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| A city under Mongol siege. From the illuminated manuscript of Rashid ad-Din's Jami al-Tawarikh. Edinburgh University Library Wiki Commons |
Soldiers on the castle wall could hear the release of the projectile and it’s buzz through the air. By the time they could hear the sound it is too late. The projectile, moving faster than the sound, was already there. The lookouts were junior officers. Many of the young men had already been apart of a siege before. For those new to the experience a besieging army of 20,000 men and the siege engines firing the projectiles made the occasional boy wet himself.
As well as lookouts, there were archers, swordsmen and runners along the wall. The runners were the fast boys, getting messages back and forth as fast as their legs would take them. Ancillary weapons men were there too. They were the dispensers of tar, hot oil and the occasional animal. The archers would sit back at a comfortable distance. They were clean. The ancillaries on the other hand saw death at close range. They knew the sights, sounds and smells of war.
The besieging camp produced a smell that neither side recognised. The projectiles flying into the moat were initially stones but now they were human bodies. Most had seen and smelt that before. Bodies, sometimes living, sometimes dead, hit the ground and exploded. The internal organs would breakfree and splatter across any surface in reach. The smell would be bearable if it could be cleaned up promptly. The smell this time was the smell of sickness.
The bodies that made it over the wall were efficiently collected and dumped back over the wall, into the moat on the north side of the city. The bodies began to build up and the harbour that sheltered the city to the south became the alternate dumping place. The bodies sent over the wall, sometimes living, were slaves who were captives of other conflicts. Sometimes the bodies living, were those of spotters, caught spying on the besieging army. Sending them back to the castle was a highly satisfying action for the besieging army. It sent their enemy a deflating reminder that their information networks had become less reliable.
The bodies, sometimes dead, were the inevitable nature of a besieging army camp. The camps were a recipe for mass illness. Medieval medicine dealt with mass sickness by implementing a quarantine as early as possible. Removing the sickness from the environment using a trebuchet was an efficient method.
The besieger, Yani Beg, was seven generations and 120 years removed from the Greatest Khan, Genghis. The westernmost realm of the Mongol empire, controlled by Yani Beg, was known to the Europeans as the Golden Horde. They controlled the northern lands of the Black Sea in what we know as southern Russia and the Crimea.
The Black Sea and the Crimea were a valuable trading region. The Genoans had controlled the sea lanes here for almost 100 years having bought the port city of Kaffa from the Golden Horde in 1266. They succeeded the Venetians, who had succeeded the East Roman Empire. The Eastern Romans were also known as the Byzantine Greeks and they had succeeded their ancient forebears of classical Greek city states long ago.
The Mongols were happy to do business with the Europeans. The slave trade made both parties rich. Thousands of slaves a year headed to the eastern capitals of Constantinople, Baghdad and Alexandria. The Genoans had long dispensed with the niceties of royal etiquette which made them look arrogant in the eyes of the Mongols. Yani Beg simply needed the Genoans to make some compromises. A little respect to the glory of the largest empire on the planet would ease the tension. This tension made trading in the Middle Ages a dangerous business.
The Mongols had dominated this part of the Western Steppe lands since Genghis Khan came in 1223. The Khan came from nowhere. He destroyed and looted and left as quickly as he came. As the descendants of Genghis established their own territories, the local inhabitant, The Rus, became the victims of the slave trade. The Rus, of Slavic and Nordic ancestry, were tall, strong and illiterate and rounded up in their thousands to be sold through the coastal Genoan colonies of Caulita, Lusta and Kaffa.
The city wall of Kaffa was 30 metres high with a moat as the secondary reinforcement protecting the low lying sections of the city. It was easily defended, but merchants didn’t need defensive measures when trade was going well. Equilibrium was reached with their neighbours when everyone made money. Trust, however, was the ingredient that made business and diplomatic relationships flow with ease.
Republics like Genoa and Venice had dispensed with royal courts to make obscene amounts of money amongst the merchant families. The Black Sea was ripe for exploitation with the Mongols not seafarers and the Byzantine emperor in Constantinople financially weak. The Queen of Cities, Constantinople, was reclaimed in 1261. The Venetians had gleefully emptied the city of its great riches during the fourth crusade in 1204.
Michael VIII Palaiologos of Nicea had regained the city with the aid of Genoa and Constantinople again controlled the flow of shipping through the Bosporus strait and the Dardanelles. This gave clear and tax free passage for the Genoan trading fleet to leave the Black Sea and head to slave markets of the mediterranean.
The besiegers of Kaffa had been camped 900 metres from the walls for a year. This was not the first time Yani Beg had tried to take Kaffa. He tried and failed 5 years earlier. The need for him to enforce his superiority was rising. If you can't dominate a small trading centre syphoning funds from your empire how could you possibly master the imperial court?
Diplomatic manoeuvring by Genoan envoys had not gone well. Unsuccessful embassies to the Golden Horde were returned to Kaffa using the trebuchet. The strategy was for the Mongols to merely settle in for a slow and merciless strangling. After all this was the most efficient method with minimal loss of equipment and manpower.
The challenge was now to stay patient. Not the strength of an army full of soldiers. A second winter was 6 weeks away and while Kaffa was located on the water of the Black Sea, this was still land of the Steppe. A place of bone rattling cold. An escalation of activity was required.
The summer and autumn of 1346 were unusual. The normal blisteringly hot and dry summer had been replaced with a warm humid air and continual rain that had left the ground wet. Soon to freeze solid. An escalation of activity was required.
Wet autumns always led to famine. Wheat for bread and barley for beer would go mouldy in the field. Even the Khan could not maintain a hungry army and with grumbling in the imperial court, Yanni Beg had chosen to lead the siege himself. The smell of a second failed siege of Kaffa would make his rule untenable. An escalation of activity was required.
The Genoese had been defiant and kept access to the sea open. Not just to receive food and arms from trade routes but to maintain hygiene. With the invention of antibiotics another 800 years away, minor infections could be life threatening. They had kept the city pristine despite the wet weather.
The same could not be said for the Mongol camp. A sickness had arrived with the Blue Horde, the Mongol court of central Asia. The Shaman of the Khan were master physicians with many having learnt their skills in the hospitals and surgeries of Baghdad. But the sickness in the camp was something they had not seen before. Large black infections raised up on the skin in the groin and the armpits. The infections were lanced to remove the fluids and treatment was finished with leeches.
Normally this was a successful remedy, but not for this outbreak. The odour released was clearly an omen. The Shaman saw a sign from God of evil doings and removing the sickness from the camp was a matter of urgency. With regular rain and cloudy days, fires could not be sustained and as a result the bodies continued to build up. The siege engines now had a new toxic biological weapon at hand and the plague of the Mongols was about to be shared with the Europeans.
A trebuchet can deposit a fully grown man over a city wall from approximately 700m. The range of an Archer of the Republican forces was 500m. The field engineers that drove the trebuchet were free to test counterbalance weights and trajectories without being pestered by arrows.
They drew the counterbalance back. Moved the locking device in place. Loaded the dead bodies into the sling. Fire away. The engineers reviewed the flight path, made a few adjustments to the swing and fired again. The city walls of Kaffa were in range.
The bodies were flying over the wall and hitting and breaking apart with the impact. Blood and brains and limbs and guts disperse across the forecourt of the markets. The Sergeant of Arms was called to the first impact of the biological weapons. To this veteran of the the crusades, something was wrong. Very wrong.
The smell of the corpse was more terrible than he had ever smelt before. The smell of death was unpleasant, acride and difficult. But this created an automatic response. The Sargent leant over and purged his lunch with a strong forthright vomit. The odours of the bodies were simply unbearable and they kept coming over the wall. The Mongols had a pile of them growing higher every day and the engineers had found their range.
Chapter 2
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