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Plague reaches the Mediterranean

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Plague arrives at Constantinople during 1347 and reaches Messina in Sicily in October, then Genoa and Marseille before the year ends, spreading across Europe through 1348 to 1351. It travelled the same corridors, and by the same shipping, that carried the trade. Ancient DNA published in 2022 places the source population of the Black Death lineage in the Tian Shan, in burials of 1338 and 1339.

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Evidence · 2
Timeline

No dated observations are stored for this object. Atlas shows what was observed and when — it does not infer a history.

Connections · 3
Assembled narrative · 1

Assembled from 39 blocks · 2 evidence · 34 related

  1. Story
  2. Plague arrives at Constantinople during 1347 and reaches Messina in Sicily in October, then Genoa and Marseille before the year ends, spreading across Europe through 1348 to 1351. It travelled the same corridors, and by the same shipping, that carried the trade. Ancient DNA published in 2022 places the source population of the Black Death lineage in the Tian Shan, in burials of 1338 and 1339.
  3. Knowledge
  4. Constantinople
  5. Maritime Silk Road
  6. Mongol Empire
  7. Plague reaches the Mediterranean
  8. Connections
  9. Constantinople
  10. Mongol Empire
  11. Maritime Silk Road
  12. Antioch on the Orontes
  13. Dedication of Constantinople
  14. Silkworm cultivation reaches Byzantium
  15. Plague reaches the Mediterranean
  16. Christianity
  17. The 'Edict of Milan' — toleration and restitution in the Roman Empire
  18. Dedication of Constantinople
  19. Administrative division of the empire on the death of Theodosius I
  20. Odoacer deposes Romulus Augustulus - the contested 'fall' of the Western Roman Empire
  21. Compilation of the Corpus Iuris Civilis
  22. Ottoman capture of Constantinople
  23. Hagia Sophia, Constantinople / Istanbul
  24. Justinian commissions Hagia Sophia from two geometers
  25. Istanbul
  26. Merv
  27. Marco Polo
  28. Temujin is proclaimed Chinggis Khan
  29. Mongol destruction of Merv
  30. Marco Polo's journey to Asia and back
  31. Plague strikes the besieging army at Kaffa
  32. Plague reaches the Mediterranean
  33. Magnetic compass
  34. Northern Tarim route
  35. Marco Polo's journey to Asia and back
  36. Plague reaches the Mediterranean
  37. Evidence
  38. Ancient DNA from burials dated 1338 and 1339 at Kara-Djigach in the Chüy valley, Kyrgyzstan, yields a Yersinia pestis genome ancestral to the strain responsible for the Black Death, placing the source population in the Tian Shan region on the northern trade corridors.
  39. The best-known account of plague at the siege of Kaffa in the Crimea and its carriage west by Genoese shipping. De' Mussi was not present and wrote at second hand shortly afterwards; the account is near-contemporary testimony rather than eyewitness record, and the catapulted-corpses detail in particular is debated as a transmission mechanism.
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/atlas?object=EVENT_BLACK_DEATH_1347&experience=EVENT_BLACK_DEATH_1347