The Black Death in the Golden Horde: An Agenda for Research on the History and Archeology of Qazaqstan in the 13th – 14th Centuries
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.69567/3007-0236.2023.4.494.509Keywords:
The Black Death, the pandemic of bubonic plague, the bacterium Yersinia pestis, the Golden Horde, the Qinghai-Tibetan plateau, QazaqstanAbstract
The Black Death (the pandemic of bubonic plague caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis) is critical for understanding the collapse of the Golden Horde and its aftermath in the 14th century. Recent historical and aDNA research argues that the Qinghai-Tibetan plateau is the point of origin for the rise of new highly virulent strains of the bacterium. It has been argued recently that this disease was present in the region during the lifetime of Chinggis Khan. The pandemic spread through Kyrgyzstan and the cities of Central Asia to Khorezm. The disease reached Kaffa simultaneously via the northern route in 1346 and spread to the rest of the Mediterranean world and beyond in 1347. Recent research has identified the southern course of the disease via Iran to Azerbaijan as well. aDNA research has shown that the same bacterium was responsible for the mass burials in Burana (near Issıq Köl, Kyrgyzstan) and Volga Bulgaria as in medieval Europe. This has implications for the study of the history of the entire territory of Kazakhstan. This study concludes that archeologists should be looking for evidence of mass burials in depopulated urban centers dating from the late 1330s-1340s to corroborate this research and to find ancient samples of the bacterium Yersinia pestis
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