I'll save you all some time. It spread from human to human quicker than it's capability of spreading from animal to human.

The reason for this is because people did not wash their ass. There are few civs that made it a point to bathe themselves regularly and the Europeans were not one of those civs. Thus the plague had a bigger impact on them.

Apparently it was the other way around. It was spread from the east to the west via human contact and regionally rooted and spread via rats in the short term

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spread by the Tories

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Sorry yes I suppose I just mean it had spread to human communities. Thanks!

A huge problem I feel is that communication between the several scientific fields implicated in the research on the Black Death is rickety at best.

I've listened to a virology podcast recently that spoke about Yersinia Pestis and how it propagates and they know and have known for a while that rats are just one of the vectors of the Plague. They got a lot of their History wrong though, which is really funny. Apparently, we focused way too much on rats and the bubonic, pulmonary and septicemic stages of the disease.

Now, I will try to vulgarize it, be gentle, please!

The initial propagation happens when a flea bites an infected rodent (any rodent, this is important) and then bites a human, which infects him with the bacteria. We'll call this human patient zero, P0. The flea continues its nasty job of biting and infecting humans and rodents until it dies of hunger, apparently.

P0 develops the symptoms and begans to secrete infected pus from the buboes that grows on his body. His saliva and blood also contains a lot of bacteria. So, P0 cough, bleeds and "pusses" all over the place, and then infects other humans. This is when the plague becomes an epidemic.

Now, some rodents are sporadic (once in a while, a colony becomes infected) carriers of the bacteria: marmots principally, rabbits, rats too. Steppe marmots were one of the staple food of Mongols and other Central Asian nomads. They carried them all over the place. At some point, some Mongols carried infected marmots out of Mongolia and due to unique circumstances, including the speed of the Mongol armies and post system, carried either infected rodents or an infected P0 and the Plague became a pandemic.

We focus a lot on the siege of Caffa in 1344 because it's when the first cases are known to Western sources. But evidence shows it was devastating in the Middle East, North Africa and China too.

As for the spread of the disease, an Italian galley could move from Crimea to Genoa in less than two weeks. Another galley coming out of Genoa could spread the "good news" to London in another month, stopping in several ports in Italy, Spain, Portugal and France along the way. By then, you have dozen of infectious hotspots and half of Europe's population would die in the next 7 years.

Didn't need to be human contact. The main transmission was through blood. IE, flees.

This feels... outdated? It wasn't rats, it was fleas, we even know the mechanisms through which it spread.

- Fleas bite diseased humans. The bacteria reproduce in their salivary glands to the point at which it clogs their proboscis. When they bite another human, they "sneeze" and release all of that bacteria into the blood.

- Fleas are temperature sensitive. When a person died and went cold, they moved to a new host. When the host's temperature became too high, they likewise migrated to new hosts.

I'm pulling this from an undergraduate degree a decade ago, which wasn't exactly teaching us cutting edge discoveries when it came to this. This feels like saying that some are beginning to believe fat isn't that bad for you in your diet. It's already established science, pop culture hasn't caught up.

The problem is that the Black Death's expansion was faster than the rats' travel. If you look at the plague in India in the late 1800s, it spread much slower.

These are all great suggestions, thanks. I think I'll start with with The Opium War, that one looks interesting. But I'll add each of these books to my list.

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At the time most European houses had thatched roofs. What I learned in a class on plagued was that that rats brought it into houses of people who were isolating themselves from other people via the roofs they lived in and spread from country to country with rat infested ships docking and the rats getting off even though the people were turned away..not that it didn't spread through human contact too...

According to ancient bones discovered at a German archaeological site, prehistoric fashion or bear skinning by ancient people dates back at least 320,000 years.

The patterns discovered on the phalanx and metatarsal paw bones of a cave bear (Ursus spelaeus or U. deningeri) are among the earliest examples of this kind of evidence and show one strategy our prehistoric ancestors employed to survive the harsh winters that prevailed in the region at the time.

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I could only skim the article but it seems like their research was focused on the animal reservoirs in Europe and the fact that rats are slow-moving mammals so wouldn't necessarily facilitate a rapid spread.

My understanding was that the rats were only the vector on the trade ships from the east and the actual spread through Europe was primarily done by humans. I suppose I just don't fully understand their hypothesis.

PS: I checked out the actual published research and it's more clear. The research is confirming the hypothesis that there weren't significant plague reservoirs in Europe. The original article is a bit clickbaity I guess is all. Tries to make it seem like some epic debunking or something lol.

I saw a wonderful documentary which convinced me that it was spread via body lice and largely spread through contact of clothing.

This is indeed the commonly accepted view

Not sure unlike plague. Smallpox was always there so it would be interesting to see a study of the America's after the Spanish came.maybe someone here can help us out?

Can you recommend a modern history of the Gallic Wars that isn't just a biography of Caesar?

What is commonly believed is that the fleas stuck to the rats until the rats' population went down, and then the fleas switched to people.

Rats didnt spread bubonic plague. The fleas on the rats did. There were so many rodents around at ghat time due to the unsanitary conditions in the streets. As the rata entered the homes, fleas then bit people transmitting the disease. Unsure if it is contracted from somebody coming into contact with it. My guess is if they were in same house, they would all get it due to all being bitten by fleas. Some people were around it all the time and never contracted it which leads me to think it wasnt airborne. But who knows!

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As others have pointed out, commercial activity is what made people move. There was definitely a dichotomy where the folks that didn't travel never traveled and those that did were almost constantly on the move. Between wars, pilgrimages, and commercial activity its' easy to imagine how the disease could spread.

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