Dr. Eleanor Janega

And the Golden Horde are besieging the city of Kaffa.

And then this is what they do.

Basically, they besiege varying cities.

They move them into trade conglomerations where they can tax them.

And that's basically the Mongol thing.

And they say that as part of this, Jannebeg, who is the leader of this particular horde, takes the dead bodies of people who died of plague and catapults them into the city.

So they clearly know that if you have a diseased body of someone who died of something, then you can get the disease off of that.

They might not know what a germ is.

but they do understand that you can catch things.

Everybody in Caffa does end up getting the Black Death, and from there, that's how it really kind of gets into Europe, because a lot of traders were on the Crimean Peninsula, especially moving salt.

Back and forth, you know salt is one of these luxury goods.

Crimean salt, very excellent, apparently.

So they all run for the ships that they've got, and their first stop is they've got to get down to Constantinople.

largest city in Europe, one of the biggest cities in the world, right?

So first you stop off at Constantinople, up, now everybody in Constantinople has it.

And then they stop in Venice, up, now everybody in Venice has it.

Then they get back to Genoa, up, now everybody in Genoa has it, right?

So we can literally track outbreaks of the plague that come from particular ships fleeing CAFA.

There's this big myth that the church, capital T, capital C, thought that cats were demonic and made a pronouncement that everyone should kill their cats and so the cats couldn't keep the rat population down and that's why everyone got the Black Death, which is...

You will not believe how prevalent this myth is.