Timeline of the Black Death
The Black Death's spread from Central Asia and the Crimea in 1346 across the Middle East, North Africa and Europe to 1353, its social and religious consequences, and recurrences of plague through the Moscow epidemic of 1770 – 1772.
- Category
- Medicine & Health
- Events
- 27 events 1346 – 1772
- Generated
- by claude-opus-5-5
1346: Plague breaks out in the Golden Horde
Russian chronicles and Italian accounts record a deadly pestilence among the peoples of the Golden Horde, around its capital, Sarai, on the lower Volga, and at Tana, on the Sea of Azov. Its source probably lay farther east: ancient DNA published in 2022 from graves near Lake Issyk-Kul in Kyrgyzstan, whose tombstones blame "pestilence" for deaths in 1338 – 1339, yielded a Yersinia pestis strain ancestral to those that caused the pandemic. Claims that it began in China lack clear evidence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death#Origin1346: Golden Horde besieges Caffa as plague spreads
Jani Beg, khan of the Golden Horde, renewed his siege of the Genoese port of Caffa (now Feodosia) in Crimea as plague spread through his lands. Gabriele de' Mussi, a Piacenza notary who was not there, wrote that plague struck the besiegers, who hurled corpses over the walls, and that fugitives carried it to Italy. Hannah Barker argued in 2021 that he conflated two sieges, that plague reached Caffa only after the siege was lifted, and that it crossed the Black Sea with grain ships once trade embargoes ended in 1347.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Caffa1347: Plague reaches Constantinople
Carried by ships from the Black Sea, plague reached the Byzantine capital and raged there for about a year. Emperor John VI Kantakouzenos, whose youngest son Andronikos died in the outbreak, later wrote an account of it modeled on Thucydides' description of the plague of Athens, noting how the disease traveled by ship from one port to the next.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_VI_Kantakouzenos1347: Genoese galleys bring plague to Messina
According to the Franciscan chronicler Michele da Piazza, writing about a decade later, 12 Genoese galleys entered the harbor of Messina, Sicily, at the beginning of October carrying a disease that quickly spread to the townspeople. The ships were driven out and fleeing residents carried plague across Sicily; it was the first recorded outbreak in western Europe, and within months it was spreading through mainland Italy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death_in_Italy1348: Plague reaches the papal court at Avignon
Having entered France at Marseille in November 1347, plague struck Avignon, then the seat of the papacy, in January. The papal physician Guy de Chauliac, who stayed and said he caught the disease and recovered, later described in his "Chirurgia magna" (1363) a first phase with fever and spitting of blood that killed within three days and a longer one with buboes in the armpits and groin, now recognized as pneumonic and bubonic plague.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_de_Chauliac1348: Plague lands in England at Melcombe
A ship from Gascony brought plague to Melcombe, now part of Weymouth in Dorset, shortly before June 24, according to the Grey Friars' chronicle of King's Lynn. It reached London by November and all of England by the summer of 1349; most modern estimates of England's losses fall between 40 and 60 percent. DNA studies published in 2010 and 2011, including a draft genome from London's East Smithfield plague cemetery, confirmed the bacterium Yersinia pestis as the cause.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death_in_England1348: Clement VI rejects blaming Jews for the plague
As rumors spread that Jews were poisoning wells, mobs killed Jews at Toulon in April and in other towns of Provence and Catalonia. Pope Clement VI issued bulls in July and September declaring the charge false, since Jews were dying of plague like everyone else, and ordering clergy to protect them, but they had little effect beyond Avignon; that autumn, "confessions" extracted by torture from Jews in Savoy were copied and sent from town to town.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Jews_during_the_Black_Death1348: Damascus holds a joint procession against plague
Plague spread from Egypt through Gaza into Syria in the spring and summer. In Damascus in late July, according to the traveler Ibn Battuta, the Mamluk governor Arghun Shah ordered three days of fasting, after which Muslims, Jews carrying the Torah and Christians carrying the Gospels walked together to the Mosque of the Footprints outside the city to pray for relief.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death_in_the_Middle_East#Syria1348: Plague devastates Cairo
Plague, which had arrived at Alexandria by ship in the autumn of 1347, reached Cairo, capital of the Mamluk Sultanate and then the largest city in the Mediterranean world, by September; the boy sultan an-Nasir Hasan withdrew from the city until late December. The historian Michael Dols estimated that a third to a half of Egypt's people died, and plague returned to Egypt dozens of times before the Ottoman conquest of 1517.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death_in_the_Middle_East#Egypt1348: Paris physicians blame a planetary conjunction
Commissioned by King Philip VI of France, the masters of the medical faculty of the University of Paris reported in October that the distant cause of the epidemic was a conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter and Mars in Aquarius on March 20, 1345, which had corrupted the air. Astrology and miasma theory, the idea that disease spreads through foul air, remained standard learned explanations of plague for centuries; its bacterium was identified only in 1894.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paris_Concilium1349: Strasbourg's Jewish residents massacred
On February 14, before plague had reached Strasbourg, Jews were burned on a wooden platform in their cemetery after false accusations of poisoning wells. A guild revolt had ousted magistrates who had protected them; the chronicler Jacob von Königshofen reported that those who accepted baptism were spared and debts owed to Jews were canceled. Massacres from 1348 to 1351 destroyed hundreds of Jewish communities across the Holy Roman Empire and beyond.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strasbourg_massacre1349: Edward III caps wages after the plague
With Parliament unable to meet because of the plague, King Edward III of England and his council issued the Ordinance of Labourers on June 18 requiring able-bodied people under 60 without land or a trade to serve for pre-plague wages and forbidding employers to pay more. Parliament reinforced it with the Statute of Labourers in 1351, but labor shortages kept pushing wages up, and enforcement of the laws became a lasting grievance among peasants and workers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinance_of_Labourers_13491349: A ship from England brings plague to Bergen
According to an Icelandic annal, a cog from England put in at Bergen, its crew died, and townspeople began dying once its cargo came ashore; plague may have reached Oslo a little earlier, in late spring. Studies of abandoned farms suggest that, after repeated outbreaks, Norway's population around 1500 was more than 60 percent below its level before the plague.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death_in_Norway1349: Clement VI condemns the flagellant processions
Bands of flagellants, penitents who whipped themselves in public to turn away God's anger, spread through Germany, the Low Countries and neighboring lands, marching from town to town; in some places their processions encouraged attacks on Jews. At the urging of the University of Paris, Pope Clement VI condemned the movement in letters dated October 20, and it quickly dwindled.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flagellant1350: Plague kills Alfonso XI at Gibraltar
Plague broke out early in the year in the camp of King Alfonso XI of Castile, who had besieged Muslim-held Gibraltar since August 1349. He refused to abandon the siege and died of the disease in late March, after which his army withdrew, carrying his body to Seville.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_siege_of_Gibraltar1353: Plague reaches Moscow and kills Simeon the Proud
Entering the Russian lands at Pskov in 1352, apparently from the Baltic rather than from the Golden Horde, plague reached Novgorod later that year and then Moscow, where it killed Grand Prince Simeon Ivanovich, two of his sons, his brother Andrey and Metropolitan Theognostus. The first wave, not called the Black Death until long afterward, is estimated to have killed 30 to 60 percent of Europe's people, though pollen evidence published in 2022 suggests some regions suffered little.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death_in_Russia~1353: Boccaccio completes the Decameron
Giovanni Boccaccio's collection of 100 tales, told by seven young women and three young men sheltering in the countryside outside Florence, opens with a description of the epidemic of 1348 in the city: the sick abandoned by their families, mass graves and the breakdown of law and custom. Written in the Florentine vernacular in the years after the plague, it influenced later writers including Geoffrey Chaucer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Decameron1360 – 1363: Plague returns in the pestis secunda
The first major recurrence after the Black Death, known in England as the pestis secunda, or second pestilence, may have killed about a fifth of the people of England and of parts of Tuscany; in England it fell especially heavily on infants and young men. Plague went on recurring for more than three centuries; in a 2024 study of manorial records, the historian Philip Slavin argued that this second wave did more lasting demographic damage in England and Wales than the Black Death itself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death_in_England#Recurrences1377: Ragusa imposes a 30-day isolation on arrivals
On July 27, the Great Council of the Republic of Ragusa (modern Dubrovnik, Croatia) decreed that people coming from plague-stricken places could not enter the city or its territory until they had spent 30 days in isolation, the trentino. The measure is often cited as the first formal quarantine; the later 40-day period gave the Venetian word quarantena, the origin of "quarantine".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarantine#Medieval1377: Ibn Khaldun reflects on the plague's devastation
Ibn Khaldun, who as a teenager lost his parents and several of his teachers when plague reached Tunis in 1348, completed a draft of the Muqaddimah, the introduction to his universal history. In it he wrote that a "destructive plague" had struck civilization in East and West, devastating nations, weakening dynasties and emptying cities, so that "civilization decreased with the decrease of mankind".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muqaddimah1381: English rebels rise in the Peasants' Revolt
Resentment of serfdom, of the labor laws enforced since 1349 and of a third poll tax erupted at Brentwood, Essex, on May 30. Rebels from Essex and Kent entered London, killed Chancellor Simon Sudbury and Treasurer Robert Hales and demanded an end to serfdom; the 14-year-old King Richard II agreed, the rebel leader Wat Tyler was killed at Smithfield, and the concessions were revoked. Historians debate how far the revolt hastened the decline of serfdom, which faded in England over the following decades.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peasants%27_Revolt1423: Venice opens a permanent plague hospital
Venice, which had appointed three officials to guard public health early in the Black Death, turned the lagoon island of Santa Maria di Nazareth into a hospital for plague victims, often described as the first permanent lazaretto, though some accounts date it to 1403. Its name, echoing Nazareth and the biblical Lazarus, spread with the institution: Genoa adopted the Venetian system in 1467, and Marseille converted a leper hospital into a lazaretto in 1476.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazzaretto_Vecchio1424 – 1425: A Paris mural depicts the dance of death
A mural painted on a wall of the Cemetery of the Holy Innocents in Paris, now lost, is often considered the earliest recorded visual example of the Danse Macabre, in which the dead summon a pope, an emperor, a king, a child and a laborer to dance to the grave. Its origins may lie in illustrated sermon texts, and historians link the motif's popularity to an age of recurring plague, famine and war; versions followed in Basel, Lübeck and elsewhere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danse_Macabre1656: Fürst's print depicts Rome's beaked plague doctor
During a plague epidemic in Rome, part of an outbreak that killed about half the people of Naples, the publisher Paulus Fürst issued the satirical print "Doctor Schnabel von Rom", showing a Roman plague physician in a long coat and a beaked mask filled with aromatic substances to ward off miasma, or foul air. The costume is first described in 17th-century sources, and there is no evidence that it was worn during the Black Death.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_doctor_costume1665 – 1666: Great Plague kills about a quarter of Londoners
London's last major plague epidemic, probably arriving from the Netherlands, killed an estimated 100,000 people, almost a quarter of the population; the weekly Bills of Mortality recorded 68,596 plague deaths in its worst year, an undercount. Infected households were shut up under guard. The Great Fire of September 1666 is often credited with ending the plague, but it had largely subsided before the fire, which burned mainly the walled City rather than the worst-hit suburbs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Plague_of_London1720 – 1722: A merchant ship brings plague to Marseille
The Grand-Saint-Antoine arrived from the Levant on May 25 with plague aboard and was placed in quarantine, but contact with its crew and its cargo of cloth, wanted by merchants for the Beaucaire fair, spread infection into the city. Estimates put deaths at roughly 40,000 to 50,000 of Marseille's 90,000 people and tens of thousands more in Provence, where a dry-stone "plague wall" was built to contain it; it was France's last major plague epidemic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Plague_of_Marseille1770 – 1772: Muscovites riot as plague peaks
Plague carried from the Moldavian front of the Russo-Turkish War reached Moscow by the end of the year and peaked in September 1771, killing between about 52,000 and 100,000 people in the city. Crowds rioted against quarantines and killed Archbishop Ambrose, who had removed a revered icon to stop mass gatherings. It was the last large plague epidemic in central Russia, though plague persisted in the Ottoman Empire and Egypt until the mid-19th century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1770%E2%80%931772_Russian_plague