How plague travelled from Central Asia along the trade routes of the Mongol world, reached Europe through the Crimea in 1347, and killed perhaps a third to a half of Europe's people in five years.
Stop 01 · 1338–1339
Out of Central Asia
The Black Death was plague, caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, which lives in wild rodents and spreads mainly through the bites of their fleas; in its pneumonic form it also passes from person to person through the air. In the Chüy Valley near Lake Issyk-Kul, in today's Kyrgyzstan, the Syriac-inscribed gravestones of a Christian community record a surge of deaths from 'pestilence' in 1338–1339. In 2022 scientists recovered plague DNA from teeth in two of these cemeteries, Kara-Djigach and Burana, and showed that the strain there was the direct ancestor of the one that ravaged Europe. How it travelled west is still debated; many historians point to the trade routes of the Mongol khanates.
Yersinia pestis (200 × magnification), the bacterium that causes plaguePhoto Credit= Content Providers= CDC/ Courtesy of Larry Stauffer, Oregon State Public… · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
The Black Death was plague, caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, which lives in wild rodents and spreads mainly through the bites of their fleas; in its pneumonic form it also passes from person to person through the air. In the Chüy Valley near Lake Issyk-Kul, in today's Kyrgyzstan, the Syriac-inscribed gravestones of a Christian community record a surge of deaths from 'pestilence' in 1338–1339. In 2022 scientists recovered plague DNA from teeth in two of these cemeteries, Kara-Djigach and Burana, and showed that the strain there was the direct ancestor of the one that ravaged Europe. How it travelled west is still debated; many historians point to the trade routes of the Mongol khanates.
Caffa, today Feodosia, was a Genoese trading port in the Crimea, one of a string of Italian colonies around the Black Sea. After a brawl between Italians and Muslims at Tana in 1343, Jani Beg, khan of the Golden Horde, besieged Caffa, and in 1345 he renewed the siege. In 1346 plague broke out among his soldiers, and by 1347 he had to give up. An Italian notary, Gabriele de' Mussi, later claimed the dying besiegers catapulted corpses over the walls. Historians doubt that was how the disease got in, since rats and their fleas could cross the siege lines anyway, but Italian ships leaving Caffa and other Black Sea ports carried it south.
Genoese ships fleeing the Black Sea brought plague to Constantinople in the summer of 1347; among the dead was the 13-year-old son of Emperor John VI Kantakouzenos. By autumn a single ship carrying slaves had taken it on to Alexandria. In October, twelve Genoese galleys brought it to Messina in Sicily, and by late 1347 it was in Marseille. Galleys from Caffa reached Genoa and Venice in January 1348; Pisa, struck a few weeks later, became the gateway to northern Italy, and in April ships from Sicily carried it to Tunis. Ships were the fastest way for the disease to travel, and every port city on the Mediterranean was within reach.
From Alexandria the plague spread across northern Egypt in the spring of 1348 and reached Cairo in September. Cairo, capital of the Mamluk Sultanate, was then the largest city in the Mediterranean world. The young sultan an-Nasir Hasan fled, and about a third of its people died, some 200,000 by one estimate; whole quarters stood empty for a century. In Upper Egypt, the district of Asyut went from 6,000 taxpayers to 116. In Damascus, Muslims and Christians walked together in processions of prayer. The traveller Ibn Battuta crossed Syria and Palestine as it raged, and found in Jerusalem that almost everyone he had known there was dead. The young Ibn Khaldun lost both his parents.
In 1348 the plague spread inland. It reached Florence in March: a city of 110,000 to 120,000 people in 1338 had about 50,000 by 1351. Giovanni Boccaccio set his Decameron among ten young people sheltering from it in a villa outside the town. In Siena, the chronicler Agnolo di Tura wrote, the dead were thrown into pits and no one wept. Paris lost about half its 100,000 people. Avignon, where the Pope lived, was struck, and so was the Crown of Aragon from the spring, Barcelona with it. People had no idea what caused it. Some blamed corrupted air, many God's anger; in many towns, Jews were falsely accused of poisoning the wells.
Fear turned to murder. In April 1348 the Jewish quarter of Toulon was sacked and forty Jews killed in their homes; attacks in Barcelona and other Catalan towns followed. Some Jews were tortured until they 'confessed' to poisoning wells. Pope Clement VI issued two bulls in 1348 calling the charge false, since Jews were dying of the plague like everyone else, but in 1349 the killing spread along the Rhine: Basel and Freiburg in January, then Strasbourg on 14 February, where around 2,000 Jews were burned alive. Mainz and Cologne followed in August. By 1351 some 60 major and 150 smaller Jewish communities had been destroyed, and many survivors fled east to Poland.
Plague reached England in June 1348, when a seaman from Gascony came ashore at Melcombe, in Dorset, and London by the autumn. By the summer of 1349 it had covered the whole country, and modern estimates put the dead at 40 to 60 per cent of the people. In late summer 1349 a ship from England is said to have brought it to Bergen, in Norway; as its cargo was unloaded the crew began to die, then the townspeople. It spread north to Trondheim and on across Scandinavia, and Norway may have lost up to 60 per cent. It also moved east through the German lands, where Hamburg and Bremen lost at least 60 per cent. Iceland escaped until 1402.
The pandemic came full circle, reaching Pskov and Novgorod in 1352 and Moscow in 1353. On 27 April it killed the Grand Prince of Moscow, Simeon the Proud, and with him his two sons, his brother Andrey and Theognostus, head of the Russian church; another brother, Ivan II, took the throne. Between 1346 and 1353 the Black Death killed, by modern estimates, between a third and a half or more of Europe's population, perhaps 25 to 50 million people, and around a third of the Middle East's. Plague kept returning every few years for centuries: England lost about a fifth of its people again in 1361–1362, and the pandemic lingered in Europe until about 1750.
With so many workers dead, the survivors could demand higher wages and better terms, and move to find them. Rulers tried to freeze pay at pre-plague levels by law, as in England's Ordinance of Labourers of 1349 and Statute of Labourers of 1351. Peasant revolts followed: the Jacquerie in northern France in 1358 and, after a poll tax, the Peasants' Revolt in England in 1381. In much of western Europe serfdom faded, land was cheap and wages high, while in eastern Europe peasants were tied more tightly to the land. Some historians argue that the shock to Florence helped pave the way for the Renaissance, though most see many causes.