Rat

Rats are mentioned as carriers in the account of the Black Death: fleas living on them spread plague from Tana across the Mediterranean. They recur only indirectly in the book’s broader discussion of trade and colonial expansion, where they form part of the disease’s transmission mechanism rather than acting as characters or independent agents.

Role in the Black Death

In 1346, bubonic plague reached Tana, a port at the mouth of the Don on the Black Sea. The book identifies fleas living on rats as the means by which the disease spread. Traders had brought the plague from China along the Silk Road; Genoese traders then helped carry the rats and fleas from Tana toward the Mediterranean. By early 1347, plague had reached Constantinople, and by the spring of 1348 it was spreading through France, North Africa, and Italy. The account places rats within a chain of transmission linking animal hosts, trade, and human catastrophe.

The passage conveys the scale of the outbreak through its effects on people: plague killed about half the population of any area it reached. In Florence, Giovanni Boccaccio witnessed the disease firsthand and later described its symptoms and rapid course. His account records swellings in the groin or armpit, followed in many cases by dark blotches and bruises; death often came within three days of symptoms appearing. The book’s focus is the epidemic and the societies it struck, not the rats themselves, but the brief reference to them helps explain how a disease could travel so widely.

Trade and Historical Consequences

The reference to rats sits within a larger argument about the consequences of commercial connections. The Silk Road carried the plague from China, and the routes and traders that connected distant places also enabled its onward movement. In this episode, exchange is not presented as an unqualified source of prosperity: the same connectivity that moved goods and people across regions could also move disease.

Elsewhere, the book follows trade as a force shaped by political institutions. In the seventeenth century, expanding Atlantic commerce helped create a relatively independent class of wealthy English traders, while European commercial and colonial expansion elsewhere imposed or strengthened extractive institutions. The Dutch East India Company used its armed power to monopolize the spice trade in the Moluccas, with lasting consequences for local economies. These developments are not attributed to rats; rather, they place the plague passage’s brief image of transmission beside a sustained analysis of how trade’s effects depend on the power and institutions governing it.

Scope and Significance

Rats have no developed biography, intention, or continuing plot in the book. Their significance is specific and material: as hosts for the fleas that carried the plague, they help make the disease’s passage from a distant source to Mediterranean communities intelligible. The reference is concise, but it gives the account a concrete mechanism for the spread of a catastrophe that transformed the populations it reached.

The book’s broader comparisons also resist treating historical outcomes as inevitable. European expansion could enrich some groups while destroying or constraining economic possibilities elsewhere; the path of development depended on institutions and political power. Rats belong to a different scale of explanation: not the authors of those political arrangements, but one element in the biological process through which the Black Death crossed regions and entered human history.