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The Empire of Illusion
1332


The Empire of illusion - The Plague - 1332

 

A person could appear healthy in the morning, but suddenly, break into fever that rapidly gave way to chills accompanied by both vomiting and diarrhea. Blood began to ooze beneath the skin which discolored the skin. Lumps formed and oozed blood and pus in the groin, the armpit and the neck. When the lumps grew too large, they burst open. The lack of oxygen moving into the body and the dried blood beneath the skin made a person appear to turn black. After a few agonizing days of tortured pain, the person usually died. In some victims, the disease attacked the lungs rather than the lymph nodes, and the air in the lung turned bloody and frothy, they drowned. As they died, they infected those around them by violent coughing, sneezing and gasping.
The plague bacterium lives in fleas, which traveled on rats transported in shipments of food or other tribute taken from the south. Although the fleas do not normally infects humans and the smell of horses repels them as well as fire. They can live in sack of grain or human clothing. Once the infected fleas arrived in the Gobi, they easily found hospitable new homes in marmot burrows and the extensive rodent colonies, where they have lived ever since.
The plague was an epidemic of commerce. The caravans brought the fleas that spread the plague from one camp to another.
In a few years, it went to Europe, Africa, Greenland etc. Between 1340 and 1400, the total world population fell from approximately 450 millions to 350 millions. More than a million a year for the rest of the fourteenth century. In Europe, in the fourteenth century, the figure represented between one third to one half of the population. By comparison, during World War II, France the scene of much fighting, lost 1.5% of it's population.
The plague effectively destroyed the social order that had dominated Europe. 
The closed and polluted environments of monasteries and convents  provided and ideal opportunity for the disease to kill everyone.
Without understanding the disease's true cause or methods of transmission, people still quickly recognized it's close association with commerce and movements of people in and out of cities.
The two primary reactions to the disease were to abandon the city, if possible, or at least close the city to outsiders.
Diplomatic delegations and letters ceased to flow.
Frightened people everywhere blamed foreigners for bringing the disease, further threatening international commerce.
The plague not only isolated Europe, but it also cut off Mongols in Persia and Russia from China and Mongolia.
With each group cut off from the other, the interlocking system of ownership collapsed.
The Mongol Empire depended on the quick and constant movement of people, goods, and information throughout its massive empire. Without those connections, there were no empire.
As foreign conquerors, the Mongols had been tolerated by their subjects, who often outnumbered the Mongols by as much as a thousand to one, because they continued to produce a tremendous flow of trade goods long after the strength of their army had dissipated.
The universal principles of Genghis Khan's empire disappeared like ashes in the wind.
The Mongol Khan of China took refuge in the spirituality of the Tibetan monks.
The Tibetan clergy encouraged new form of religious practice in their Tantric rites that proclaimed the path of enlightenment via sexual acts.
The rumors of debauchery increased the paranoia and distrust among the Chinese.
Throughout most the the twentieth century, Russia and China maintained an accord dividing the homeland of Genghis Khan between them, with China occupying Inner Mongolia, the part south of the Gobi, and the Soviet Union occupying the other half, Outer Mongolia, north of the Gobi. The Soviets  turned Mongolia into a buffer zone that they kept largely empty between themselves and  the Chinese.
Mongolia became independent in 1992 at the collapsed of the Soviet Union.