Historiography of the Epidemic of “Black Death” on the Territory of Juchid Ulus (1814–2016)

• Main Author: T.F. Khaydarov
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: State Institution «Sh.Marjani Institute of History of Tatarstan Academy of Sciences» 2017-03-01
• Series: Zolotoordynskoe Obozrenie
• Online Access: http://goldhorde.ru/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/%D0%97%D0%9E-1-2017-164-192.pdf

Objective: to examine the main works and theories of foreign and domestic authors, which has considered the theme of “Black death” on the territory of the ulus of Jochi in 1814–2016. Research materials: at the present stage of development of historical science the way out from methodological crisis is the most pressing issue. As international experience shows, progress towards the knowledge of the past is only possible through interaction with other disciplines, such as genetics or biology. At the moment, the epidemic of “Black Death” is rightfully considered one of these research topics. This event was of great importance in the history. Raged for several hundreds of years and killed up to a third of the then population, the plague significantly changed the face of human societies, accelerated the transition to a new economic system, to the culture and philosophy of Modern times. However, until recently research on this topic mainly focused on studying either biology of the plague, or the study of reality emerged after the “Black Death”. In these circumstances, the transition to interdisciplinarity, which occurred in recent years in Western science, allowed not only more comprehensive approach to the study of this topic, but to expand the regions under study and to include among them, in the first instance, Northern Eurasia and its most important part – Juchid ulus. In general, Western historiography had not yet developed an unambiguous assessment of the “Black Death” in this region. This is partly due to lack of experience with written sources in the Tatar and Russian languages as well as due to not long period of work with archaeological sources. At the same time, domestic science has more than 200 years of experience in understanding of this problem, but it suffers from several disadvantages. Results and novelty of the research: on the basis of historiographical material, the article manages to conclude that despite a thorough theoretical study of a subject in the field of biology of the plague, a historical study on the “Black Death in Russia” is extremely inconsistent and did not yet form a united research school. Against this background, the historiography of the epidemic “Black Death” in the Juchid ulus is situated in a better position than the research on the plague in the North-Western Rus’.