Dr. Eleanor Janega

You got to get through Kyrgyzstan if you are going to be going from China to Constantinople, which these people are.

Germs, and in particular, the Black Death or the plague.

Germs move as easily as money.

So if you have trade routes where you are moving unfathomable riches, if you're moving nutmeg and pepper and silk,

and pottery and furs and wonderful things like silver, you're also moving microbes and that means that you are essentially gambling whatever you trade.

And now that's an almost unthinkable number.

It didn't get to the Americas and Australasia.

When you consider it's 25% of the world's population and the Americas and Australia are not even involved.

You know, we're talking about a death rate on the Arabian Peninsula of about 30 to 50% of the population.

Same in Europe.

In Asia, very, very similar stories.

It's just that we tend to focus a bit on what happens in Europe.

This is something that happens in Northern Africa, Asia, Europe, and it's absolutely devastating.

Oh yeah, and I mean, literally you cannot have one without the other.

The Black Death simply would not have happened in the way that it did if the Silk Road wasn't going through there.

I feel very strongly about this because everybody blames rats.

The rats did nothing wrong.

So what happened was the Yersinia pestis germ lives in the digestive tracts of fleas.

And marmots then come into contact with the animals that are in the caravans moving through the Silk Road and the fleas get off of the marmots and onto the varying animals, including humans.

So there is a group of Mongol people that we call the Golden Horde.