The Black Death began in a valley in Kyrgyzstan

In 1338 a great death begins in the wide Chüy Valley, at the huge mountain lake Issyk Koel in Eastern Kyrgyzstan. In some places there are suddenly more than eighty funerals a year, instead of just ten.

Eight years later, the Black Death strikes Europe. Tens of millions of people die within a few years. In many areas, the plague is rapidly halving the population. Asia and Africa are also affected.

The Black Death has been called the greatest epidemic in human history, with subsequent outbreaks for hundreds of years to come. Now the plague bacterium (Yersinia pestis) demonstrated. It turns out to be the long-sought variant that is genetically at the root of all variants that arose during the eruption of the Black Death. This is where it started, not in Crimea, in China or somewhere near the Caspian Sea, as was also believed.

This variant of the much longer existing plague bacterium must have originated somewhere between 1310 and 1338, researchers led by Philip Slavin (University of Stirling) and Maria Spyrou and Jonathan Krause (both Max Planck Institute Leipzig) wrote this week. Nature† The bacteria probably originated from marmots in this vast mountain area between Kazakhstan and China and the disease quickly spread to humans. Part of the Silk Road ran along the Issyk Koelmeer: ​​the many trade contacts with China and the West meant that the bacteria could spread quickly.

It is not clear what caused the disease to jump, the researchers can in Nature only suspect that there were changes in the ecosystem around that time that made people more likely to come into contact with marmots or other infected rodents.

Transmission via fleas

The plague bacterium – which can now be effectively combated with antibiotics – still occurs in various genetic variants worldwide and the variant now found at Issyk Koelmeer still forms the basis of two thirds of those variants. There are no major differences in pathogenesis between the many variants. The major mutations that Yersinia pestis so dangerous have been present in the bacterium for almost 6,000 years, as was previously shown dna analyses of plague bacteria from Stone Age graves. The transmission via fleas is probably 4,000 years old. It seems that the plague keeps coming back through (re)contamination from reservoirs in the animal world, mostly rodents.

The 14th-century Nestorian Christian cemeteries near Issyk Koel have been associated with the Black Death since the 1920s, not only through the clear dating on the tombstones, in (Old) Syriac or Turkish, but especially because on a few tombstones it is explicitly stated that the dead died of ‘mawtana‘, an (old) Syrian word that means as much as ‘epidemic disease’, ‘plague’.

There has been much scientific discussion as to whether ‘mawtana’ here indeed meant the dreaded bubonic plague, or at least some other deadly disease. Subsequently, the scholars who assumed plague again disagreed on the meaning of this entry. For was this cemetery a stop of the disease on a long way west from China, where the origin of the Black Death was often suspected? Others again thought that this find at Issyk Koelmeer must have been an eastern sideline in the distribution, from a Black Death origin in Crimea, from where the plague was spread to Italy in 1347.

This ‘mawtana’ reference has been so hotly debated that last year the leading Norwegian Black Death expert Ole J. Benedictow – almost sighing – in his revised Complete History of the Black Death wrote that it is now clear that Issyk Koel was not dealing with the plague at all, but with another disease: “It is a pity that some scientists still cling to that old material.” The current research in Nature has now put an end to this uncertainty.

Madagascar

The current plague cases, such as in Madagascar in 2017, are seen as offshoots from the third great epidemic of plague that began in 1772 in Yunnan, China, and increased in the course of the 19th century due to the growing traffic on railways and steamships, to Glasgow and San Francisco around 1900, Paris in 1920 and Kaliningrad in 1947 In total, 26 million people died in that epidemic, of which more than 12 million in China and India. There is evidence of an epidemic around 3000 BC, but the Justinian plague, which raged in the sixth through eighth centuries, is believed to be the first real plague epidemic. The Black Death is second in that count.

The plague bacteria is transmitted to humans through bites from infected fleas or through direct contact. The signs are high fever, bleeding, joint pain, and general weakness. The high mortality is due to the toxic gasses that produce the plague bacteria and lead to blood clots, internal bleeding and organ failure. Septic shock also often occurs.

Most common is the bubonic plague, in which the Y.pestis bacteria infect the lymph, which then develops chicken egg-sized bumps full of infectious pus. Those bumps were called “the sign of God” in the Black Death epidemic, the sign of an early death. Shakespeare called it “the tokened pestilence where death is sure†Antony and Cleopatra 3:10). The pneumonic plague, in which the bacterium infects the lungs, whether or not via the lymph, is the most contagious, through coughed-out droplets containing bacteria.

Also read about the major plague outbreaks in Europe: The plague struck from outside Europe