What is remarkable from a modern perspective is how slowly and methodically it spread. Although the plague did make occasional long-range jumps, as in its travel along trading routes such as the Silk Road and via ships, its progression throughout Europe averaged only about two kilometers per day, slow even by the standards of foot travel at the time. Even though the bubonic plague rarely transmits directly from person to person, the disease traveled alongside humans – via the fleas who fed on rats on ships, on farm animals, people, and in clothing – and so it made its way through the networks of humans and the various animals that accompanied them. The slow movement of the plague tells us how limited the mobility and range of contacts of most humans were in the Middle Ages. Modern pandemics are quite different: they spread remarkably quickly, with diseases jumping continents typically within a matter of days or weeks. A measles outbreak among unvaccinated adults and children sparked via interactions at an American theme park in southern California in 2014 appeared in schools hundreds of miles away days later. Ebola was carried by health workers from Sierra Leone in 2015 to cities in Europe and North America within a week of their exposure. Beyond immediate insights into the spread of diseases, the understanding of how contagion and diffusion depend on the structure of our networks will serve as a starting point for comprehending the more complex spread of ideas, financial contagions, inequality in employment and wages, and lots of other subjects concerning how our networks work.
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