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The Mongol Empire before 1259. This map depicts the expansion of the Mongol Empire prior to 1259. At its greatest extent, this empire stretched from Central Europe to the Paciﬁc. The empire was born in the forests and prairies of Central Asia, the ancestral homeland of the Mongol people. Expansion began under Chinggis Khan, who, beginning in 1206, led military campaigns southward into north China, west to Afghanistan and Persia, and east to Korea. The armies of his sons reached both the Paciﬁc Ocean and the Adriatic Sea. Chinggis’s sons and grandsons organized the empire into separate khanates, as this map depicts. Although Chinggis’s successors often competed with each other for dominance, they maintained his commitment to fostering widespread trade and extensive communication throughout the Mongol territories. Black Death 2/5

The Mongol Empire after 1259. Decades after Chinggis’s death, the most prosperous and populous territory in Eurasia remained independent. Although northern China came under Mongol control in 1234, southern China, under the indigenous Song dynasty, resisted all efforts at conquest. Furthermore, the terrain of southern China was poorly suited to Mongol cavalry. Chinggis’s grandson Khubilai did not succeed in conquering southern China until 1276. As the map shows, from his base in China, Khubilai ordered campaigns into Vietnam, Java, and Japan. However, none of these overseas ventures were successful. Black Death 3/5

The Spread of the Black Death to 1347. The Mongol campaigns into southern China passed through Tibet, south to Burma, and from there north to Yunnan before reaching China proper. These sparsely populated tropical regions were home to the bubonic plague bacillus. Unleashed into the populations of armies on the move, the plague spread into cities in China, then throughout Eurasia. This map depicts the ﬁrst wave of infection and the routes of transmission, beginning with the city of Pagan in Burma in 1320 and spreading to a few cities in central China during the 1320s, 1330s, and early 1340s. Black Death 4/5

The Spread of the Black Death after 1346. Some dates of plague outbreak are unknown, but it is clear that by 1346, the plague had jumped out of its East Asian homeland and into the rest of Eurasia. Outbreaks were attested that year and the next in the Persian heartland and around the Black Sea and the Mediterranean Sea. By the end of the decade, no major European city was plague free. By the early 1350s, more Chinese cities, which had managed to resist the ﬁrst wave of infection, were afﬂicted as well. Black Death 5/5

The Black Death in Europe and North Africa. The spread of the Black Death out of inner Asia was the fourteenth century’s most signiﬁcant historical development. The disease spread west during a brief time through increasingly interconnected trade routes. It entered Europe and the Middle East at port cities and moved inland along roads. City dwellers, living in crowded quarters, were most vulnerable. Urban death rates exceeded two-thirds. All of the affected populations lacked immunity to the disease. Famine and social dislocation followed the plague, and death rates in Europe topped one-third.