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Zuleyha Adil-kyzy Ismailova

Independent researcher, Bryansk, Russia

PESTILENCE IN RUSSIA IN THE 11th–13th CENTURIES: CAUSES, CONSEQUENCES AND PERCEPTION BY CONTEMPORARIES

The study is devoted to such a relatively young field in historical science as historical epidemiology. It examines the pestilences during the Russian Middle Ages of the 11th–13th centuries, investigates their causes, consequences and the attitude of contemporaries towards them. The author focused on identifying the internal conditions of the occurrence and spread of epidemic diseases and concluded that these conditions were both anthropogenic and natural factors. Pestilences often broke out when two groups of these factors acted simultaneously, for example, a major military invasion coincided in time and geographical location with natural and climatic disasters. Determining the number of victims of pestilences of the 11th–13th centuries in the territories of Russia causes difficulties due to the scarcity of sources, however, it can be assumed that the demographic damage inflicted on the Kiev and Novgorod lands in the pestilential years 1092–1093 and 1230–1231 significantly weakened Russia before the foreign invasions of the Polovtsians and Mongols. The ways of dealing with the plagues and the attitude towards their victims at that time strongly depended on the ideas of Russian people about pestilences, which revealed archaic pre-Christian features.

Keywords: epidemic, pestilence, plague, Russia, historical epidemiology, archaic customs

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