The supposed story of the Black Death racing across Asia was born from a misread medieval poem, not historical record. Scholars now reveal how a centuries-old literary trickster fooled generations of historians. Credit: AI/ScienceDaily.com Researchers have traced long-standing myths about the rapid spread of the Black Death across Asia to a single source from the fourteenth century. For centuries, depictions of the plague racing along the Silk Route, devastating cities and towns in its path,