A pox on your houses: How disease and pandemics have shaped history and remade empires

The Black Death wiped out 50 years of economic progress, destroying empires and building others. Borzou Daragahi traces the history of plagues and disease, and wonders what our post-pandemic future will look like

The angel of death presides over London during the Great Plague of 1665-1666 (Hulton Archive/Getty)

When Abu Sa’id Bahadur Khan, the last ruler of the Mongol empire’s Ilkhanate, surveyed his domain in the year 1330 he must have been really pleased with himself. He held power over a vast region stretching from the Indus River to the Meditarranean. It included a network of trade and military routes that stretched thousands of miles across Persia and the Fertile Crescent into Anatolia.

The caravans carrying spices and fabrics generated vast wealth for him and his courtesans. Profits from tolls, taxes and tributes sustained a life of splendour for him, his wives, and his offspring. He was only 25 years old. Within five years, it was all gone. The Ilkhanate had disintegrated into a collection of squabbling armies overseen by lesser warlords, his achievements and successes forever obscured by time. Abu Sa’id himself was dead, either at the hands of his own men or by a surging disease that was the primary cause of the unrest and agony throughout his domain: the Black Death.

The pandemic had swept across Eurasia and left tens of millions dead. Just as the coronavirus spread across the world via jet planes that are the lifeblood of today’s global economy, the deadly 14th-century pathogen traversed the same desert trade routes and sea channels that were the source of the empire’s power and wealth. The Black Death killed as many as 70 per cent of the people in the cities, towns and villages through which it raced. According to scholars, it wiped out an estimated 50 years of economic growth. In recent years, scholars and scientists have done genetic tracing of skeletal remains to sketch out the Black Death’s course through the world.