A better Black Death story

Summary

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Unexplainable: "A better Black Death story" (May 13, 2026) – Detailed Summary

Main Theme

In this episode of Unexplainable, host Bird (Byrd) Pinkerton explores how our popular understanding of the Black Death—a pandemic that devastated Europe in the 14th century—is built on stories and assumptions that have shifted over time. The episode challenges the canonical narrative that blames rats (and Mongol-era biological warfare) for spreading the plague, and examines how recent historical research uncovers not just who or what was responsible, but also how new perspectives on evidence can change our sense of blame, inevitability, and the complexity of history.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Why is the Black Death still so mysterious?

(Starts ~01:06)

• Bird shares how she reached out to climate researchers (Ulf Buntgen and Martin Bauch) about the Black Death and was surprised by how many basic historical "facts" about it come with caveats.

• Example: The estimated death toll ranges from 30-60% of Europe's population, but historical statistics are sketchy and contested.

  “I guess it surprised me that we don't have a better or narrower number on what percentage of people died or how many died.” — Bird Pinkerton (04:17)

• The unknowns matter; how we pin down the story affects how we perceive the event and its consequences.

2. What was the Black Death, really?

(~05:07 - 09:12)

• Textbook narrative: Rats from Asia, carrying plague-bearing fleas, spread the Black Death to Europe (bubonic plague = Yersinia pestis).

• Scientific challenge: Until the 2010s, even the identification of the Black Death with Yersinia pestis was debated.

  “You need, like, a smoking bacterium in a bone or a tooth.” — Bird Pinkerton (09:12)

• DNA from medieval mass graves confirmed Y. pestis as the culprit, but many details about “who” and “what” spread the disease remain debated.

3. Was it just rats? Enter camels, sheep, lice, and more

(~09:12 - 12:42)

• Historian Hannah Barker introduces greater complexity: not just rats and fleas, but other mammals and insects (camels, sheep, possibly lice).

  “Camels… it turns out, are pretty good plague transmitters.” — Hannah Barker (10:57)

• Pinpointing the “animal suspect” is difficult; we lack comprehensive historical records (“you had to keep track of what historical fleas were doing”—Bird, 10:26).

• Genetics papers trace the plague’s origins to locations in Asia, but origins and routes remain unresolved.

  “If we are still debating where Covid started from six years ago, it's hard for me to imagine we could figure out where the Black Plague started, like 600 plus years ago.” — Noam Hassenfeld (12:42)

4. The classic story: Mongols, sieges, and catapulting bodies

(~16:35 - 23:06)

• Traditional explanation: In 1347 at the port of Kaffa (Crimea), Mongols besieging the city flung plague-infected corpses into the city, sparking the outbreak in Europe (a view still cited in the Encyclopedia Britannica).

• Barker challenges this: Source is Gabriele de’ Mussi, an Italian notary writing from far-off Piacenza, not an eyewitness.

  “So his information about Piacenza is fantastic. His information about Caffa in the Black Sea is not.” — Hannah Barker (21:21)

• Barker’s detective work uncovers a petition written by Genoese residents after the siege. The letter proves the disease did not arrive during the siege:

  “The disease is not transmitted during the siege because this is a petition that was written after the siege and the disease hasn't been transmitted yet.” — Hannah Barker (22:46)

5. A new suspect: Grain, not war

(~23:18 - 26:13)

• Barker posits that the crucial vector for plague was grain shipments, not biological warfare.
  • After sieges lifted, starving cities imported grain from nearby regions (the Black Sea), inadvertently bringing plague-carrying rodents and fleas with their food supplies.

  “What travels with grain? Rats and mice. What travels with the rats and mice? Fleas.” — Hannah Barker (23:38)

  • Venice and Genoa did not import grain during the siege, but resumed immediately after, coinciding with plague outbreaks.

  “You can trace the timing of plague outbreaks in connection with the arrival of the grain ships.” — Hannah Barker (25:48)

6. Why do these stories matter?

(~26:13 - 30:47)

• Noam and Bird reflect on how the dominant story shapes our perspective:

  “The first story is, like, someone did this to Europe, and there's someone to blame. And the second story is...the way life works, that things travel and disease travels...much more of a tragic story than a story that is one that has blame as a part of it.” — Noam Hassenfeld (27:10)

• Barker: Emphasizes the importance of “thinking about historical events that happened without intentionality”—not searching for blame, but examining how chance, systems, and unintended consequences can shape history.

  “This is actually a really good exercise in thinking about historical events that happened without Intentionality.” — Hannah Barker (27:26)

• The deep uncertainties (“love a good caveat!”) in Black Death research invite better questions and more nuanced understanding.

• Varying interpretations (grain, not biological warfare; considering the role of climate change and famine) are prompting entirely new avenues of research.

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Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• “You'll be shocked to learn fleas are illiterate.” — Bird Pinkerton (10:46)
• “Camels... That is something that I would never have assumed. Camels were part of this.” — Noam Hassenfeld (11:32)
• “This whole thing is just kind of Kapha-esque.” — Noam Hassenfeld (23:06)
  (Bird: “Oh, a lot of people died, Noam. ...Too soon.”)
• “It's hard to tell a story about the past where something terrible happened and there isn't a bad guy.” — Noam Hassenfeld (27:47)
• “If even a couple of small tweaks could make this story look totally different, there could also be researchers with bigger tweaks.” — Bird Pinkerton (28:40)

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Important Timestamps & Segments

| Timestamp | Segment Description | |---------------|-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 01:06 – 05:06 | Setting up the mystery: Why so little certainty about basic facts? | | 06:10 – 09:12 | The textbook story: rats, plague, and scientific doubts | | 10:00 – 12:42 | Introducing camels, sheep, and lice as possible disease carriers | | 16:35 – 23:06 | The Mongol siege/catapult myth – its source and Barker’s detective disproof | | 23:18 – 26:13 | The grain theory – Barker’s alternative: plague likely arrived in Europe via trade, not warfare | | 26:13 – 28:40 | How these stories shape blame, tragedy, and historical lessons | | 28:40 – 30:47 | How small evidence tweaks can open new research fronts (e.g., climate impacts, reconsidering Eurocentric narratives) |

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Themes & Tone

• The episode is warm, curious, conversational, often humorous (“blame the fleas!”), but ultimately thoughtful about the weight of historical storytelling.
• The hosts and guests emphasize skepticism towards neat historical explanations, encouraging openness to complexity and caveats.

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Further Reading

• Hannah Barker’s research paper: "Laying the Corpses to Rest"
• Martin Bauch and Ulf Buntgen’s climate and Black Death paper

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This summary covers all the vital points and shifts in the narrative of the Black Death as discussed by Bird Pinkerton, Noam Hassenfeld, and Hannah Barker, and reveals how easy it is for even well-known history to remain shrouded in debate, myth, and continuous revision.

Transcript

[Bird Pinkerton]

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[Bird Pinkerton]

Noam, are you ready?

[Noam Hassenfeld]

Yes. Hello. Hi.

[Bird Pinkerton]

Hello. I have you here today to talk about the Black Death.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

Fun.

[Bird Pinkerton]

Yeah, well, kind of. Actually, though, like, interesting.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

At least you got a fun take on the Black Death.

[Bird Pinkerton]

Well, I got interested in the Black Death because. Because this paper came out last year about sort of climate and the Black Death in Europe. And I wound up calling up these two lovely researchers, this guy named Ulf Buntgen and another guy named Martin Bauch. And I wanted to talk to them about their research. And I was doing the thing that we usually do, which is to basically be like, let's establish a baseline of information here. Like, let's just get our facts straight before we dive into the research.

[Hannah Barker]

Okay.

[Bird Pinkerton]

But then as I was asking, sort of, what's the Black Death? Like, what are the basics here? They would sort of hit me with these caveats.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

We have to be honest and always cautious. This is something that happened 700 years ago. So the idea that you're saying is that we don't know what the Black Death is, so.

[Bird Pinkerton]

No, we do know a lot. We know there was an outbreak of disease in the 1300s. We know this was one of the biggest pandemics in recorded history. We know it had a huge effect. So historians have made the case that this caused a lot of economic upheaval, spiritual upheaval. People have talked about it having an evolutionary effect on the people who survived it, because there might have been genes that helped people survive that were then passed on, or even people have made the argument that the Black Death laid the groundwork for some public health interventions that we know today. But, like, as Ulf and Martin would talk to me about specific details that I honestly would have. Would have thought would be simple. They'd often. Hetch, um, caveat.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

What exactly is he caveating?

[Bird Pinkerton]

So, a whole range of things, but one example would be how many people died. Because obviously people weren't. You weren't doing statistics in the 1300s the way that we are now. And so we.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

But we know it was a lot, right?

[Bird Pinkerton]

Yeah, we know. So the estimates that I encountered for Europe at least, were initially, I was hearing maybe like 30 to 50% of everyone died. But then some people were saying it was more like 40 to 60% of everyone died, which is a pretty staggering percentage.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

Yeah, I mean. I mean, Covid was nowhere near that.

[Bird Pinkerton]

Right. So any of those estimates is sort of unimaginable.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

Yeah.

[Bird Pinkerton]

But given how big a deal it was, I guess it surprised me that we don't have a better or narrower number on what percentage of people died or how many died. And I was sort of encountering that over and over. And so that's the show today. Instead of talking about climate and the Black Death, I wound up reaching out to a medieval historian named Hannah Barker. And she really helped me understand first, like, why this key moment in our history is so hard to pin down, but also sort of why that ends up mattering. Not to be too dramatic, but why it ends up mattering for how we tell our own history.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

A better Black Death story.

[Bird Pinkerton]

A better Black Death story, actually, maybe by the end of this. So just to start, what do you know, just off the dome about sort of what caused the Black Death,

[Noam Hassenfeld]

my mind immediately goes to rats. I feel like it was something like rats coming from somewhere in Asia on merchant boats or something, and. And then the boats come to some port in Europe, like Italy or something, and then the people on the boats get infected, or the rats go off the boats and infect people. But long story short, rats is my answer.

[Bird Pinkerton]

Got it. And what are they giving people in your mind? Like, what's the disease beyond. Just like the Black Death?

[Noam Hassenfeld]

Bubonic plague.

[Hannah Barker]

Okay.

[Bird Pinkerton]

So, yes, this is like, this is basically exactly what I learned in school as well. Right. There were rats. They were spreading the plague. This explanation goes back a long time, but for decades now, researchers have been kind of reexamining that sort of textbook basic understanding here and trying not to make assumptions. So, for example, even the most basic thing, the idea that this is plague, until, as recently as the 2000 and tens, that was being debated seriously. Yeah. Like, to me, Black death and plague are inextricably linked. Right? Black death is plague. But that was actually an open question.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

Huh.

[Bird Pinkerton]

The disease that we nowadays call plague is caused by this bacterium, Yersinia pestis.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

Yersinia pestis.

[Bird Pinkerton]

Yersinia pestis. It can have different forms. If the bacteria gets into your lungs or your blood or your lymphatic system. The version you and I had heard of, bubonic plague is when it swells up your lymph nodes into these large buboes that can be the size of an egg. It's also pretty grim if it gets into your blood and your lungs as well. And the plague symptoms that we know of nowadays, they sound like the things medieval authors were writing that they'd experienced. But some researchers had questions because they were like, well, in other instances of plague, it hasn't spread this fast. And with these descriptions, medieval authors are. They're just working in, like, a really different model of disease. So they're talking about, like, the four humors or whatever.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

This was like miasma theory time, too, right? Where disease is kind of like a cloud of, I don't know, smelling odorous vapor.

[Bird Pinkerton]

Right. And so some historians were like, given that it's a little apples to oranges and comparing these, are we sure they're talking about plague?

[Hannah Barker]

How do we know about anything about bacteria in the 14th century? What if it was a different disease? So there was a lot of debate

[Bird Pinkerton]

about that, and ultimately that wasn't resolved until they. They took a bunch of old bodies from Black Death mass graves and looked in their bones and their teeth and analyzed the DNA in them.

[Hannah Barker]

And so they were able to collect teeth from the cemetery in London and test the teeth. And they found a lot of Yersinia pestis. And so that was kind of the convincing evidence that this is a plague outbreak. It is not other diseases. It is specifically plague.

[Bird Pinkerton]

So, like, that is the level of kind of questioning everything that we are talking about here. And also sort of the level of proof you need for people to agree on things. You know, you need like a smoking bacterium in a bone or a tooth. And in some other areas, we just don't quite have that level of clarity. So you mentioned rats, right?

[Noam Hassenfeld]

Rats.

[Bird Pinkerton]

And the story I heard, very similar to the story that you heard, right. Is like, okay, this bacterium, Yersinia pestis, right? It's in rats. The rats have fleas. The fleas. Oh, the fleas.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

I totally forgot the fleas.

[Bird Pinkerton]

Yeah.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

The fleas are pretty bad. I'm sorry, rats. I blamed you.

[Bird Pinkerton]

Well, I mean, the rats are also. They play a role.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

Yeah, but they don't want the fleas. I should have blamed the fleas. I'm sorry.

[Bird Pinkerton]

Blame the fleas, and then we blame Eve, and then we blame the snake. And honestly, like, Adam's the one who ate that. Whatever. So the rest of fleas. Fleas bite the rats, and then the fleas move on to humans. They bite the humans, they give them plague.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

Got it. Yeah.

[Bird Pinkerton]

That's already hard as a historian to sort of keep track of. Cause, like, it's not just like, what historical humans were doing. You had to keep track of what historical fleas were doing or, like, what historical rats were doing. And Hannah was like, we don't have

[Noam Hassenfeld]

rat histories, but did fleas keep any records?

[Bird Pinkerton]

You'll be shocked to learn fleas are illiterate. But the thing is that there's also now research that suggests that this is not just a story about rats.

[Hannah Barker]

We can be looking at other kinds of rodents, we can look at other kinds of mammals. Camels, it turns out, are pretty good plague transmitters. Camels, sheep, potentially as well. And the same thing, it seems, is true with the insects. So there's this particular species of flea that is associated with the rats. That is kind of the go to explanation. But there are other types of fleas, possibly also lice. On the biological side, this is one of the areas of investigation is what other insects, what other rodents or mammals are potential carriers of the disease.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Camels. That is something that I would never have assumed. Camels were part of this.

[Bird Pinkerton]

Right. And so, as you can imagine, I went into this thinking, you know, we all know that it is about the rats. And then it was like, well, you know, and it sort of. It felt like over and over, there

[Noam Hassenfeld]

were animals to blame.

[Bird Pinkerton]

And don't forget the marmots. There are, like, lots of things about marmots as well, and they do sort of need to know which animals to pay attention to here, because it is part of this sort of bigger project to figure out where did the Black Death even come from. Like, how did it get from point A to Z? And that's also more complicated than it might appear. So you mentioned when we first started this, Asia, and there have been attempts to use sort of genetics of Yersinia pestis to nail down an origin point. So basically, to look at this bacteria and, like, its family tree and be like, can we trace things back and figure out where it might have started. And so you have papers pointing to different spots in Asia, but people sort of debate that.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

I gotta say, if we are still debating like where Covid started from six years ago, it's hard for me to imagine that we could figure out where the Black plague started, like 600 plus years ago. Yeah, yeah.

[Bird Pinkerton]

And then like from there, they're also debating sort of how did it move

[Hannah Barker]

around, how long it took and what routes it took to move into the Middle east, to the area that's now southern Russia, the steppe, and then into Europe. That is an open question right now. That's an area of current research.

[Bird Pinkerton]

And you might think, okay, bird, this seems granular. Okay, who cares if it's rats or camels? Like, who cares if it's from one place or another place? But one of the other things I realized in talking to Hannah was how a few facts kind of in one direction or another direction kind of changes our perception of things.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

In what way?

[Bird Pinkerton]

After the break, I will tell you,

[Commercial Narrator]

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[Bird Pinkerton]

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[Noam Hassenfeld]

Rats. We're rats.

[Hannah Barker]

We're the rats.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

We pray at night.

[Hannah Barker]

We stalk at night. We're the rats.

[Bird Pinkerton]

So, Hannah Barker, this medieval historian zoomed in on one piece of the Black Death puzzle. This small but pretty consequential jump that people believe this bacterium, Yersinia pestis, made back in 1347.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

Specific.

[Bird Pinkerton]

So I think that in that year, 1347, the bacteria moved from the Black Sea into parts of Italy, and then from Italy, it spreads through Europe, hits different parts of Europe in a big way in the next few years.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

Okay.

[Bird Pinkerton]

And basically, some people think this, this sort of moment was a key moment for the European experience of Black Death. And there's this very long standing story that people have told to explain what happened here. So the story starts in a port city called Kaffa, located in modern day Crimea on the coast of the Black Sea. Caffa had lots of Italian merchants living in it, especially Genoese merchants. And in the 1340s, they were under siege because they were fighting with the Mongol army.

[Hannah Barker]

It can be called the Golden Horde, it can be called the Jochid Khanate, but the Mongol state that controlled the land in that area, they were fighting each other. And the Mongol army experienced this disease. People started to get sick. And so the story that people believed, the explanation for how Black Death ended up moving from Asia to Europe was that what they did was throw bodies, catapult bodies over the walls into this besieged city. And so the people inside the city started getting sick, and they abandoned the city and fled, but they took the disease with them. And so when these ships that were fleeing the siege went back to Italy, the people on the ship spread the disease to Italy. And that's how the Black Death ended up in Italy. And from there, it went to the rest of Europe. That's the story that was prevalent.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

Okay, so that's not rats or fleas. That's people.

[Bird Pinkerton]

Well, it's fleas coming off of people, but okay, okay, yeah, it is it's very.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

But the fleas aren't gonna fly over the walls, right?

[Bird Pinkerton]

It's just very intentional. Like, the Mongols get the plague. They deliberately give in the city of the plague. Italians bring the plague home. Right? It's seen as this, like, early example of biological warfare. One article I read mentioned that, like, this story is literally in the Encyclopedia Britannica.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

Wow.

[Bird Pinkerton]

But Hannah does not believe in it.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

Doesn't believe it happened.

[Bird Pinkerton]

She does not believe that this is how plague got to Italy.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

So people still catapulted.

[Bird Pinkerton]

While she told me, even before she got involved, people had questions about this. So for one thing, plague apparently does not spread very easily from dead bodies.

[Hannah Barker]

Fleas in particular, they will leave the body when it's cold. So if there's fleas in the clothing, then these are recently dead people. So are you gonna take someone? You know they died. All right. Stick them in the catapult? Like, really?

[Bird Pinkerton]

And people also thought this didn't totally make sense from, like, a military history perspective. Flinging bodies in this particular situation.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

I love it. Okay.

[Bird Pinkerton]

But more than kind of catapulted cold corpses, the thing that bothered Hannah about this story was essentially the source. So it comes from a text by a guy named Gabriella Dimousi, and he lived through the Black Death and wrote about it, but he was not in the besieged town of Caffa. He was in a town called Piacenza, which is thousands of kilometers away, like

[Noam Hassenfeld]

in Italy, not Crimea, I assume.

[Bird Pinkerton]

Exactly.

[Hannah Barker]

He never went to Caffa, and we know that because his job was as a notary. So he wrote legal documents. He was a lawyer, but he was doing part of the lawyer's job, that is writing documents. He wasn't, like, making arguments in court. So because he was writing all these documents, every document has a date on it. Right. And a place. And so we know that he was in piacenza throughout the 1340s. He didn't travel. He was there.

[Bird Pinkerton]

I'll just pause to say, like, I do really love the detective work that historians do. Like, I love that she's like, I went through all the documents, and I can prove that this person notarized them. So he. I know where he was or where he wasn't 600 years ago.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

Like, he didn't like to travel. He stayed home.

[Bird Pinkerton]

But so Han is established, right? This guy Dumoussi, he's not left Piacenza.

[Hannah Barker]

So his information about Piacenza is fantastic. His information about Caffa in the Black Sea is not. Because that's thousands of miles away, and he wasn't personally there. So as a historian, I want to ask, can we do better? Can we find someone who was in Caffa in 1345, 1347, 1350, this period, who is not only at the right time, but also at the right place? And the answer is yes.

[Bird Pinkerton]

She did find about a lot of sources, a lot of people writing in and around Kaffa at the time, records from the Italians, from travelers and so on. So she read through all this material and she found this document, this petition, actually written after the siege was ended. Mongols were sick. They ended the siege. They left. And after. After that happened, some of the Genoese people in the city of Caffa wrote this document.

[Hannah Barker]

They're writing back to Genoa asking for help.

[Bird Pinkerton]

They ask for a new bishop to replace the one who died. They also say in this letter, we

[Hannah Barker]

want to refortify the city because the Mongols left, because they are suffering from an endless plague of death. So there it is.

[Bird Pinkerton]

For Hannah. This document pretty clearly shows this about dead bodies being catapulted into Caffa during the siege and spreading. Yersinia pestis. Can't hold up.

[Hannah Barker]

The disease is not transmitted during the siege because this is a petition that was written after the siege and the disease hasn't been transmitted yet.

[Bird Pinkerton]

So, like, the Mongols did not deliberately give everyone in the town the disease because they'd already left. Nobody in the town has the disease.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

This whole thing is just kind of kapha esque.

[Bird Pinkerton]

Oh, a lot of people died. Noam.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

Too soon.

[Bird Pinkerton]

Yeah. It's only been 600 years, dude. Okay, but if the dead bodies, the dead, catapulted bodies. Right. Did not bring plague into Kaffa, then what did? Right. And so Hannah thinks that the answer here might be grain.

[Hannah Barker]

Oh, in the letter, they talk about the horrors of siege. And when medieval people talk about the horrors of siege, what they usually mean is starvation. So this is a situation where they've been besieged for a little while. They were definitely running short on food. They were very afraid of that. Now the siege has been lifted, they're going to start importing food right from the countryside around. This is a grain producing region. There's lots of grain there. It just wasn't coming into the city because of the siege. So one of the first things they're going to do in order to relieve the horrors of the siege is bring food into the city. What travels with grain? Rats and mice. What travels with the rats and mice? Fleas. So there's plenty of other situations, other evidence that we have more in modern times. Right. Of grain Shipments with rats or mice or other rodents that are carrying plague.

[Bird Pinkerton]

There are also other historical examples of plague traveling with grain. And so Hannah thought, you know, what if that's how plague came to the city? What if it was not a Mongol act of war, but instead just something the townspeople did to themselves accidentally in a time of peace.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

It definitely gives it a different feeling of, this was brought here aggressively to hurt people.

[Bird Pinkerton]

Right. It becomes this, like, poignant thing.

[Hannah Barker]

They don't understand what we understand about bacteria and plague transmission. They're aware that there's a disease. They think they probably are likely to get it, but they don't connect food shipping with disease transmission. So as far as they're concerned, what do you do to protect the population? You want them to be well fed. They're already suffering because of the siege. Bring food into the city so people can be well fed. They don't realize that that is what is going to bring the disease into the city.

[Bird Pinkerton]

And then when Hannah looks at how plague could have traveled to Italy, she also thinks, based on some digging, that, you know, Venice, Genoa, they were not getting grain from the Black Sea region during the siege. They had an embargo.

[Hannah Barker]

So as soon as the siege is lifted, the grain shipments start to move again. And you can trace the timing of plague outbreaks in connection with the arrival of the grain ships.

[Bird Pinkerton]

And so her case is that it's not intentional. You know, it's just grain chipping that brought Yersinia pestis into Italy and then spread the plague through Europe.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

Yeah. I mean, I'm thinking about what you said before, about these small historical details shaping how we tell a story. And when I think about the difference between, okay, the plague came from Asia through Mongols catapulting dead bodies purposefully into a city that causes the residents of that city to flee and bring the plague to Italy versus another story of there was a war, the Mongols got sick, they went away, then there was peace, but the people were hungry, and they got wheat, and the wheat had rats with fleas, and then the people got the plague. Like, that's just a totally different story. The first story is, like, someone did this to Europe, and there's someone to blame. And the second story is just, you know, the way life works, that things travel and disease travels, and sometimes it happens, and it's much more of a tragic story than a story that is one that has blame as a part of it.

[Bird Pinkerton]

Yeah. Hannah said something so similar to this.

[Hannah Barker]

This is actually a really good exercise in thinking about historical events that happened without Intentionality. So I think that's something that's really important for us to think about, right? Rather than looking for who to blame, thinking about how this can happen in a way where no one meant for it to happen.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

It's just so interesting because even when I told the story, like when you asked me to say, what's the one thing I know about the plague? And I'm like, blame the rats. It's hard to tell a story about the past where something terrible happened and there isn't a bad guy.

[Bird Pinkerton]

And I think made me sort of even more than I already did, respect the desire for caveats, as people do history, the sort of desire to question everything.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

You love a good caveat.

[Bird Pinkerton]

I love a good caveat. Cause I think it's not like Hannah's totally changed all the pieces of this story, right? Like, we are still talking about the blacksmith. We're still talking about Italy. We're still talking about 1347. We're still talking even about rats, right? Like, it's not like she came in and said, I think this was camels,

[Noam Hassenfeld]

actually, but it was camels.

[Bird Pinkerton]

But it was camels. But if even a couple of small tweaks could make this story look totally different, there could also be researchers with bigger tweaks. One of the researchers I spoke to wants us to reexamine the timeline of the plague. Researchers I spoke to also emphasized that historians have been really Eurocentric in their plague research so far. And so maybe as they expand the scope of their understanding of the medieval world, there are other changes to make to the stories we tell here. I think that's part of caveating and reconsidering. I don't know. An exciting part of this to me is that once you open a new door like this paper does, saying, you know, maybe it was grain, not biological warfare, that then invites people to walk through that door. So those researchers I talked to about the climate stuff, Martin and Ulf, the people who sort of kicked this whole conversation off. Martin was saying that he was inspired to look into the Black Death because of Hannah's paper. He studies past climates, and when he saw this grain paper, he was like, climates play a role in grain. Like, maybe there's a connection here. And so he and his co author found, you know, Europe had had a bunch of really terrible climate years leading up to 1347. There was sort of widespread famine. And so maybe it's not just that the embargo was lifted on grain from the Black Sea, but also maybe that Europeans were really desperate for grain from the Black Sea.

[Noam Hassenfeld]

Yeah, so if you're changing one detail here, it's not just changing this one story. By thinking about how we tell these stories, we're getting better questions and then hopefully we can get to that better Black Death story.

[Bird Pinkerton]

Hopefully. If you would like to read more about the Black Death, we will link to Hannah's paper laying the Corpses to Rest in our transcript. And we will also link to the paper that was written by Martin Bauch and Ulf Bunken, the paper on climate and the Mediterranean grain trade and the Black Death. This episode was produced by me, Bird Pinkerton. It was edited by the wonderful Lyssa Soap. Thanks also to Sally Helm for some initial feedback and structuring help. Christian Ayala did the mixing and the sound design. Melissa Hirsch checked the facts. Noam Hassenfeld does our music. Meredith Hodnot and Joanna Solotaroff are the fact that Camels have three eyelids thanks always to Brian Resnik for co creating the show with me and Noam. And a big thanks also to Monica Green and Spike Gibbs for taking the time to speak with me about the Black Death, as well as to Martin Bauch and Ulf Bunken for just being careful. Science communicators really appreciate it. If you have thoughts about the Black Death or if you think there are other historical diseases that we should dig into, we are@ unexplainableox.com if you would like to support the show and the journalism that Vox does. We would love it if you would become a member. It is very easy to do. Just go to Vox.com members and you will get access to all of Vox's journalism. But you will also know that you are supporting all of Vox's journalism. And for those of you who have emailed to let us know that you signed up because of Unexplainable. Thank you. And thank you to those of you who have left us a nice review on your podcast platform or told someone in your life about the show. You are all excellent. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network and we will be back very soon with another episode about everything that we do not yet know.

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[Bird Pinkerton]

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