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Darrera modificació: 2021-07-19
Bases de dades: Sciència.cat
Slavin, Philip, "Death by the Lake: Mortality Crisis in Early Fourteenth-Century Central Asia", Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 50/1 (2019), 59-90.
- Resum
- Our information about the fourteenth-century plague in Central Asia, or indeed anywhere east of the Crimea/Caspian, derives from a close analysis of the epigraphical evidence from three East Syriac (Nestorian) cemeteries not far from Issyk-Kul' lake in northern Kyrgyzstan. The absence of palaeogenetic data to confirm it could be partially rectified by both textual and palaeoclimatological data. The ratio of mortality rates between “normal” and plague years in the Issyk-Kul' communities is not unlike that in Europe during the plague years 1348 to 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, thereby depriving sylvatic rodents of sufficient grass to sustain their high population density. Hence, the plague pathogen and its vectors needed an alternative host to maintain their activity. Anthropogenic factors, including international trade and military campaigns along Central Asian trade routes, may also have contributed to the outbreak and spread of the plague. The Issyk-Kul' mortality crisis ties into wider questions about the origins and initial spread of plague after the “big bang” of the thirteenth century, whereby four new plague branches emerged (possibly in Central Asia).
The geographical origins 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 years) palaeogeneticists. Roughly speaking, the history of the debate begins in 1893 with Gasquet's The Black Death of 1348 and 1349 (1893), which situated the origins of the plague in China, whence Italian merchants spread it to Europe in trading caravans, through Crimea. In 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 epigraphical 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. Conversely, the “Chinese origin” hypotheses found advocates in Ziegler (1969), who was not aware of the Issyk-Kul' evidence, as well as in McNeill (1979) and Campbell (2016), who both saw Issyk-Kul' as an intermittent station in the pathogen's journey from China to Europe.
In 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 century. In 1977, Norris proposed an altogether different explanation, 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 by Dols, who criticized Norris' thesis as unsubstantiated by any historical evidence; Norris' rejoinder reaffirmed his original position about the Caspian origin of the plague.
The Chinese-origin hypothesis deserves attention. On the one hand, there is no reference to plague mortality on a pandemic scale in any Chinese source from the Yuan period, be it the Yuanshi chronicle or the local history gazetteers. On the other hand, 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) and 1344/5 (the prefectures of Fujian, Fuzhou, Yanping, Shaowu, and Tingzhou). We may also add a 1353 outbreak in Datong (in Shanxi province, northwestern China), 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, including 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 interpretation. Nonetheless, 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 mortality of the Black Death. What we lack is any indication of a plague pandemic that engulfed vast territories of the Yuan Empire and later moved into western Eurasia through Central Asia.
Recent advances in palaeogenetics shed important light on the controversy regarding the geographical origins of the plague. In a 2010 study, Morelli et al. established a global phylogeny of Yersinia pestis that suggested an origin and evolution of the bacillus in or near China. In 2013, Cui et al. identified the four-lineage “big bang” polytomy of Yersinia pestis, which they dated between 1142 and 1339 (a median date of 1268 was re-calibrated by Spyrou et al. in 2018 to 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. In 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).
Of particular importance is the identification of an additional and previously unknown strain of Branch 0 (0.ANT5), which is unique to the Tien-Shan' focus of eastern Kyrgyzstan and southeastern 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 dominated by three additional strains of Y. Pestis—0.ANT2, 0.ANT3, and 2.MED1. This remarkable diversity of strains points to the possibility that the Tien-Shan' focus in eastern Kyrgyzstan (which 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 polytomy on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau). Such reasoning replicates and expands upon Green's 2014 analysis and the historical application of the Cui team's work.
The present article does not (and cannot) pretend to solve the mystery of the geographical origins of the Black Death. Instead, it focuses on an intriguing, yet unstudied, instance of a mortality crisis 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 outbreak 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 historians, 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 disease attempted an analysis of the corpus to reconstruct the demographic and mortality patterns of the local population with regard to an outbreak of severe mortality that occurred in 1338/9. This 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. In fact, it is the only quantifiable plague crisis in Central Asia during the Second Plague Pandemic. In the absence of palaeogenetic 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 to 1353. Nor does it deny such possible connection. Instead, it treats the Issyk-Kul' crisis as a local instance of plague preceding the Black Death. To 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, wrapping the outbreak in this wider context.
- Matèries
- Història de la medicina
Medicina - Pesta i altres malalties
- URL
- https://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article/50/1/59/49591/D ...
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