Marc Fennell

Something nobody is trading for, nobody's paying for, and most definitely nobody saw coming.

Yes, perhaps the most globally impactful commodity traded along the Silk Road was death.

The black death, spreading into cities from Baghdad to Cairo and indeed all the way up into Europe.

With every sale, traders were rolling the dice, inhaling the breath of someone who felt maybe just a bit hot that day, but they didn't realise they were truly sick.

And what would await them at the end of that week?

It spread far and it spread fast and would eventually kill, yes, a quarter of the world's population.

We've got two very famous kind of fragments of history, right?

We've got the plague and we've got the Silk Road.

And I think if you ever think about them at all, you think about them as separate things.

But actually, there is this deep and very tragic connection between the two that most people aren't aware of.

The plague spread along these trade routes, coursing through them like arteries in a body.

But, and this is a personal request from Eleanor to you, contrary to popular opinion,

Please stop blaming rats.

And those fleas lived on marmots, which are a sort of large ground squirrel thing.

But how much did the people of the Middle Ages actually understand what was happening?

Because I think it's easy to assume that they just had no idea as all this chaos was unfolding around them.

But there is a story that suggests that the people of the time knew a lot more about what was going on than perhaps we might give them credit for.

The Golden Horde emerged in like the 1200s, initially led by the grandson of Genghis Khan.

Now, the story goes that during the siege of Kaffa in the 1300s in what is now modern day Crimea, the Golden Horde was struck by the Black Death.

And this bit is interesting.