The Black Death: A Detrimental End to the Silk Roads

In the mid-1330s, an epidemic of deadly bubonic plague emerged in southwest China, which was later called the Black Death. It traveled along the Silk Road and spread across western Asia and Europe by 1347. Plague is a disease that affects rodents, but fleas can transmit the disease to humans through contact. The disease rapidly infected people in a short span of time. The Black Death was not only detrimental to China and Western Europe; it was also the death of the most advanced trade route that had a great influence on cultural interaction.

The Black Death caused a disruption of trade routes, destabilization, and led to the decline of many strong states. It wiped out nearly a third of Europe's population. The death rate was estimated at 30-60%, and more than 75 million people died from the disease. For a visual of the spread of the Black Death, link here to an interactive map.

Giovanni Boccaccio wrote of the physical symptoms in one of the most graphic descriptions of the Black Death:

In men and women alike it first betrayed itself by the emergence of certain tumours in the groin or the armpits, some of which grew as large as a common apple, others as an egg, some more, some less, which the common folk called gavoccioli. From the two said parts of the body this deadly gavocciolo soon began to propagate and spread itself in all directions indifferently; after which the form of the malady began to change, black spots or livid making their appearance in many cases on the arm or the thigh or elsewhere, now few and large, now minute and numerous. And as the gavocciolo had been and still was an infallible token of approaching death, such also were these spots on whomsoever they [showed] themselves.[1]

With the rise of the Black Death, the death of the Silk Roads also came. The disease traveled quickly down the trade routes and infected many states at an alarming rate. As a result of the plague spreading, the Silk Roads fell apart and could not be reconnected like before, thus putting an end to one of history's most successful and influential trade routes.

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[1] Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, translated by J.M. Rigg (London, 1903), pp. 5-11.