Aktuelle Veranstaltungen
14. 06. 2023

Undine Ott: Climate Crisis and Food Security. How the Black Death Traveled from the Black Sea to the Middle East

Wednesday, June 14 2023, 5 p.m.

Valentinská 91/1, 3rd floor, 110 00 Prague 1

The lecture will be streamed via Zoom as well, please contact:
florian.ruttnerwhatever@collegium-carolinum.de

Collegium Carolinum,
the German Historical Institute Warsaw,
and the Leibniz-Institute for History and Culture in Eastern Europe
in collaboration with the Centre for Medieval Studies
cordially invite you to the lecture

 

UNDINE OTT (LEIPZIG)
Climate Crisis and Food Security. How the Black Death Traveled from the Black Sea to the Middle East

 

Wednesday, June 14 2023, 5 p.m.
Valentinská 91/1, 3rd Floor
The lecture will be streamed via Zoom as well, please contact
florian.ruttner@collegium.carolinum.de

In the mid-14th century, the so-called second plague pandemic reached the Middle East as well as Europe. It arrived from Central Asia and the Northern shores of the Black Sea. How it got to Egypt, Syria and the Hejaz, the territories which, at the time, constituted the Mamluk sultanate, remains unclear, though.
As has recently been demonstrated with regard to Europe, a massive climate crisis in the 1340s formed the background upon which the spread of the Black Death on the continent needs to be understood. The climate anomaly of the 1340s affected the Middle East, too, but has, so far, gone unnoticed in research on the region. The years 1343 and 1345 to 1347 witnessed an accumulation of locust infestations and extreme weather events, especially during the winter months, a crucial period for agriculture.
The paper will combine epidemic, climate and economic history to shed some light on plague transmission routes that have, so far, largely remained in the dark: A fatal chain of climate crisis, harvest failures, famine and the sultan's efforts to secure food supply in his territories culminated in the biggest calamity in the 14th-century Mideast: the plague wave that hit Egypt, Syria and the Hejaz in 1348 and 1349 and exacted an unparalleled death toll on the region's population.

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Undine Ott is a doctoral candidate at the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the ERC project "Mobility, Empire and Intercultural Contacts in Mongolian Eurasia" and Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the Alexander von Humboldt Kolleg for Islamic Intellectual History at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn. Her Ph.D. topic is "Erinnerungsort Grab. Funktiones muslimischen Totengedenken in Zentralasien im 12./6. bis 14./8. Jahrhundert". She was researcher at the Georg-August-University Göttingen at the Courant Research Centre "Education and Religion" and at the Seminar for Arabic Studies/Islamic Studies. She was part of a project at the GWZO "Early Medieval Centres on the Danube". Since April 2020 she is a research assistant at the GWZO in the junior research group "Dantean Anomaly".