Sussman George D
LaGuardia Community College of the City University of New York, NY, USA.
Bull Hist Med. 2011 Fall;85(3):319-55. doi: 10.1353/bhm.2011.0054.
Firsthand accounts of the Black Death in Europe and the Middle East and many subsequent historians have assumed that the pandemic originated in Asia and ravaged China and India before reaching the West. One reason for this conviction among modern historians is that the plague in the nineteenth century originated and did its worst damage in these countries. But a close examination of the sources on the Delhi Sultanate and the Yuan Dynasty provides no evidence of any serious epidemic in fourteenth-century India and no specific evidence of plague among the many troubles that afflicted fourteenth-century China.
欧洲和中东关于黑死病的第一手记述以及许多后世历史学家都认为,这场大流行病起源于亚洲,在蔓延到西方之前肆虐了中国和印度。现代历史学家形成这种看法的一个原因是,19世纪的鼠疫起源于这些国家并造成了最严重的破坏。但是,仔细研究德里苏丹国和元朝的资料后发现,没有证据表明14世纪的印度发生过任何严重疫情,在困扰14世纪中国的诸多问题中也没有鼠疫的具体证据。