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an end at the very moment when the First Pandemic also reached its demise.62 And it was not until the dawn of the ninth century, when a generation or more of Europeans had lived with no need to fear of plague, that the northern barbarian kingdoms under the leadership of Charlemagne were finally able to achieve recognition as equals from rivals in Constantinople and Baghdad. If plague did indeed play a role in such momentous events as the rise and fall of empires or the emergence of Europe, then surely it was only in conjunction with other forces that crashed in on the late classical or early medieval world: the mass migrations of Germanic tribes, for instance, or the birth of a Plague y 33
    dynamic, new religion—Islam—that was to become the great rival of Christianity. Instead, I believe that the varied and intangible cultural responses to plague outlined above, both with respect to Christian and Muslim communities in Europe and the Middle East, comprised the most enduring legacy of the First Pandemic: as already indicated, they helped set the stage for what was to come during the Second Pandemic centuries later.
    Six centuries, to be exact, were to pass before another major outbreak of plague was to arrive in Europe and the Middle East. Since trade had played an instrumental role in spreading the plague in the Mediterranean at the beginning of the First Pandemic, particularly so as Egypt was the grain basket of the empire, the steady decline of international commerce through to at least the eighth century was probably responsible for the disappearance of the disease. Much new evidence has come to light—including distribution of pottery shards, ship-wrecks, and even traces of ancient pollution trapped in ice cores or peat bogs (indicating the relative strength of the metal smelting industry)—that points to the contraction of the Mediterranean economy and its shipping traffic, both on the sea and inland along rivers, which would thereby impose a virtual quarantine on the increasingly isolated port cities, first in the West and then later in the East.63 Over time, the process also probably snowballed due to the fact that plague and the economy were undoubtedly intertwined: the more population declined due to disease, so too inevitably did demand for goods from abroad.64
    Indeed, the repeated occurrences of plague about once a decade throughout the First Pandemic ironically contributed to the very circumstances of the plague’s demise. For instance, we now know that it was the plague, and not the irruption of Islam, that caused so much upheaval to the urban environments and settled regions of the Near East.65 Other factors aside from plague assuredly played their role in disrupting Mediterranean trade and commerce and thus breaking the chain of infection of the disease; in turn, other possibilities besides trade, such as unintentional quarantine as people fled or avoided the already declining population centers of the Mediterranean once they became infected and changes due to genetic mutation or contamination in the virulence of Yersinia pestis , may have contributed to the decline of plague.66
    Plague returned to the world in a Second Pandemic that is traditionally seen to have begun in the 1330s from an endemic center in Central Asia. Evidence for this includes the archaeological discovery of three Nestorian Christian headstones from the region of Lake Issyk Kul in present-day Kyrgyzstan, which record ten victims as dying from “pestilence” in 1338–1339.67 Meanwhile, our most informed contemporary source, the Muslim author Ibn al-Wardī, writing in 1348 from Aleppo in northern Syria, a hub of trade for routes further east, states that the plague “began in the land of darkness” fifteen years earlier and then 34 y Chapter 1
    spread eastward from there to China and India and westward to the land of the Uzbeks, Transoxiana, Persia, the land of the Khitai (perhaps Turkestan), and finally, Crimea and the Byzantine