This is a rescues post: a Twitter thread salvaged as Twitter goes under, an essay I meant to extend. Better here, as is, than hidden in my files.

I remain concerned about how new work on the origins of the Black Death is going to set medievalists and other people talking about Mongol history. We know what happens when diseases are associated with foreigners. But, as with the turn towards the Global Middle Ages, Mongol history can also flower under new attention.

Incident at Caffa: Mongols lobbing plague dead into the enemy? Not likely

First, my Twitter thread on the incident at Caffa. Context — the murder of a Mongol:

The most serious episode, which ushered in a long period of hostilities between Genoese and Venetians on one side and Janibeg Khan (r. 1342-57) on the other, occurred in 1343 as a consequence of the Venetian refusal to deliver to Mongol authorities a Venetian nobleman, Andreolo Civran, who had been found guilty of having ambushed and slain a Mongol with whom he had previously had an altercation. The subsequent turmoil all but wiped out the Italian presence on the Black Sea, forcing the “Franks” (that is, the Italians) to flee Tana to save their lives and seek refuge in Caffa. Caffa, however, was attacked, besieged, and nearly taken by the army of Janibeg. This episode is famously known for the connection between the Mongols’ bombardment of Caffa with infected corpses and animal carcasses and the spread of the Black Death that ravaged Europe.

— Nicola Di Cosmo, ‘Black Sea emporia and the Mongol Empire: A reassessment of the Pax Mongolica’

me on a Twitter rant:

[searches Twitter for ‘Mongols’ + ‘Black Death’] We so need to dislodge the factoid ‘first recorded use of biological warfare’ from people’s heads. The one source is a complaint full of rhetorical flourish from a stay-at-home lawyer in Italy. Consider his ignorance and prejudice.
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We need to be source-critical and not just re-tell a grisly tale for the same reason Gabriele de’ Mussis told it: for the shock-horror, to appease readers’ cravings and transmit our own texts on the back of a grisly story. We need to do lit-crit on de Mussis in our history books.
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But instead, historians themselves (Mongolists not excluded) revel in the war-and-gore tale and only want to tell it again to the kids.
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It matters because ‘first recorded use of biological warfare’ is lodged in heads, all over the internet, accepted in reputable books, and one of the basic factoids people ‘learn’ [in quote marks] about Mongol history. While it doesn’t stand up to any source criticism at all…
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Even May (found in agreement with Dr Green’s new work on marmots, Issyk Kul origins & plague as a factor in the collapse of Mongol states) — in an otherwise excellent chapter on ‘Mongols and Plague’, licks his lips at this story and dives in. He calculates body splatter range.
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Instead of interrogating Gabriele de’ Mussis and his prose-poem of blame for the plague.
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Such sensationalism is *exactly what we have to avoid* now that Dr Green’s stellar work has made Mongols and the Black Death an inevitably big talking-point and, once again, a main way into Mongol history. We don’t want a ‘Mongol plague’ language now — after de Mussis’ Tartars.
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I can see the talking-points about Mongols eating rodents. Wet markets, anyone?
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So let’s at least avoid historians’ disgust when discussing Mongol eating habits. It’s easy to express disgust in that not-so-neutral, not-so-measured historians’ style. We have to try not to replicate attitudes of 13thC European travelers on rat-eating, even while we quote them.
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Like, it’s easy to write without disgust or a laugh on what historical Mongols ate and why. But writers seem to find it easy to imagine eating marmot or rats, screw up their faces and smirk in collusion with the reader. Don’t do that? Write straight-faced. Imagine historically.
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Download Dr Monica H. Green’s The Four Plagues. For the moment, still read Timothy May on The Mongols and Plague, which stands up well enough after Dr Green (but ask questions — always).
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Dr Barker lays our meme to rest. A reconstruction of Caffa from Byzantine, Genoese, Venetian, Mamluk residents and travelers. ‘Laying the Corpses to Rest: Grain, Embargoes, and Yersinia pestis in the Black Sea, 1346–48’ Hannah Barker, Speculum 96.1 Jan 2021
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Yesterday-today have read Dr Barker. Along with Dr Green’s intervention, it’s conclusive. Ends: ‘Plague’s movement across the Black Sea was certainly not a matter of bioterrorism during the siege of Caffa. Instead, it was an unintended consequence of peace.’
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[end thread]

A few years previously I’d written this essay on how plague destroyed European-Mongol contacts. It’s a sad essay. I’ll introduce it with this quote:

To the few who could perceive it, the Mongols’ arrival had appeared in the thirteenth century as a comet that indicated the way to a brighter future of global trade and unfettered exchange. They had demonstrated that it was possible to achieve a more integrated world… — Nicola Di Cosmo, ‘Black Sea emporia and the Mongol Empire: A reassessment of the Pax Mongolica’.

 

What was lost to plague? or, a lament for the Pax Mongolica and its other, forgotten Marco Polos

The Black Death of 1347-50 began on the Black Sea, for Europe. Before the great pestilence, Genoese were the most heavily involved of Europeans with the Mongol world beyond the Black Sea. This essay looks at Italian contacts with farther Asia, and the effects of the plague on these contacts. Mongol states suffered in the plague and lost their ability to facilitate trade; for Italian merchants, who had travelled with unprecedented freedom through this world, farther Asia was again cut off. Cultural interchanges were lost, and even knowledge of them was often lost to sight in a post-plague world, except as preserved in popular romances. Italian art also testifies to an engagement with farther Asia in the later thirteenth and the early fourteenth centuries, before the plague. Thus we need to turn to paintings and romance, in order to see the before and after, and assess the effects of the plague. This very trade between the Italian merchant republics and the Mongols was understood to be the agent of transmission of the plague to Europe; the Genoese feature in chronicles as shipping plague from port to port. It is a sad end to a story of exchange and openness between Asia and Europe in the medieval age.

For a century before the great plague of 1347-50, the Pax Mongolica was in effect. The whole Mongol world was open for trade, into farther Asia – that is, beyond what touches the Mediterranean and Black Seas. Previous states in these areas, running on principles of settled peoples, had not allowed foreigners to travel freely in their interiors, and they had their own merchants whose commercial interests to protect. Not so Mongols, who took every means possible to attract foreign merchants and facilitated their travel through the vast spaces in which they had demolished borders.¹ The four khans’ territories were loose-knit; the Ilkhans in Iran and the khans of the Golden Horde above the Black and Caspian Seas were political rivals, at times at war. Nevertheless, neither government let this disrupt the transit trade, or punished each other through trade access as is usual for non-nomad states. Trade was of the first concern to Mongols. Janet Abu-Lughod has seen in this century, A.D. 1250-1350, an emergent ‘world system’ of trade connections; Roxann Prazniak, who studies Italian-Asian contacts, talks of a ‘Mongol world century’ with these same dates.² It ends around the date of the Black Death.

Italians moved confidently in the Mongol world. They negotiated with Mongol governments, made treaties, stood up for their rights, quarrelled with Mongols and entered into armed conflict.³ They are found as individuals in service at the court of the Ilkhans; in a Genoese Quarter in the Ilkhans’ capital Tabriz; a brother and a sister, guessed to be Genoese, have tombstones in the port city of Zayton (Quanzhou) in China, where lived a Latin community.⁴ Genoa had won a struggle with Venice for the lion’s share of trading opportunities in the Mongol world. Its operations on the Black Sea can be described as a partnership or a symbiosis with the Golden Horde Mongols – the ‘closest recorded working relationship’ between a European and an Asian state in the medieval age.⁵ Unfortunately, the far-travelled Genoese left few records of their activities, in part due to commercial secrecy and a preference for oral information.⁶ None of these exploratory merchants and adventurers met the accidents that led the Venetian Marco Polo to divulge his experiences. Other reasons for the quiet of the records have been adduced: vital to Genoa’s trade arrangements between the Golden Horde and Egypt was the shipping of slaves to be mamlukes from one to the other. This service, a necessity for the Dawla al-Turkiyya (‘The State of the Turks’) in Egypt and its Mongol ally, was not a matter for the European go-betweens to boast of; if merchants chose to major in this trade, they did not keep the accounts they did for other merchandise.⁷

The plague coincided with and in part caused the close-down of trade with farther Asia and the end of the Pax Mongolica. The Golden Horde had been over a diplomatic barrel; the khans in Saray had often displayed a reluctance to export their own population, but strategy required they satisfy this unique need of Egypt for new slave soldiers from the steppe, in order to keep Egypt as an ally against their rival Ilkhans.⁸ Plague depopulated the Golden Horde and this sacrifice of people became unconscionable for the Saray khans.⁹ Plague, at the same time, helped the descent of the Ilkhans’ state into chaos, which ended the diplomatic triangle, and the Golden Horde’s attitude towards its Genoese trading partners on the Black Sea underwent a change. It did not have to do business with them in the old ways, and resentments over the slave trade became evident.¹⁰

As Nicola di Cosmo observes, the Genoese on the Black Sea in fact had a strengthened hand against a debilitated Golden Horde after the plague, and their colony cities gained in sovereign rights.¹¹ However, farther Asia was cut off, as Mongol states in Iran (1340s onwards) and China (the two decades up to 1368) collapsed – both, it has been argued, victims of the plague.¹² There is a distinction to be made between Genoa’s government and its private merchants: the government had never pursued opportunities to extend its activities east; even Mongol offers for diplomatic exchange were not taken up.¹³ The Genoese government was content to exploit the immediate Black Sea surrounds, that had been familiar European places for trade and slave acquisition since the Greek colonies in ancient times.¹⁴ Ventures into farther Asia had been of private initiative. Privately led and funded enterprises were a mark of Genoese ways of doing business; Benjamin Kedar contrasts the traits ascribed to Genoese and Venetians in the contemporary view, with the Genoese individualistic and resistant to state control.¹⁵ Indeed, Genoese resident on the Black Sea were known to disobey the home government when its orders interfered with trade.¹⁶ These differences can help explain Genoa’s deeper engagement with Asia. It was individual exploits, self-organised, that struck out beyond the purview of the Genoese state. After the plague on the Black Sea, the more conservative trade interests of Genoa’s government held sway: just as in post-plague Europe, trade became localised and distance trade suffered. Di Cosmo lists the retained merchandise from local sources: fish, caviar, timber, hides – not the conspicuous ‘Tartar cloth’, or nasij in the Mongol world, gold-embroidered brocades.¹⁷ In Kedar’s study of Genoese and Venetian merchant mentalities in the fourteenth-century depression, the evidence indicates retrenchment, safe bets, low aims.¹⁸ Steven Epstein writes similarly in his history of medieval Genoa: he farewells ‘the earlier, heroic age of merchant entrepreneurs’ for a risk-averse climate after the plague: ‘the Genoese do seem collectively to have lost their intrepid spirit… nothing would be heard of China for a long time.’¹⁹

To see what was lost in the post-plague world, we need a view of the world before the plague: so Kedar reasons when he sets out to assess the fourteenth-century depression.²⁰ This is true of Italy’s engagement with the east. With the interruption of the plague and the closure of farther Asia, knowledge too went into retrenchment, and the engagement of Italy with Asia was lost sight of – even into the scholarship today. Art history is one road to rediscovery of how close these worlds once were. Fourteenth-century Italian painting has been plumbed for evidence of Asian influence.²¹ Most strikingly, Roxann Prazniak has detected in the paintings of Ambrogio Lorenzetti of Siena, on the eve of the Black Death in the 1340s, a direct imitation of art styles in Tabriz, the ‘world historical’ city of the Ilkhans, as well as an intelligent commentary on Mongol conditions in one work set at a Central Asian court.²² Meanwhile, art historians of the period of Mongol rule in Iran trace Italian influences there.²³ Prazniak’s ongoing investigations are at the forefront of Italian-Mongol cultural links.

After the plague, there is also reminiscence in romance. That ‘heroic age’ of mercantile Genoese before the post-plague depression is captured in romance, which in the thirteenth century took a turn to Asia, as known through merchant travellers. Michael Murrin, in his book Trade and Romance, argues that the new Asian settings, first inspired by Marco Polo, continued to be fuelled by the experiences, the real adventures – and the interests – of non-aristocratic travellers for commerce, even though the heroes remained knights.²⁴ Chaucer set his Squire’s Tale in Saray, capital of the Golden Horde. This tale has proven to be well-informed about the Mongol world, with its most extravagant fantasies anchored in actual events, historical stories, material items.²⁵ Murrin posits that Chaucer heard tales of the Golden Horde from Genoese merchants, in the later decades of the fourteenth century.²⁶ Inexplicable, otherwise, is his idealisation of Chinggis Khan (Cambyuskan) as an exemplary monarch – a portrait matched elsewhere only by Marco Polo’s eulogy on Chinggis.²⁷ Marco Polo took a Mongol view of things and may scarcely have felt European. Residents among the Mongols were open to this foreign world: the Squire’s Tale, written on Genoese intelligence, stands as proof. It contrasts with a view from home: the doges of Genoa and Venice, in correspondence with each other in 1345, ‘vent their real feelings’ on the Tartars – insulting and estranged.²⁸ In a later reminiscence, from 1495, Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Italianised Roland makes friends with a Tartar king whose characterisation also invokes (good) qualities told of Chinggis Khan.²⁹ Boiardo’s open Asia is more that of the Pax Mongolica than of his present-day; while the Squire’s Tale envisages a golden age in the Golden Horde. These are the memories of merchants, preserved in romance; an evidence not to be neglected.

Within Europe, the picture is quite different. The alliterative Morte Arthure, with a date close to the Squire’s Tale at the end of the fourteenth century, has King Arthur slay a baby-spitting giant from Genoa.³⁰ The Genoese in Europe lived in disrepute, very often – this is the theme of David Wallace’s study of Genoa as a place in the imagination, then and now.³¹ Now, in the historical imagination: Abu-Lughod notes the ‘inequal treatment in the literature’ of Venice and Genoa, when these were equivalent in importance in the thirteenth century.³² Genoa’s connections with the little-understood Tartars, with the slave trade, with ambivalently-seen wealth from the east, must have fed into this unsavoury image. Then, they were blamed for shipping the plague. Its very transmission to Europeans was located at Genoese Caffa on the Black Sea, besieged by Tartars in a quarrel over a murder. The tale of Gabriele de’ Mussis in his Historia de Morbo need not be taken at face value: both shamanists and Muslims had ways to dispose of dead, which didn’t include lobbing them at the enemy; in the khan’s plague-stricken army despair might have set in, over religious concerns.³³ Whether true or not, this is the tale that went around, with the declamation of de’ Mussis: ‘Speak, Genoa, of what you have done.’³⁴ Next, Genoese ships feature in chronicles around the coasts of Europe as bringers of the terrible disease. ‘Tartars’, ‘Caffa’, ‘ships of Genoa’ recur as Europe records its history of transmission of the plague in the year 1347.³⁵ Of the course of the plague in Genoa itself, Epstein finds absolutely no local records.³⁶ But Genoese, and their eastwards trade with Tartars, acquired the ill-fame of afflicting Europe with the great pestilence known as the Black Death. There seems to be a split view, of Genoese as of Tartars: a golden age, a Pax Mongolica, remembered by the merchants involved; and the scapegoating of these Europeans who had truck and traffic with such a foreign world – before the plague.

The Black Death, from a European perspective, began on the Black Sea, an unfortunate contact between the adventurous Genoese merchants and the Mongol world that welcomed them. It must be seen against the contacts that existed in a world before the plague, where Italians travelled into Mongol Iran and Mongol China. They left few records – Marco Polo is a stand-out – and the evidence of them often lies in cultural exchanges, in Italian art influenced by art styles in Tabriz, in romances that know the Mongol world through the tales of these travellers. The great pestilence of 1346-50 interfered with trade, helped reduce the Mongol states to chaos, and left affairs on the Black Sea to the more conservative Genoese government, instead of private, exploratory ventures farther into Asia. The trade itself, the connection of Genoa and the Mongols, was seen as the agent of this catastrophic disease. The closest cooperation between Europe and Asia, in the medieval period, was over.

Further reading

My blog post Mongols and the Plague: mostly about Mongol understandings of disease and contagion.

My blog post Chaucer Goes to the Golden Horde: on the Squire’s Tale and its Mongol knowledge.

Roxann Prazniak, often mentioned in this essay, has since published a book about the interconnected Mongol world. Here’s my review for the Asian Review of Books.

My review of Jo Ann Cavallo’s The World Beyond Europe in the Romance Epics of Boiardo and Ariosto, where I get excited about meeting a sympathetic Mongol khan in Italian romance; and of Michael Murrin’s Trade and Romance, for when romance changed from the ‘Celtic fantastic’ to the ‘marvelous real’, whose tutelary spirit was Marco Polo.

Bibliography and footnotes

Abu-Lughod, Janet L., Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1989.

Allsen, Thomas T., Commodity and Exchange in the Mongol Empire: A Cultural History of Islamic Textiles, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Blair, Sheila, ‘The Religious Art of the Ilkhanids’, in The Legacy of Genghis Khan: Courtly Art and Culture in Western Asia, 1256-1353, eds. Linda Komaroff and Stefano Carboni, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2002, pp. 104-33.

Braud, David, ‘The Slave Supply in Classical Greece’, in The Cambridge World History of Slavery, Volume 1: The Ancient Mediterranean World, eds. Keith Bradley and Paul Cartledge, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2011, pp. 112-33.

Cavallo, Jo Ann, The World Beyond Europe in the Romance Epics of Boiardo and Ariosto, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2013.

Childs, Wendy, ‘Anglo-Italian Contacts in the Fourteenth Century’, in Chaucer and the Italian Trecento, ed. Piero Boitani, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983, pp. 65-87.

Ciocîltan, Virgil, The Mongols and the Black Sea Trade in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries, trans. Samuel Willcocks, Leiden, Brill, 2012.

Di Cosmo, Nicola, ‘Black Sea emporia and the Mongol Empire: A reassessment of the Pax Mongolica’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, vol. 53, iss. 1-2, 2009, pp. 83-108.

Di Cosmo, Nicola, ‘Mongols and Merchants on the Black Sea Frontier in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries: Convergences and Conflicts’, in Mongols, Turks and Others: Eurasian Nomads and the Sedentary World, eds. Reuven Amitai and Michal Biran, Leiden, Brill, 2005, pp. 391-424.

Epstein, Steven A., Genoa and the Genoese, 958-1528, Chapel Hill and London, University of North Carolina Press, 1996.

Epstein, Steven A., Purity Lost: Transgressing Boundaries in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1000-1400, Baltimore, The John Hopkins University Press, 2006.

Ho, Colleen, ‘Thirteenth and Fourteenth Century European-Mongol Relations’, History Compass, vol. 10, iss. 12, 2012, pp. 946-68.

Horrox, Rosemary, The Black Death, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1994.

Jordan, Carmel, ‘Soviet Archeology and the Setting of the Squire’s Tale’, The Chaucer Review, vol. 22, iss. 2, 1987, pp. 128-9.

Kedar, Benjamin Z., Merchants in Crisis: Genoese and Venetian Men of Affairs and the Fourteenth-Century Depression, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1976.

Korobeinikov, Dimitri, ‘A Broken Mirror: The Kipchak World in the Thirteenth Century’, in The Other Europe in the Middle Ages: Avars, Bulgars, Khazars, and Cumans, ed. Florin Curta, Leiden, Brill, 2008.

Lach, Donald F., Asia in the Making of Europe, Volume 1: The Century of Discovery, Book One, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 1965.

May, Timothy, The Mongol Conquests in World History, London, Reaktion, 2012.

McKee, Sally, ‘Domestic slavery in Renaissance Italy’, Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies, vol. 29, iss. 3, 2008, pp. 305-326.

Murrin, Michael, Trade and Romance, Chicago & London, University of Chicago Press, 2014.

Peleggi, Maurizio, ‘Shifting alterity: The Mongol in the visual and literary culture of the late Middle Ages’, The Medieval History Journal, vol. 4, iss. 1, 2001, pp. 16-33.

Piacentini, Valeria Fiorani, ‘The Golden Age of Genoa’s eastwards trade (13^th-15^th centuries)’, The Journal of Central Asian Studies, vol. 19, iss. 1, 2010, pp. 25-40.

Prazniak, Roxann, ‘Siena on the Silk Roads: Ambrogio Lorenzetti and the Mongol Global Century, 1250-1350’, Journal of World History, vol. 21, iss. 2, 2010, pp. 177-217.

Prazniak, Roxann, ‘Tabriz on the Silk Roads: Thirteenth-century Eurasian cultural connections’, Asian Review of World Histories, vol. 1, iss. 2, 2013, pp. 169-188.

Wallace, David, Premodern Places: Calais to Surinam, Chaucer to Aphra Behn, Malden MA, Blackwell, 2004.