*NEW EPISODE!* 52. When Kinship Failed: Cyprus & The Black Death with Tassos Papacostas

But can you just provide listeners just an overview of what the Yersinia pestis bacterium is and, you know, what do we know? Where did it originate? What were its vectors of transmission?

So the bacterium you mentioned, Yersinia pestis, well, it's a bacterium which is carried by fleas,

and it

is

spread

through rodents, in fact.

So fleas go onto rats, right? Then rats go into settled areas, into warehouses, into buildings, houses, and taking them, the fleas, And eventually, when the rats die because of the disease they get from the fleas, the fleas move onto humans.

And

that's how the disease is transmitted.

I mean, there's a lot of discussion, again, in terms of the difference theories and some disagreement at least in the past in terms of you know what species of rats do you need for disease to spread where and in what conditions in terms of climate geography and all that but the overall picture is that rats fleas coming into contact with humans It seems that it originated, again, in the past there were various theories.

The most commonly accepted nowadays is that it originated from Central Asia, by which I mean the area sort of north and east of the Caspian Sea.

It most likely traveled westwards through the Black Sea, so getting to the shores of the Black Sea, the northern shore of the Black Sea, and then into the Mediterranean world and eventually into Western Europe.

That's the route it follows

through

exchange,

through trade, through

grades, through all sorts of different types of human contact, people traveling back and forth.

That's the overall

idea,

very

briefly.