37. Catapulting the Plague
The plague first reached Europe through a siege in the then-distant Crimean Peninsula in the Black Sea. In 1346, the Mongols set out to capture the city of Caffa, now Feodosiya, in the Crimea, and subjected it to a prolonged siege. In an era of poor sanitation and medical knowledge, sieges were often as fatal for the besiegers as the besieged, because the besieging armies encamped around the targeted city often came down with illnesses.
That is what happened during the Mongol Siege of Caffa, and the illness the besiegers came down with was the Black Death. The Mongol commander, Jani Beg, decided to share the misery by catapulting plague-infected bodies over the walls into Caffa, to infect the inhabitants. Some Genoese traders in the city fled, and carried the plague with them to Mediterranean ports. They arrived in Sicily in 1347, which they infected, and from there, the Black Death spread north to the Italian mainland and thence rapidly to the rest of Europe.
