This weapon was used much earlier than the scale of its effectiveness was understood. There is evidence that it was used by Hannibal. Documentary evidence tells in detail about the creative variability of using this option for neutralizing the enemy in the old days.
Gadami wanted to lime
The first story about the practical use of biological weapons can be considered the memoirs of the Roman historian Cornelius Nepot (up to 99 BC). He argued that the Carthaginian general Hannibal Barak defeated the Pergamon king Eumenes by means of sophisticated military cunning - at a certain point in the decisive battle of the warring squadrons, as Cornelius Nepos wrote, Hannibal's soldiers showered the enemy with clay pots with poisonous snakes teeming in them.
According to the ancient Roman historian, this strategic step was initially perceived by the warriors of Eumenes with humor. But after most of the soldiers of the Eumenian army understood what they were dealing with, the enemy fled, the resistance of the Pergamon army was eventually overcome.
"Plague on both our homes": Janibek's tactics and the consequences of "Night of Sorrow"
In the XIV century, the Golden Horde Khan Janibek, among whose subjects at that time the plague was already raging, during the storming of the Genoese fortress, Kafa began to throw the corpses of his fellow tribesmen, who died from the plague, into the besieged city with the help of catapults. This use of biological weapons was described by the notary of the Italian city of Piacenza, Gabriel de Mussi, who witnessed this action. Subsequently, he moved from Kafa to Sicily.
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Sources citing Gabriel de Moussi are inclined to believe that he himself, who is unlikely to have survived after arriving in Italy (1347), as well as his fellow tribesmen who then came from Kafa, could well have brought the so-called "Black Death" to Europe (plague), which mowed down thousands of Europeans over the next several years.
… At the beginning of the 16th century, the Aztecs put up a serious resistance to the Spanish conquistadors-conquerors, arranging for them the famous "Night of Sorrow" (an unsuccessful campaign against the capital of the Indian empire of Tenochtitlan in the summer of 1520, as a result of which Cortes was forced to leave the city with his army). Bernal Diaz del Castillo, an eyewitness to these events, later described them. His testimonies (as well as the opinions of a number of modern historians) differ from the widespread version of the death of a large number of Aztecs from a smallpox epidemic, allegedly caused by contact with infected gifts received from the Spaniards. Castillo writes that in this case, the violent actions on the part of the conquistadors were of decisive importance.
Infected Blankets from Amherst
This famous story of the pacification of North American Indians in the British colony (modern areas of the states of Illinois and Ohio, as well as the territory of the Great Lakes) in the second half of the 18th century is known for the fact that the main military leader who led the suppression of the uprising of the indigenous inhabitants of these areas, British General Jeffrey Amherst (named after him, by the way, then the city in Massachusetts was named), presented "for the purpose of reconciliation" the Delaware Indians with blankets infected with smallpox. As a result, the epidemic killed thousands of indigenous people in North America.
This is how Amherst University of Massachusetts presents the story. Citing information from Elizabeth Fenn's book Biological Warfare in North America: Before Jeffrey Amherst, they cite evidence that Native Americans are not the only possessors of the knowledge and applicants of biological warfare technologies using the smallpox virus. Nevertheless, the official website of the university cites excerpts from other publications by American historians, from which it follows that Jeffrey Amherst nevertheless gave orders for the deliberate infection of the Delaware.
Ban at the beginning of the twentieth century
The use of biological weapons was formally banned by the Geneva Convention in 1925. Three years later, the USSR also ratified the Geneva Protocol. At the same time, the Soviet Union put forward 2 conditions: to reckon in this case only with those states that acted in this way; to use biological weapons against the enemy, who was the first to do this, showing external aggression against the USSR.
Nikolay Syromyatnikov