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Western and Central Europe (14th – mid-15th c.)Nature and disasters

The Black Death

The great plague pandemic that swept Eurasia and North Africa in 1346–1353 reached western Europe in October 1347, when twelve Genoese galleys brought it to Messina. Within three years it had passed through Italy, France, Spain, England, Germany and Scandinavia, killing, by different historians’ estimates, between about 30 and 60 per cent of Europe’s population.

Date
1346–1353year known · duration: ≈ 7 years
Place
Messinatoday: Messina, Sicily, Italy · Western and Central Europe
Route
Messina → Florence → Paris → London
Participants
Republic of Genoa
Threads
Western and Central Europe (14th – mid-15th c.)
Also known as
Black Plague; Great Mortality; Great Pestilence; Pestilence of 1348; Atra mors; Чёрный мор; Великая чума; Моровое поветрие

The disease, caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, broke out in 1346 among the Golden Horde troops besieging the Genoese port of Caffa in the Crimea, and ships carried it to Constantinople and across the Mediterranean in 1347. Where the pandemic began is still debated: graves of 1338–1339 in the Chüy valley, with inscriptions naming “pestilence”, have yielded Y. pestis DNA, while Ole Benedictow placed its source in the plague focus north-west of the Caspian. At the beginning of October 1347, according to the Sicilian friar Michele da Piazza, twelve Genoese galleys put in at Messina; the plague spread over Sicily, reached Genoa and Venice in January 1348 and, through Pisa, the cities of Tuscany — Florence in the spring of 1348. By the summer it was in Paris and in the ports of Dorset in England, by the autumn in London; in 1348–1350 it moved through Germany, Scotland and Scandinavia, and in 1352 it reached northern Russia.

No exact figures exist, and mortality varied greatly from place to place. According to the historian Robert Gottfried, agents of Pope Clement VI put the number of dead in Christian Europe at 23,840,000 as early as 1351 — about 31 per cent of a population of some 75 million; Philip Daileader estimates that 45–50 per cent of Europeans died within four years, and Ole Benedictow about 60 per cent. Physicians were helpless; people looked for causes in the stars and in earthquakes, saw the plague as God’s punishment for sin, and many blamed the Jews, accused of poisoning wells: from 1348 to 1351 Jewish communities were massacred from Toulon and Barcelona to the Rhineland — in Strasbourg some 2,000 Jews were murdered in February 1349 — although Clement VI, in bulls of July and September 1348, declared the accusations false. Many Jews fled to Poland under Casimir the Great.

The plague returned again and again for centuries, and Europe’s population did not regain its early-14th-century level until the 16th century. Labour became scarce and wages rose; in England the Ordinance of Labourers (1349) and the Statute of Labourers (1351) tried to hold wages at pre-plague levels, feeding tensions that broke out in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. In 1377 the city of Ragusa (Dubrovnik) ordered a thirty-day isolation for arrivals from plague-stricken places; the period was later extended to forty days, which gave the word “quarantine”.

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Connections

Consequences

  • Peasants’ Revolt30 May 1381 – November 1381 · Western and Central Europethe labour shortage after the plague and the laws that tried to freeze wages fed the tensions behind the revolt

Includes

  • Plague strikes the siege of Caffa1346 · Eastern EuropeThe plague broke out among the Golden Horde troops besieging Genoese Caffa in 1346; from the Crimea it spread by sea — to Constantinople by the summer of 1347 — and in October 1347 twelve Genoese galleys brought it to Messina
  • The Black Death in Constantinople1347 · Balkans and AnatoliaConstantinople was one of the first great cities of the Mediterranean struck by the pandemic, a few months before Messina
  • Black Death in Cairo and Damascus1347–1349 · Middle East and EgyptThe same pandemic reached Alexandria in the autumn of 1347 and devastated Egypt and Syria in 1348–1349
  • The Black Death reaches Rus’1352–1353 · Eastern EuropeThe pandemic reached Pskov and Novgorod in 1352, coming from the north-west

Related events

  • Pax Mongolicac. 1250 – c. 1350 · Central and Northern Asiathe plague spread along trade routes that the Mongol empire had joined together — though its origin and route are debated — and its devastation helped to end the ‘Mongol peace’
  • Plague burials at Kara-Djigach in the Chüy valley1338–1339 · Central and Northern AsiaAncient DNA from the Kara-Djigach burials of 1338–1339 in the Chüy valley points to a strain ancestral to those of the Black Death (Spyrou et al., 2022)
  • Boccaccio writes the Decameronc. 1349 – c. 1353 · Western and Central Europethe frame story is set in Florence during the plague of 1348, which the introduction describes
  • Hundred Years’ War24 May 1337 – 19 October 1453 · Western and Central Europethe plague, which reached Paris in 1348, interrupted the fighting for several years

Same participants

Adjacent events in the thread

  • Avignon Papacy9 March 1309 – 17 January 1377 · Western and Central Europe

Meanwhile in the world

Other regions, within a year of this event

Eastern Europe

Balkans and Anatolia

Middle East and Egypt

Africa

Central and Northern Asia

South Asia

East Asia

Southeast Asia and Oceania

North America

Latin America

The same period

14th century

Sources

  1. Wikipedia (English): Black Death
  2. Wikipedia (English): Persecution of Jews during the Black Death
  3. Wikipedia (Russian): Чёрная смерть
  4. Benedictow O. J. The Black Death, 1346–1353: The Complete History. — Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2004.
  5. The Black Death / Transl. and ed. R. Horrox. — Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994.
  6. Spyrou M. A. et al. The source of the Black Death in fourteenth-century central Eurasia // Nature. — 2022. — Vol. 606. — P. 718–724.
  7. Wikidata: Q42005