The Black Death reaches Rus’

Russian chroniclers had recorded the great pestilence of 1346 in the Horde, but it did not then cross into Rus’. The plague came six years later from the north-west, after it had spread across Europe — according to the historian Ole Benedictow, probably from the area of present-day Latvia. By the summer of 1352 it was raging in Pskov. The terrified Pskovians sent for Archbishop Vasily Kalika of Novgorod to bless them; he came, but on the way home he died on the river Uza on 3 July 1352.

In Novgorod, the chronicler writes, the pestilence began at the Dormition (15 August 1352) and lasted until Easter (24 March 1353). Its sign was that a person coughed up blood and died on the third day, and he believed that it went over the whole land. The later Nikon Chronicle names Smolensk, Kiev, Chernigov and Suzdal among the stricken towns and says that in Glukhov not a single person was left alive, and the same at Beloozero. The chronicles give no overall death toll.

In Moscow, in the spring of 1353, Metropolitan Theognostus died on 11 March, Grand Prince Simeon's two young sons in the same month, Simeon himself on 27 April and his brother Andrei of Serpukhov on 6 June. These deaths are usually attributed to the plague, although the historian N. S. Borisov points out that the chronicles do not name the disease in Moscow and that the aged metropolitan may have died a natural death. The throne passed to Simeon's brother Ivan II. The plague returned to Rus’ again and again in the decades that followed, the next time in 1364–1365 from the Volga.