The Black Death, or the plague pandemic of the fourteenth century, also arrived in Puglia: the first scientific evidence is published in a study presented at the European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ECCMID), which closes today in Vienna.
The DNA of the bacterium was found in the remains of two men aged between 30 and 45 buried in the abbey of San Leonardo in Siponto, an important religious and medical center of the Middle Ages. “The study was born from an intuition of the professor Giuseppe Sarcinelli of the University of Salento, who is the numismatist of our research group: following the discovery of coins hidden in bodies buried at the medieval abbey, Sarcinelli hypothesized the possibility that the bodies had been buried in a hurry, without sifting them, because infected by some infectious disease and therefore dangerous “.
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Explain Donato Raele, researcher of the Experimental Zooprophylactic Institute of Puglia and Basilicata, first author of the research. “It is precisely the coins that made it possible to date the bodies around 1345/1350: a very important historical period because the plague pandemic known as the Black Death was raging in Europe”.
The abbey is located in what, at the time, was a crossroads of religious and commercial itineraries. It was on the road from Rome to the various ports in Puglia. The pilgrims who went to the sanctuary of San Michele Arcangelo, very important in medieval times, and also those who went to the Holy Land passed by “explains Raele.” And in 1300 a medieval hospital was active on that site which was used for hospitalization and the care of pilgrims and local people, which was unhealthy: as a malarial area “.
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Once the infectious disease was hypothesized as a possible explanation for the presence of coins on the two bodies, the group of researchers from Puglia dedicated themselves to identifying the disease. “On the teeth of the two bodies we found ancient DNA that we amplified with the PCR technique (polymerase chain reaction, which allows to multiply the fragments of nucleic acids of which the initial and final sequences are known)” explains Raele “We looked for the correspondence of the DNA thus obtained with that characteristic of plague, malaria, tuberculosis, epidemic typhus, Maltese fever. The only DNA that coincided with that present in the two burials was the DNA of the plague bacterium: Yersinia pestis”.
A discovery that has its own scientific relevance: “The information on the black plague epidemic in Italy is numerous, but it is mainly linked to municipal registers, or to tales and stories such as the Decameron” continues Donato Raele.
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“But scientific researches aimed, like ours, at identifying the pathogen are rare. With the Experimental Zooprophylactic Institute we had already published on Plos a study with the identification, in Puglia, of a case of plague in a burial of 1657. But the two cases of the abbey of San Leonardo in Siponto are interesting precisely because they relate to the plague of three centuries earlier, on which we still have less scientific data “.
“The study was the result of coordinated work. The excavation and research activities were directed by the regional secretary of the Ministry of Culture for Puglia, by the ABAP superintendencies for the provinces of Foggia and the metropolitan city of Bari – explains Raele – for the numismatic and archaeological investigations, together with Sarcinelli were involved Geneva Panzarino (University of Valencia) e Elena Dellù (Superintendence ABAP Bari) “.
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