Chapter 1: What new insights are being uncovered about the Black Death?
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Does anyone really know what goes on behind closed doors at the Supreme Court? Four years ago, I got a tip about the court, and I was not in the market to cover it whatsoever. But this tip was about a secret influence campaign that had been carried out inside the court. As you know, the very idea of that is outrageous.
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Yes. Hello. Hi.
Hello. I have you here today to talk about the Black Death.
Fun!
Yeah. Well, kind of, actually, though. Like, interesting, at least.
You got a fun take on the Black Death?
Well, I got interested in the Black Death. 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 Bündchen and another guy named Martin Bauch. And I wanted to talk to them about their research.
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Chapter 2: How do climate factors relate to the Black Death?
And what are they giving people in your mind? Like what's the disease beyond just like the Black Death?
Bubonic plague?
Okay, so yes. 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 re-examining that sort of textbook basic understanding here and try not to make assumptions.
So, for example, even the most basic thing, the idea that this is plague, until as recently as the 2010s, 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. Huh. The disease that we nowadays call plague is caused by this bacterium, Yersinia pestis.
Yersinia pestis.
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.
This was like miasma theory time too, right?
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Chapter 3: What role did historical narratives play in understanding the Black Death?
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.
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?
Wait, wait, wait. Camels? That is something that I would never have assumed camels were part of this.
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's more animals to blame.
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.
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...
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Chapter 4: How have researchers challenged traditional beliefs about plague transmission?
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.
Okay, so that's not rats or fleas. That's people.
Well, it's fleas coming off of people, but... Okay, okay. Yeah, it is, it's very... But the fleas aren't going to fly over the walls. Right, it's this very intentional, like, the Mongols get the plague, they deliberately give Italians in the city 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. Wow. But Hannah does not believe in it.
Doesn't believe it happened?
She does not believe that this is how plague got to Italy. So people still catapulted. Well, 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 anywhere.
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 going to take someone, you know, they died, all right, stick them in the catapult.
Like, really? And people also thought this didn't totally make sense from like a military history perspective. Flinging bodies in this particular situation.
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Chapter 5: What evidence supports the idea of grain as a transmission route for the plague?
They're writing back to Genoa asking for help. They ask for a new bishop to replace the one who died.
They also say in this letter, We want to re-fortify the city because the Mongols left, because they are suffering from an endless plague of death. So there it is.
For Hannah, this document pretty clearly shows this story about dead bodies being catapulted into Caffa during the siege and spreading Yersinia pestis can't hold up.
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.
So, like... The Mongols did not deliberately give everyone in the town the disease because they'd already left. Nobody in the town had the disease.
This whole thing is just kind of Kaffa-esque.
Oh, a lot of people died, Noam.
Too soon.
Yeah, it's only been 600 years, dude. Okay. But if the dead bodies, the dead catapulted bodies, right, did not bring plague into Caffa, then what did?
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Chapter 6: How did the Black Death reshape European societies?
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.
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.
And I think it 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.
You love a good caveat.
I love a good caveat. Because I think it's not like Hannah's totally changed all the pieces of the story, right? Like, we are still talking about the Black Sea. 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, actually. But it was camels. 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.
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