This is the second topic of World Civilizations II which examines the Long Distance Trade, Climate Change, and Epidemics from 1300 to the 1500s AD. This third session looks at Part III: From Epidemics to Pandemics and it starts with a general assessment on the causes of epidemics in the pre-modern and early modern world, and how the rise of long-distance trade along with climate change produced the conditions for the rise of the first two pandemics in world history, the Black Death and the Amerindian population catastrophe. This last session covers these two pandemics and their global effects.
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