Climate-driven introduction of the Black Death and successive plague reintroductions into Europe

Abstract

The Black Death, originating in Asia, arrived in the Mediterranean harbors of Europe in 1347 CE, via the land and sea trade routes of the ancient Silk Road system. This epidemic marked the start of the second plague pandemic, which lasted in Europe until the early 19th century. This pandemic is generally understood as the consequence of a singular introduction of Yersinia pestis, after which the disease established itself in European rodents over four centuries. To locate these putative plague reservoirs, we studied the climate fluctuations that preceded regional plague epidemics, based on a dataset of 7,711 georeferenced historical plague outbreaks and 15 annually resolved tree-ring records from Europe and Asia. We provide evidence for repeated climate-driven reintroductions of the bacterium into European harbors from reservoirs in Asia, with a delay of 15 ± 1 y. Our analysis finds no support for the existence of permanent plague reservoirs in medieval Europe.

Global parasite and Rattus rodent invasions: The consequences for rodent‐borne diseases

“…The best-known example of spillover by rats is the plague and first from gerbils to Rattus (Schmid et al 2015). In the mid-14 th century, one third of the European human population died from plague for which black rats were assumed to be the source.…”

Yersinia pestis halotolerance illuminates plague reservoirs

“…Post-genomic analyses confirmed that Y. pestis was derived from the environmental bacteria Yersinia pseudotuberculosis 3,000 to 6,000 years ago in Central Asia and gradually spread from east to west along the historical tracks of human migration such as the Silk Road34567. Y. pestis reached Europe and North Africa where it caused a pandemic called the Justinian pandemic between 541–767 AD; then a medieval pandemic between 1346 and the end of the eighteenth century89.…”

“…Strikingly, two millennia after swiping over Europe and North Africa, plague established foci in later regions but not in neighboring Europe4. In North Africa, plague foci are still active as illustrated by the resurgence of the plague after 53 years of silence in Oran, Algeria, for which genetic analyses confirmed a local and not imported strain of Y. pestis 27.…”

Ancient Human Parasites in Ethnic Chinese Populations

“…It connected eastern China with central Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, and in its entirety was about 7,000 km in length [2,31]. It has been proposed to have acted as a route via which diseases, such as bubonic plague, anthrax, and leprosy might have spread between Asia and Europe [32–34]. However, the evidence supporting this hypothesis is based upon genetic similarity between bacterial strains in East Asia and Europe [35,36].…”