The Black Death
1346 O.S. – 1353 O.S.49 items
medievalplagueThe Black Death, city by city
In 1346 plague broke out in the Golden Horde, on the steppe north of the Black Sea. Seven years later it was killing the grand prince of Moscow. In between it travelled by galley, cart and river barge from Caffa to Constantinople, Alexandria, Messina and Marseille, and from there to almost every town between Cairo and Bergen. This timeline follows it month by month across that map, and follows what people did in its path: the physicians, the chroniclers, the flagellants, the killers of Jews, the lawmakers.
How it is built
Each regional wave is a band, drawn over a rough outline of the land it struck: the Golden Horde, Egypt and Syria, Italy, France and Iberia, the British Isles, the Holy Roman Empire, Scandinavia and Russia. Events mark arrivals and what happened in them. Arrival dates are the ones the chroniclers give or that Ole Benedictow reconstructs; where scholars differ, the notes say so.
Every European date is in the Julian calendar, which Latin Europe and Russia kept; English documents begin their year on 25 March, and the bishop’s letter of “10 January 1348” shows here in 1349. The Egyptian and Syrian events are dated in the Islamic calendar of the Arabic chroniclers who recorded them.
How many died
Nobody counted. The common range is 25 to 50 million deaths in Europe, 30 to 60 per cent of its people. Ole Benedictow’s reconstruction sits at the top: about 60 per cent, some 50 million of 80 million. Many historians give a third to a half. Every figure below names who gave it.
What it was
The cause was argued for a century after the bacterium was found in 1894. In 2011 Kirsten Bos and colleagues rebuilt the genome of Yersinia pestis from victims buried at East Smithfield in London, settling that it was plague. In 2022 Maria Spyrou’s team traced the strain’s ancestor to a cemetery in the Tian Shan, in today’s Kyrgyzstan, where gravestones record a “pestilence” in 1338–1339, before this timeline begins.
Threads to follow
plague: where it arrived, and wheneyewitness: chroniclers who wrote as it happenedmedicine: what physicians saw, advised and blamedreligion: popes, bishops, pilgrims and flagellantsscapegoats: the massacres of Jewish communitieslabour: the wage laws that followed the dying
And I, Agnolo di Tura, called the Fat, buried my five children with my own hands. — Siena, 1348
Items
Plague in Jani Beg’s army at Caffa
Plague reaches Constantinople
Plague reaches Alexandria
Twelve Genoese galleys at Messina
Plague lands at Marseille
Plague in the papal city
Venice appoints three sages for the public health
Laura dies in Avignon
The Jews of Toulon are attacked
A letter from Avignon
Pistoia’s ordinances for a time of mortality
Plague reaches Siena
Plague lands at Melcombe
Gentile da Foligno dies in Perugia
Giovanni Villani dies mid-sentence
Clement VI defends the Jews
Princess Joan dies at Bordeaux
Confessions extracted at Chillon
Ibn Khaldun loses his parents in Tunis
The Paris medical faculty blames the stars
Plague reaches London
“Even to a woman”: a bishop on confession
The Jews of Strasbourg are burned
Ibn al-Wardi dies of plague in Aleppo
The Jews of Erfurt are killed
The Ordinance of Labourers
The Scots swear by the “foul death of England”
An English ship brings plague to Bergen
Friar Clyn leaves parchment
Petrarch writes to “Socrates”
Flagellants in London
Clement VI condemns the flagellants
The Jews of Nuremberg are killed
Alfonso XI dies at the siege of Gibraltar
- ≈ 1 year
Archbishop Vasily of Novgorod dies after blessing Pskov
Simeon the Proud dies in Moscow