Pod Insights Unexplainable A better Black Death story About this episode What happens when researchers reexamine some of the basic facts about the Black Death? They start rewriting history and rethinking blame.
Guests: Hannah Barker, professor at Arizona State University; Ulf Büntgen, professor at the University of Cambridge; Martin Bauch, historian at the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:18 Speaker 02 Noam, are you ready?
1:20 Noam Hassenfeld? Yes, hello. Hi.
1:22 Speaker 02 Hello. I have you here today to talk about the Black Death.
1:29 Noam Hassenfeld? Fun.
1:30 Speaker 02 Yeah, well.
1:32 Noam Hassenfeld? Wow.
1:32 Speaker 02 Kind of, actually, though. Like, interesting, at least.
1:36 Noam Hassenfeld? You got a fun, you had a fun take on the Black Death?
1:39 Speaker 02 Well, I got interested in the Black Death. Because this paper came out last year about sort of climate and the Black Death in Europe. And I wound up calling up these two lovely researchers, this guy named Olf Bündgen and another guy named Martin Bauch. And I wanted to talk to them about their research. And I was doing the thing that we, we usually do, which is to basically be like, let's establish a baseline of information here. Like, let's just get our facts straight before we dive into the research.
2:10 Noam Hassenfeld? Okay.
2:11 Speaker 02 But then, as I was asking, sort of, what's the Black Death? Like, what are the basics here? They would sort of hit me with these, these caveats.
2:23 Speaker 03 We have to be, be honest and always cautious. This is something that happened 700 years ago.
2:32 Noam Hassenfeld? So the idea that you're, you're saying is that we don't know what the Black Death is?
2:40 Speaker 02 So, no, we, we do know a lot. We know there was an outbreak of disease in the 1300s. We know this was one of the biggest pandemics in recorded history. We know it, it had a huge effect. So historians have made the case that this caused a lot of economic upheaval, spiritual upheaval. People have talked about it having an evolutionary effect on the people who survived it. Cause there might've been genes that helped people survive that were then passed on. Or even people have made the argument that the Black Death laid the groundwork for some public health interventions that we know today.
3:18 Speaker 02 But like, as Oif and Martin would talk to me about specific details that I honestly would have, would have thought would be simple, they'd often hedge.
3:33 Speaker 03 Caveat?
3:34 Noam Hassenfeld? What exactly is he caveating?
3:37 Speaker 02 So a whole range of things, but one example would be how many people died? Cause obviously people weren't, uh, you weren't doing statistics in the 1300s the way that we are now. And so.
3:53 Noam Hassenfeld? But we, we know it was a lot, right?
3:56 Speaker 02 Yeah, we know. So the estimates that I encountered for, for Europe at least were initially I was hearing maybe like 30 to 50% of, of everyone died. But then some people were saying it was more like 40 to 60% of everyone died, which is a pretty staggering percentage, like.
4:23 Noam Hassenfeld? Yeah. I mean, COVID was nowhere near that.
4:26 Speaker 02 Right. So, so any of those estimates is sort of unimaginable.
4:31 Noam Hassenfeld? Yeah.
4:32 Speaker 02 But given how big a deal it was, I guess it surprised me that we don't have a, a better or narrower number on what percentage of people died or how many died.
4:45 Speaker 02 And I was sort of encountering that over and over.
4:50 Speaker 02 And so that's the show today. Instead of talking about climate and the Black Death, I wound up reaching out to a medieval historian named Hannah Barker. And she really helped me understand, first, like, why this he moment in our history is is so hard to pin down, but also sort of why that ends up mattering, not to be too dramatic, but but why it ends up mattering for how we tell our own history.
5:21 Noam Hassenfeld? A better Black Death story.
5:23 Speaker 02 A better Black Death story, actually, maybe, huh, by the end of this.
5:41 Speaker 02 So just to start.
5:45 Speaker 02 What do you know, just off the dome, about sort of what caused the Black Death?
5:53 Noam Hassenfeld? My mind immediately goes to rats.
5:57 Noam Hassenfeld? I feel like it was something like rats coming from somewhere in Asia on merchant boats or something. And then the boats come to some port in Europe, like Italy or something. And then the people on the boats get infected or the rats go off the boats and infect people. But, long story short, rats is my answer.
6:25 Speaker 02 Got it. And what are they giving people in your mind? Like, what's the what's the disease beyond just like the Black Death?
6:34 Noam Hassenfeld? Boobonic plague?
6:36 Speaker 02 OK, so, yes, this is like, this is basically exactly what I learned in school as well. Right? There were rats, they were spreading the plague. Explanation goes back a long time. But for for decades now, researchers have been kind of reexamining that sort of textbook, basic understanding here and trying not to make assumptions. So, for example, even the most basic thing, the idea that this is plague.
7:08 Speaker 02 Until as recently as the 2010s, that was being debated.
7:12 Noam Hassenfeld? Seriously?
7:13 Speaker 02 Yeah, like, to me, Black Death and plague are inextricably linked, right? Black Death is plague, but that was actually an open question.
7:22 Noam Hassenfeld? Huh.
7:23 Speaker 02 The disease that we nowadays call plague is caused by this bacterium, Yersinia pestis.
7:30 Noam Hassenfeld? Yersinia pestis.
7:31 Speaker 02 Yersinia pestis. It can have different forms if the bacteria gets into your lungs, or your blood, or your lymphatic system. The version you and I had heard of, bubonic plague, is when it swells up your lymph nodes into these large buboes that can be the size of an egg. It's also pretty grim if it gets into your blood and your lungs as well. And the plague symptoms that we know of nowadays, they sound like the things medieval authors were writing that they'd experienced.
8:04 Speaker 02 But some researchers had questions because they were like, well, in other instances of plague, it hasn't spread this fast. And with these descriptions, medieval authors are, they're just working in like a really different model of disease. So they're talking about like, the four humors, or whatever.
8:25 Noam Hassenfeld? This was like miasma theory time, too, right?
8:27 Speaker 02 Right, right, right.
8:28 Noam Hassenfeld? Where disease is kind of like a, like a cloud of, I don't know, smelling, odorous vapor.
8:37 Speaker 02 Right, and so some historians were like, given that it's a little apples to oranges and comparing these, are we sure they're talking about plague?
8:48 Speaker 04 How do we know about anything about bacteria in the 14th century? What if it was a different disease? So there was a lot of debate about that.
8:56 Speaker 02 And ultimately, that wasn't resolved until they, they took a bunch of old bodies from Black Death mass graves and looked in their bones and their teeth and analyzed the DNA in them.
9:08 Speaker 04 And so they were able to collect teeth from the cemetery in London and test the teeth, and they found a lot of Yersinia pestis. And so that was kind of the convincing evidence that this is a plague outbreak. It is not other diseases, it is specifically plague.
9:28 Speaker 02 So like, that is the level of kind of questioning everything that we are talking about here.
9:34 Noam Hassenfeld? Mm-hmm.
9:35 Speaker 02 And also, it's sort of the, the level of proof you need for people to agree on things. You need like, a smoking bacterium in a bone, or a tooth. And in some other areas, we just don't quite have that level of clarity. So, you mentioned rats, right?
9:54 Noam Hassenfeld? Rats.
9:55 Speaker 02 And the story I heard, very similar to the story that you heard, right, is like, okay, this bacterium, Yersinia pestis, right, it's in rats. The rats have fleas. The fleas bite the rats.
10:07 Noam Hassenfeld? Oh, the fleas, I totally forgot, the fleas.
10:09 Speaker 02 Yeah.
10:09 Noam Hassenfeld? That's my bad. I, oh. I'm sorry, rats. I blamed you.
10:15 Speaker 02 Well, I mean, the rats are also, they play a role.
10:19 Noam Hassenfeld? Yeah, but they're, they don't want the fleas. I should have blamed the fleas. That's, I'm sorry.
10:25 Speaker 02 Blame the fleas. And then we blame Eve, and then we blame the snake, and honestly, like, Adam's the one who ate that, whatever. So the, the rats have fleas, fleas bite the rats, and then the fleas move on to humans, they bite the humans, they give them plague.
10:40 Noam Hassenfeld? Got it, yeah.
10:42 Speaker 02 That's already hard, as a historian, to sort of keep track of, because like, it's not just like, what historical humans were doing, you had to keep track of what historical fleas were doing, or like, what historical rats were doing. And Hannah was like, we don't have rat histories to look at.
11:00 Noam Hassenfeld? Did fleas keep any records?
11:02 Speaker 02 You'll be shocked to learn, fleas are illiterate. But the thing is, that there's also now research that suggests that this is not just a story about rats.
11:13 Speaker 04 We can be looking at other kinds of rodents, we can look at other kinds of mammals. Camels, it turns out, are pretty good plague transmitters.
11:20 Noam Hassenfeld? Camels?
11:22 Speaker 04 Sheep, potentially, as well. And the same thing, it seems, is true with the insects. So, there's this particular species of flea that is associated with the rats, that is kind of the go-to explanation, but there are other types of fleas, possibly also lice. On the biological side, this is one of the areas of investigation, is what other insects, what other rodents or mammals are potential carriers of the disease.
11:47 Noam Hassenfeld? Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Camels? That is something that I would, I would never have assumed camels were part of this.
11:56 Speaker 02 Right. And so as you can imagine, I went into this thinking, you know, we all know that it is about the rats. And then it was like, well,
12:06 Speaker 02 you know, and it's sort of, it felt like over and over.
12:08 Noam Hassenfeld? There's more animals to blame.
12:10 Speaker 02 And don't forget the marmots. There are like lots of
12:13 Noam Hassenfeld? Oh, of course.
12:13 Speaker 02 Things about marmots as well. And they do sort of need to know which animals to pay attention to here because it is part of this sort of bigger project to figure out where did the Black Death even come from? Like, how did it get from point A to Z? And that's also more complicated than it might appear. So you mentioned when we first started this, Asia, and there have been attempts to use sort of genetics of Yersinia pestis to nail down an origin point. So basically to look at this bacteria and like its family tree and be like, can we, can we trace things back and figure out where it might have started? And so you have papers pointing to different spots in Asia, but people sort of debate that.
12:58 Noam Hassenfeld? I gotta say, if we are still debating like where COVID started from six years ago, it's hard for me to imagine that we could figure out where the Black Plague started, like.
13:09 Speaker 02 600 plus years ago. Yeah.
13:11 Noam Hassenfeld? Yeah.
13:12 Speaker 02 And then like from there, they're also debating sort of, how did it move around?
13:17 Speaker 04 How long it took and what routes it took to move into the Middle East, into the area that's now Southern Russia, the step, and then into Europe? That is an open question right now. That's an area of current research.
13:35 Speaker 02 And you might think, okay, bird, this seems granular. Okay. Who cares if it's rats or camels? Like, who cares if it's from one place or another place? But one of the other things I realized in talking to Hannah was how a few facts kind of in one direction or another direction kind of changes our perception of things.
14:00 Noam Hassenfeld? In what way?
14:02 Speaker 02 After the break, I will tell you.
14:07 Noam Hassenfeld? Camels.
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18:15 Speaker 02 So Hannah Barker, this medieval historian, zoomed in on one piece of the Black Death puzzle, the small but pretty consequential jump that people believe this bacterium, Yersinia pestis, made back in 1347.
18:31 Noam Hassenfeld? Specific.
18:32 Speaker 02 So I think that in that year, 1347, the bacteria moved from the Black Sea into parts of Italy, and then from Italy, it spreads through Europe, hits different parts of Europe in a big way in the next few years.
18:45 Noam Hassenfeld? Okay.
18:46 Speaker 02 And basically, some people think this this sort of moment was a key moment for the European experience of Black Death. And there's this very longstanding story that people have told to explain what happened here. So the story starts in a port city called Kaffa, located in modern day Crimea on the coast of the Black Sea. Kaffa had lots of Italian merchants living in it, especially Genoese merchants. And in the 1340s, they were under siege because they were fighting with the Mongol army.
19:21 Speaker 04 It can be called the Golden Horde, it can be called the Jochid Khanate, but the Mongol state that controlled the land in that area, they were fighting each other. And the Mongol army experienced this disease. People started to get sick. And so the the story that people believed, the explanation for how Black Death ended up moving from Asia to Europe, was that what they did was throw bodies, catapult bodies over the walls into this besieged city. And so the people inside the city started getting sick and they abandoned the city and fled, but they took the disease with them.
20:05 Speaker 04 And so when these ships that were fleeing the siege went back to Italy, the people on the ship spread the disease to Italy, and that's how the Black Death ended up in Italy, and from there it went to the rest of Europe. That's the story that was prevalent.
20:21 Noam Hassenfeld? Okay, so that's not rats or fleas, that's people.
20:25 Speaker 02 Well, it's fleas coming off of people, but
20:28 Noam Hassenfeld? Okay, okay.
20:29 Speaker 02 Yeah, it is. It's, it's very
20:31 Noam Hassenfeld? But the fleas aren't going to fly over the walls.
20:34 Speaker 02 Right. It's this very intentional, like, the Mongols get the plague. They deliberately give Italians in the city the plague. Italians bring the plague home, right? It's seen as this, like, early example of biological warfare. One article I read mentioned that, like, this story is literally in the Encyclopedia Britannica.
20:51 Noam Hassenfeld? Wow.
20:52 Speaker 02 But Hannah does not believe in it.
20:55 Noam Hassenfeld? Doesn't believe it happened?
20:57 Speaker 02 She does not believe that this is how plague got to Italy.
21:02 Noam Hassenfeld? So people still catapulted?
21:03 Speaker 02 Well, she told me, even before she got involved, people had questions about this. So for one thing, plague apparently does not spread very easily from dead bodies.
21:16 Speaker 04 Fleas in particular, they will leave the body when it's cold. So if there's fleas in the clothing, then these are recently dead people. So are you going to take someone, you know, they died, all right, stick them in the catapult? Like, really?
21:28 Speaker 02 And people also thought this didn't totally make sense from, like, a military history perspective. Flinging bodies in this particular situation.
21:36 Noam Hassenfeld? I love it. Okay.
21:37 Speaker 02 But more than kind of catapulted, cold corpses. The thing that bothered Hannah about this story was essentially the source. So it comes from a text by a guy named Gabriella de Mucy. And he lived through the Black Death and wrote about it. But he was not in the besieged town of Caffa. He was in a town called Piacenza, which is thousands of kilometers away.
22:06 Noam Hassenfeld? Like, in Italy, not Crimea, I assume?
22:09 Speaker 02 Yeah, exactly.
22:10 Speaker 04 He never went to Caffa, and we know that because his job was as a notary. So he wrote legal documents. He was, he was a lawyer, but he was doing part of the lawyer's job that is writing documents. He wasn't, like, making arguments in court. So because he was writing all these documents, every document has a date on it, right? And a place. And so we know that he was in Piacenza throughout the 1340s. He didn't travel. He was there.
22:37 Speaker 02 I just paused to say, like, I do really love the detective work that historians do. Like, I love that she's like, I went through all the documents and I can prove that this person notarized them. So he, I know where he was or where he wasn't 600 years ago.
22:50 Noam Hassenfeld? And he didn't, he didn't like to travel. He stayed home.
22:55 Speaker 02 But so Hannah's established, right? This guy De Mucy has not left Piachenza.
23:01 Speaker 04 So his information about Piachenza is fantastic. His information about Kaffa in the Black Sea is not, because that's thousands of miles away, and he wasn't personally there. So as a historian, I want to ask, can we do better? Can we find someone who was in Kaffa in 1345, 1347, 1350, this period, who is not only at the right time, but also at the right place? And the answer is yes.
23:29 Speaker 02 She did find. She found a lot of sources, a lot of people writing in and around Kaffa at the time, records from the Italians, from travelers, and so on. So she read through all this material, and she found this document, this petition, actually, written after the siege was ended. Mongols were sick. They ended the siege. They left. And after that happened, some of the Genoese people in the city of Kaffa wrote this document.
23:55 Speaker 04 They're writing back to Genoa, asking for help.
23:59 Speaker 02 They asked for a new bishop to replace the one who died. They also say in this letter,
24:04 Speaker 04 "We want to refortify the city because the Mongols left, because they are suffering from an endless plague of death." So there it is.
24:14 Speaker 02 For Hannah, this document pretty clearly shows this story about dead bodies being catapulted into Kaffa during the siege and spreading Yersinia pestis can't hold up.
24:27 Speaker 04 The disease is not transmitted during the siege, because this is a petition that was written after the siege, and the disease hasn't been transmitted yet.
24:36 Speaker 02 So like, the Mongols did not deliberately give everyone in the town the disease, because they'd already left. Nobody in the town had the disease.
24:47 Noam Hassenfeld? This whole thing is just kind of Kaffa-esque.
24:54 Speaker 02 Oh, a lot of people died, no, um.
24:57 Noam Hassenfeld? Too soon.
24:59 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's only been 600 years, dude.
25:03 Speaker 02 Okay, but if the, if the dead bodies, the dead catapulted bodies, right, did not bring plague into Kaffa, then what did, right? And so Hannah thinks that the answer here might be grain.
25:18 Noam Hassenfeld? Oh.
25:19 Speaker 04 In the letter, they talk about the horrors of siege. And when medieval people talk about the horrors of siege, what they usually mean is starvation. So this is a situation where they've been besieged for a little while. They were definitely running short on food. They were very afraid of that. Now the siege has been lifted, they're going to start importing food, right? From the countryside around, this is a grain producing region, there's lots of grain there. It just wasn't coming into the city because of the siege. So one of the first things they're going to do in order to relieve the horrors of the siege is bring food into the city. What travels with grain? Rats and mice. What travels with the rats and mice? Fleas.
26:02 Speaker 04 So there's, there's plenty of other situations, other evidence that we have more in modern times, right, of grain shipments with rats or mice or other rodents that are carrying plague.
26:12 Speaker 02 There are also other historical examples of plague traveling with grain. And so Hannah thought, you know, what if that's how plague came to the city? What if it was not a Mongol act of war, but instead just something the townspeople did to themselves accidentally in a time of peace?
26:35 Noam Hassenfeld? It definitely gives it a different feeling of this was brought here aggressively to hurt people.
26:44 Speaker 02 Right, it becomes this like poignant thing.
26:47 Speaker 04 They, they don't understand what we understand about bacteria and plague transmission. They're aware that there's a disease. They think it, they probably are likely to get it, but they don't connect food shipping with disease transmission. So as far as they're concerned, what do you do to protect the population? You want them to be well fed. They're already suffering because of the siege. Bring food into the city so people can be well fed. They don't realize that that is what is going to bring the disease into the city.
27:15 Speaker 02 And then when Hannah looks at how plague could have traveled to Italy. She also thinks, based on some digging, that Venice, Genoa, they were not getting grain from the Black Sea region during the siege. They had an embargo.
27:28 Speaker 04 So as soon as the siege is lifted, the grain shipments start to move again. And you can trace the timing of plague outbreaks in connection with the arrival of the grain ships.
27:41 Speaker 02 And so her case is that it's not intentional. You know, it's just grain shipping that brought Yersinia pestis into Italy and then spread the plague through Europe.
27:52 Noam Hassenfeld? Yeah, I mean, I'm thinking about what you said before about these small historical details shaping how we tell a story. And when I think about the difference between, okay, the plague came from Asia through Mongols catapulting dead bodies purposefully into a city that causes the residents of that city to flee and bring the plague to Italy, versus another story of there was a war, the Mongols got sick, they went away, then there was peace, but the people were hungry and they got wheat, and the wheat had rats with fleas, and then the people got the plague.
28:36 Noam Hassenfeld? Like, that's just a totally different story. The first story is like, someone did this to Europe and there's someone to blame. And the second story is just, you know, the way life works, that things travel and disease travels and sometimes it happens. And it's much more of a tragic story than a story that is one that has blame as a part of it.
29:02 Speaker 02 Yeah. Hannah said something so similar to this.
29:06 Speaker 04 This is actually a really good exercise in thinking about historical events that happened without intentionality. So I think that's something that's really important for us to think about, right? Rather than looking for who to blame, thinking about how this can happen in a way where no one meant for it to happen.
29:27 Noam Hassenfeld? It's just so interesting, because even when I told the story, like, when you asked me to say, what's the one thing I know about the plague? And I'm like, blame the rats. It's hard to tell a story. About the past where something terrible happened and there isn't a bad guy.
29:43 Speaker 02 And I think it it made me sort of even more than I already did.
29:51 Speaker 02 Respect the desire for for caveats as people do history, the sort of desire to question everything.
29:57 Noam Hassenfeld? You love a good caveat.
29:58 Speaker 02 A good caveat because I think it's not like Hannah's totally changed all the pieces of the story. Right? Like, we are still talking about the Black Sea. We're still talking about Italy. We're still talking about 1347. We're still talking even about rats, right? Like, it's not like she came in and said, I think this was camels, actually.
30:20 Noam Hassenfeld? But it was camels.
30:21 Speaker 02 But it was camels.
30:24 Speaker 02 But if even a couple of of small tweaks could make this story look totally different.
30:33 Speaker 02 There could also be researchers with with bigger tweaks. One of the researchers I spoke to wants us to reexamine the timeline of the plague. Researchers I spoke to also emphasized that historians have been really Eurocentric in their plague research so far. And so maybe as they expand the scope of their understanding of the medieval world, there are other changes to make to the the stories we tell here. I think that's part of caveatting and reconsidering.
31:06 Speaker 02 I don't know, an exciting part of this to me is that once you open a new door, like this paper does, saying, you know, maybe it was grain, not biological warfare.
31:18 Speaker 02 That then invites people to walk through that door. So those researchers I talked to about the the climate stuff, Martin and Ove, the people who sort of kicked this whole conversation off. Martin was saying that he was inspired to look into the Black Death because of Hannah's paper. He he studies past climates and when he saw this grain paper, he was like. Climates play a role in grain. Like, maybe there's a connection here. And Soheen, his co-author, found, you know, Europe had had a bunch of really terrible climate years leading up to 1347. There was sort of widespread famine. And so maybe it's not just that the embargo
32:02 Speaker 02 was lifted on grain from the Black Sea, but also maybe that Europeans were really desperate for grain from the Black Sea.
32:11 Noam Hassenfeld? Yeah, so if you're changing one detail here, it's not just changing this one story. By thinking about how we tell these stories, we're getting better questions. And then hopefully, we can get to that better Black Death story.
32:27 Speaker 02 Hopefully.
32:35 Speaker 02 If you would like to read more about the Black Death, we will link to Hannah's paper, "Laying the Corpses to Rest", in our transcript. And we will also link to the paper that was written by Martin Bauch and Ulf Binkin, the paper on climate and the Mediterranean grain trade and the Black Death. This episode was produced by me, Gert Pinkerton. It was edited by the wonderful Melissa Soep. Thanks also to Sally Helm for some initial feedback and structuring help. Christian Ayala did the mixing and the sound design. Melissa Hirsch checked the facts. Noam Hassenfeld does our music. Meredith Hodnott and Joanna Soltaroff are the fact that camels have three eyelids.
33:19 Speaker 02 Thanks always to Brian Resnick for co-creating the show with me and Noam. And a big thanks also to Monica Green and Spike Gibbs for taking the time to speak with me about the Black Death, as well as to Martin Bauch and Ulf Binkin for just being careful science communicators. Really appreciate it. If you have thoughts about the Black Death, or if you think there are other historical diseases that we should dig into, we are at [email protected] . If you would like to support the show and the journalism that Vox does, we would love it if you would become a member. It is very easy to do. Just go to vox.com/members, and you will get access to all of Vox's journalism.
34:03 Speaker 02 But you will also know that you are supporting all of Vox's journalism. And for those of you who have emailed to let us know that you signed up because of Unexplainable, thank you. And thank you to those of you who have left us a nice review on your podcast platform, or told someone in your life about the show. You are all excellent. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we will be back very soon with another episode about everything that we do not yet know.
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Previous The hunt for a lost species Next The aftermath Page updated October 30, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
