“When the Black Death arrived in Europe, it was like striking a match in tinder”
Ellie Cawthorne As a leading expert in the field of Black Death studies, how would you say science has changed the picture for research into this dark episode in human history?
Monica Green I have to be able to talk about the Black Death – it’s part of the remit of my job. But the problem with the Black Death was that, for 30 years, there was an intense debate about what caused it. And when you don’t know the biological cause of a pandemic, it becomes a black hole in the story that you can throw all kinds of theories into. So I had spent most of my career being frustrated about not being able to tell a coherent story about what was clearly a major historical event.
But in the last couple of decades there’s been an absolute sea change, caused by something called paleogenetics. You can now take modern laboratory techniques and apply them to the past – enabling the genetic analysis of molecular material from 100 years, 500 years, 10,000 years ago. This has allowed us to identify the pathogens that have caused diseases.
And the first pathogen that was completely sequenced from ancient DNA was the Black Death. Right in the middle of modern London, near the Tower of London, there is a cemetery that was created when they heard that a great plague was coming in 1348. When the epidemic passed, the bacterium that causes plague.
