Borders, plagues and some history

“The virus doesn’t recognise borders”

This quote is from a tweet by the odious toxic toad Guy Verhofstadt, the European Parliament’s man for dealing with Brexit. Of course, he sees the virus as an opportunity and he’s not alone. Let’s turn away from him, (just thinking about him makes my jaw tighten and my fists itch).

Imagine

It’s very fashionable at the moment to decry borders and walls, especially if The Donald is involved at any point. The usual globalists are clinging onto this virus like drowning men to driftwood and using it to push their agenda. It’s no coincidence that the selfless luvvies chose to serenade us with John Lennon’s dreary year zero anthem. The one world mood music is everywhere. I read a piece today on the current very relaxed line being taken by Sweden, it quoted a Swedish official saying that borders don’t work. Well, of course they don’t if you don’t use them. Likewise, a piece in Forbes said that Italy stopped flights from China before the US (four days) and this did nothing. Well no *bleep* Sherlock! I wouldn’t expect banning flights from China when your borders are wide open to the rest of the EU and you already have tens of thousands of textile workers from China in the country to have much effect. Stopping an infection getting in in the first place is another matter. Both Australia and New Zealand banned travel from China early on and have an amazingly low death rate from the virus. But I’m weary of the CCP virus, let’s look at an historical example.

All You Need is Rats

In 1345-6 the Black Death came out of central Asia through the Khanate of the Golden Horde (one of the successors to Mongol Empire, covering much of modern southern Ukraine and Russia, Kazakhstan and the other smaller ex-Soviet “Stans”). It arrived in the city of Azov, north east of the Black Sea in 1346. It followed the trade routes and in 1347 it hit the still Christian city of Constantinople (Istanbul). Its progress through Europe from that point is interesting, and instructive. Spreading north west across the landmass the plague moved at a leisurely pace, getting to Belgrade in 1348, Budapest and Vienna in 1349, Prague in 1350 and Krakow at the end of the year/start of 1351. However, along the sea trade routes it travelled much more quickly, leapfrogging its way through the Mediterranean and up the Atlantic coast.

In the same year that it hit Constantinople it also arrived in Greece, all the major Mediterranean islands and the great trading cities of Venice, Pisa, Genoa and Marseilles. The Black Death arrived in London, Bordeaux, Bristol, Dublin, Calais, Paris and even Oslo in 1348. The next year it was the turn of Hamburg, Bremen, Lübeck and Danzig (Gdansk). Warsaw was hit by the plague in 1351, caught effectively between a short right jab from the south east and a big left hook from the west.

The plague then moved eastward into the Kingdom of Lithuania (stretching from the Black Sea to the Baltic), reaching Minsk and Kiev in 1352 and finally Moscow in 1353. Even allowing for slower transmission than in the more densely populated lands further west the plague should have got to Kiev by land towards the end of 1348 at the latest, the same year London fell victim. Kiev is only about 450 miles from Azov, while London is over 1,700 miles as the crow flies and yet the Black Death took four years longer to get there, why is this?

Another Twig in the Wall

It’s simple, there was a border. The nation state as we know it was yet to develop and across Europe borders between jurisdictions were pretty notional, but between the Moslem Khanate of the Golden Horde and the Christian lands of Russia and Lithuania there was a physical line of defence across which Christians were not permitted to travel. Effectively there was a hard border and so the plague came to Kiev and Moscow not from the south, but purely from the western route. For parts of its length this border was marked by rivers and elsewhere was defended against Tatar raids by small forts and strong points with stretches of abatis, a forerunner of barbed wire consisting  of small trees or tree branches cut and laid out with the sharpened ends pointing towards whoever you’re trying to keep out. Not a wall as such, not even one single continuous line, but a definite physical barrier which firmly said what was in and what was out. The approximate line is marked on the map above. The Zasechnaya cherta, as it was known, was extended and developed, being completed in the 1560s. It didn’t prevent the Black Death reaching Kiev or Moscow, but it did buy them years of breathing space.

Borders, walls, fences and so on aren’t perfect, nothing is. But when people say that borders don’t work at all, remember Kiev and the Black Death.