How volcanoes upend the story of what sparked the Black Death

For centuries, the prevailing explanation of how the Black Death entered medieval Europe was a simple narrative of biological warfare. During a siege of Caffa, a Genoa-controlled port city on the Crimean Peninsula, a Mongol army catapulted plague-infested bodies over the city walls, according to a historical account. It was a simple narrative, with a clear villain.

But a new study published Thursday adds to a body of evidence that upends that grisly origin story, suggesting that a perfect storm of volcanic eruptions, crop failure, famine and medieval globalization converged in the mid-1300s to unleash the Black Death across Europe.

The paper in the journal Communications Earth & Environment is the latest in a wave of recent scientific and historical evidence that is rewriting our underst