title: Diseases and the medieval Silk Roads
abstract: The high medieval period, between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, witnessed a flourishing of trade, travel, and cultural exchange along the silk roads. This proto-globalisation also provided the context for the outbreak of a devastating pandemic of bubonic plague which swept across Eurasia in the 1340s and 1350s, known to historians as the Black Death, killing up to one-half of the population. In the past decade, new scientific evidence has transformed our understanding of the origins of t