← After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal
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- [00:00]
Anthony Delaney
Hi, we're your hosts Anthony Delaney and Maddy Pelling. And if you would like After Dark, Myths, Misdeeds and the Paranormal ad free and get early access, Sign up to.
- [00:10]
Maddy Pelling
History Hit with a History Hit subscription. You can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries with top history presenters and enjoy a new release every week.
- [00:21]
Anthony Delaney
Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com subscribe.
- [00:27]
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- [01:07]
Professor Hannah Barker
It'S 1346 and the port city of Kaffa 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 defences hold. But beyond the battlements of Caffa, 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, spiraling over the walls, filling the streets behind the battlements with their malodorous stench. The disease, whatever it is, has breached the defences. Now, quickly, silently, 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.
- [03:57]
Anthony Delaney
Hello and welcome to After Dark. My name's Anthony.
- [04:01]
Maddy Pelling
And I'm Maddie.
- [04:03]
Anthony Delaney
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 Maddy 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 Mussi, which records its spread, the spread of the disease into Christianized 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 the 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. 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, 1260-1500. Hannah, thank you so much for joining us on After Dark.
- [05:53]
Professor Hannah Barker
Thank you for having me.
- [05:54]
Maddy Pelling
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. So let's start there. Where is Caffa? What is it?
- [06:10]
Professor Hannah Barker
Right, so Caffa is a port on the coast of Crimea on the Black Sea. And 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 Caffa. 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 Catha 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 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.
- [07:32]
Anthony Delaney
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 for this episode and 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, exactly where we're located in the world.
- [07:59]
Professor Hannah Barker
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 Jochit 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 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.
- [09:45]
Maddy Pelling
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, and we're talking about this history typically being Eurocentric. And I suppose one of the things to say here is that the people who are converging on caffeine 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. So I think this is really interesting that Kafa kind of sits at the heart of this. You mentioned that it's a colony, but the Mongols around Kafa 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 peace, given that we're talking about a siege.
- [10:45]
Professor Hannah Barker
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 Italian. 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 Caffa 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 the 1330s, was a period where this is kind of a mutually 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 Caffa, there's another port he's also interested in, Tanna, 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.
- [12:23]
Anthony Delaney
This is why Kaffa is so important and why, even though Maddie was talking about there being myths involved in. 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. The Italians. So I want to know a little bit more about Gabriel de Mussy. 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.
- [12:59]
Professor Hannah Barker
Right. So the summary that Matti gave at the beginning was pretty good. I mean, that is the story that Gabriella Dumoussi is telling. Right. Gabriele di 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. And so 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. So 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. 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. And, I mean, as a storyteller, he did a fantastic job.
- [15:05]
Maddy Pelling
So 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 de Mussi is a notary. You're 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 caffeine. So, 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 slightly strange that a notary living in Italy, admittedly living through the plague that has made its way to Europe. So, you know, 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 a seemingly quite random person is writing what becomes a foundational piece of history, having never been there? Why would he do that, do you think?
- [16:29]
Professor Hannah Barker
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.
- [17:33]
Anthony Delaney
So I'd like to, if you don't mind, center 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, 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? There's. 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.
- [18:26]
Professor Hannah Barker
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 enzoootic. 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 Yersinia pestis, but when they think about disease, they talk about it either in terms of sin. So that's God's will. Catapulting bodies has 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 dumusy 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. I mean, people have looked, right, 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. Zen, 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 Dumusy's and you ask those questions, 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.
- [21:42]
Maddy Pelling
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why history is so great. Not just the events of the past.
- [21:46]
Anthony Delaney
Oh, my God, I love it. That's excited me.
- [21:49]
Maddy Pelling
Yeah, exactly. You know, 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 catapults. It's time for a little break. And when we come back, we're going to be building a very different version of events.
- [22:27]
Anthony Delaney
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- [22:33]
Professor Hannah Barker
That sounds like a.
- [22:34]
Anthony Delaney
Then how do you think we should say it?
- [22:36]
Professor Hannah Barker
Unlimited talk, text and data for just $25 a month for the rest of your life?
- [22:41]
Anthony Delaney
I don't know.
- [22:42]
Professor Hannah Barker
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Anthony Delaney
What if we just say forever? Okay, $25 a month. Forever.
- [22:47]
Professor Hannah Barker
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Anthony Delaney
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Professor Hannah Barker
Long as they remain active on the Boost Unlimited plan.
- [22:58]
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- [24:48]
Maddy Pelling
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 DeMussi's version, his story of how the Black Death is transferred from Caffre itself to Europe. But we are so excited to have our guests back with us because Professor Hannah Barker has spent a lot of time not only debunking primary sources like that written by De Mussy, 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.
- [25:48]
Anthony Delaney
I assumed it might.
- [25:49]
Maddy Pelling
I'll be honest, he know 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.
- [26:03]
Anthony Delaney
Since the place Kaffa was besieged for a long time, with every method by which terror can be instilled, and God granting we arrived at an honorable 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 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.
- [27:00]
Professor Hannah Barker
Okay, so this is Not a nice story, right? It's a letter. This is a letter from the Genoese colonial administrators in Cava 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 and a castellan and stop asking us for money so that we can deal with this crisis situation.
- [28:25]
Anthony Delaney
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?
- [28:43]
Professor Hannah Barker
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, at 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 going to be rats and mice riding along. Then we have the siege. The letter mentions, you know, all the horrors that are associated with sieges. 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 sie? 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. This is beneficial to both Italian merchants and Mongol merchants. But what's the first thing Italian merchants show up wanting to buy? Grainy, 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.
- [31:35]
Maddy Pelling
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 is over, the city reopens, trade begins again. That that grain then is moved into Europe. And, you know, I'm looking at this statistic in front of me that in 1384, Caffa 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. 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.
- [32:16]
Professor Hannah Barker
Yes.
- [32:16]
Maddy Pelling
You know, this is something that's spreading in plain sight, and that's going into the homes of every ordinary person. It's terrifying.
- [32:25]
Professor Hannah Barker
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 sie. 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 Gabriela de Mussy 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.
- [33:50]
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- [35:21]
Anthony Delaney
I'd love to know Hannah. There are certain elements of historical narrative that appeal to an audience forever, a general history audience forever. Mattie 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 long 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.
- [36:05]
Professor Hannah Barker
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 gonna 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. 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 years.
- [37:48]
Anthony Delaney
Years.
- [37:48]
Professor Hannah Barker
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.
- [38:56]
Maddy Pelling
I'm just listening to you talk, Lehanet, and I've been thinking while we've been having this conversation about the Eurocentric tilt, if you like, on this story, and how it's so interested with how, in terms of how the plague came to Europe, specifically to Italy. And he talked there about how the version that we've been handed down by Dumusi 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 enemy that use dead bodies, their own dead, to pollute their enemy's territory and to therefore whether they meant to or not spread disease into these Christian kingdoms in Europe. And 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, and whether that's one of the elements of why it's survived this version of the story today that, you know, you can look at global politics today and the power that 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?
- [40:19]
Professor Hannah Barker
Definitely. I think this is a Situation, Especially by the time you get to Dumusis, 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 Dumusis, he does know that this is a massive outbreak on the scale that he is now ever seen. And people are looking for someone to blame, and they're looking for someone different from themselves to blame. So Dumousi 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 Mongols route. There's a whole nother 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 anyone, 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. Hopefully this is something we could then take to look at other disease outbreaks and other kinds of disasters and say, okay, 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 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 it.
- [43:29]
Anthony Delaney
I think, Hannah, 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 surer 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 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.
- [44:08]
Professor Hannah Barker
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 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 who wrote it, where and when. I think that's always good advice for looking at anything connected with the plague or anything else.
- [44:44]
Anthony Delaney
Really well, consider us armed, Hannah. We shall go forth with those words of warning in mind. Thank you so much for sharing your research and your finding with us today and 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 neighbor all about us as well. It helps us to spread the word about the podcast. Until next time. Happy listening.
- [45:16]
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