Caused by a bacterium not identified until 1894, in Hong Kong, and named after the Swiss-French doctor who found it
Yersinia pestis, named for Alexandre Yersin.
History · Medieval
The Black Death
1346–1353
The great pandemic of medieval Europe
The plague pandemic that reached Europe from the Black Sea in 1347 and killed perhaps a third to a half of its population within six years. Its demographic shock broke the grip of serfdom in western Europe, drove up wages, emptied villages and left a permanent mark on European art, law and religion.
How to spot them
- ▸Clue patterns: a Crimean port under Mongol siege, ships docking at Messina in 1347, buboes in the groin and armpit
- ▸The bacterium was identified in Hong Kong in 1894 and named after its discoverer
- ▸England's outbreak peaked in 1348–49; a statute of 1351 tried to freeze wages
- ▸The beaked mask belongs to a later century, and the nursery rhyme link is a myth
What happened
Said to have entered Europe when besiegers catapulted their own dead over the walls of a Crimean port
Caffa (Kaffa), besieged by the Golden Horde; the story comes from Gabriele de' Mussi.
Arrived in Sicily in October 1347 aboard Genoese galleys
At Messina; it reached England the following summer, probably through Dorset.
An English statute of 1351 attempting to hold wages at pre-plague levels
The Statute of Labourers; resentment fed into the Peasants' Revolt of 1381.
A hundred tales told by ten young Florentines who have fled the city
Boccaccio's Decameron, framed by the 1348 outbreak in Florence.
Massacres of Jewish communities blamed for poisoning wells, notably at Strasbourg in 1349
Pope Clement VI issued bulls condemning the accusations.
Processions of penitents whipping themselves through the towns of Germany and the Low Countries
The flagellant movement, condemned by Clement VI in 1349.
Quick-fire facts
- •The pandemic swept Europe between 1347 and 1353, killing an estimated 30–60 per cent of the population — perhaps 25 to 50 million people.
- •The cause is the bacterium Yersinia pestis, identified by Alexandre Yersin in Hong Kong in 1894.
- •It is traditionally blamed on fleas carried by black rats, though person-to-person transmission by human ectoparasites is now also argued.
- •The three forms are bubonic (swollen lymph nodes, or buboes), pneumonic and septicaemic.
- •It entered Europe through Black Sea trade, reaching Messina in Sicily in October 1347.
- •It reached England in summer 1348 and peaked in 1348–49; the Statute of Labourers followed in 1351.
- •Boccaccio's Decameron is set among Florentines who have fled the 1348 outbreak.
- •It triggered flagellant movements and pogroms against Jewish communities, including the Strasbourg massacre of 1349.
- •The beaked plague-doctor mask dates from the seventeenth century and is attributed to Charles de Lorme.
- •The link between 'Ring a Ring o' Roses' and the plague is a twentieth-century myth; the Derbyshire village of Eyam quarantined itself in 1665–66, during the Great Plague, not the Black Death.
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Sources
- John Hatcher — The Black Death: A Personal History
- John Kelly — The Great Mortality
- Encyclopaedia Britannica — Black Death