[who] hemmed in by an immense army, could hardly breathe.” To the Genoese caught inside the city, the siege seemed like the end of the world, but they were wrong. In 1343 the end of the world was still several thousand miles away, on the eastern steppe.

 

Medieval Europeans like de’ Mussis and musician Louis Heyligen were aware that plague as well as ecological upheaval raged in Asia. The new global economy had made the world a little smaller. In his account of the siege of Caffa, de’ Mussis writes: “In 1346, in the countries of the East, countless numbers . . . were struck down by a mysterious illness.” Heyligen, too, mentions the plague in his account of “unheard of calamities . . . hard by Greater India.” The musician says that “the terrible events” in India culminated in an outbreak of the pestilence that infected “all neighboring countries . . . by means of the stinking breath.” However, the best medieval guide to the Black Death’s early history in Asia is Ibn al-Wardi, an Arab scholar who lived in the Syrian town of Aleppo, an important international trading center and listening post in the Middle Ages.

Al-Wardi, who like de’ Mussis also got his information from merchants, says that the pestilence raged in the East for fifteen years before arriving in the West. This timeline fits the plague’s pace of dissemination, which is relatively slow for an epidemic disease. A 1330s starting date would also explain the references to a mysterious illness that begin to appear in Asian documents around the same time. Among them are the Chronicles of the Great Mongol Khanate of Mongolia and Northern China, which state that, in 1332, the twenty-eight-year-old Mongol Great Khan Jijaghatu Toq-Temur and his sons died suddenly of a mysterious illness. In 1331, the year before the Great Khan’s death, the Chinese records also make reference to a mysterious illness; this one, a treacherous epidemic, swept through Hopei province in the northeast region of the country and killed nine-tenths of the population.

Most modern historians believe that what we call the Black Death originated somewhere in inner Asia, then spread westward to the Middle East and Europe and eastward to China along the international trade routes. One frequently mentioned origin point is the Mongolian Plateau, in the region of the Gobi desert where Marco Polo says the night wind makes “a thousand fantasies throng to mind.” In an account of the pestilence, the medieval Arab historian al-Maqrizi seems to speak of Mongolia when he says that before the Black Death arrived in Egypt, it had raged “a six month ride from Tabriz [in Iran, where] . . . three hundred tribes perished without apparent reason in their summer and winter encampments . . . [and] sixteen princes died [along with] the Grand Khan and six of his children. Subsequently, China was depopulated while India was damaged to a lesser extent.”

Another often mentioned origin point is Lake Issyk Kul, where medieval travelers would come to pick up the fast road into China. Surrounded by dense forest and snow-capped mountains, in Kirgizia, near the northwest border of China, the lake region is located close to several major plague foci. (Foci are regions were plague occurs naturally.) More to the point, something terrible happened around the lake a few years before the pestilence arrived in Caffa. In the late nineteenth century a Russian archaeologist named D. A. Chwolson found that an unusually large number of headstones in local cemeteries bore the dates 1338 and 1339, and several of the stones contained a specific reference to plague.