The Plague
1. The Mongol Empire
2. The Plague in Europe
1. The Mongol Empire
• First of all, where is Mongolia?
• In 1206 CE, Genghis Khan united the
nomadic tribesmen of Mongolia and
began a military conquest
• Khan’s forces conquered much of Asia,
the Middle East, and Eastern and Central
Europe
• The Mongolian Empire is the secondlargest empire in the history of the world
• At its peak in 1279, it controlled:
–33 million km2
–25% of the world’s population (110
million)
• The Mongolian Empire was 4 times the
size of the Roman Empire
• The Mongolians established trade routes
connecting its empire together and
linking the empire to Europe
• But trade goods were not the only things
the thousands of traders using those
routes transported
• Where there are people, there are rats!
• A pair of rats can produce 2,000 offspring
every year
• These rats carried flees, which were the
carrier of a deadly bacteria that caused
the plague
• By 1347, the plague had reached Italy via
the trade routes from Asia
The Plague in Europe
• The first outbreak of the plague in Europe
began in 1348
• For the next three years, it advanced
rapidly across Europe
• There were major outbreaks in Europe
roughly every decade for the next 150
years
• By the end of the epidemic, 50 to 60% of
the entire population of Europe had died
from the plague!
• The plague killed as many as 200 million
people
• It took 150 years for Europe’s population
to recover
• The plague created many social, religious,
and economic problems in Europe, but
more on those later...