest. He knows how I work. He's going to read it to you and we're going to listen to what he says and then we're going to get Hannah to talk us through it because it's an absolutely fascinating piece of history. So Anthony, over to you. Since the place Caffa was besieged for a long time with every method by which terror can be instilled,

and, God granting, we arrived at an honourable end with the one who believes himself to rule the whole world, from which followed a peace, although uncertain and not secure, because the Tartars watch for nothing except precisely that the expenses run short and the place be stripped of soldiers, especially because they expect an endless plague of death to enter the city, which laid low endless tartar soldiers in such a way that few men remain. Okay, Hannah, tell us exactly what we've read there. Because I said words. It's not gripping. I said a lot of words one after the other, but it was only when I was coming to the end

of that that I was saying, oh, I see what they're trying to say here. Okay. So break it down for us. Tell us why this is so important. Okay. So this is not a nice story, right? It's a letter. This is a letter from the Genoese colonial administrators in Caffa writing back

to Genoa to ask for help. So it's not very elegantly phrased, but they are asking for three things. They're asking for the city to suspend collection of debts because they're in financial trouble. They want a castellan to be sent to help organize the defense of one of the ports down the coast and they want a bishop because their bishop died during the siege. And in passing, they make reference to the fact, first of all, that the siege is over, but they are expecting future trouble. And they make reference to the fact that the Tatars, these are the Mongols, right, this is the term that they use for the Mongols, are suffering from an endless plague of death and that they in the city expect that this will affect them too.

So right away, this tells us that the disease was not transmitted during the siege, right, because this is a letter written after the siege was over, saying, we see disease spreading among the Mongols. It hasn't reached us yet, but we think that it's coming. Therefore, please send us a bishop in a castellan and stop asking us for money so that we can deal with this crisis situation. How, if there's not flying corpses, how is this disease spread? Is there anything specific about the conditions or the trade routes or the interaction between

the different cultures here that's going to propagate the spread of what turns out to be the Black Death? Right. So people writing the letter didn't know this, but we do, right? Because we know much more about Yersinia pestis, what it is, how it works. And when we look at other outbreaks, modern outbreaks, actually when we look at outbreaks in the ancient world as well, very frequently Yersinia pestis is transmitted in connection with grain shipments.

So we said Yersinia pestis likes to live in animal populations, especially mammals, especially rodents. So we find it sometimes in mountain rodents like marmots or prairie dogs, but the other group of rodents it really likes is rats and mice. What do rats and mice like? They like grain, food supplies of any other kind, and garbage. So that's where we tend to find plague outbreaks originating now,

right? When rats and mice come into close contact with human beings, they're fleas. Doesn't have to be fleas. There are other kinds of insects, but we'll talk about fleas for now. Jump from the rats or the mice, bite a person. This is how you start getting human plague outbreaks. So generally speaking, biologically, medically, when we're looking for plague outbreaks, we're looking first for grain or other kinds of food sources. How are those things moving? So this is a situation, first of all,

this is one of the big grain trading regions of the world at the time. So of course there's grain moving. Of course there's gonna be rats and mice riding along. Then we have the siege. The letter mentions all the horrors that are associated with siege. It's easy to read that and think, oh, catapulting bodies over the wall. No, we don't actually associate that with sieges.

We can't find another example of that anywhere. When we read medieval texts, when they talk about the horrors of siege, they talk about starvation and then all the horrors that arise from people who are starving, right? So what's the first thing they're going to do at the end of the siege? They are going to bring some grain into the city, right? And they didn't see that as a disease spreading activity, but we as historians can look back and say, are there mice in the carts with the grain? Probably yes, right? And then more generally speaking, the siege of Caffa,

but there was a broader embargo program that was connected with this. So not just the port, but trade in general between Italians and Mongols was disrupted. Once the siege is over, that means you can reopen trade again. And this is beneficial to both Italian merchants and Mongol merchants, but what's the first thing Italian merchants show up wanting to buy? Grain, because that's what they always buy in this region. So now you have grain being put on ships and shipped into the Mediterranean, which from their perspective is absolutely normal, right? They have no idea that this is spreading disease until

it starts showing up in all the ports along the way going into the Mediterranean. The irony here, I suppose, Hannah, is it's not the siege itself that introduces the plague to Europe, but actually it potentially delays the introduction of plague because it's when the siege isges over the city reopens trade begins again that that grain then is moved into Europe. I'm looking at this statistic in front of me that in 1384, Kaffir supplied Genoa with 2,600 tons of grain. That's about 36% of the total amount of grain coming into that region. I mean, this is catastrophic. I suppose as well it's less dramatic than catapult is catastrophic. And I suppose as well, it's

less dramatic than catapulted bodies, but from a modern perspective, it seems to be so much more insidious and terrifying, actually. This is something that's spreading in plain sight and that's going into the homes of every ordinary person. It's terrifying. LS And people think that what they're doing is something beneficial, right? They're bringing food. Except this turns out to be suddenly an extremely dangerous activity in a way that it hadn't been a couple years ago before the siege. I think this sort of gets back to the problem of intentionality that both we reading these stories and they at the time really wanted someone to blame. And I think

that's where the Gabriella de Mussi story is so popular because then you can blame the Mongols, right? But when you look at the people who were living in the Black Sea right next to the Mongols, the people who had been besieged by the Mongols, in fact, they're not blaming the Mongols. I mean, they're worried about being attacked again, but they're not blaming them for the disease. The disease is something else. And in certain ways, it's more scary to think about the fact that this is not something that happened intentionally. No one wanted to cause the Black Death. If you're going to talk about intentions, bacteria want to eat, they want to propagate.

Rats also want to eat. So do fleas. That's understandable. But none of them are intentionally spreading disease, and nevertheless, without anyone intending it, you have this massive loss of human life. I'd love to know, Hannah, there are certain elements of historical narrative that appeal to an audience forever, a general history audience forever. Maddy and I have spoken on this podcast about the Tudors. They will always appeal. They have such a wide interest group in a general history audience. But the Black Death is one of those things too, or what we now understand as the Black Death. I'd be really interested to know what it is you think specifically about this history that has such a longevity to its appeal.

And I'd be also interested to know what we get wrong most often. What you hear about the Black Death, what you hear about plague that you're like, oh, that's not quite correct, but I'm trying not to be a historian in this moment in time. That's a really good question. This is a very important event. And so I think people are interested in the Black Death, partly for itself. They're interested in the horror and the tragedy and how do people react and people are interested in other great tragedies of the past, right? And I think this is connected with that. But then there's also the Black Death tends to be thrown around as a cause for all kinds

of different things. So after the Black Death, everything changed. You know, you can talk about political changes, you can talk about economic changes, you can talk about social changes. So it's not just the Black Death itself as an event, it's that it then casts a shadow over the next century, several centuries. It becomes a recurring disease in Europe, so the Black Death is just the beginning. You continue to have plague outbreaks. It has this special status as a historical cause where people like to connect other events that happened later back to the Black Death. And so having a good understanding of the Black Death, I think, is important for understanding then everything we're going to try to attach to it that comes later. Not all of this has to do

with the origin story. There's also the questions of how do people react and how does it become an established disease in European animal populations. That's actually very interesting, but a totally different topic. I think the most annoying thing that people get wrong at this point is this matter of the catapults, right? I mean, I have to say, there were actually three sieges of Caffa. The one that we're interested in is siege number two. But there was an earlier siege in 1344 and there was a later siege in 1350 because even though, I mean, the Black Death did temporarily halt this conflict over who controls the trade, but it did come back after a couple of years.

The Black Death didn't stop that for long. So there were catapults used in the first siege of Caffa, but they were used normally, right, for throwing normal sort of missiles. And in fact, the way they broke the siege was to sneak out and set the catapults on fire. Then the Mongols sort of pulled back and regrouped and then besieged again. The second siege, I've seen no reference to catapults. I think they figured they didn't work and they were going to try something else. So there's this sort of collapsing of different historical events. And there is this very entertaining and exciting story that pushes all the buttons of the tragedy and the fear and all that kind of thing. It's a very attractive story. I understand why it's attractive. It's

just not true. And so I think having a better understanding of what actually happened, then we can see, okay, so why was he telling this story, which is rhetorically very compelling and emotionally very compelling, but it's not true. What can we understand about how plagues actually spread versus how we think plagues spread? That's what comes out of this that I think is the most interesting. I'm just listening to you talk, Lehanna. I've been thinking while we've been having this conversation about the Euro-centric tilt, if you like, on this story and how it's so

interested in terms of how the plague came to Europe, specifically to Italy. You talk there about how the version that we've been handed down by Demusie operates in terms of the narrative storytelling, the drama, but also the fear. I wonder if you can speak a little bit to the othering of the Mongols in this story, that they are these uncivilized, quote unquote, enemy that use dead bodies, their own dead, to pollute their enemies' territory and to therefore, whether they meant to or not, spread disease into these Christian kingdoms in Europe. I wonder if that is something that played into the narrative in the time period, that the Black Death was feared as something having come from the East in these general terms. Whether that's one of the elements of why it's survived this version of the story

today, you can look at global politics today and the power that othering the enemy, whoever that might be, has is still moving and shaking the world and dictating the way that we all live. Is that something that's at play here? LW. Definitely. I think this is a situation, especially by the time you get to D'amussis, I think in that petition, that letter, it's too early. They don't know that this is a global catastrophe, right? But by the time he gets to De Moussé's, he does know that this is a massive outbreak on a scale that he has never seen. And people are looking for someone to blame.

And they're looking for someone different from themselves to blame. So De Moussé is blaming the Mongols. And this is a pattern, right? We see this in other kinds of outbreak narratives, not just for plague and not just for disease. We see it in connection with other kinds of catastrophes too, but we can focus on disease for now.

That people really want a reason why this terrible thing is happening to them. And they would really like to blame it on someone. Not everyone in medieval Europe went the Mongol's route. There's a whole other story we can tell about blaming it on Jews and massacres of Jews that took place during the Black Death, looking for another group to blame. They had nothing to do with this, either scientifically or if we're looking at it from a medieval medical perspective. But it's this impulse that there has

to be someone who's responsible. You can find it in other parts of the world. The disease also spread very widely in the Islamic world, and that would be a whole other discussion to talk about the spread of the Black Death in the Islamic world. But we have similar accounts of the early spread of the Black Death, the symptoms, how did people react, what did people do with the volume of the dead. We can look at it in Byzantine sources, Greek sources, Greek language as well. They describe this, they talk about people's reactions. They're all looking for someone to blame.

They pick different people, depending on which author we're describing. They often pick the Mongols. And geographically speaking, they're not wrong, right? I mean, this did come from the Mongol region, but it's not because any Mongols decided that they wanted to go and make other people sick. So, separating the cause and effect of events from human intentionality. I think for a story that's this big and this popular,

being able to take a step back and say, okay, we understand the pull of wanting to blame someone. But in fact, in this case, we can prove that that's not the right way to look at it. That doesn't describe what actually happens, right? Hopefully this is something we could then take to look at other disease outbreaks and other kinds of disasters and say, okay, of? Hopefully this is something we could then take to look at other disease outbreaks and other kinds of disasters and say,

okay, of course, this is terrible. We want to figure out who's responsible and stop them and punish them and whatever else we can do, but sometimes it doesn't work that way. And it's helpful to be able to take a step back and say, in this case, it's a terrible disease outbreak spread by people who thought they were trying to do something good by bringing grain to hungry people. You know, you can find examples of that in connection with other disease

outbreaks as well, where someone thought they were doing the right thing, or at least didn't intend to do anything bad. And it had terrible consequences that were not what they intended. I think kind of this has been a really useful and fruitful way to start our four episode discovery of the Black Death. It's really enlightened some of our starting points, I think, so that when we delve into this history, we'll know that we're on sure footing because of the discussions we've had with you. So thank you for that.

But before I wrap up properly, if you were to give us one warning or one tip for our next three episodes, what would you say is the best way to approach this history? What should we bear in mind or what should we watch out for? What's the tip you'd give us as not medievalists heading into this history over the next four episodes? I have two pieces of advice. One of which is to always bear in mind the gap between our modern understanding of how diseases work and medieval understanding of how diseases work. And a lot of the wackier things that come up in connection with the plague are not necessarily wacky if you look at them from a medieval perspective.

So keeping that gap in mind at all times is very helpful. The other piece of advice I would give is what I always tell my undergraduates, who wrote it, where and when. I think that's always good advice for looking at anything connected with the plague or anything else really. Well consider us armed Hannah, we shall go forth with those words of warning in mind. Thank you so much for sharing your your research and your finding with us today on After Dark. Thank you all for listening as ever. If you've enjoyed this episode, please leave us a five star review wherever you get your podcasts and tell your friends, your granny and your neighbour all about it as well. It helps us to spread the word about the podcast. Until

next time, happy listening.