Marc Fennell

So I got infected on Monday.

Then by the Wednesday, if it got into my lungs, I'm gone.

You're gone.

But I certainly didn't make it to Sunday.

Okay.

So in popular imagination, we regard the plague as something that really happened in Europe.

But the truth is that is not where it started.

So where did the plague actually, in terms of this major moment in time, where did it actually begin?

Yes, why Kyrgyzstan indeed?

Well, to answer that, we need to get one thing straight about the medieval world.

It was not just a bunch of sad, insular, muddy towns cut off from each other.

People were moving, they were trading, they were talking.

I think we tend to imagine it as a bunch of isolated hamlets.

In reality, it was anything but.

Living in such an interconnected world meant that if I was in Constantinople, today's Istanbul, and I wanted pottery from China, I could get it.

I would just have to travel a very long way along something you might know as the Silk Road, baby.

Fun fact, what we call the Silk Road, actually not a road.

It was this massive network of routes.

We're talking about like 6,500 kilometres.

And it linked, well, pretty much linked the entire known world.