Black Death

• 1. Introduction

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  The Black Death killed as many as 50 million people, perhaps half of Europe's 14th-century population, between 1346 and 1353. In Siena, the chronicler Agnolo di Tura wrote that he buried his five children with his own hands. Father abandoned child, he recorded, and none could be found to bury the dead for money or friendship. Across Europe great pits were dug and piled deep with the multitude of dead. So many died that all believed it was the end of the world. This was the second great natural disaster to strike Europe during the Late Middle Ages, following the Great Famine of 1315 to 1317. The disease is caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, spread by fleas and through the air. But where did it begin, and how did a localized rodent illness reach across three continents? Who first gave it the name we use today? And why did so many survivors believe the world they knew had ended?

• 2. Hunt For Patient Zero

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  In 2022, researchers published an article titled The source of the Black Death in fourteenth-century central Eurasia. They pointed to two cemeteries in the Chuy Valley near Lake Issyk-Kul in modern Kyrgyzstan. The graves there carried tombstones with Syriac inscriptions, giving the name of the deceased, the year of death, and often the cause. Those inscriptions recorded a spike in deaths due to pestilence in 1338 to 1339. Teeth from seven individuals at the cemeteries of Kara-Djigach and Burana yielded DNA evidence of Yersinia pestis. This strain in Kyrgyzstan predates and was the direct ancestor of the strains that struck Europe and the Middle East starting in 1346 to 1347. Genetic analysis suggests the bacterium itself evolved roughly 7,000 years ago, at the beginning of the Neolithic, with flea-mediated strains emerging around 3,800 years ago. Long before that 2022 discovery, scholars had argued over the origin. Mark Achtman's team once placed it in or near China over 2,600 years ago, while a later team led by Galina Eroshenko pointed to the Tian Shan mountains on the border between Kyrgyzstan and China. The findings settled one debate while opening another about how the disease travelled west.

• 3. The Road From The Steppe

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  Caffa, a Genoese trading port in Crimea, sits at the heart of the European outbreak story. During a protracted siege in 1345 to 1346, the Golden Horde army of Jani Beg suffered heavy casualties from the disease. The chronicler Gabriele de' Mussi recorded that the Mongols catapulted plague-infected corpses over the city walls, an early instance of biological warfare. As the disease took hold, Genoese traders fled across the Black Sea to Constantinople, where the disease first arrived in Europe in the summer of 1347. The epidemic in Constantinople killed the 13-year-old son of the Byzantine emperor John VI Kantakouzenos, who wrote a description of the disease modelled on Thucydides's account of the Plague of Athens. Twelve Genoese galleys carried plague to Sicily in October 1347, and the disease spread rapidly across the island. Once ashore, the Black Death mainly spread from person to person as pneumonic plague. That explains the quick inland spread, faster than rat fleas causing bubonic plague would allow. From Italy the disease moved northwest, striking France, Spain, Portugal, and England by June 1348. It reached Norway in 1349 when a ship landed at Askoy, then spread to Bjorgvin, modern Bergen. By 1352 it reached northern Russia, arriving in Moscow in 1353.

• 4. Three Faces Of The Disease

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  Buboes, or gavocciolos, in the groin, neck, and armpits were the most commonly noted symptom, oozing pus and bleeding when opened. Boccaccio described tumours that grew as large as a common apple, others as an egg, followed by black spots that he called an infallible token of approaching death. Fever ran from 38 to 41 degrees Celsius, with headaches, aching joints, nausea, and vomiting. Left untreated, 80 percent of bubonic victims die within eight days, most people dying two to seven days after infection. Lodewijk Heyligen, whose master Cardinal Giovanni Colonna died of plague in 1348, noted a distinct form that infected the lungs. This pneumonic plague brought fever, cough, and blood-tinged sputum that turned bright red, with a mortality rate of 90 to 95 percent. Septicemic plague is the least common of the three forms, with an untreated mortality rate near 100 percent. Its high fevers and purple skin patches came on so fast that there was often no time for buboes to develop at all. The bacterium responsible would not be identified for centuries, when Alexandre Yersin, a pupil of Louis Pasteur, discovered it during an epidemic in Hong Kong in 1894.

• 5. Counting The Dead

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  Twenty-three million, eight hundred and forty thousand dead. That was the figure agents for Pope Clement VI calculated for Christian Europe as early as 1351, a mortality of about 31 percent against a preplague population of roughly 75 million. Estimates of overall mortality range from 25 to 60 percent of Europe's population. Ole J. Benedictow proposes 60 percent for Europe as a whole, with up to 80 percent given the poor nutrition of the 14th century. Half of Paris's population of 100,000 died. Florence fell from between 110,000 and 120,000 inhabitants in 1338 to 50,000 in 1351, and its tax records suggest 80 percent of the city's population died within four months in 1348. At least 60 percent of the populations of Hamburg and Bremen perished. A 2022 study of pollen samples from 1250 to 1450 complicated the picture, finding high mortality in parts of Scandinavia, France, western Germany, Greece, and central Italy, but uninterrupted agricultural growth in central and eastern Europe, Iberia, and Ireland. The authors concluded the pandemic was immensely destructive in some areas but in others had a far lighter touch. In Cairo, a city of as many as 600,000 and possibly the largest west of China, between a third and 40 percent of inhabitants died within eight months. The Nile was choked with corpses, and the historian al-Maqrizi described the abundant work for grave-diggers.

• 6. Toppling The Khanates

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  The Mongol Empire, founded by Genghis Khan, had reached its maximum extent and fractured into four khanates by the time the plague emerged in Central Asia in the late 1330s. The Black Death became a catalyst for its fall. The Chagatai Khanate served as ground zero for the genetic ancestor of the disease, the focal point from which the strains that devastated the Ilkhanate, the Golden Horde, and Europe all radiated. As the geographic heart of the Silk Road, with high-speed postal stations known as Yam and protected merchant caravans, it had unintentionally created the perfect laboratory for a rodent-borne disease to spread across continents. The Golden Horde carried the disease from Central Asia to the Mediterranean. In 1346 the plague reached its territories along the Volga River and devastated the capital, Sarai. Mass death of the ruling elite triggered a protracted civil war known as the Great Troubles, beginning in 1359, which weakened Mongol authority over its Russian vassals and helped the Grand Duchy of Moscow rise. The Ilkhanate's collapse after the death of its ruler Abu Sa'id in 1335 has been linked to the outbreak, though no mass graves from the early 1330s have been found there. In 1368, the fall of the Yuan Dynasty in China came from a combination of plague, famine, and flooding that fueled the Red Turban Rebellion and established the Ming Dynasty.

• 7. Naming The Pestilence

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  Den sorte dod. That Danish phrase gives us the first attested use of the term Black Death for this pandemic, in 1755. At the time of the 1347 outbreak, no European language called the plague black. Contemporary writers used Latin terms like pestis, pestilentia, epidemia, and mortalitas. In English before the 18th century, people spoke of the pestilence, the great pestilence, the plague, or the great death. The image of black death itself is far older. Homer used it in the Odyssey to describe the monster Scylla, with her mouths full of black Death. Seneca the Younger may have been the first to describe an epidemic as mors atra, though only in reference to lethal prognosis. In 1350, the Belgian astronomer Simon de Covino used the phrase mors nigra in a poem attributing the plague to a conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn. The historian Elizabeth Penrose, writing as Mrs Markham, applied black death to the 14th-century outbreak in 1823. Cardinal Francis Aidan Gasquet later traced the Latin name to a 1631 book on Danish history by J. I. Pontanus, who wrote that commonly and from its effects, they called it the black death.

• 8. A World Remade

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  Strasbourg, February 1349. About 2,000 Jews were murdered there, blamed for poisoning wells. By 1351-60 major and 150 smaller Jewish communities had been destroyed, and the communities in Mainz and Cologne were annihilated in August 1349. Many Jews relocated to Poland, where King Casimir the Great welcomed them. Survivors who escaped the persecutions found a transformed economy. Wages soared in response to a labour shortage, rents collapsed, and landowners substituted monetary rents for labour services to keep tenants. Lands grew more abundant, many people inherited property from dead relatives, and the power dynamics of the fiefs and city-states crumbled, destabilizing feudalism. The word quarantine has its roots in this period. In the city-state of Ragusa, modern Dubrovnik, a thirty-day isolation was imposed in 1377 on arrivals from plague-affected areas, later extended to forty days and named quarantino from the Italian word for forty. One theory holds that the devastation of Florence between 1348 and 1350 helped lead to the Renaissance, as familiarity with death made thinkers dwell more on life on Earth. The plague kept returning. According to Jean-Noel Biraben, it was present somewhere in Europe in every year between 1346 and 1671. The third pandemic, from 1855 to 1960, killed 10 million people in India alone, and in October 2017 the deadliest modern outbreak hit Madagascar, killing 170 people.