16. A Plague’s Journey From China to Europe
Modern research and scholarship has pinned the Black Death on Yersinia pestis, a bacterium with no spores. Per genetic analysis, a strain of Yersinia pestis caused that plague. However, it did not die off at the end of that pestilence. Instead, it has lingered around ever since, mutating and reappearing from time to time to cause additional plague outbreaks. The most recent major outbreak, known as the Modern Plague or the Third Pandemic, emerged in China in the mid nineteenth century. It was carried by rats aboard steamships all over the world, and killed an estimated 10 million people. As to the original, the Black Death first erupted in Mongol-ruled China and Central Asia in the 1330s. It traveled the Silk Road with merchants and Mongol armies, and took about fifteen years to reach Europe in 1347.
