Introduction

In the first edition of this book, the analysis of the historical sources concluded that the original outbreak of the Black Death occurred in the lands of the then Khanate of the Golden Horde. The homeland of the Black Death was the same area where, according to recent paleobiological research, the Y. pestis lineage of bubonic plague apparently developed. It was also shown that the purported evidence of local plague mortality found on gravestones in the Nestorian cemetery at Issyk Kul (Yssykköl) in present-day north-western Kirghizstan (near China’s western border) was erroneous. It did not support the presence of the Black Death, allegedly on a westwards movement from China to Europe. In recent years, this historical analysis has been independently corroborated by paleobiological studies, which have been briefly presented in the preceding chapter and show that, on the contrary, plague contagion of the Black Death spread eastwards and eventually reached China 300 years later.

The Golden Horde was established shortly before 1250 as the north-western khanate of the recently established Mongol Empire. Around 1260, the Mongol Empire broke up into several successor states or khanates, in the west into the Ilkhanate in Persia and the Khanate of the Golden Horde. The main area of the Golden Horde stretched from the southern Urals to the R. Danube on the western shores of the Black Sea in present-day Romania; in the south-west it bordered on the Black Sea; and from its eastern corner, consistently bordering on the Ilkhanate, the southern border ran eastwards along the Caucasus about to Baku on the western side of the Caspian Sea and, continuing on the eastern side of that sea, the border ran south-eastwards about to the present-day city of Urgench, south-west of the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan, where it turned sharply northwards. From the southern border, the territory of the Golden Horde stretched roughly 2,000 km northwards.