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Philip Slavin
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Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
The Journal of Interdisciplinary History (2019) 50 (1): 59–90.
Published: 01 May 2019
FIGURES
Abstract
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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).
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
The Journal of Interdisciplinary History (2013) 44 (1): 37–60.
Published: 01 May 2013
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Archaeological findings, in conjunction with contemporary quantitative data from manorial records, demonstrate that most of the English population before the onset of the Black Death (1348–1350) suffered from a chronic shortage of protein, calcium, and Vitamin B12 for at least one generation—much longer than the three years of bad harvests and grain famine typically attributed to the Great Famine (1315–1317). The skeletal evidence suggests that after the Great Famine had thinned the population of its frailest individuals, the Great Bovine Pestilence (1319–1320), which caused a prolonged dearth of dairy products, created a generation of people who were less healthy than those who had survived the famine and who therefore were particularly susceptible to the ravages associated with the Black Death.