“...Neither the doctors then nor the historians later figured out the routes along which the plague invaded the blessed Astrakhan province. More recently, the war between Russia and Turkey had died down, and they thought that the plague was brought by the Cossacks who fought near Kars, and near Kars it appeared among the Turkish soldiers, brought by them from Mesopotamia; others claimed that the plague sailed along the waves of the Caspian Sea from Persia, where not so long ago it had a good stay in the city of Rasht...”