Revista de Historia Interdisciplinaria, l:1 (Verano, 2019), 59–90.
Philip Slavin
Death by the Lake: Mortality Crisis in Early
Fourteenth-Century Central Asia The geographical ori-
gins of the Black Death is one of the most pressing and hotly
debated questions concerning the historiography of the Second
Plague Pandemic, involving not only historians but also (in recent
años) palaeogeneticists. Roughly speaking, the history of the de-
bate begins in 1893 with Gasquet’s The Black Death of 1348 y 1349
(1893), which situated the origins of the plague in China, whence
Italian merchants spread it to Europe in trading caravans, a través de
Crimea. En 1951, Pollitzer brought attention to the existence of
two East Syriac Christian (Nestorian) cemeteries in Chu Valley
(in the Issyk-Kul’ region of northern Kyrgyzstan), excavated in
1885/6, containing ten inscriptions from 1338/9 indicating “death
through pestilence.” Although Pollitzer himself never studied the ep-
igraphical evidence from the Issyk-Kul’ cemeteries, he “relocated”
the initial outbreak of the plague to Central Asia, whence, according
to him, it spread to Crimea and later to Europe. Dols adopted the
“Central Asian origin” hypothesis in his 1977 monograph about
the plague in the Middle East. En cambio, the “Chinese origin”
hypotheses found advocates in Ziegler (1969), who was not aware
of the Issyk-Kul’ evidence, as well as in McNeill (1979) y
Campbell (2016), who both saw Issyk-Kul’ as an intermittent
station in the pathogen’s journey from China to Europe.1
Philip Slavin is Associate Professor of History, University of Stirling. He is the author of Bread and
Ale for the Brethren: The Provisioning of Norwich Cathedral Priory, c.1260–1536 (Hatfield, REINO UNIDO., 2012);
Experiencing Famine in Fourteenth-Century Britain (Brepols, 2019); with Sharon DeWitte, “Between
Famine and Death: England on the Eve of the Black Death—Evidence from Paleoepidemiology
and Manorial Accounts,” Revista de Historia Interdisciplinaria, XLIV (2013), 37–60.
The author thanks two anonymous reviewers for their most helpful comments, así como
Professor Pier-Giorgio Borbone (Universidad de Pisa) for kindly sharing his insights, así como
his pre-published transcriptions of the tombstone inscriptions from the plague years.
© 2019 por el Instituto de Tecnología de Massachusetts y The Journal of Interdisciplinary
Historia, Cª, https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_a_01376
1 Francis A. Gasquet, The Black Death of 1348 y 1349 (Londres, 1908; origen. pub. 1893), 2–3;
Robert Pollitzer, Plague (Geneva, 1954), 14; Michael W. Dols, The Black Death in the Middle
East (Princeton, 1977), 35–38; William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (Nueva York, 1976), 43;
Bruce M. S. Campbell, The Great Transition: Clima, Disease and Society in the Late-Medieval
Mundo (Nueva York, 2016), 246–247.
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60 | P H IL IP SL AVI N
En 2014, Hymes suggested that the Mongols may have carried
plague into China through Gansu Corridor during their conquest
of Jin (northern China) as early as the first half of the thirteenth
siglo. En 1977, Norris proposed an altogether different explana-
ción, postulating that the Issyk-Kul’ outbreak was unrelated to the
European outbreak a few years later and that the disease originated
in the Caspian basin (not China) before spreading to the west into
the Golden Horde, to the east into Central Asia, and to the south
into the Middle East. Norris’ arguments were rejected in 1978 por
Dols, who criticized Norris’ thesis as unsubstantiated by any histor-
ical evidence; Norris’ rejoinder reaffirmed his original position
about the Caspian origin of the plague.2
The Chinese-origin hypothesis deserves attention. En el uno
mano, there is no reference to plague mortality on a pandemic scale in
any Chinese source from the Yuan period, be it the Yuanshi chron-
icle or the local history gazetteers. Por otro lado, as Hymes has
recently shown, the sources make reference to sporadic outbreaks of
epidemic mortality among Mongol soldiers campaigning in the Jin
state during the early thirteenth century, as well as to two outbreaks
of mass mortality in the south—in 1333 (the prefectures of Songjiang,
Jiaxing, and Hangzhou) y 1344/5 (the prefectures of Fujian,
Fuzhou, Yanping, Shaowu, and Tingzhou). We may also add a
1353 outbreak in Datong (in Shanxi province, northwestern
Porcelana), which was designated as a “pestilence” (“Yì”) that killed
more than half of the local inhabitants.
The evidence does not suggest, at least at present, that these
mortality crises were caused by plague. Although some scholars, en-
cluding McNeill and Cao, see the 1333 outbreak as a prelude to the
outbreaks in Europe from the late 1340s to the early 1350s, scholars of
the Yuan and Ming periods remain skeptical about such an interpre-
tation. Sin embargo, the remarkably high mortality rates during the
Datong mortality should discourage us from rejecting the possibility
of localized/regional outbreaks of plague in different parts of China,
albeit differing in scale from, and unrelated to, the pandemic mortal-
ity of the Black Death. What we lack is any indication of a plague
2 Robert Hymes, “A Hypothesis on the East Asian Beginnings of the Yersinia Pestis Polytomy,"
Medieval Globe, I (2014), 285–308; John Norris, “East or West? The Geographic Origin of the
Black Death,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, LI (1977), 1–24; Dols, “Geographical Origin of
the Black Death: Comentario,” ibid., LII (1978), 112–113; John Norris, “Response,” ibid., 114–120.
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MOR TA LI TY IN C E NT RA L ASI A
| 61
pandemic that engulfed vast territories of the Yuan Empire and later
moved into western Eurasia through Central Asia.3
Recent advances in palaeogenetics shed important light on
the controversy regarding the geographical origins of the plague.
en un 2010 estudiar, Morelli et al. established a global phylogeny of
Yersinia pestis that suggested an origin and evolution of the bacillus
in or near China. En 2013, Cui et al. identified the four-lineage
“big bang” polytomy of Yersinia pestis, which they dated between
1142 y 1339 (a median date of 1268 was re-calibrated by Spyrou
et al. en 2018 a 1238). They found the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau to
have had the largest diversity of strains, meaning that this region
could have been the original focus of the pathogen polytomy. En
2017, Eroshenko et al. sequenced fifty-six modern samples of Yersinia
pestis collected from the three plague foci of Kyrgyzstan (Tien-Shan’
[itself consisting of three autonomous sub-foci—Sarydzhaz, Upper-
Naryn, and Aksai], Alai and Talas) during the past fifty years. Fifteen
of these samples came from the vicinity of the Issyk-Kul’ region
(the Tien-Shan’ focus in eastern Kyrgyzstan).4
Of particular importance is the identification of an additional
and previously unknown strain of Branch 0 (0.ANT5), cual es
unique to the Tien-Shan’ focus of eastern Kyrgyzstan and south-
eastern Kazakhstan. It is older than most other known pre-Black
Death strains of the same clade (except 0.ANT4, responsible for
the sixth-century Justinianic plague, which just preceded 0.
ANT5). In addition to 0.ANT5, the Issyk-Kul’ region is also dom-
inated by three additional strains of Y. Pestis—0.ANT2, 0.ANT3,
and 2.MED1. This remarkable diversity of strains points to the pos-
sibility that the Tien-Shan’ focus in eastern Kyrgyzstan (cual
covers Issyk-Kul’) was the original location of the great big bang
of the plague lineages (contrary to Cui et al.’s placement of the
3 Hymes, “Hypothesis,” 288–294, 299–300; McNeill, Plagues and Peoples, 43; Cao Shuji,
“Dili huanjing yu Song-Yuan shidai de chuanranbing,” Lishi yu dili, XII (1995), 183–192.
For Cao’s arguments, see Hymes, “Hypothesis," 287; Paul D. Buell, “Qubilai and the Rats,"
Sudhoffs Archiv, XCVI (2012), 127–144; Yuanshi (Beijing, 1976), Chapter 43, 912 (I am grateful
to Ilya Mozias, who translated the relevant entry).
4 Giovanna Morelli et al., “Yersinia Pestis Genome Sequencing Identifies Patterns of Global
Phylogenetic Diversity,” Nature Genetics, XLII (2010), 1140–1145; Yujun Cui et al., “Histor-
ical Variations in Mutation Rate in an Epidemic Pathogen, Yersinia Pestis,” Proceedings of the
Academia Nacional de Ciencias (hereinafter PNAS ), CX (2013), 577–582; Galina Eroshenko et al.,
“Yersinia Pestis Strains of Ancient Phylogenetic Branch 0.ANT Are Widely Spread in the
High-Mountain Plague Foci of Kyrgyzstan,” PLoS ONE, XII (e0187230).
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62 | P H IL IP SL AVI N
polytomy on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau). Such reasoning replicates
and expands upon Green’s 2014 analysis and the historical applica-
tion of the Cui team’s work.5
The present article does not (and cannot) pretend to solve the
mystery of the geographical origins of the Black Death. En cambio, él
focuses on an intriguing, yet unstudied, instance of a mortality cri-
sis that preceded the Black Death outbreak in the Caspian/Crimea
of late 1346 by seven to eight years but exhibited clear signs of
plague. The outbreak in question occurred among the East Syriac
(Nestorian) communities of the Chu Valley, not far from Issyk-
Kul’ Lake in northern Kyrgyzstan. Our information about the out-
break derives from a rich epigraphical corpus consisting of about
620 tombstone inscriptions from three East Syriac cemeteries in
the Chu Valley. Scholars have been aware of the corpus of the
Issyk-Kul’ inscriptions for some time, but philologists, not histo-
rians, were the ones to explore it intensively. Historians of the East
Syriac church used it to reconstruct the socioreligious aspects of
local Christian communities, but no historians of health and dis-
ease attempted an analysis of the corpus to reconstruct the demo-
graphic and mortality patterns of the local population with regard
to an outbreak of severe mortality that occurred in 1338/9. Este
article fills the gap, performing both linguistic and quantitative
analysis on the epigraphical corpus to examine mortality trends.
The Issyk-Kul’ mortality seems to be the earliest instance of a
quantifiable mortality crisis during the so-called Second Plague
Pandemic. De hecho, it is the only quantifiable plague crisis in Central
Asia during the Second Plague Pandemic. In the absence of pa-
laeogenetic data from the same cemeteries, this study does not
purport to establish any direct causal (let alone genetic) connection
between the Issyk-Kul’ mortality and the ensuing Black Death
that hit Eurasia and North Africa from 1346 a 1353. Nor does
it deny such possible connection. En cambio, it treats the Issyk-Kul’
crisis as a local instance of plague preceding the Black Death. A
appreciate the timing and contours of its outbreak, it scrutinizes
the environmental, climatic, and socioeconomic context of the
Issyk-Kul’ region in particular and Central Asia in general, wrap-
ping the outbreak in this wider context.
5 For Monica Green’s historical application of Cui et al.’s work, see Green, “Taking
‘Pandemic’ Seriously: Making the Black Death Global,” Medieval Globe, I (2014), 35–41.
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MOR TA LI TY IN C E NT RA L ASI A
Higo. 1 Chronology of Christian Burials on the Issyk-Kul’, 1248–1345
| 63
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30
28
, 74°42
), Tokmak/Burana (42°49
00
00
THE MORTALITY CRISIS AROUND ISSYK-KUL’, 1338/9 The epi-
graphical corpus consists of about 620 tombstone inscriptions from
three East Syriac (Nestorian) cemeteries in the Chu Valley. El
sites in question are Karadzhigach, on the outskirts of Bishkek
(42°48
),
, 75°18
and Krasnaya Rechka (42°54
). Almost three-
00
quarters of the inscriptions (439) are dated; the chronology
spans from 1248 a 1345 (Cifra 1). Pantusov (1849–1909),
who excavated the first two cemeteries in 1885/6, reckoned
that the total number of East Syriac tombstones in the area
was around 3,000. Chwolson meticulously edited and published
548 inscriptions, almost all of them in Syriac. Kokovtsev (1905–
1909), Dzhumagulov (1968, 1971, 1982, y 1987), and Klein
(2000 y 2009) discovered and published, in stages, an addi-
tional seventy-two inscriptions.6
, 74°57
36
07
28
00
0
0
6 daniel a. Chwolson, “Syrisch-Nestorianische Grabinschriften aus Semirjetschie,” Memoires de
l’Academie Imperiale des Sciences de St. Petersbourg, XXXVII (1890), 10–168; ídem, Syrischnestorianische
Grabinschriften aus Semirjetschie: Neu Folge. (Calle. Petersburg, 1897); PAG. k. Kokovtsev, “Khristiyansko-
siriyskiya nadgrobnyya nadpisi iz Almalyka, Zapiski Vostochnogo Otdeleniya Imperatorskogo
Russkogo Arkheologicheskogo,” Obshchestva, 16 (1904/5), 190–200; ídem, “Neskol’ko novykh
nadgrobnykh kamney s khristiyansko-siriyskimi nadpisyami iz Sredney Azii,” Izvestiya Imperators-
koy Akademii Nauk, 12 (1907), 427–458; ídem, “K siro-turetskoy epigrafike Semirech”ya,” ibid., 11
(1909), 773–796; C. Dzhumagulov, “Die syrisch-türkischen (nestorianischen) Denkmäler
in Kirgisien,” Mitteilungen des Instituts für Orientforschung, 14 (1968), 470–480; ídem, Yazyk
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64 | P H IL IP SL AVI N
Del 439 dated inscriptions, 114 (26 por ciento) are from
1337/8 and 1338/9—years 1649 y 1650, according to East
Syriac dating, which began, by the Seleucid calendar, en 312 a.e.c..
(each year ran from October 1 of the previous year to October 1 de
the next year) (Cifra 1). That this remarkable spike was connected
to an acute mortality crisis is corroborated by ten inscriptions pro-
viding the additional detail that people “died of pestilence” (mīt[ā]
bi-mawtānā, in Syriac). According to one tombstone inscription,
“In the Year 1649 / this is the tomb / of the maiden Qïz Terim / OMS
died of pestilence.” The Syriac term mawtānā has an unambiguous
meaning of “pestilence” or “great mortality.” Yet, the presence of
this term alone is by no means sufficient to suggest that Yersinia
pestis caused the mortality crisis of 1338/9. In theory, palaeogenetic
analysis involving sequencing genomes—in this case, from one of the
mawtānā graves—could provide a definitive answer, as it recently
did in several Black Death cemeteries in England, Alemania, Francia,
Italia, Los países bajos, España, Norway, and Tatarstan (and subse-
quent late fourteenth-century outbreaks). Such an undertaking is
no, sin embargo, currently in the works at the Issyk-Kul’ cemeteries
because the tombstones there were removed from the graves during
el 1885/6 excavations, leaving no way to identify the original loca-
tions of the mawtānā graves or, en efecto, any of the graves from the
mortality years. To make matters worse, many of the skulls were also
removed from the graves during the excavations rendering the
whereabouts of most of them unknown. Por eso, no identification
of mawtānā with the Black Death of a few years later can be estab-
lished without a palaeogenetic analysis.7
These difficulties notwithstanding, we can still present a
good case that the 1338/9 outbreak was the earliest documented
and quantifiable instance of fourteenth-century plague in Central
siro-tyurkskikh (nestorianskikh) pamyatnikov Kirgizii (Frunze, 1971); ídem, Epigrafika Kirgizii,
Vypusk 2 (Frunze, 1982); ídem, Epigrafika Kirgizii, Vypusk 3 (Frunze, 1987); Wassilios Klein,
Das nestorianische Christentum an den Handelswegen durch Kyrgyzstan bis zum 14. Jh. (Turnhout,
2000); Klein and Kuvatbek Tabaldiev, “Zwei neu gefundene syrische Grabsteine aus Kyrgyzstan,"
in Dietmar W. Winkler and Li Tang (editores.), Hidden Treasures and Intercultural Encounters: Studies on
East Syriac Christianity in China and Central Asia (Münster, 2009), 87–90; John Stewart, Nestorian
Missionary Enterprise (Edimburgo, 1928), 198–213.
7 Chwolson, Syrischnestorianische Grabinschriften aus Semirjetschie: Neu Folge. (Calle. Petersburg,
1897), 32 (No. 142). The removal of the stones and skulls is surveyed in T. W.. Thacker,
“A Nestorian Gravestone from Central Asia in the Gulbenkian Museum, Durham University,"
Durham University Journal, LIX (1967), 94–107.
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MOR TA LI TY IN C E NT RA L ASI A
Higo. 2 Annual Mortality Levels in Issyk-Kul’ and Europe (Indexed on
| 65
Pre-Plague Levels), 1325–1357
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NOTES The “1348 peak” sample includes Baghdad, Barcelona, Lyon, Givry, Arezzo, Assisi,
Florencia, Perugia, Pisa, Siena, Bologna, and Dubrovnik (Ragusa). The “1349 peak” sample in-
cludes Besançon, Lausanne, Tournai, and London. The “1350 peak” sample includes Lübeck and
Stralsund. All figures are indexed on averages for pre-plague years. Por eso, for the “1348 peak”
sample, 1= average mortality rates for pre-1348 years.
Asia by closely scrutinizing the epigraphical evidence in its bio-
environmental and socioeconomic contexts. The first step is to con-
sider the ratio between mortality in “normal” years and that in 1338/9.
Throughout the entire period from 1295 a 1345, the average number
of Issyk-Kul’ tombstones in a single year was 4.4. The figure rose to
31 en 1337/8 y para 74 en 1338/9. This increase indicates that the
mortality crisis seems to have started sometime in the spring/summer
de 1338. The ratios between the crisis years (y, En particular, the sec-
ond crisis year) and “normal” (eso es, non-plague) years are strongly
comparable with figures from different parts of Europe and the
Middle East during the Black Death, deriving largely from probated
wills (in the case of Givry in Bourgogne, from a local parish register,
and in the case of Baghdad, annual counts of mortality of scholars).
Como figura 2 indicates, the ratio for Issyk-Kul’ was nearly 17 a 1.
The comparable ratios for locations where the plague peaked in
1348, 1349, y 1350 eran, respectivamente, alrededor 15 a 1, 15 a 1,
y 16 to 1—a striking similarity.8
Stuart Borsch and Tarek Sabraa, “Refugees of the Black Death: Quantifying Rural Mi-
8
gration for Plague and Other Environmental Disasters,” Annales de démographie historique,
66 | P H IL IP SL AVI N
Another comparison between the Issyk-Kul’ mortality and the
Black Death in Europe concerns the distribution of deaths across gen-
ders. As Table 1 indicates, durante el 1338/9 crisis, the ratio of male-
to-female deaths went down to 0.9 from about 1.27 in normal years.
One theory holds that in nonepidemic years, testosterone reduces the
resistance to pathogens, whereas estrogen increases it, thus explaining
why men are normally frailer than women. Whether this rule works
in the case of plague outbreaks remains an unsolved question; el
available evidence is contradictory. Sex ratios from different skeletal
assemblages vary from place to place. At the Black Death burial site of
East Smithfield (Londres), adult female skeletons accounted for 40
percent of the total adult skeletons identified by sex; at Hereford
Cathedral and Dreux (northwestern France), the figures stood at
56 y 58 por ciento, respectivamente. The preponderance of one sex
at a particular burial site does not, sin embargo, mean that one sex was
at a higher risk of mortality than the other. As DeWitte has established,
applying the biostatistical Gompertz Model of mortality, the East
Smithfield evidence does not necessarily indicate that the Black Death
in London was sex-selective. Asimismo, Castex and Kacki con-
cluded that the sheer number of sexed skeletons at both Hereford
and Dreux was too small to establish Black Death sex selectivity.9
CXXXIV (2017), 85; Jordi Gunzberg Moll, “Epidemias y mortalidad en la Cataluña medieval:
1300–1500,” in Simonetta Cavaciocchi (ed.), Le interazioni fra economia e ambiente biologico
nell’Europa preindustriale secc. XIII-XVIII (Florencia, 2010), 57–80; Marie-Thérèse Lorcin, Vivre
et mourir en Lyonnais à la fin du Moyen Age (París, 1981), 192; PAG. Gras, “Le registre paroissial de
Givry (1334–1357) et la peste noire en Bourgogne,” Bibliothèque de l’école des chartes, C (1939),
295–308; Samuel K. Cohn, Jr., “The Black Death: End of a Paradigm,” American Historical
Revisar, CVII (2002), 728–733; Martin Bertram, “Bologneser Testamente: Erster Teil: Die
urkundliche Überlieferung,” Quellen und Forschungen aus italienischen Archiven und Bibliotheken,
LXX (1990), 208–212; Testamenta notariae, Vols. 1–5, Državni arhiv Dubrovnik (The State
Archive of Dubrovnik) (I am grateful to Gordan Ravančić for making a digital copy of the
Dubrovnik registers available to me); Ulysse Robert, Testaments de l’officialité de Besançon, 1265–
1500 (París, 1902), 24–52; Bernard Andenmatten and Jean-Daniel Morerod, “La Peste à
Lausanne au XIVe siècle (1348/9, 1360): étude du Chapitre cathédral et des testaments vaudois,"
Etudes de lettres, II–III (1987), 19–49; A. de la Grange, “Choix de testaments Tournaisiens
antérieurs au XVIe siècle,” Annales de la Société historique de Tournai, II (1897), 47–80; R. R. Sharpe
(ed.), Calendar of Wills Proved and Enrolled in the Court of Husting, Londres: Parte 1, 1258–1358
(Londres, 1889); A. Von Brandt (ed.), Regesten der Lübecker Bürgertestamente Band I: 1278–1350
(Lübeck, 1964); Band II: 1351–1363 (Lübeck, 1973); Testamente 1–331, Stadtarchiv Stralsund,
Alemania.
Sharon N. DeWitte, “The Effect of Sex on Risk of Mortality during the Black Death in
9
Londres, ANUNCIO. 1349–1350,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology, CXXXIX (2009), 222–234;
Dominique Castex and Sasha Kacki, “Demographic Patterns Distinctive of Epidemic Cemeteries
in Archaeological Samples,” Microbiology Spectrum, IV (2016), 7–8.
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MOR TA LI TY IN C E NT RA L ASI A
| 67
Mesa 1 Mortality Distribution across Genders, Issyk-Kul’ (1248–1345) y
Hainaut (1349–1450)
Issyk-Kul’
Issyk-Kul’
Issyk-Kul’
Hainaut
Hainaut
Hainaut
All years (1248–1345)
Non-plague years
Plague years (1337/8–1338/9)
All years (1349–1450)
Non-plague years
Plague years (1349–1351)
Male
Female
Ratio
232
178
54
11,292
6,960
342
200
140
60
10,559
5,925
383
1.16
1.27
0.90
1.07
1.17
0.89
SOURCE Daniel Curtis and Joris Roosen, “The Sex-Selective Impact of the Black Death and
Recurring Plagues in the Southern Netherlands, 1349–1450,” American Journal of Physical
Antropología, CLXIV (2017), 246–259.
Todavía, Curtis and Roosen’s work on the sex distribution of
mortality in Hainault (Bélgica) entre 1349 y 1450, based
on an analysis of almost 22,000 death duties (“mortmains”), found
that greater proportions of women died during the Black Death
and its recurrent outbreaks than during non-crisis years. The sex
ratio in mortality was 0.89 a 1.00 durante el 1349/50 outbreak
Opuesto a 1.07 a 1.00 for non-plague years (Mesa 1). Alabama-
though the contradiction between these sets of data may have
something to do with regional differences, much new work, based
on fresh archival and skeletal data, remains to be done, to resolve
él. En otras palabras, although the Issyk-Kul’ data could rule in favor
of Curtis and Roosen’s recent findings without the benefit of any
robust biostatistical analysis of skeletal data based on the Gompertz
Model of mortality, the conclusion that the 1338/9 mortality was
sex-selective remains purely hypothetical.10
ISSYK-KUL’ AS A PLAGUE FOCUS The three cemeteries are located
between two sub-foci of the Tien-Shan’ plague—“Talas High
Mountain” to the west, dominated by the 0.PE4t strain (cual
does not cause mortality in humans) and the 2.MED1 strain,
and “Sarydzhaz High Mountain” to the east, dominated by 0.
ANT5 (by far, the most widespread strain in that sub-focus), como
well as 0.ANT2, 0.ANT3, and 2.MED1. The Branch 0 strains
all predate both the Branch 1 (which was responsible for the
10 Daniel Curtis and Joris Roosen, “The Sex-Selective Impact of the Black Death and
Recurring Plagues in the Southern Netherlands, 1349–1450,” American Journal of Physical Anthro-
pology, CLXIV (2017), 246–259.
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68 | P H IL IP SL AVI N
outbreak of the Black Death) and the great big bang (the polytomy).
Such a long perseverance of the ancient strains can at least partly be
explained by the environmental conditions of the Issyk-Kul’ area,
which along with other parts of the Chu Valley, is characterized
by the predominance of salty soils of different kinds. As some recent
research has shown, Yersinia pestis boasts a strong halotolerance
(adaptation to salinity conditions), which permits it to persevere
in salty soil areas.
In theory, even though the bacterium can survive in soil for
weeks and even months, the pathogen cannot survive longer pe-
riods without vectors and hosts. The Tien-Shan’ focus boasts a rich
faunal bio-diversity consisting of several species of sylvatic rodents,
hosts of the plague bacillus. The main host is the grey marmot
(Marmota baibacina), but susliks, gerbils, and pikas, as well as some
rodents of the Mustelidae family (including steppe polecats, ferrets,
and stoats) take part. Bactrian camels, también, can carry the pathogen,
as they did in a number of plague outbreaks in late imperial and
Soviet Central Asia and Siberia, particularly local outbreaks in
Kyrgyzstan (1917/8) and Kazakhstan (1926, 1945, y 1947). As far
as vectors are concerned, the Tien-Shan’ focus is a natural habitat
for more than thirty-five types of rodent fleas that are known to
have been the carriers of the pathogen, and at least as many types
of rodent lice and acari, whose role in the transmission of the
plague is less apparent.11
ISSYK-KUL’S CHANGING ENVIRONMENT UNDER THE MONGOL RULE
En 1218, the Issyk-Kul’ region, then part of the Qara Khitai
Empire, fell to Mongol forces. After the death of Chinggis Qan
11 Yu. z. Rivkus and Alexander G. Blyummer, Endemiya chumy v pustynyakh Sredney Azii i
Kazakhstana ( Voronezh, 2016), 27–28; Eroshenko et al., “Yersinia Pestis Strains.” For the soil
of the Chujskaya Valley, see https://www.open.kg/about-kyrgyzstan/nature/soil-and-minerals/
313-pochva-chuyskoy-doliny.html (accessed January 24, 2019); Maliya Alia Malek et al., “Yersinia
Pestis Halotolerance Illuminates Plague Reservoirs,” Informes científicos, VII (2017), doi: 10.1038/
srep40022; Saravanan Ayyadurai et al., “Long-Term Persistence of Virulent Yersinia Pestis in
Soil,” Microbiology, CLIV (2008), 2865–2871; Rebecca Eisen et al., “Persistence of Yersinia Pestis
in Soil under Natural Conditions,” Emerging Infectious Diseases, XIV (2008), 941–943; Kenneth L.
Gage and Michael Y. Kosoy, “Natural History of Plague: Perspectives from More than a
Century of Research,” Annual Review of Entomology, l (2005), 505–528; Kyrre Linné Kausrud
et al., “Modeling the Epidemiological History of Plague in Central Asia: Palaeoclimatic Forc-
ing on a Disease System over the Past Millennium,” BMC Biology, VIII (2010), 1–14; Rivkus
and Blyummer, Endemiya chumy, 20–21, 61, 138–139, 150–151, 155–169.
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MOR TA LI TY IN C E NT RA L ASI A
| 69
en 1227, his second son, Chagatai Qan, inherited the eastern part
of the empire, which included the Issyk-Kul’ area, ruling over his
father’s ulus (the Chaghadaid khanate) until his death in 1242.
When the Mongol Empire fragmented after 1259, the Chaghadaid
khanate, which was initially an integral part of it, became one of
four co-existing Mongol khanates that covered Eurasia. El
Mongol conquest of the Semirechye region brought about
not only political change but also pronounced environmental
shifts. As pastoral nomads, the Mongols needed a steady supply
of pasturage for their livestock—horses, camels, cattle, sheep,
and goats.
Contemporaries likely exaggerated the degree of “pastoraliza-
tion” in the conquered landscape. Por ejemplo, en 1230, Yelü
Chucai (1190–1244), an energetic Khitan administrator under both
Chinggis and his son Ögedei, was said to have convinced Ögedei
to spare the recently conquered Jin lands from conversion into
pasturage and woodland via the imposition of taxation on agricul-
l Allāh al-ʿUmarī
tural and mercantile income. Similarmente, ibn Fad
_
described the Trans-Volga lands of the Qipchaks during the reign
of Özbeg Qan (1313–1341) as abundantly arable until the Mongol
conquest, when they all became pastures.12
Although those references may well have been apocryphal,
substantial evidence about the piecemeal pastoralization of Central
Asian landscape, and the Issyk-Kul’ region in particular, is avail-
capaz. When Qiu Chuji (1148–1227), a notable Taoist alchemist,
visited the region in 1222, shortly after Chinggis’ conquest of
the Qara Khitai in 1218, he described the local land as productive
of good harvests, full of mulberry trees, crops, wine, and fruits,
without any mention of pastoral husbandry. Franciscan diplomat
Giovanni del Pian Carpini painted an altogether different picture
in the course of his travels through the region in 1246, noting a
multitude of ruined and deserted cities and villages. Carpini’s nar-
rative finds corroboration in an equally pessimistic account of 1253
by William de Rubruck, a Flemish Franciscan missionary, OMS
reported that the Mongols destroyed the many cities that once
occupied the Chu valley to create rich pastures for their livestock.
12 N.Ts. Munkuyev, Kitayskiy istochnik o pervykh Mongol‘skikh khanakh: Nadgrobnaya nadpis’ na
mogile Yeluy Chu-Tsaya (Moscow, 1965), 12b; V. GRAMO. Tizengauzen (trans.), Istoriya Kazakhstana v
Arabskikh istochnikakh I (Almaty, 2005), 173.
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70 | P H IL IP SL AVI N
In a similar vein, a biographer of Yahballaha III, Patriarch of the
Church of the East from 1281 a 1317, narrates that in the course
of his travels in 1280 in Central Asia, the future patriarch saw a
devastated local landscape, including the once-prosperous city of
Loton (most likely, Khotan in Uyghuristan/Xinjiang), where crops
used to grow in its hinterland, now with the surviving population
reduced to hunger and flight. h
amdallāh Mustawfī Qazvīnī, a
_
Persian geographer, who visited the region c.1320, reported that
most of the people were nomads with lots of cattle and horses.
He praised the hay crop and remarked about the absence of grain.
The Chaghadaid rulers certainly valued the quality of the pasture
land in Issyk-Kul’. Al-Qāshānī in his History of Öljaitü (c.1325) noted
that Esen-Buqa Qan (1310–1318) had his winter pasture near Issyk-
Kul’ and his summer pasture in Taraz. Qaidu Qan (d. 1301) prob-
ably had his pastures between Taraz and the Chu River.13
CLIMATIC SHIFTS IN THE ISSYK-KUL’ REGION: EVIDENCE FROM
DENDROCHRONOLOGY Although the full extent of the impact that
the Mongol conquest had on the transformation of the Issyk-
Kul’ terrain is unclear, by the early fourteenth century, the land-
scape there was predominantly pastoral, supplying both the native
Turkic population and the Mongol rulers and settlers with enough
grassland for their horses, cattle, sheep, goats, y, to a more lim-
ited extent, Bactrian camels (notorious herbivores and plague-
pathogen transmitters).
Pasturage growth strongly depends on rainfall levels. Several
contemporary sources indicate this pastoral society’s dependence
on rainfall. Al-Qāshānī’s description of the unusual drought in
the spring of 1282 in the Sarakhs area (in northeastern Khorasan
province of Iran), highlighted the black soil of the steppe and
13 Qiu Chuji (trans. A. Waley), The Travels of an Alchemist (Londres, 1931), 88; Ricardo
Hakluyt (ed. C. Raymond Beazley), The Texts and Versions of John de Plano Carpini and William
de Rubruquis (Londres, 1903; origen. pub. 1598), 97; Peter Jackson (ed. and trans.), The Mission of
Friar William of Rubruck: His Journey to the Court of the Great Khan Mongke, 1253–1255 (Londres,
1990), 147–148; mi. A. Wallis Budge (ed.), The Monks of Kublai Khan, Emperor of China
amdallāh Mustawfī (trans. GRAMO. Le Strange), The Geographical Part of the
(Londres, 1928), 44; h
_
Nuzhat-al-qulūb (Leiden, 1919; origen. pub. 1340), 249; Maryam Parvisi-Berger, “Die Chronik
des Qāšānī über den Ilchan Ölğäitü (1304–1316): Edition und kommentierte Übersetzung,"
unpub. Doctor. diss. (Univ. of Göttingen, 1968), 181 (138a); Michal Biran, “Rulers and City
Life in Mongol Central Asia (1220–1370),” in David Durand-Guedy (ed.), Turko-Mongol
Rulers, Cities and City Life (Leiden, 2013), 267.
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MOR TA LI TY IN C E NT RA L ASI A
Higo. 3 Reconstructed Precipitation Levels from the Tien-Shan’ Region in
Kyrgyzstan, 1301–1360 (Indexed on 1311–1320; 1311–1320=100).
| 71
SOURCE Hui-Qin Wang et al., “Comparison of Drought-Sensitive Tree-Ring Records from
the Tien Shan of Kyrgyzstan and Xinjiang (Porcelana) during the Last Six Centuries,” Advances in
Climate Change Research, VIII (2017), 21–22.
people made desperate by the lack of fodder for their livestock.
The sudden torrential rain that followed two months of extreme
drought, sin embargo, yielded plentiful grass for animals. According to
al-Qāshānī, the rain saved people and animals from starvation in
late 1307 Tabriz by producing grain and fodder. Al-Maqrīzī wrote
that in 1303, after three years of drought in parts of the Golden
Horde, many horses and sheep died for lack of pasture, and people
starved on the account of the animal murrain.14
The sylvatic rodent population profited from the abundance
of grassland as much as domesticates did. Marmots, susliks, gerbils,
and pikas all thrive on grass and prefer to burrow either in grass-
land or under shrubs. The rodent population levels are determined
by the availability of grassland resources, cual, Sucesivamente, are deter-
mined by precipitation levels. In the twentieth century, local out-
breaks of plague in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan often occurred
during damp, mild weather, which encouraged grass growth, un
expansion of the rodent population, aggressive behavior on the
part of fleas, y, hence, pathogen activity.15
14 Parvisi-Berger, “Chronik des Qāšānī," 32 (11a–11b), 72–3 (50b); V. GRAMO. Tizengauzen
(trans.), Istoriya Kazakhstana v Arabskikh istochnikakh I (Almaty, 2005), 308.
15 Rivkus and Blyummer, Endemiya chumy, 197, 218.
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72 | P H IL IP SL AVI N
No contemporary accounts of annual weather and precipita-
tion patterns are available for Chaghadaid Central Asia. To recon-
struct these patterns, we must turn to the dendrochronological
record of the tree rings of the Schrenk spruce (Picea schrenkiana)
from the Tien-Shan’ region in Kyrgyzstan, most recently com-
piled by Wang et al. (Cifra 3). As the figure indicates, the period
entre 1301 y 1360 saw several intermittent episodes of rising
and falling precipitation levels. After a decade or so of rising levels,
the years 1314 a 1322 witnessed a gradual decline in rainfall, 1322
being a particularly dry year. The period from 1323 a 1327 bajo-
went increased dampness; 1327 stands out as the second-wettest
year on record. The next phase (1327–1334) saw a renewed de-
cline in precipitation levels; 1334 was the second-driest year
during that period. After a short-lived damper interval from
1334 a 1336 came two back-to-back extreme episodes of ex-
cessive drought (1336–1339) and wetness (1339–1343); 1339,
the second year of the plague, was also the single-driest year
on record, with precipitation levels about 36 percent below aver-
edad. En cambio, 1343 represents the single-wettest year in that
período, its rainfall levels peaking at 41 percent above average. El
next seven years (1344–1350) saw a piecemeal decline in precipita-
ción, followed by a short rise between 1351 y 1354 and then a
decline (1355–1360).16
How does this chronology fit into the context of the plague
outbreak? The damp and humid weather of the early 1310s and
1323–1327 produced more grass fodder for rodents and optimal
conditions for the hatching and survival of flea larvae. The growth
of both the host and vector population levels would also have in-
creased the population-density levels of Yersinia pestis, thereby ele-
vating the risks of a mortality outbreak in the rodent population.
En efecto, as the evidence from Soviet Kazakhstan suggests, plague
mortality in rodents tended to spike in warmer springs and wetter
summers. En cambio, the extreme drought from 1336 a 1339
brought a sharp decline in vegetation, to the extent that it could
no longer sustain the rodent population. Drought can have a dev-
astating effect on rodent mortality and fertility, and the immune
16 Hui-Qin Wang et al., “Comparison of Drought-Sensitive Tree-Ring Records from the
Tien Shan of Kyrgyzstan and Xinjiang (Porcelana) during the Last Six Centuries,” Advances in
Climate Change Research, VIII (2017), 21–22.
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MOR TA LI TY IN C E NT RA L ASI A
| 73
systems of surviving rodents can become increasingly susceptible to
fleas (and thus to the pathogen).
The research of Eads et al. discovered that prairie dogs in
New Mexico became infested with plague-carrying fleas much
more readily during the dry spell of 2011 than during the wet
spells of 2010 y 2012. Similarmente, the drought from 1336 a
1339 and the decline in rodent population levels could well have
induced the zoonotic crossover from sylvatic rodents to humans
(either through commensal rodents or directly), when fleas actively
sought an alternative host to spread the bacterium. This hypothesis
finds confirmation in evidence from the early twentieth century. En
Kazakhstan, entre 1904 y 1945, outbreaks of plague in rodents
seem to have occurred in wetter years, whereas human plague
mortality tended to emerge in dry years (chiefly from 1910 a
1929 and in 1945).17
THE ZOONOTIC STAGE: POSSIBLE MODES OF TRANSMISSION During
the twentieth-century outbreaks in Central Asia, three main mam-
mal hosts were responsible for the transmission of the plague ba-
cillus to humans: (1) sylvatic rodents (primarily marmots but also
susliks, gerbils, and pikas, y, in some instances, steppe polecats,
ferrets, and stoats); (2) commensal rodents; (3) Bactrian camels.
Neither the relationship between the old and new hosts nor the
transmission mode was straightforward. Ocasionalmente, the zoonotic
stage involves a direct transmission of the pathogen from an old to
a new host. Given the pastoral nature of Central Asian settlement,
sociedad, y economía, the direct contact between sylvatic rodents
and humans can often be direct, through hunting. Además, en
dry years, with dwindling pasture resources, rodents sometimes
migrate closer to human habitats in search of alternative food re-
sources. There were numerous recorded cases of plague transmission
17 Nils Ch. Stenseth et al., “Plague Dynamics Are Driven by Climate Variation,” PNAS,
CIII (2006),13110–13115, doi: 10.1073/pnas.06024471032006; Kenneth B. Armitage, “Cli-
mate Change and the Conservation of Marmots,” Natural Science, V (2013), 36–43, doi:
10.4236/ns.2013.55A005; David A. Eads et al., “Droughts May Increase Susceptibility of
Prairie Dogs to Fleas: Incongruity with Hypothesized Mechanisms of Plague Cycles in Ro-
abolladuras,” Journal of Mammalogy, XCVII (2016), 1044–1053. The yearly variations in precipitation
in Kazakhstan derive from Feng Chen et al., “Drought Variations in Almaty since AD 1785
Based on Spruce Tree Rings,” Stochastic Environmental Research and Risk Assessment (2016), doi
10.1007/s00477-016-1290-y. The yearly volume of plague outbreaks derives from Kausrud
et al., “Epidemiological History.”
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74 | P H IL IP SL AVI N
through the human consumption of rodents in parts of Central Asia
(Mongolia, as well as the Altai and Transbaikal regions of the
Russian Empire, during the Third Plague Pandemic in the early
siglo veinte). The pathogen could also be transmitted from
sylvatic rodents to humans through commensal rodents—mice and
rats—although this mode seems to be uncommon in the Central
Asian context.18
Although the human consumption of rodents is uncommon in
Muslim and Christian communities of Central Asia, it is prevalent
among Buddhist Mongols, Buryats, Tuvans, and Kalmyks. A variety
of contemporary sources confirm that the Mongols—at least those
who did not convert (at a later stage) to Islam or Christianity—
regularly ate rodents, especially marmots. Among the thirteenth-
century European travelers who report it are C. de Bridia (1247)
from Poland, William of Rubruck (1253) from Flanders, Marco
Polo from Venice (c.1271 to 1275), Peng Daya (1233) from China,
and Kirakos Gandzakets’i’ (1250s to the 1260s) from Armenia. El
Chinese dietary treatise Yinshan Zhengyao, compiled in 1330 by Hu
Sihui, a Yuan court therapist and dietitian, mentions marmot
meat. Although widespread among the Mongols and other
Buddhist and Shamanist inhabitants of fourteenth-century Central
Asia, rodent consumption was certainly not encouraged by local
Christian and Muslim communities by the time of the plague
outbreak.
Although direct evidence from Central Asia is lacking, cristiano
communities elsewhere made several references to the rejection of
“unclean food.” Gandzakets’i’s maintained that during the Mongol
conquest of Armenia in the 1230s, subjugated Christians refused to
eat unclean animals and drink kumys (fermented mareʼs milk).
Similarmente, Rubruck wrote that Orthodox subjects of the Ulus
Juchi did not drink it. Hymes studied the consumption of marmots
in medieval Central Asia and the bio-ecological peculiarities of
marmots and their interaction with humans.19
18 Gerald Chikozho Mazarire, “The Burrowed Earth: Rodents in Zimbabwe’s Environ-
mental History, Critical African Studies, VIII (2016), 109–135; A. k. Belyavskiy, “O Chume
tarbaganov: Zapiska po povodu 7 smertnykh sluchayev ot upotrebleniya v pishchu surkov,
porazhennykh chumoyu v poselke Sok-tusvskom,” Vestnik obshchestvennoy gigieny, sudebnoy
i prakticheskoy meditsiny, XXVI (1895), 1–6.
19 Peter S. Pallasa, Puteshestvie po raznym mestam Rossiyskoy Imperii (Calle. Petersburg, 1773), I,
471; S.V. Aksenova and A.G. Yurchenko (trans.), Khristiyanskiy mir i “Velikaya Mongol‘skaya
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MOR TA LI TY IN C E NT RA L ASI A
| 75
Bactrian camels must also be taken into account. durante el
Third Plague Pandemic in Central Asia, as well as a more recent
outbreak in Mauritania (1973–1975), these camels played an im-
portant role as plague pathogen hosts. Camels can become infected
directly via fleas because of their tendency to graze and rest in
proximity to rodents’ burrows. Having contacted the disease, camels
can then transmit it to humans via riding or meat processing and/or
eating. That Mongols stocked camels and ate their flesh is reflected in
contemporary sources. A Latin report from c. 1330, previamente (y
erroneously) attributed to the Dominican John de Cora, depicts
Mongols as consumers of camel meat at great feasts. Sin embargo, como
we shall see later, camels may not have been as numerous and
prominent in the Issyk-Kul’ region as they were elsewhere in the
Chaghadaid khanate. Además, the connection between human–
camel interaction and the spread of plague should not be taken for
granted: During the Black Death outbreak in Damascus and Cairo,
corpses were carried to their graves by camels, and local chroniclers
did not mention an outbreak of the disease in camels.20
TRADE, TRIBUTE, AND WARFARE: THE ANTHROPOGENIC CONTEXT OF
THE ISSYK-KUL’ OUTBREAK Despite the suppositions above, nei-
ther the geographical origins of the Issyk-Kul’ outbreaks nor their
spread elsewhere can be established with any degree of certainty
without palaeogenetic data. En este punto, we can only tentatively
sketch the anthropogenic context in which the Issyk-Kul’ mortal-
ity occurred in order to ascertain its potential modes of transmis-
sión. Within the Mongol Empire, two main anthropogenic factors
are highly significant—trade and military activity. As numerous
studies of historical plague outbreaks have shown, international
Imperiya”: Materialy Frantsiskanskoy missii 1245 goda (Calle. Petersburg, 2002), 96, 122 (Ch. 54);
Jackson (ed. and trans.), Mission of Friar William of Rubruck, 84, 101; Henry Yule (ed.), El
Book of Ser Marco Polo (Londres, 1903), I, 252; S.M. R. Nesterova (trans.), Hei Da Shi Lyue:
Istochnik po istorii mongolov (Moscow, 2016), 24; Robert Bedsorian (trans.), Kirakos Ganjaks’i’s
History of the Armenians (Nueva York, 1986), 212, 219; Paul D. Buell and Eugene N. anderson
(trans.), A Soup for the Qan (Bostón, 2010), 513; John Masson Smith, “Mongol Campaign
Rations: Milk, Marmots and Blood?” in Pierre Oberling (ed.), Turks, Hungarians and Kipchaks:
A Festschrift in Honor of Tibor Halasi-Kun (Cambridge, Masa., 1984), 223–228; Hymes,
“Hypothesis,” 298–303.
20 Rivkus and Blyummer, Endemiya chumy, 198; Jean-Marie Klein et al., “La peste en
Mauritanie,” Medecine et Maladies Infectieuses, V (1975), 198–207; Yule (ed. and trans.), Cathay
and the Way Thither: Being a Collection of Medieval Notices of China (Londres, 1866), I, 246; Dols,
Black Death in the Middle East, 237.
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76 | P H IL IP SL AVI N
and regional trade was instrumental in spreading the disease across
time and space. During the Black Death of 1346 a 1353, Genoese
merchants from Caffa imported the plague into Constantinople in
Puede 1347 and then to Messina (in Sicily) in June of the same year;
wine-carrying cargoes from Gascony brought the pathogen to
Dorset in southwest England in late June 1348; and merchant
vessels imported the disease from England to Bergen, Norway,
in autumn 1349, before it migrated to northern Scotland, Shetland,
and the Faeroe Islands. Regarding warfare’s effect on the spread of
plague (and other diseases), the Siege of Caffa in late 1346 is a well-
known example. Más tarde, en 1380, during the Genoese–Venetian war,
the Genoese fleet brought the plague into Constantinople. El
plague outbreak in the eastern Ottoman Empire from 1533 a
1535 coincided with a military campaign into northern Iran.
The examples are legion. The same paradigm can be applied to
Central Asia, and the Issyk-Kul’ region in particular.21
Around the time of the 1338/9 outbreak, Issyk-Kul’ and
other parts of the larger Semirechye region (Zhetysu)—situated
along the northern branch of long-distance trans-Asian trade
routes (often erroneously called the “Silk Road”) from the Ulus
Juchi to Yuan China—played an important role in international
mercantile activity. Although the Mongol conquest of Semirechye
(together with other parts of the future Chaghadaid ulus) en el
early thirteenth century set back urban life and international trade
in the region, a remarkable urban revival appears to have taken
place in the first half of the fourteenth century, after the death
of Qaidu Qan in 1301 and the return of the Chaghadaid dynasty.
De este modo, Almaliq (in western Uyghuristan/Xinjiang, on the modern-
day Kazakh–Chinese border) was a vibrant, multi-religious city, a
home to Christians (both East Syriac and Catholics), musulmanes,
Buddhists, and Shamanists, and an important commercial and
political center. Similarmente, both Jamal al-Qarshi (d. c.1303) y
l Allāh al-ʼUmarī (d. 1348/9) refer to Jand (presum-
Shihāb ibn Fad
_
ably today’s Zhan-Kala), 115 km west of Kyzylorda in south
Kazakhstan, as an important hub of international trade. William
21 Nükhet Varlik, Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World: The Ottoman
Experience, 1347–1600 (Nueva York, 2015), 99–107, 171–174; Ole J. Benedictow, The Black
Death, 1346–1353 ( Woodbridge, 2004), 127–128; ídem, The Black Death and Later Plague Epi-
demics in the Scandinavian Countries: Perspectives and Controversies (Berlina, 2016), 136–146.
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| 77
MOR TA LI TY IN C E NT RA L ASI A
of Rubruck mentioned “a big town called Qayaligh” (near Qapal,
in southeastern Kazakhstan) that had markets frequented by many
comerciantes.
One especially important city on the trans-Asian, long-distance
trade routes was Otrar (in southwestern Kazakhstan). After its de-
struction and the massacre of its inhabitants in 1218, the city was
rebuilt anew by the mid-thirteenth century. But not until the
reign of Erzen Qan (c.1310/5-1320) did Otrar see a dramatic re-
vival and expansion, becoming a key hub of international business
for merchants from the western and eastern parts of Eurasia. In his
handbook of trade, Pratica della Mercatura (written c.1340 but treat-
ing the 1320s and 1330s), Pegolotti portrays the city as a popular
place for merchants.
International trade in Central Asia was facilitated further by
Tarmashirin Qan’s (1331–1334) conversion to Islam, which resulted
in the abolition of tariffs and customs for Muslim merchants in ac-
cordance with Sharia law. Por eso, as al-ʼUmarī wrote, Syrian and
Egyptian merchants flocked in large numbers to the Chaghadaid
khanate. This preferential policy, sin embargo, may have been short-
lived; it apparently ended with the ascent of Changshi Qan
(1335–1338), who was either a East Syriac Christian or at least
pro-Christian. Finalmente, the importance of the northern route, passing
through the Chu Valley, seems to have increased after the disinte-
gration of the Ilkhanate and the death of Abu Sa’id Qan in 1335,
which made the southern route passing through Transoxania, estafa-
necting Central Asia with Iran, less secure.22
The Christian settlements in the Chu Valley were located in
the heart of this trade network—halfway between the two linked
trade emporia of Otrar and Almaliq. The route between the two
points went along the north coast of the lake, through the Chu
Valley. Eastbound travelers would have passed through or near the
0
settlements of Sauram—on the outskirts of Shymkent (42°19
norte,
00
0
22 Biran, “Rulers and City Life,” 269–274; Wilhem Barthold, “Almaligh,” Encyclopaedia of
Islam (Leiden, 1986), I, 418–419; Sh. Kh. Vokhidov and B. B. Aminov (trans.), Istoriya
Kazakhstana v Persidskikh istochnikakh (Almaty, 2005), I, 156; Vladimir G. Tizengauzen (trans.),
Istoriya Kazakhstana v Arabskikh istochnikakh (Almaty, 2005), I, 175; Jackson (ed. and trans.), Mis-
sion of Friar William of Rubruck, 148; k. A. Akishev, k. METRO. Baypakov, y yo. B. Yerzakovich,
Drevniy Otrar (Alma-Ata, 1972), 37; Francesco Balducci Pegolotti (ed. Allan Evans), La Pratica
della mercatura (Cambridge, Masa., 1936), 21; Klaus Lech (ed. and trans.), Das Mongolische
Weltreich: al-’Umari’s Darstellung der mongolischen Reiche in seinem Werk Masālik al-abşār fī
mamālik al-amşār ( Wiesbaden, 1968), 119.
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78 | P H IL IP SL AVI N
00
0
0
00
0
00
0
0
0
0
0
00
00
00
00
45
12
45
12.60
39
7.79
norte, 71°35
mi), Aktobe (43°27
14
mi), Sharvashlyk
69°35
55
norte, 70°24
0
(Kendjak-Sangir near Taraz, 42°54
mi), and Sadyr-Kurgan
norte, 71°22
00
0
mi)—before reaching,
(near Kyzyl-Adyr, 42°37
24
primero, Karadzhigach, Krasnaya Rechka, and Burana, then Almaty
mi), and finally Almaliq (44°14
(43°16
norte,
norte, 76°53
00
0
80°32
mi). Pegolotti in his Pratica della Mercatura describes the
route from Tana (Azov) in Crimea to Cathay during the 1320s
and 1330s as perfectly safe (sicurissimo) by night and day. Three ca-
lamities caused conditions to deteriorate rapidly, sin embargo, de
1340 onward: (1) conflict between a pagan Yisun Temür Qan
(1338–1342) and ‘Alī Sulţān (1342/3), a Muslim pretender to the
throne; (2) ʼAlī Sulţān’s persecution of Christians in 1339/40; y
(3) a war between the Chaghadaid Qazan Qan (1343–1346) y
Qazaghan, the emir of Qara’unas (1345–1358). By March 1345,
two Venetian envoys in Caffa complained that “the road of the
Middle Empire is totally ruined, and it is way worse than it used
to be before.” Whether the 1338/9 outbreak contributed to the
decline in international trade along the northern branch of the
trans-Asian trade routes is a question that must be left unanswered
for now.23
Although no written sources indicate any large-scale move-
ment of goods through the Chu Valley in the 1330s, numismatic
evidencia, in the form of coin hoards recovered from various sites
within the Mongol Empire, suggests otherwise. Researchers have
found nearly 200 coins, mostly from the Ulus Juchi, dated to the
1290s until the 1360s (the majority minted in the 1340s, notwith-
standing the reported decline of trade in the region), in the ruins of
Zhan-Kala, the presumed site of Jand (Dzhend). The monetary
exchange between the Chaghadaids and other parts of the Mongol
Empire is also evident from other hoards—particularly the several
non-Chaghadaid coins discovered in the Chu Valley near the
Issyk-Kul’ cemeteries—indicating the prominent place that the
Issyk-Kul’ region held in the international exchange of goods.24
23 k. METRO. Baypakov, Srednevekovye goroda Kazakhstana na Shelkovom Puti (Almaty, 1998);
Gary Tiedermann (ed.), Handbook of Christianity in China. I. 635-1800 (Leiden, 2009), 109–
110; Pegolotti, Pratica della mercatura, 21.
24 Dmitriy Voyakin and Aleksandr Pachkalov, “Monetnye nakhodki na gorodishche Dzhan-Kala,"
Istoriko-kul’turnoe nasledie Aralo-Kaspiyskogo regiona: Materialy II mezhdunarodnoy nauchno-prakticheskoy
konferentsii, Aktau (2010), 55–63; PAG. norte. Petrov and A. METRO. Kamyshev, “Chuyskaya dolina po
numizmaticheskim dannym (XIII-pervaya polovina XIV vv.),” in Tsentral’naya Aziya ot Akhemenidov
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MOR TA LI TY IN C E NT RA L ASI A
| 79
The coin hoards implicate not only mercantile but also military
actividad. Silver bullion, which was a mainstay of the Chaghadaid
monetary system, served as campaign booty and tribute from the
Delhi Sultanate, a dependency of the Chaghadaid khanate. Alabama-
though the 1330s was a decade of relative peace and stability in
Central Asia, both Özbeg Qan of the Golden Horde (1313–1341)
and Chaghadaid Changshi Qan (1335–1338) (whose reign witnessed
the plague eruption in Issyk-Kul’), when dispatching Russian
captives to the Yuan court of Tugh Temür Qa’an (1328–1332) en
Qanbaliq, would have marched their soldiers along the same trans-
Asia route that the traders took. The moving ordo (mobile court)
of Changshi and that of his predecessors probably did, también. Como
noted above, both Qaidu and Esen-Buqa had their pastures
around Issyk-Kul’. Esen-Buqa’s pasture was captured and plun-
dered by the Yuan forces of Buyantu Qa’an (1311–1320), bajo
the command of Chongur in 1316/7, during the Chaghadaid–
Yuan war from 1314 a 1318.25
What goods traveled along the northern branch of trans-Asian
trade routes? First and foremost were the luxury goods going
westward—primarily spices and silk but also cotton, linen, y
exotic jewelry. These goods would have had little (if any) interés
for bacterial hosts like the sylvatic rodents. The smell of spices
tends to repel rodents, not attract them. En cambio, silk and es-
pecially cotton and linen may have provided bacterial vectors,
a saber, fleas, with perfect hiding places from which to jump
on and bite humans. But the bacterium could theoretically sur-
vive in contaminated cloth, without live fleas, for long periods;
dead fleas can sustain Y. pestis for 427 días.
The transmission of plague via clothes receives mention in nu-
merous plague accounts, in different chronological and geographical
do Timuridov: Arkheologiya, istoriya, etnologiya, kul’tura: Materialy mezhdunarodnoy konferentsii,
posvyashchennoy 100-letiyu do dnya rozhdeniya A.M. Belenitskogo (Calle. Petersburg, 2005), 286–290;
Petrov, “Numizmaticheskaya istoriya Chagatayskogo gosudarstva 668/1270-770/1369 gg.,”
unpub. Doctor. diss. (Kazan State Univ., 2009); V. GRAMO. Koshevar, “O nakhodkakh Dzhuchidskikh
monet v Chuyskoy Doline,” Numizmatika Zolotoy Ordy, I (2011), 121–123; Arsenio Martinez,
“The Use of Mint-Output Data in Historical Research on the Western Appanages,” in Denis
Sinor (ed.), Aspects of Altaic Civilization (Bloomington, 1990), III, 87–127.
25 Emil Bretschneider, “Rusy i Asy na voyennoy sluzhbe v Kitaye,” in Vladimir I. Lamanskiy
(ed.), Zhivaya Starina (Calle. Petersburg, 1894), 67–73; Parvisi-Berger, “Die Chronik des Qāšānī,"
181 (138a).
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80 | P H IL IP SL AVI N
settings. Gabrielle de Mussis’ contemporary Historia de Morbo tells of
four soldiers outside of Genoa in 1348 who stole a fleece to use for
overnight bedding and died the next morning. Asimismo, the Report
of the Indian Plague Commission about the Indian outbreak from 1896
a 1899 cites the transportation of contaminated clothing as a likely
channel of the disease’s transmission. Sin embargo, without an active
presence and participation of rodents, the pathogen would have
spread at a slower pace.26
Contrary to other parts of the Mongol Empire, the Central
Asian steppe engaged in agriculture on a limited scale, alguno
pockets of the region cultivating millet and sorghum for domestic
consumption rather than for markets. Por el contrario, the Crimea/
Caspian basin was a zone of intense arable farming that produced
large surpluses of wheat for both domestic consumption and ex-
port to Paphlagonia and Pontos. Todavía, grain certainly moved across
the steppe, along the Chu Valley, for commercial and military
purposes. Pegolotti instructed Italian merchants traveling from
Tana to China to bring flour and salt fish, which were rare in
the steppe. Asimismo, several sources, including Qot
b-al-Din
_
Shirāzi’s Akhbār-i Mughūlān and Juvayni’s Tarīkh-i Jahān-gushā
(History of the World Conqueror) mention that the movement
of Mongol armies or ordos involved setting up special stations
for flour, which would then be transported elsewhere.
Rodents are notorious consumers of crops in any form, caus-
ing much damage and loss of post-harvest grains in developing
countries. During the plague years, sylvatic rodents could con-
ceivably have thrived on flour by congregating around the flour
stations and by occupying the carts and wagons of merchants,
armies, and ordos. To make matters worse, infected fleas can
be transported in grain and flour. As McCormick pointed out,
the international grain trade around the Mediterranean, cual
involved the movement of grain across Europe, facilitated the
spread of plague during the active period of the First Pandemic,
Jackson, The Mongols and the West, 1221–1410 (Londres, 2005), 290–328; l. Fabian Hirst,
26
The Conquest of Plague: A Study of the Evolution of Epidemiology (Oxford, 1953), 303–455; jeffrey
Wimsatt and Dean E. Biggins, “A Review of Plague Persistence with Special Emphasis on
Fleas,” Journal of Vector Borne Diseases, XLVI (2009), 91; Rosemary Horrox (ed. and trans.), El
Black Death (Manchester, 1994), 20; “The Report of The Indian Plague Commission,” British
Medical Journal, I (1902), 1093–1098.
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MOR TA LI TY IN C E NT RA L ASI A
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de 541 onward. Could the same situation have prevailed in
early fourteenth-century Chaghadaid Central Asia?27
ūt
_
The movement of cloth and grain was closely connected with
human traffic—qans’ ordos, soldiers, captives, and slaves—along the
north branch of the trans-Asian routes. Several sources make refer-
ences to slave markets in Chaghadaid Central Asia, especially the
trade in young Turkics and Mongols in Tana and Cairo. Similarmente,
Ibn Bat
ah described slave caravans traveling from India to Central
_
Asia, and a document from 1333 Bukhara mentions Mongol field
slaves. The implication is that there was a mass movement of people
along the Chu Valley and its vicinity. Could slave caravans have
been another possible mode of plague dissemination in that area?
Poor hygienic conditions could have caused the infestation of lice
among captives and slaves. As recent studies have shown, humano
ectoparasites are important vectors of plague transmission not to
be neglected. Además, the grain and flour used to feed slaves
could easily have attracted rodents and fleas, and their clothing
could have sustained plague in both live and dead fleas.28
Regarding the modes of transportation in the Issyk-Kul’ re-
gion, Pegolotti identified the most common method of transpor-
tation around Issyk Kul’ as the donkey rather than the camel. Como
he stated, merchants traveled by camel all the way from Crimea to
Otrar, where they switched to donkeys the rest of the way to
Almaliq and beyond. Contemporary Uyghur documents attest
to this reliance on donkeys in Uyghuristan/Xinjiang. As one re-
cent study has shown, none of the seventy documents from the
Turpan region (western Uyghuristan/ Xinjiang) that deals with
the postal system of the Mongol Empire mentions camels. Given
27 Michael McCormick, “Rats, Comunicaciones, and Plague: Toward an Ecological His-
conservador,” Revista de Historia Interdisciplinaria, XXXIV (2003), 1–25; Benedictow, What Disease Was
Plague? On the Controversy over the Microbiological Identity of Plague Epidemics of the Past (Bostón,
2011), 115; Lorenzo Pubblici, “Il pane nella storia dell’Asia Centrale: secoli VIII-XVI,” in
Gabriele Archetti (ed.), La Cività del pane: Storia, tecniche e simboli dal Mediterraneo all’Atlantico
(Spoleto, 2015), 1826–1827; Sergei P. Karpov, “The Grain Trade in the Southern Black Sea
Region: The Thirteenth to the Fifteenth Century,” Mediterranean Historical Review, VIII
(1993), 55–73; primero, Conquest of Plague, 311–320; Pegolotti, Pratica della mercatura, 22;
Qot
b (Qum, 2010),
_
23–24; Ata-Malik Juvaini (trans. John Andrew Boyle), Genghis Khan: The History of the World
Conqueror (Manchester, 1997), 609, 621.
28 Olga Chekhovich, Bukharskie dokumenty XIVgo veka (Tashkent, 1965); Katharine R.
Dean et al., “Human Ectoparasites and the Spread of Plague in Europe during the Second
Pandemic,” PNAS, 115 (2018), 1304–1309, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1715640115.
b-al-Din Shirāzi, Akhbār-i Mughūlān (650–683) dar anbānah-ʼi Mullā Qut
_
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82 | P H IL IP SL AVI N
that only two documents from the Dunhuang region (eastern
Uyghuristan/Xinjiang) further to the east mention camels in rela-
tion to the local postal system, camels apparently saw limited use as
pack animals in the Issyk-Kul’ region; donkeys dominated local
and trans-regional transportation there. Although Bactrian camels
can contract and spread plague, their relative scarcity in this area
hints that they had little to do with spreading the disease around
the Issyk-Kul’.29
PLACING THE ISSYK-KUL’ OUTBREAK INTO A WIDER PALAEOGENETIC
CONTEXT Recent palaeogenetic studies have advanced our
knowledge about the history of plague to a new level, partially re-
vealing the history of plague in areas where written evidence was
not produced. Desafortunadamente, the available palaeogenetic data can-
not help to determine the phylogenetic position of the Issyk-Kul’
outbreak; nor can it help to determine the outbreak’s relationship,
or lack thereof, with the ravages of the Black Death from 1346 a
1353. Such an exercise is not feasible without the extraction, se-
quencing, and analysis of the aDNA from one of the victims of this
outbreak. Todavía, our growing corpus of palaeogenetic data about the
history of Yersinia pestis, both before and after the Black Death, poder
raise important questions regarding the wider genetic and biolog-
ical context of the Issyk-Kul’ outbreak and crucial genetic devel-
opments in the “Age of the Great Polytomy,” that is, en el
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
The Issyk-Kul’ outbreak occurred sometime after the big
bang, or the great polytomy. Cui et al. placed the origins of the
polytomy in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, which has the largest di-
versity of strains and so was likely to have been the original focus
of the polytomy. But Eroshenko et al.’s 2017 study found an even
more remarkable diversity of Yersinia pestis strains in the Tien-
Shan’ focus of eastern Kyrgyzstan (which covers Issyk-Kul’), sug-
gesting the Tien-Shan’ mountains as the original home of the
polytomy instead. The precise dating of the polytomy is unclear.
Cui et al.’s 2013 study dated it to c. 1142 a 1339, with a median
date of c. 1268. Spyrou et al. recently recalibrated the dating of the
29 Pegolotti, Pratica della mercatura, 21; Márton Vér, “The Postal System of the Mongol
Empire in Northeastern Turkestan,” unpub. Ph.D diss. (Univ. of Szeged, 2016), 278–280.
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MOR TA LI TY IN C E NT RA L ASI A
| 83
divergence of the Black Death strain from Branch 1 to the median
date of c.1238, which would imply that the actual polytomy had
occurred even earlier, perhaps in the late twelfth century.30
The post-polytomy history of the new four branches starts
with Branch 1, which was responsible for the Black Death from
1346 a 1353. At some point between the Black Death and the
subsequent pestis secunda from 1356 a 1366, Branch 1 split into
two sub-lineages—Branch 1A, which persisted exclusively in
Europe and became extinct after the Plague of Marseille from
1720 a 1722, and Branch 1B, which caused the pestis secunda from
1358 a 1364, which seems to have originated in central Germany
en 1356 before spreading in all four directions. Hoy, various phy-
logenetic branches of the Branch 1B lineage persist in East Asia,
the western United States, and South America, as well as in sub-
Saharan Africa. Branch 2 is also marked by phylogenetic diversity,
as attested in virtually all of Eurasia, from the Russian Steppe to
the Pacific Ocean and in Libya. The earliest phylogenetic branch
of Branch 2 is 2.MED0, which seems to have originated shortly
after the great polytomy and which is currently found in the
Caucasus. En cambio, Branch 3, found in China and Mongolia,
and Branch 4, confined to eastern Siberia and Mongolia, are char-
acterized by a lack of phylogenetic diversity. In addition to the
“new” lineages, a dozen phylogenetic branches of pre-polytomy
Branch 0 (represented by two main clades, 0.PE and 0.ANT), still
prevail in Eurasia, from the Caucasus to China.31
How are these genetic developments relevant to our under-
standing of the Issyk-Kul’ outbreak on the eve of the plague’s
30 Cui et al., “Historical Variations”; Eroshenko et al., “Yersinia Pestis Strains”; Maria A.
Spyrou et al., “Analysis of 3800-Year-Old Yersinia Pestis Genomes Suggests Bronze Age Origin
for Bubonic Plague,” Comunicaciones de la naturaleza, IX (2018), doi: 10.1038/s41467-018-04550-9.
31 Green made the discovery that Branch 1 split into Branch 1A and 1B. She detected that
one skeletal sample from the Museum of London (Sample 6330), originally thought to be
from the East Smithfield burial of 1349, came instead from St. Mary Graces burial of 1361.
She announced this finding in “Plague Dialogues: Monica Green and Boris Schmid on Plague
Phylogeny,” available at https://contagions.wordpress.com/2016/06/29/plague-dialogues-
monica-green-and-boris-schmid-on-plague-phylogeny-ii/. For other branches, see G. norte.
Odinokov et al., “Analiz polnogenomnoy posledovatel’nosti stammov Yersinia pestis na
osnove stupenchatogo 680-SNP algoritma,” Problemy osobo opasnykh infektsiy (2013), 49–54;
N.Yu. Nosov et al., “Filogeneticheskiy analiz stammov Yersinia Pestis srednevekovogo biovara
iz prirodnykh ochagov Rossiyskoy Federatsii i sopredel’nykh stran,” Problemy osobo opasnykh
infektsiy (2016), 75–78; Cui et al., “Historical Variations.” I am currently studying the outbreak
and movement of the pestis secunda in its wider Eurasian and North African context.
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84 | P H IL IP SL AVI N
arrival in Europe? The existence of pre–Black Death strains and
their persistence in the post-polytomy era, as well as the appear-
ance of four new branches and their subsequent diversification in
the aftermath of the polytomy, indicates an incredibly complicated
situation. Although it is tempting to connect the Issyk-Kul’ out-
break to the arrival of the Black Death in Crimea seven or eight
years later and hence shift the geographical origins of the Black
Death outbreak eastward into Central Asia, we cannot establish
any genetically direct link between the two outbreaks with any
confidence. In the absence of palaeogenomic data from one of
the Issyk-Kul’ cemeteries, the Issyk-Kul’ outbreak cannot be re-
garded as an early episode in the spread of the Black Death. Después
todo, no evidence suggests that Branch 1 was the cause of the Issyk-
Kul’ mortality; nor do any palaeogenetic data, at least at this point,
reveal which phylogenetic branch of Yersinia pestis was responsible for
él. Además, we have no palaeogenetic evidence that Branch 1 incluso
existed in the Issyk-Kul’ area, or anywhere else east of Tatarstan, por
the time of the Black Death’s arrival in 1346. De hecho, the phylogenetic
analysis of the plague strains prevalent in the vicinity of Issyk Kul,'
extracted from modern strains (from vectors and hosts, both rodent
and human), reveals that other phylogenetic branches dominated
this region, especially 0.ANT5 but also 0.ANT2, 0.ANT3 (todo
three pre-polytomy), and 2.MED1 (post-polytomy).32
The presence of these branches around Issyk-Kul’ in the last
seventy years or so (when their modern strains were isolated in
local labs) hardly implies their existence in the early fourteenth
siglo. Strains and branches can “migrate” to different areas at
a late stage, long after their initial appearance. Strains can also seed
a temporary reservoir in a certain area, only to “disappear” some-
time after an outbreak, or several outbreaks, of mortality. Por eso,
the Issyk-Kul’ outbreak could have been caused by a phylogenetic
branch no longer observed in Kyrgyzstan. Por ejemplo, phyloge-
netic branch 2.MED0 is currently found only in the Caucasus
highlands. It seems to have branched off the main Branch 2 lineage
shortly after the great polytomy. The remarkable diversity of Branch
2, comparable to that of Branch 1, indicates that its multiple strains,
including 2.MED0, could have caused numerous mortality crises in
32 Maria A. Spyron et al., “A Phylogeography of the Second Plague Pandemic Revealed
through the Analysis of Historical Y. Pestis Genomes,” available at http://www.biorxiv.org/
content/10.1101/481242v1 (accessed May 2, 2019).
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MOR TA LI TY IN C E NT RA L ASI A
| 85
different parts of Asia that have evaded our detection because no
written records are available. 2.MED0’s positioning right after the
polytomy may qualify this phylogenetic branch as a candidate the
for Issyk-Kul’ mortality. In any event, without a genome from
Issyk-Kul’ plague graves, it is impossible to determine whether the lo-
California 1338/9 outbreak was an early Black Death event (from Branch 1,
which may have been present around Issyk-Kul’ around 1338, only to
disappear later), or an unrelated plague outbreak, caused by another
strain (decir, 0.ANT5 or 2.MED0). Both scenarios are possible.
Equally puzzling are the geographical origins of the Issyk-Kul’
outbreak. Were they in or around the Issyk-Kul’ region, or did the
outbreak derive from elsewhere? As we have seen, the diversity of
Yersinia pestis strains in the Tien-Shan’ focus of eastern Kyrgyzstan
could imply that the great polytomy may have occurred in that
área, which could also imply, at least in theory, that the Issyk-
Kul’ outbreak originated somewhere in the relative vicinity.
Además, the excessive drought of the 1330s (y, de este modo, the po-
tential reduction of biomass and decline in the rodent population)
and the salinity of the soil and water reservoirs in the Issyk-Kul’
área, which would have helped the bacterium to persevere with-
out host for weeks on end, strengthens the hypothesis that the
1338/9 outbreak, at least for humans, arose in the vicinity of
the Chu Valley, or at least somewhere nearby in Central Asia.
The plague may have prevailed somewhere in Central Asia for
decades after the big bang, ravaging sylvatic rodent populations
before crossing over to humans in the 1330s.
Although the big bang may have indeed occurred close to Issyk-
Kul’, el 1338/9 outbreak did not necessarily originate there. El
same strain responsible for the Issyk-Kul’ outbreak could have left
its native home after the polytomy, traveling back later to move from
rodents to humans. Además, there is no evidence that the Issyk-
Kul’ outbreak was the effect of a post-polytomy strain; it could have
come from one of the Branch 0 strains that preceded the big bang.
Arguments that the fourteenth-century pandemic had “Chinese”
origins have a long history. A pesar de, as discussed above, several
sources report mass mortality among Mongol soldiers campaigning
in the Jin state during the early thirteenth century, as well as an out-
break in the prefectures of Songjiang, Jiaxing, and Hangzhou in
1333, none of them suggests that these episodes were related to
the one at Issyk-Kul’. Además, these outbreaks occurred more
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86 | P H IL IP SL AVI N
on a regional scale than a pandemic one, and the pathogen left no
sign that it moved from these prefectures northwestward into Cen-
tral Asia. Finalmente, whether these outbreaks were caused by plague
remains a mystery, at least at this stage.
A possible clue that the Issyk-Kul’ outbreak may not have de-
rived from Yuan China is the absence of any known mortality spikes
similar to that of 1338/9 at Issyk-Kulʼ, nor any references to “pesti-
lence” (mawtānā) in other surviving East Syriac cemeteries east of
the Chu Valley. Although the sheer number of inscriptions extant
in those cemeteries is considerably lower than that in the Chu Valley
cemeteries—twenty-one in Almaliq, twenty-eight in Inner
Mongolia, and ten in Zaitun (Quangzhou, in Fujian Province)—
this paucity does not allow any argumentum ex silentio that these re-
gions evaded mortality crises before or around the one at Issyk-Kul’.
Sin embargo, the fact that some Almaliq graves date to the 1350s, 1360s,
and early 1370s (the latest tombstone is from 1371/2) indicates that
the local East Syriac community continued to flourish after the
likely demise of the Issyk-Kul’ Christians c. 1345.33
One further speculation is that the Issyk-Kul’ outbreak came
from the north rather than the east. Ibn al-Wardī (1292–1349), him-
self a victim of the plague, reported that the pandemic began in the
“Land of Darkness”—now western Siberia near the Arctic Circle,
on the rivers Angara, Yenisey, Ob, Chulym, Irtysh, and Tom’—
where it allegedly prevailed for fifteen years, before spreading in
all directions. These distant territories—described by Marco Polo
ah (1332), al-”Umarī (c.1342–9), and others—
(1293), Ibn Bat
_
were settled by Ugric tribes, sometimes called Yughra. These peoples
maintained their contact with the outside world largely through the
fur trade, or through tribute and raids conducted by the Mongols
from the south and the Novgorodians from the west. As the early
authors observed, merchants and raiders imported exotic and valu-
able stoat and sable furs. Stoats, along with polecats and weasels, en
addition to being common inhabitants of western Siberia also hap-
pen to be potential carriers of Yersinia pestis.34
ūt
_
33 Hymes, “Hypothesis,” 288–294, 299–300; Kokovtsev, “Khristiyansko-siriyskiya
nadgrobnyya nadpisi," 196; Ruji Niu, La croix-lotus: inscriptions et manuscrits nestoriens en ecriture
syriaque decouverts en Chine (Shanghai, 2010), 149–278.
34 Dols, “Ibn al-Wardī’s Risālah al-naba’ ‘an al- Waba’: A Translation of a Major Source for
the History of the Black Death in the Middle East,” in Dickran K. Kouymjian (ed.), Near
Eastern Numismatics, Iconography, Epigraphy and History (Beirut, 1974), 448. For the various
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Although to this point, no Yersinia pestis genomes from those
northern regions have been sequenced, recent genetic studies have
established that the Altai region, to the south of the “Land of
Darkness,” boasts several natural plague foci. Between 2015 y
2018, eighteen full genomes from the Gorno-Altai high mountain
focus have been sequenced, two of which were from a couple of
Bronze Age sites (Kytmanovo, C. 2887–2667 B.C.E., and Afanasyevo
Gora, C. 1746–1626 B.C.E.). The Bronze Age strains belong to the
so-called LNBA (Late Neolithic Bronze Age) lineage; modern sam-
ples belong to 0.PE4a (which does not cause plague in humans),
0.ANT4 (the same strain that caused the Justinianic plague in
sixth-century Bavaria), 2.ANT3, and 4.ANT. Any migration of
plague from western Siberia to Issyk-Kul’ and other regions in
Central Asia remains, at this stage, highly speculative. Sin embargo,
Ibn al-Wardī’s assertion should not be summarily dismissed, especialmente-
cially since western Siberia is replete with plague-transmitting
rodents, some of which had gone southward around the time of
the Issyk-Kul’ outbreaks (through trade and tribute), and several
plague strains were present in the neighboring Altai region.35
A close analysis of the epigraphical evidence from the Issyk-Kul’
tombstones, from an environmental, socioconomic, political, y
palaeogenetic perspective, reveals that the sudden spike in burial
levels in 1338/9 reflects an outbreak of plague mortality in local
communities. The absence of palaeogenetic data to confirm it could
descripciones (mostly Muslim) of the “Land of Darkness,” see Paul Lunde and Caroline Stone
(trans.), Ibn Fadlān and the Land of Darkness: Arab Travellers in the Far North (Londres, 2011);
Robbie A. McDonald and Serge Lariviere, “Diseases and Pathogens of Mustela spp, with Spe-
cial Reference to the Biological Control of Introduced Stoat Mustela Erminea Populations in
New Zealand,” Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand, XXXI (2001), 721–744; Julia M.
Riehm et al., “Yersinia pestis Lineages in Mongolia,” PLos ONE, VII (2012), doi:10.1371/
diario.pone.0030624.g001 (supporting information, Mesa 1).
Simon Rasmussen et al., “Early Divergent Strains of Yersinia pestis in Eurasia 5,000 Años
35
Ago,” Cell, CLXIII (2015), 571–582, doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2015.10.009; Aida
Andrades Valtueña et al., “The Stone Age Plague and Its Persistence in Eurasia, Current Bi-
ology, XXVII (2017), doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2017.10.025; Vladimir V. Kutyrev
et al., “Phylogeny and Classification of Yersinia pestis through the Lens of Strains from the
Plague Foci of Commonwealth of Independent States,” Frontiers in Microbiology, IX (2018),
doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2018.01106; Angelina A. Kislichkina et al., “Nine Whole-Genome As-
semblies of Yersinia pestis subsp. microtus bv. Altaica Strains Isolated from the Altai Mountain
Natural Plague Focus (No. 36) in Russia,” Genome Announcements, VI (2018), doi: https://
doi.org/10.1128/genomeA.01440-17.
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88 | P H IL IP SL AVI N
be partially rectified by both textual and palaeoclimatological data. Como
we have seen, the ratio of mortality rates between “normal” and pla-
gue years in the Issyk-Kul’ communities is not unlike that in Europe
during the plague years 1348 a 1350. A proper appreciation of the
pandemic outbreak requires setting its timing in a climatic context.
After two pluvial episodes in the 1310s and 1320s, precipitation levels
in Issyk-Kul’ during the 1330s underwent a sharp decline (especially
during the severe drought from 1336 a 1339), thereby depriving
sylvatic rodents of sufficient grass to sustain their high population
density. Por eso, the plague pathogen and its vectors needed an alter-
native host to maintain their activity. Such were the climatic circum-
stances in which mortality in the Issyk-Kul’ communities originated.
The paucity of written documents from the Chu Valley re-
gion makes any reconstruction of possible channels of the patho-
gen’s spread tentative. Sin embargo, certain anthropogenic factors
may have contributed to the spread of the pathogen, such as local
dietary habits and communication networks. Although local
Christian communities probably did not make a habit of con-
suming rodent meat, Mongol nomads apparently were regular
consumers of marmot meat. Reports from late imperial and Soviet
Central Asia during the Third Plague Pandemic reveal that
sylvatic rodents played a major role in spreading plague among
humanos; most likely, the biological interaction between the
bacillus and the host was not much different during the Second
Plague Pandemic.
Comunicaciones, también, may have been instrumental in the
spread of the disease. Around the time of the plague outbreak,
the Chu Valley was still involved in international trade along the
northern branch of the trans-Asian mercantile routes. Because the
merchants used donkeys, not camels, to transport their goods,
camels were not significant hosts for plague transmission here as they
were elsewhere. Sin embargo, the silk merchandise that the pack ani-
mals carried could have attracted plague-infected fleas, and the flour
transported by soldiers along the same routes could have lured ro-
abolladuras. Además, the poor hygienic conditions of captives and slaves
could well have encouraged lice infestation, another possible plague
vector. All of these factors could have contributed to the outbreak
and spread of human plague around Issyk-Kul’ in 1338/9.
Fundamentalmente, a number of scholars, including Pollitzer, McNeill,
and Campbell, interpreted the Issyk-Kul’ plague as an early
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MOR TA LI TY IN C E NT RA L ASI A
| 89
instance of the Black Death, which then moved westward to Ulus
Juchi in 1345/6. This article does not attempt to link the two out-
breaks but to study the Issyk-Kul’ mortality as a local phenomenon
within a wider Central Asian environmental, palaeoclimatic,
socioeconomic, and palaeogenetic context. Nothing in the surviv-
ing evidence suggests that the two outbreaks were related, no-
withstanding a few scholarly views to the contrary.
The big bang, occurring at some point in the late twelfth or
the thirteenth century, created four new branches, meaning that
each new lineage could potentially unfold into a deadly outbreak
in humans. The Black Death is now known to have been caused
by Branch 1, which is marked by a remarkable diversity of sub-
branches and strains responsible for numerous outbreaks. Pero el
same diversity also characterizes the pre-polytomy Branch 0 y
post-polytomy Branch 2, the strains of which now dominate the
Tien-Shan’ sub-foci of Kyrgyzstan (En particular, 0.ANT2, 0.ANT3,
0.ANT5, and 2.MED1 lineages). The lack of a single Branch 1
genome detected or sequenced in the Issyk-Kul’ region does not
preclude the possibility that Branch 1 strains may have existed
there historically, but without aDNA evidence from the Issyk-
Kul’ region (o, en efecto, anywhere in Central Asia), any such claim
does not go beyond speculation. En breve, to prove or disprove a
link between the Issyk-Kul’ mortality and the Black Death
requires aDNA evidence.
Regardless of whether the Issyk-Kul’ aDNA happened to re-
veal Branch 1 or another lineage as causal, the results would be
of a great scientific and historical importance. In the event of a
Branch 1 strain, historians, archaeologists, and palaeoclimatolo-
gists will need to explore an expanded Eurasian palaeoenviron-
mental and socioeconomic context to account for a possible
spread from Central Asia to Ulus Juchi. If the palaeogenetic anal-
ysis points to a different lineage, even bigger historical questions
will arise, potentially encompassing a multitude of undocumented
plague outbreaks in Central Asia and other territories, where writ-
ten records were uncommon or nonexistent.
The pervasiveness of the Second Plague Pandemic outside of
its traditionally known European and Middle Eastern territories
may come to light only by placing the history of the fourteenth-
century plague into more of a global picture. Until recently, eruditos
tended to study the Second Plague Pandemic almost exclusively
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90 | P H IL IP SL AVI N
from a Eurocentric perspective, neglecting Afro-Eurasian roots
and the extent of the medieval plague. Recent efforts, sin embargo,
have raised awareness of Second Plague Pandemic as a global
bio-environmental and sociopolitical phenomenon. To under-
stand the pandemic, we need first to understand its proliferation.
The question of its geographical scope remains one of the most
pressing questions in this field. Only by departing from a traditional
Eurocentric standpoint to a much wider geo-chronological frame-
work can we start to appreciate the sudden appearance of the single
deadliest killer that the human race has ever faced.36
No such approach to the study of the plague will be able to
break new ground without a collaboration between humanists, ar-
chaeologists, and palaeoscientists working on different cultures and
civilizations. Although words and bones can provide information
about many aspects of the disease, the answers to many questions
will require the constant replenishment of palaeoenvironmental
and palaeogenetic data, especially in the case of nonliterary civili-
zaciones, about which material discoveries must replace or supple-
ment written records to shed light on complex situations.
The case of the Issyk-Kul’ plague outbreak of 1338/9 is just
one such example. No Central Asian chroniclers reported on year-
to-year weather variations in the Chu Valley; nor were any local
mid-fourteenth-century literati aware of the genetic differences
between outbreaks in different plague foci. Only with the help
of dendrochronological and palaeogenetic evidence can we appre-
ciate the full nature of what might have been the earliest docu-
mented outbreak of the Second Plague Pandemic. The future of
plague study is therefore in the hands of multidisciplinary teams of
humanists, archaeologists, and scientists.
36 Verde, “Taking ‘Pandemic’ Seriously,” 27–61.
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