Interestingly, the Wikipedia article contains this sentence in the description of the early origins of the outbreak in Asia, in the early 14th century:
Due to climate change in Asia, rodents began to flee the dried-out grasslands to more populated areas, spreading the disease.They just toss this off like no one will notice. Climate change, 700 years ago? How can that have been?
Climate change affecting rodent behavious in central Asia is a new one to me. Most of my study of the Black Plague ascribes it to Silk Road “caravansarai.”
“An inn, usually with a large courtyard, for the overnight accommodation of caravans.”
These were built like motels just a day’s caravan march apart all the way across Asia, putting them into the habitat of the plague-carrying ground squirrels. The rats came along with the human travelers and caravans of camels, horses and mules. Local plague-carrying ground squirrels intersected with rats, now that they were co-located.
The plague was endemic to the ground squirrels and didn’t kill them (like bats with Coronavirus, etc). And locals understood, “Stay away from ground squirrels!” and so they had always avoided the plague.
But the Black Plague (yersinia pestis) did kill the rats, who had no immunity, so virus-loaded fleas would hop off the cold dead rats and infect the nearby sleeping human travelers. And so the plague moved by caravan to the Black Sea, and the rats got on board ships, and that’s all she wrote.
You probably already know the above, I’m just recapping the history for the curious.
I first read about the Asian connection to the Black Death when I read a book about Genghis Khan and the Mongols. That book suggested that the silk road was becoming traveled more frequently and over a wider area than before, thus disturbing the marmots that carried the y pestis. It only required a few fleas jumping onto travelers and their horses for it to start spreading. It basically destroyed the Yuan (Mongol) dynasty in China.