BW/ The Beginnings

The beginnings

Cheeeeerss!!  

What could be more relaxing than having a beer with your friends? After the day is done you can finally lean back, clink glasses and enjoy your company.

However, if I stuck you into a time machine and catapulted you back to the Middle Ages you probably wouldn’t feel as relaxed. Back in the Dark Ages it was quite common to poison people you wanted to get rid of. It was an easy exercise to slip poison into your drinking buddy’s cup. This is where the habit of clinking glasses comes from. As people were anxious about getting poisoned they knocked there cups together as forcefully as possible so the beer would spill over into all the other cups as well. So much for a relaxing glass of beer.

The beginnings of biological warfare though date back even further! In ancient times the common practice of biological warfare included poisoning arrow tips, tainting water supplies with herbs, fungus and - well, let’s just say it – shit. This way entire cities suffered horrible diarrhea and hallucinations.

The first most big scale event in the history of biological warfare occurred in the 14^th and caused an epidemic which wiped out half of Europe. The epidemic I am talking about is the most severe, deadly and horrifying human history had to see: The  plague! Apparently the disease had its origin in North East Asia and entered Europe through the city of Caffa which lies on the Crimean peninsula. (today’s Ukraine) In the 13^th century Caffa was purchased by the Republic of Genoa and becoming a major trading point. The city was flourishing until it gave refuge to other Italians from the nearby city of Tana who had a dispute with Muslim Mongolians. Following this event the Mongolians, under Janibeg, besieged the city. The besiegers were already partly infected with the plague and so they resorted to catapulting infected bodies over the walls of Caffa.  The Genoese Gabriele de’ Mussi, a contemporary, describes the event as follows:

“The dying Tartars, stunned and stupefied by the immensity of the disaster brought about by the disease, and realizing that they had no hope of escape, lost interest in the siege. But they ordered corpses to be placed in catapults1 and lobbed into the city in the hope that the intolerable stench would kill everyone inside.2 What seemed like mountains of dead were thrown into the city, and the Christians could not hide or flee or escape from them, although they dumped as many of the bodies as they could in the sea. And soon the rotting corpses tainted the air and poisoned the water supply, and the stench was so overwhelming that hardly one in several thousand was in a position to flee the remains of the Tartar army. Moreover one infected man could carry the poison to others, and infect people and places with the disease by look alone. No one knew, or could discover, a means of defense.”

Due to the enorme infectiousness of the disease many of the inhabitants of Caffa fell ill. As Caffa was a port city it is believed that some Genoese could flee back to Italy and brought the plague into Europa. This is possible. Still it is not the siege of Caffa which has to account for the epidemic in Europe. It is rather a time correlation than a cause and effect relationship. The plague would have spread anyway, as trade ships were frequently commuting between the Black Sea and Europe’s harbors. Aboard on those ships were rats, which are one of the most essential disease transmitters. This being said the siege of Caffa still accounts for biological warfare.