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Rus’ and Eastern Europe (14th – mid-15th c.)Nature and disasters

Plague strikes the siege of Caffa

In 1346 plague broke out in the Golden Horde army that had been besieging the Genoese port of Caffa in the Crimea since the previous year. The notary Gabriele de’ Mussi, who was not there, wrote soon afterwards that the dying Tatars hurled corpses into the city and that ships from Caffa carried the disease to Italy — the most famous, and most disputed, account of how the Black Death reached Europe.

Date
1346year known
Place
Caffa (Kaffa)today: Feodosia, Crimea · Eastern Europe
Participants
Golden Horde, Republic of Genoa
Threads
Rus’ and Eastern Europe (14th – mid-15th c.)
Also known as
Siege of Caffa; Siege of Kaffa; Gabriele de’ Mussi; Ibn al-Wardi; Осада Каффы; Осада Кафы; Габриэль де Мюсси

Caffa (modern Feodosia), founded by the Genoese around 1266 by agreement with the khan of the Golden Horde, was one of the chief Italian ports on the Black Sea. In September 1343 a Venetian, Andreolo Civran, killed a Tatar official at Tana at the mouth of the Don; Khan Jani Beg expelled the Italians, and his troops besieged Caffa. The first siege was lifted in February 1344 and a second began in 1345, while the Genoese and Venetians answered with a trade embargo; supplied by sea, the city held out.

In 1346 plague struck the besiegers. The Syrian scholar Ibn al-Wardi, who had the news from Muslim merchants returning from the Crimea, wrote that it raged in the ‘land of the Uzbeks’ in Rajab 747 AH (October–November 1346) and then in the Crimea, where a qadi put the dead at 85,000; Russian chronicles record under the same year a great pestilence in Sarai, Astrakhan, Urgench and other towns of the eastern lands, among Muslims, Tatars, Armenians, Italians and other peoples. Gabriele de’ Mussi, a notary of Piacenza who probably never left his city, wrote about 1348 that the Tatars, dying in thousands, lost interest in the siege, had corpses loaded onto their siege engines and hurled into Caffa, and that fugitives from the city carried the infection by ship to Genoa, Venice and other Christian lands.

The microbiologist Mark Wheelis judged that the hurling of corpses might well have happened and, if so, probably carried the disease into the city, but that it was unlikely to have played a decisive role in the spread of plague to Europe, since trade went on through other Crimean ports. The historian Hannah Barker has argued that the plague spread with the grain shipments resumed after the embargo was lifted in 1347, when Jani Beg made peace with the Italians and let them return to Tana. By the autumn of 1347 the plague had reached Constantinople, Alexandria and Sicily.

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Connections

Consequences

  • The Black Death in Constantinople1347 · Balkans and AnatoliaThe plague reached Constantinople in 1347 by sea from the Crimea, where it had broken out at the siege of Caffa

Part of

  • The Black Death1346–1353 · Western and Central EuropeThe plague broke out among the Golden Horde troops besieging Genoese Caffa in 1346; from the Crimea it spread by sea — to Constantinople by the summer of 1347 — and in October 1347 twelve Genoese galleys brought it to Messina

Related events

  • Pax Mongolicac. 1250 – c. 1350 · Central and Northern AsiaCaffa and Tana, where the conflict began, were the Black Sea ends of the trade routes of the Mongol age
  • Plague burials at Kara-Djigach in the Chüy valley1338–1339 · Central and Northern Asiaaccording to the 2022 study, the Kara-Djigach strain was ancestral to the strains of the Black Death, which appeared around the Black Sea eight years later; how it travelled west is unknown
  • The Black Death reaches Rus’1352–1353 · Eastern Europethe plague that struck the Horde in 1346 did not cross into Rus’; it came six years later from the north-west

Same participants

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Western and Central Europe

Balkans and Anatolia

Middle East and Egypt

Africa

Central and Northern Asia

South Asia

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The same period

14th century

Sources

  1. Wikipedia (English): Siege of Caffa
  2. Wikipedia (English): Gabriel de Mussis
  3. Wikipedia (English): Jani Beg
  4. Wikipedia (English): Black Death
  5. Wikipedia (Russian): Чёрная смерть
  6. Wheelis M. Biological Warfare at the 1346 Siege of Caffa // Emerging Infectious Diseases. — 2002. — Vol. 8, no. 9. — P. 971–975
  7. Barker H. Laying the Corpses to Rest: Grain, Embargoes, and Yersinia pestis in the Black Sea, 1346–48 // Speculum. — 2021. — Vol. 96, no. 1. — P. 97–126.
  8. Dols M. Ibn al-Wardī’s Risālah al-naba’ ‘an al-waba’: A Translation of a Major Source for the History of the Black Death in the Middle East // Near Eastern Numismatics, Iconography, Epigraphy and History: Studies in Honor of George C. Miles / Ed. D. K. Kouymjian. — Beirut: American University of Beirut, 1974. — P. 443–455
  9. Wikidata: Q96506039