"Bacteriological Attack" of 1346 in Kaffa and Magical Practices of Medieval Nomads

In: Stratum plus: archeologija i kulʹturnaja antropologija = Stratum plus : archaeology and cultural anthropology, Heft 5, S. 99-108

Abstract

Gabriel de Mussy's report, apparently recorded from the words of eyewitnesses of
the event, is a convincing description of one of the first facts in human history of the
use of "bacteriological weapons". Allegedly, during the siege of the Crimean city of
Kaffa by the Golden Horde troops of Khan Dzhanibek, a plague epidemic broke out among
the soldiers. Then the besiegers began to throw the bodies of the dead into the city
with the help of stone throwers, after which the epidemic broke out there as well. Many
of the townspeople fled on ships and arrived in Italy by sea, thus bringing the disease
to Europe. De Mussy's report is criticized or accepted by different authors with a
different set of arguments, but both points of view are built on the basis of the
assumption that the nomads bombarded the city with corpses and tried to spread an
epidemic to it in order to facilitate the assault. However, de Mussy's text directly
says that this action was a gesture of desperation and was carried out after the Mongols
had lost interest in the siege. The article compares the actions of the Golden Horde
army in 1346 in Kaffa with the practices that, according to Russian and Polish sources,
were used by nomads in Southwestern Russia during the campaign against Poland in
1287—1288, when there was also an epidemic. This comparison, in the context of accounts
on how the Mongols of the imperial period understood the manifestation of a deadly
infectious disease, allows to conclude that, perhaps, the practices recorded by de Mussy
had a magical, rather than a rational meaning.