Laying the Corpses to Rest: Grain, Embargoes, and<i>Yersinia pestis</i>in the Black Sea, 1346–48

Barker, Hannah

doi:10.1086/711596

Cited by 45 publications

(34 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…The onset of the Black Death has been conventionally associated with outbreaks that occurred around the Black Sea region in 1346 (refs. 1 , 47 ), eight years after the Kara-Djigach epidemic. At present, the exact means through which Y. pestis reached western Eurasia are unknown, primarily due to large pre-existing uncertainties around the historical and ecological contexts of this process.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The source of the Black Death in fourteenth-century central Eurasia

Spyrou

Musralina

Ruscone

et al. 2022

Nature

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The origin of the medieval Black Death pandemic (ad 1346–1353) has been a topic of continuous investigation because of the pandemic’s extensive demographic impact and long-lasting consequences1,2. Until now, the most debated archaeological evidence potentially associated with the pandemic’s initiation derives from cemeteries located near Lake Issyk-Kul of modern-day Kyrgyzstan1,3–9. These sites are thought to have housed victims of a fourteenth-century epidemic as tombstone inscriptions directly dated to 1338–1339 state ‘pestilence’ as the cause of death for the buried individuals9. Here we report ancient DNA data from seven individuals exhumed from two of these cemeteries, Kara-Djigach and Burana. Our synthesis of archaeological, historical and ancient genomic data shows a clear involvement of the plague bacterium Yersinia pestis in this epidemic event. Two reconstructed ancient Y. pestis genomes represent a single strain and are identified as the most recent common ancestor of a major diversification commonly associated with the pandemic’s emergence, here dated to the first half of the fourteenth century. Comparisons with present-day diversity from Y. pestis reservoirs in the extended Tian Shan region support a local emergence of the recovered ancient strain. Through multiple lines of evidence, our data support an early fourteenth-century source of the second plague pandemic in central Eurasia.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The source of the Black Death in fourteenth-century central Eurasia

Spyrou

Musralina

Ruscone

et al. 2022

Nature

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“…In recent years, paleogeneticists have con rmed the pandemic's Y. pestis identity and established that the outbreak seeded novel plague reservoirs in Europe 5,6 . Archeologists and historians meanwhile have begun to put Sub-Saharan Africa on the Black Death map 9 , to ll in lacunae in our understanding of the pandemic's Mediterranean and European spread 10,11 , and to explore the pandemic's origins in Central Asia and dissemination in East Asia, drawing on evolutionary biology and paleogenetics 12 . But while multiple disciplines have reassessed the pandemic's spatiotemporality, the mortality of the outbreak, estimates of which have drawn attention to the Black Death for centuries, remains underexplored and limited to unidisciplinary, written-source-based approaches.…”

Section: Estimating Black Death Mortalitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Cereal trade is thought to have been instrumental for the introduction of the Black Death to Mediterranean Europe, and along established conduits of commerce and communication, ecological factors, associated contingency effects and historical path dependency mattered from the outset. Before the pandemic arrived in the Crimea, the volume of cereal trade between Italy and the Black Sea was sizeable, yet blocked by embargo 11,36,37 . High demand in Southern Europe for Black Sea cereals from 1345 onwards was associated with a period of excessive precipitation and cooling 38,39 negatively affecting cereal supplies in Italy and beyond, 1345-47 8,36,40,41 .…”

Section: Landscape and Demographic Change: Four Major Scenariosmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…High demand in Southern Europe for Black Sea cereals from 1345 onwards was associated with a period of excessive precipitation and cooling 38,39 negatively affecting cereal supplies in Italy and beyond, 1345-47 8,36,40,41 . Cereal imports from Black Sea coasts resumed once the situation improved in 1347, and by early 1348 Venetian merchants had lled many Italian granaries with Black Sea produce 11,36,37,42 and introduced plague to Europe. Plague outbreaks disseminated from major cereal ports in southern and north-western Italy from January 1348 1,43 .…”

Section: Landscape and Demographic Change: Four Major Scenariosmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Big Data Palaeoecology reveals significant variation in Black Death mortality in Europe

Izdebski

Guzowski

Poniat

et al. 2021

Preprint

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The Black Death is the most reknown pandemic in human history, believed by many to have killed half of Europe's population. However, despite the advances in ancient DNA research that allowed for the successful identification of the pandemic's causative agent (bacterium Yersinia pestis), our knowledge of the Black Death is still limited, based primarily on medieval texts available for single areas of Western Europe. In our study we remedy this situation and we focus in particular on the scale of the Black Death mortality. We collected data on landscape change from 261 coring sites (lakes and wetlands) located in 19 European countries. We used two independent methods of analysis to evaluate whether the changes we see in the landscape at the time of the Black Death agree with the hypothesis that half of the population died within a single year in each of the 21 regions we studied. We discovered that while the Black Death had devastating impact in some regions, it had negligible or no impact in others. The inter-regional differences in the Black Death mortality across Europe demonstrate the significance of cultural, ecological, economic and climatic factors that mediate the dissemination and impact of the disease. The complex interplay of these factors, along with the identification of the pathogen that caused disease outbreaks, should be the focus of future research on historical pandemics.

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“…The dissemination of historical plague across the globe is being studied and discussed since many decades. The second pandemic entered Europe in 1347 [1], but it may have started a century earlier in Central Asia and China [2]. The pandemic caused millions of casualties before gradually disappearing from Europe and the Mediterranean in the 18 th century.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mapping the plague through natural language processing

Krauer

Schmid

2021

Preprint

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Plague has caused three major pandemics with millions of casualties in the past centuries. There is a substantial amount of historical and modern primary and secondary literature about the spatial and temporal extent of epidemics, circumstances of transmission or symptoms and treatments. Many quantitative analyses rely on structured data, but the extraction of specific information such as the time and place of outbreaks is a tedious process. Machine learning algorithms for natural language processing (NLP) can potentially facilitate the establishment of datasets, but their use in plague research has not been explored much yet. We investigated the performance of five pre-trained NLP libraries (Google NLP, Stanford CoreNLP, spaCy, germaNER and Geoparser.io) for the extraction of location data from a German plague treatise published in 1908 compared to the gold standard of manual annotation. Of all tested algorithms, we found that Stanford CoreNLP had the best overall performance but spaCy showed the highest sensitivity. Moreover, we demonstrate how word associations can be extracted and displayed with simple text mining techniques in order to gain a quick insight into salient topics. Finally, we compared our newly digitised plague dataset to a re-digitised version of the famous Biraben plague list and update the spatio-temporal extent of the second pandemic plague mentions. We conclude that all NLP tools have their limitations, but they are potentially useful to accelerate the collection of data and the generation of a global plague outbreak database.

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Laying the Corpses to Rest: Grain, Embargoes, andYersinia pestisin the Black Sea, 1346–48

Cited by 45 publications

References 29 publications

The source of the Black Death in fourteenth-century central Eurasia

The source of the Black Death in fourteenth-century central Eurasia

Big Data Palaeoecology reveals significant variation in Black Death mortality in Europe

Mapping the plague through natural language processing

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