Georgetown Historian Awarded €10 Million to Solve Enduring Mystery of the Black Death

In the early 14th century, pandemic plague emerged in central Asia. It arrived in the Mediterranean region and Europe in the late 1340s, spreading widely and killing millions. Somewhere between one and two-thirds of people died. In terms of population loss, no other pandemic compares.

This was the Black Death, the first outbreak of the second plague pandemic, a series of epidemics that devastated the Mediterranean region and Europe for centuries. The loss of life was extreme, but plague did not equally impact all affected areas. Why some regions and some cities - and even some neighborhoods in cities - fared drastically worse is one of the most confounding and enduring mysteries of the Middle Ages.

It's a riddle that Timothy Newfield, a historical epidemiologist and environmental historian in Georgetown's College of Arts & Sciences, hopes to finally solve nearly 700 years later. Newfield is part of an interdisciplinary and international team of researchers - EUROpest - that recently received a Synergy Grant from the European Research Council. That grant will fund a research program on plague's differential toll with €10 million over the next six years.

Spreading Like the Plague

The second plague pandemic is one of the most well-known, and most misunderstood, events in human history, according to Newfield.

"Every time a plague outbreak occurs or, for instance, a case emerges from within the United States, it is invariably linked to the Black Death and the second plague pandemic. Yet, our grasp of even some basic fundamentals of the second pandemic plague is weak," said Newfield. "Just to start, how plague spread then and what variables caused the second pandemic to recede remain debated. Answering those questions and others will be of value for us today, considering the hefty cultural weight plague has and that it's a global disease present in more than 25 countries."

In academia and the public sphere, the second plague pandemic is often considered a universal killer that swept across the Mediterranean and Europe. But thinking of plague in this way or as a so-called "great equalizer" is misguided, according to Newfield. He points to individual outbreaks within the pandemic, like those that affected northern Italy and Tuscany around 1630, where the prevalence and mortality of plague was shockingly uneven.

"In that outbreak, plague illness and death were irregular, from Venice to Prato and Milan to Florence. Why that is remains unknown," said Newfield. "Over the last 15 years, we have had repeated confirmation from paleogenetics that plague was indeed responsible for the second plague pandemic, but plague is an extremely complex disease. Knowing that it was plague does not explain how it was transmitted. Of course, accounting for why plague's spread was so irregular and so choppy will help us understand why plague shaped history in the way that it did."

Plague Problem Solving

The Synergy Grant will allow the team to supercharge their research, putting money and workforce behind state-of-the-art tools and techniques.

"With this grant, we will disaggregate more than 50 individual plague epidemics to account for what variables allowed plague to spread and kill the way it did," said Newfield. "Too often we conceive of the microorganisms behind disease outbreaks as out there somewhere doing their own thing independent of us. Of course, people are at the heart of outbreaks. We are implicated in their emergence and their spread, and we shape the toll they take."

The research team is headed by four principle investigators - Newfield, Adam Izdebski, Elena Xoplaki, and Alexander Herbig - who will oversee a collaboration spanning ten institutions and involving historians, paleogeneticists, paleoclimatologists and paleoecologists. Together they will draw on a wide array of expertise with the intention of providing interdisciplinary solutions to seemingly intractable problems.

With the data the team will amass and produce, researchers will be able to set epidemics into their cultural, economic and societal contexts. With new paleoclimate models and new pathogen paleogenomes, the team will also be able to set epidemics into their climate and epidemiological contexts.

"Doing all this", said Newfield, "will let us figure out what allowed plague to become the plague."

"Interdisciplinary disease history is a super exciting space to work in. There's a lot we don't understand yet and because the data's not finite, the ground is constantly moving under our feet and old ideas are being tossed out windows left, right and center." "It's challenging," Newfield noted, "but more than that it's just really exciting!"

This fall, Newfield was one of three associate professors at Georgetown to receive the Magis Prize, a $100,00 research award given to early-stage scholars in their post-tenure careers. With this award, he plans to study the origins of smallpox. Learn more about his research below:

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