PC No Genghis Khan = No Black Death?

So, IIUYC, so long as the plague breaks out in China roughly the same time as OTL, then even without a "Pax Mongolia", it will still reach European shores in the same amount of time?

I would think so. Trade roads were very active, and tended to become such more and more as the time advance. Maybe slower time to come up to Mediterranea.

But as it reaches the sea, you'll have a quick transmission trough Europe. This was really the worst century to happen.
 
Influenza is endemic in Europe. But the "spanish" flu killed millions.

Yes, but if I recall, it's been shown the Spanish Flu was genetically distinct in ways that ended up making it more deadly.

The same might have been true for Yersinia pestis, but I don't know if anyone's found conclusive evidence one way or another.
 
I would think so. Trade roads were very active, and tended to become such more and more as the time advance. Maybe slower time to come up to Mediterranea.

But as it reaches the sea, you'll have a quick transmission trough Europe. This was really the worst century to happen.

I certainly agree with the latter point -- OTL, it hit Kaffa and subsequently Constantinople (killing half of the later population) in 1346, and by 1349, it was rapidly depopulating the continent. Without the Golden Horde or Mongols politically unifying the silk road, and even with a Chinese* outbreak in the 1330's, I can't help but imagine this initial breakout getting delayed maybe 15 years -- so that the plague is sweeping across Europe in the 1360's, as the Little Ice Age is formally underway.

*initially, just in the Jin or Song
 

BlondieBC

Banned
If it was just endemic among marmots, then the whole thing is probably the result of some guy or some rat coming in contact with an infected marmot. From there, it could spread to other people, either directly or via fleas and rats. In this case, large scale changes to human activity (such as Mongol non-invasions of China) could mean that the one point of contact does not occur. A similar one could occur later--one year, or five, or ten, or fifty years down the road--but by that time a lot of things would be different.

I'm not saying the Mongols brought it--as you point out, there's a lot of ways for it to spread... if it gets started. I'm saying that without the disruption to the lives of a bunch of Chinese farmers, it might not get started at all.

The Black death was a butterfly of the Mongol conquest. Remove the conquest, remove the butterfly.

The disease came from Marmots. The local people who lived in the area had many taboos that made it hard for the disease to jump to humans. They had severe restrictions on killing the animals. If they found a single sick marmot, they IMMEDIATELY moved the entire village. This taboo indicates a very lethal disease that the taboo was designed to prevent. When the Mongols took over a side effect was that populations moved around. It is believe the mostly likely transmission was from a sick Marmot to a Chinese hunter/trapper who lacked the taboos. The disease then spread to the general population and down the Silk Road. Now with a disease that obvious had jumped to humans on other occasions, it would have eventually made the leap, but it would have been in a different decade or century.
 
The local people who lived in the area had many taboos that made it hard for the disease to jump to humans. They had severe restrictions on killing the animals. If they found a single sick marmot, they IMMEDIATELY moved the entire village.

I'd be interested in seeing a source for this, if you have one handy.
 
I would make a comparison.

Influenza is endemic in Europe. But the "spanish" flu killed millions.

I think influenza is considered epidemic disease, since the virus tends to mutate on annual basis and spread (not killing millions, but is still a significant death cause in some places).
However, I think there is evidence that Yersinia Pestis (who is a bacterium and mutates less than a virus on average) did not essentially mutate since the Justinian Plague.
 
Quite possibly.

From Encyclopedia of Mongolia and the Mongol Empire:

Although the plague spreads to human populations from fleas that infest black rats, the plague bacillus, Pasteurella pestis, is fatal to humans and rats and hence needs a separate long-term reservoir. In nature it exists as an endemic disease in burrowing rodent populations. In the 20th century, for example, after spreading by ship from Hong Kong to port cities of North and South America, it became nativized among Andean and Rocky Mountain ground squirrels and marmots. Since plague outbreaks occasionally reached the Mediterranean but never became a constant threat before the great outbreak of 1347, the plague bacillus, now endemic among marmots in the neighboring Black Sea steppe zone, probably became nativized there only in the 14th century. From then on the burrowing rodents of the Black Sea and Caspian steppes served as reservoirs for constant outbreaks in western Eurasia until trade and lifestyle changes occurred in the 17th century.

The 14th-century Black Death first appeared in Mongol-ruled China. From 1313 a series of epidemics struck Henan province; they culminated in 1331 with an epidemic that supposedly killed nine-tenths of the population. Epidemics broke out in coastal provinces in 1345–46. Finally, in 1351 massive epidemics began to strike throughout China yearly up to 1362, causing catastrophic population decline. William McNeill has thus speculated that the plague was originally native to burrowing rodents of the Himalayan foothills. The Mongols, by joining YUNNAN on the southeastern skirts of the Himalayas to China proper and hunting marmots there, inadvertently transmitted the plague to Henan and the Chinese heartland by 1331, if not before. From there Mongol activity introduced it into the marmot colonies of Inner Asia, whence it began to spread west. European and Muslim writers virtually all recorded the plague as beginning in China and then crossing the steppe to the Crimea. Excavations of a Christian cemetery near Ysyk-Köl Lake (Kyrgyzstan) suggest a devastating outbreak of plague in 1338–39. Muslim writers noted the progress of the plague from KHORAZM in 1345 to the center of the Golden Horde in 1346 and south to Mongol soldiers in Azerbaijan in 1346–47. Mongol military operations then spread it to Mosul and Baghdad in 1349. Early outbreaks in Sindh had probably followed caravan routes south from Khorazm; evidence of an Indian Ocean transmission route is slim.
 

Delvestius

Banned
It would have been delayed, but not butterflied. For how long though is an nigh impossible question to answer. Given the speed of trade across Transoxania though, I'd say at least a few decades.

EDIT: Unless, as LS had mentioned, it hit water routes around the same time.
 
It would have been delayed, but not butterflied. For how long though is an nigh impossible question to answer. Given the speed of trade across Transoxania though, I'd say at least a few decades.

I'm gonna say 15 years is a safe bet -- that'll be interesting in itself, since the Medieval Warm period ended circa 1350, and the delay could well mean Europe gets the hang of the new seasons before the plague comes...
 
You'll still have an huge death ratio. Nothing under 25%.

Oh sure. But still better than a third.

While we're on 13th Century PoDs changing the Black Death -- though this may need to be another thread -- what if no Pope of the 13th Century writes any equivalent of Vox in Rama going into detail on "Luciferanism", meaning cats have a much easier time of it in the century or so preceding the plague's outburst? AIUI, OTL Europe was worse affected by the plague than its neighboring regions, not only because of issues like sanitation and medicine, but because the countryside was so much more rat infested.
 
I'm gonna say 15 years is a safe bet -- that'll be interesting in itself, since the Medieval Warm period ended circa 1350, and the delay could well mean Europe gets the hang of the new seasons before the plague comes...
I'm not sure that's something you can get the "hang of" as I understand it the weather became less predictable which just furthered the general trend of bad nutrition that had already been occurring since the end of the thirteenth century.

Be interesting to see if Tibet and China had not been connected, what would have happened with that disease in terms of when and how it spread. It's always possible a random mutation occurs that makes it less deadly for instance.
 
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