A Knight’s Tale is a classic story of mediaeval adventure that follows William Thatcher (Heath Ledger) as he competes in a series of jousting matches in an effort to gain wealth, fame, and honor. The film’s actual setting is unknown, in part because it borrows from a number of centuries of mediaeval society. However, the existence of real-life figures like Geoffrey Chaucer and Edward the Black Prince helps to date it to the second part of the 14th century.
A terrible illness epidemic is not one of the many obstacles Thatcher and his merry band must overcome.
However, although having a minor role in the film, the Black Death indeed rocked Europe around the middle of the 14th century. We now know where and how it started owing to a new study that was published in the journal Nature.
A group of Russian researchers unearthed the graves of 118 persons who passed away from an unidentified illness in 1880. The graves were near Lake Issyk-Kul in what is now Kyrgyzstan, and monuments at the graves contain dates that fall between 1338 and 1339, which is exactly when experts anticipate the Black Death to have started. Additionally, some grave markers have inscriptions that list pestilence as the reason for death.
At the Peter, the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography in Saint Petersburg, skulls from those excavated graves are kept. It remained unclear what caused the deaths until the publication of this latest study. Pestilence was frequently used as a blanket term for a variety of illnesses because it existed centuries before the development of germ theory.
Maria Spyrou and Johannes Krause from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History’s Department of Archaeogenetics first learned about the bones, but it wasn’t until then that they began to assume they might hold the key to the emergence of the Black Death.
They examined the centuries-old DNA from the plague victim’s teeth with assistance from team members from the museum where the bones were kept, and they were able to confirm the presence of Yersinia pestis, the bacteria that causes bubonic plague, in three of the teeth.
The bacterial DNA was also shown to represent the most recent common ancestor from right before a significant diversification event that gave rise to the pandemic. While that ancestor strain was at least partially to blame for the deaths at Issyk-Kul, one of its offspring raged across Europe less than ten years later and did so intermittently for the following five centuries.
According to scientists, these 118 individuals represent the origin of one of the deadliest disease pandemics in human history, which would go on to claim the lives of at least 25 million people in the following few decades and tens of millions more centuries later. The intensity of the disease even inspired Isaac Newton to develop a novel remedy.
As per Syfy, the evidence also supports the theory that the epidemic began in non-human animals before spreading to people, similar to more recent disease pandemics. Once that occurred, the disease was able to spread swiftly because of even our mediaeval level of international mobility, possibly finding passage on ships.
The authors of the study report that strains still infect dozens of non-human animals, and all of those strains can be traced back to this one progenitor in 14th-century Kyrgyzstan. The World Health Organization reports that the Black Death is now largely contained, with only about 1,000 to 2,000 reported cases globally each year and a mortality rate of between 8 percent and 10 percent.
The fiercest and deadliest microbial brawl in human history had just begun. At least so far, it appears that we are winning. However, we must admit that Black Death would make a killer knight nickname.
This article originally appeared in SyFy and has been updated.
