ABSTRACT
Toward the end of the year 1347, some merchants who had been trading in the Black Sea region returned to their home ports in Italy. Unbeknownst to their friends and family, and perhaps even to themselves, they brought back with them a most unwelcome commodity: the dreaded plague or pestilence, a disease that had not been seen in Europe and the Mediterranean for nine centuries. According to the apocryphal account of Gabriele de Mussis, a contemporary chronicler from Piacenza, Italy, these first victims and carriers of the Black Death into Europe had contracted the disease as the result of a primitive form of germ warfare. In 1346, the Mongol armies of the Kipchak khan, Janibeg, attempted to expel the infidel Christian presence from his recently converted Muslim lands. As the Mongols were besieging the Genoese at Caffa (now Feodosiya), an important trading post on the north coast of the Black Sea, the besiegers suddenly found themselves besieged by the plague. Before leaving, the Mongols decided to give their enemies a taste of their own affliction. Loading their dead, plague-ridden comrades onto their catapults, they then lobbed these human missiles “into the city of Caffa in order that the intolerable stench of those bodies might extinguish everyone.” Although it is unlikely that the disease was first communicated from East to West in such a highly dramatic fashion, it is entirely possible that the Mongols did transmit the plague to Europeans by the more peaceful means of trade. One of the most coveted export products from the Black Sea region were luxurious animal furs, such as ermine and marten. These furs—even when skinned—made ideal homes for fleas that carried within their stomachs the bacteria causing bubonic plague. When Italian merchants brought their exclusive wares home, to be draped around their wives’ lovely necks or sold at some high-end market, little did they know how costly their imports were to become.
