Black Death
Plague reaches Solgat during the Golden Horde epidemic
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Original prompt & settings (JSON) ↗The familiar roll-call of emptied 'Crimean towns' includes Sarai and Astrakhan — cities hundreds of kilometres from Crimea, and struck months earlier.
Rajab 747: a report, not a date
The chronicler Ibn al-Wardi placed severe plague in the 'land of Özbek' — the Golden Horde — in Rajab 747 AH, a span covering October and November 1346, and wrote that towns and villages were emptied of inhabitants. He was relaying a merchant who had crossed the Black Sea, not reporting as an eyewitness.
Rajab 747 is a month, not a day. And 'emptied' is a chronicler's word, not census evidence that every inhabitant died or fled.
The one Crimean place that fits
Hannah Barker's reconstruction places plague at Solgat — Qirim, modern Staryi Krym, and the seat of the Golden Horde's governor in Crimea — in October–November 1346.
The great Golden Horde cities named in Russian sources, Urgench, New Sarai, Astrakhan and Beldjamen, were struck earlier, in summer 1346, and lie mostly outside Crimea. Plague had already advanced through the Horde's Volga and Don urban centres before appearing at Solgat.
How it entered Crimea is not documented.
Numbers that cannot be checked
The medieval reports give roughly 1,000 deaths a day in Crimea, and a total of 85,000 that Ibn al-Wardi attributed to a Crimean qadi. Neither figure is independently verifiable, and neither is a modern demographic estimate.
Black Sea grain traffic stayed halted by wartime embargoes through this autumn. Barker argues that the interruption delayed rather than accelerated transmission across the sea: people crossed in 1346 without starting the Mediterranean epidemic, and she implicates the resumption of grain shipping in 1347.
Sources
- Hannah Barker, "Laying the Corpses to Rest: Grain, Embargoes, and Yersinia pestis in the Black Sea, 1346–48"
- Uli Schamiloglu, "Preliminary Remarks on the Role of Disease in the History of the Golden Horde"
- Philip Slavin, "From the Tian Shan to Crimea: Dynamics of Plague Spread during the Early Stages of the Black Death, 1338–46"
- Maria Spyrou et al., "The Source of the Black Death in Fourteenth-Century Central Eurasia"
Researched 23 Aug 2026 4 sources not yet audited Date disputed
How this was checked
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Date disputed. Sources disagree; the research places it at ~1346-10.
What the sources leave uncertain
- The source supplies Rajab 747 AH, a span covering October and November 1346, not a single November date.
- The wording that settlements were “emptied” is a chronicler’s description, not census evidence that every inhabitant died or left.
- The listed event combines two reports: depopulation across the wider “land of Özbek” and a separate Crimean report. Only Solgat is securely identified in Crimea for October–November.
Checked against
- Hannah Barker, “Laying the Corpses to Rest: Grain, Embargoes, and Yersinia pestis in the Black Sea, 1346–48”
- Uli Schamiloglu, “Preliminary Remarks on the Role of Disease in the History of the Golden Horde”
- Philip Slavin, “From the Tian Shan to Crimea: Dynamics of Plague Spread during the Early Stages of the Black Death, 1338–46”
- Maria Spyrou et al., “The Source of the Black Death in Fourteenth-Century Central Eurasia”