From the Tian Shan to Crimea: Dynamics of Plague Spread during the Early Stages of the Black Death, 1338–46
Journal: Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient
Year: 2023

Abstract The present paper aims to reconstruct tentative ways, in which the Black Death (the first wave of the Second Plague Pandemic) spread from its now-established home in the Tian Shan region to Western Eurasia between c .1338/41 and 1346. On the basis of all the available evidence—textual, palaeogenetic, archaeological, topographic, numismatic and palaeoclimatalogical—the article argues for two phases of the plague spread: (1) the slow phase of c .1338/41–45, hindered by political and comme