Death by the Lake: Mortality Crisis in Early Fourteenth-Century Central Asia
Journal: The Journal of Interdisciplinary History
Year: 2019

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 un