Poke through the history of biological weapons long enough and you will likely come across a particularly macabre claim. In 1346, the story goes, an army of the Golden Horde—an offshoot of Genghis Khan’s Mongol empire—was laying siege to Caffa, a Genoese trading center on the Crimean Peninsula. But as Janibeg, the ruler of the Golden Horde, waited for Caffa to surrender, his fighters began to succumb to a mysterious ailment. “It was as though arrows were raining down from heaven to strike and crush” the Mongols, a notary from the city of Piacenza in present-day Italy wrote. According to the 14th century account, the beleaguered Mongol commanders had one final move: to hurl their plague dead over the fortress walls.
This article was written by Matt Field and originally published by The Bulletin Of The Atomic Scientists.
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