Siege of Caffa
Plague strikes the Golden Horde army besieging Caffa
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Original prompt & settings (JSON) ↗The famous corpse-bombardment story comes from a notary hundreds of kilometres away who never claimed to have seen it — and Caffa itself survived the siege.
1346: the siege that plague broke
During the Golden Horde's renewed siege of Genoese Caffa — modern Feodosia in Crimea — plague devastated Jani Beg's besieging army and forced it to abandon the operation in 1346, after roughly a year of renewed fighting. The 'spring 1346' precision in the old listing has no independent support; some reconstructions place plague's arrival in Crimea as late as winter 1346–1347.
Inside Caffa's two rings of walls stood a reported 17,000 houses — 6,000 within the inner wall, 11,000 within the outer — occupied by Genoese, Venetians, Greeks, Armenians, Jews, Mongols and Turkic peoples.
The trebuchet story, weighed
The indelible image of this siege — infected corpses hurled over the walls by trebuchet — rests chiefly on Gabriele de' Mussi, a Piacenzan notary writing around 1348–1349 who probably never witnessed the siege; his account is secondhand, uncorroborated, and survives only in a later copy.
The story's famous sequel is even shakier. Recent scholarship argues the Caffa sieges were unrelated to the plague's maritime dispersal, which could not have begun before Black Sea commerce resumed in 1347 — undermining the tale of a few fleeing Genoese ships carrying the pandemic straight to Italy.
After the withdrawal
Caffa remained in Italian hands after the Golden Horde withdrew, and Italian access to Tana was restored through negotiations in 1347. Regular Black Sea commerce resumed early that year.
Scholars disagree about whether plague entered Caffa during the siege at all, and about whether the city played any special role in carrying it into the Mediterranean.
Sources
Researched 23 Aug 2026 4 sources 3 audit passes, 1 issue open Date disputed
How this was checked
Researched from the web into a fact sheet, rewritten from that sheet, then audited against it by a different model. How the pipeline works →
Date disputed. Sources disagree; the research places it at ~1346.
What the sources leave uncertain
- No consulted source independently supports the listed precision “Spring 1346.” Some reconstructions place plague’s arrival in Crimea in winter 1346–1347.
- The corpse-hurling episode rests chiefly on de’ Mussi, a probable non-eyewitness whose account is uncorroborated.
- Scholars disagree about whether plague entered Caffa during the siege and whether Caffa played any special role in carrying it into the Mediterranean.