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Balkans and Anatolia (14th – mid-15th c.)Nature and disasters

The Black Death in Constantinople

In 1347 the plague that had broken out among the Golden Horde troops besieging Caffa reached Constantinople, probably with Genoese ships from the Crimea, making the Byzantine capital one of the first great cities of the Mediterranean struck by the Black Death. From there it spread by sea to the Aegean islands, Thessaloniki, Trebizond and Alexandria; Emperor John VI Kantakouzenos, whose youngest son died in the epidemic, left a famous description of the disease.

Date
1347year known
Place
Constantinopletoday: Istanbul, Turkey · Balkans and Anatolia
Participants
Byzantine Empire, John VI Kantakouzenos
Threads
Balkans and Anatolia (14th – mid-15th c.)
Also known as
Plague of Constantinople (1347); Чума в Константинополе (1347)

The epidemic struck a city exhausted by the civil war of 1341–1347, which had ended only in February with John VI Kantakouzenos’ entry into the capital. Accounts differ on the season — the spring or the summer of 1347 — but agree that the disease came by sea, along the Black Sea routes that linked Caffa with the Genoese colony of Pera across the Golden Horn. Among the victims was Kantakouzenos’ thirteen-year-old son Andronikos. In his History the emperor described the disease — the lung infection, chest pains, coughing of blood and burning thirst, in which many modern scholars recognise the pneumonic form of plague — modelling his account on Thucydides’ description of the plague of Athens; the historian Nikephoros Gregoras, writing to Demetrios Kydones, described the rising death toll, the helplessness of physicians and the panic of the citizens.

In the same year the plague reached Lemnos, Euboea and Crete, Thessaloniki, Trebizond and the Venetian ports of Modon and Coron, and in the autumn a ship from Constantinople carried it to Alexandria. The losses shrank the empire’s tax and recruiting base and helped Stefan Dušan of Serbia to seize Byzantine strongholds in Macedonia, Epirus and Thessaly in 1347–1348. The disease returned again and again: according to Costas Tsiamis and colleagues, Byzantine and Italian sources record nine major waves of plague in the empire between 1347 and 1453, and Constantinople was the city most often affected.

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Connections

Causes and preconditions

  • Plague strikes the siege of Caffa1346 · Eastern EuropeThe plague reached Constantinople in 1347 by sea from the Crimea, where it had broken out at the siege of Caffa

Consequences

Part of

  • The Black Death1346–1353 · Western and Central EuropeConstantinople was one of the first great cities of the Mediterranean struck by the pandemic, a few months before Messina

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Same place

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Other regions, within a year of this event

Western and Central Europe

Eastern Europe

Middle East and Egypt

Africa

Central and Northern Asia

South Asia

East Asia

Southeast Asia and Oceania

North America

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The same period

134714th century

Sources

  1. Wikipedia (English): Black Death
  2. Wikipedia (English): John VI Kantakouzenos
  3. Wikipedia (English): Byzantine civil war of 1341–1347
  4. Wikipedia (Russian): Чёрная смерть
  5. Bartsocas C. S. Two Fourteenth Century Greek Descriptions of the “Black Death” // Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences. — 1966. — Vol. 21, no. 4. — P. 394–400.
  6. Tsiamis C., Poulakou-Rebelakou E., Tsakris A., Petridou E. Epidemic waves of the Black Death in the Byzantine Empire (1347–1453 AD) // Le Infezioni in Medicina. — 2011. — Vol. 19, no. 3. — P. 193–201
  7. Byrne J. P. Encyclopedia of the Black Death. — Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2012. — P. 87.