John Kelly's the Great Mortality Term Paper

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John Kellys "the great mortality"

The bacillus Yesinia Pestis made two continents pay intolerably high life prices both in human and animal lives. Along a few decades in the first half of the thirteenth century, it engulfed Eurasia and kept the world under its terror, making many think its end was near (The Great Mortality).

The Great Plague has carved in the history of humanity signs that will never fade with the passing of time because of its enormous toll on human lives. John Kelly's book "The great mortality" places the plague in a historic context and tackles the topic of Black Death from the perspective of the twentieth century. The word is not free from the deadly attack of infectious diseases, viruses are still threatening animals and human beings alike. John Kelly points out in the introduction to his book that in spite of the numerous victories reported by medicine in the fight against infectious diseases, like the small pox, for example, people are today almost as vulnerable and powerless when confronted with a new virus as they were during the thirteenth century.

By the end of the first half of the thirteenth century, the first wave of globalization had started to bring worlds through closer together. The fastest terrestrial vehicle available to people was still the horse, but trade was regulating the way new regions were developing. As Kelly point out, medieval Europe was a place where people as well as animals were living under the most precarious conditions, subject to the dangers of overpopulation, bad water and an unsanitary life style. Although the industrial era was still a few centuries away, the environment was also affected in the fight between humans and nature. The natural resources available to Europeans and Asian alike, were becoming scarce compared to the birth rate. The response nature gave to the savage exploitation of its resources was: draft, locusts' invasions, tempests etc. (The Great Mortality, p. 4).

Kelly blames the spread of the plague throughout Asia and Europe on the fact that the Mongols had unified most of Asia under what became the most powerful empire of the medieval world.

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The clash between the Genoese merchants, the representatives of the European world and the Mongols and therefore the first contact with the mortal virus of the plague happened according to Kelly in Caffa, small port town at the Black Sea on the eastern cost of Crimea that meteorically rose from the status of a tranquil isolated maritime village to that of an important trading post, a place where east and west met in order to exchange goods, people, cultures etc.

By 1346, Europe had already heard of the terrible consequences of an illness that was sweeping across Asia. Kelly brings evidence to support the fact that Europeans were already aware of the plague's ravaging in Asia by indicating two sources: Gabriel de' Mussins, from Piacenza and Louis Heyligen, a musician from Avignon. Both of them wrote of the "mysterious illness" (The Great Mortality, p.6). The writings of the musician are quite precise in their description of the way the illness spread and the regions affected by it: "the terrible events" in India culminated in an outbreak of the pestilence that infected "all neighboring countries…by means of the stinking breath"(The great Mortality, p.6, quotes from Heyligen). Kelly brings evidence to support the idea that it took over a decade for the epidemic to spread out in the west from the testimonies and writings of Muslims as well as Asian historians, found in Mongols and Chinese records from the time.

Warfare is something humanity is very good at and natural disasters, environmental instability, unsanitary living conditions, overpopulation and ignorance due to medical science that was still in the dark ages contributed to the spread of the epidemic and its victorious arrival in Europe. The Genoese who were attacked by the Mongols in the port town of Caffe found themselves under siege. The tartars were carrying along what was to become the seeds of the deadliest enemy of our human race in history: infected people. The Genoese were ineffective in their response to the….....

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