Black Death

The Black Death is the name commonly given to the devastating plague epidemic that reached Europe in the fourteenth century. Encyclopaedia Britannica dates its main European outbreak to 1347–1351; a broader chronology places the pandemic in 1346–1353. It is often treated as the opening catastrophe of the second plague pandemic, a long era of recurring outbreaks that continued in parts of Europe for centuries. The term therefore describes a major historical wave, not every later epidemic of plague.

Ancient DNA and pathogen proteins recovered from medieval plague burials provide direct evidence that Yersinia pestis caused the Black Death. For plague today, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention describes infection as usually following a bite from an infected rodent flea and, less often, direct contact with an infected animal; this modern pattern is not by itself a complete reconstruction of medieval transmission. A 2022 genomic study found the bacterium in people buried in the Chüy Valley of present-day Kyrgyzstan in 1338–1339; the sampled strain was ancestral to lineages associated with the later pandemic in western Eurasia. This supports an early-fourteenth-century source in Central Eurasia, but the precise path by which plague reached western Eurasia remains uncertain. Historical records and archaeological work place plague outbreaks around the Black Sea and Mediterranean before its spread through Europe; shipping, commerce and conflict are among the routes researchers investigate. It is not possible to identify from surviving evidence exactly how much each clinical form of plague contributed to the medieval epidemic.

The initial wave moved rapidly across connected regions, though local dates and severity differed. A synthesis of historical records and pathogen evidence places plague in Mediterranean Europe by 1347 and its arrival in England in 1348. The second plague pandemic did not end with the first wave: new outbreaks returned in later generations and remained a public-health and political concern into the eighteenth century. The timing of these recurrent outbreaks varied across places.

The death toll cannot be known precisely. Britannica gives an estimate of about 25 million deaths in Europe, while a University of Cambridge research project describes estimates of roughly one-third to one-half of the continent's population; both convey the scale but not a uniform experience across regions. The loss of life disrupted families, local economies and institutions. In England, labour shortages and rising wages prompted authorities to try to restrict pay and workers' mobility: the 1351 Statute of Labourers followed the first outbreaks there. This is one documented national response, not a description of every European society. Historians continue to debate the epidemic's long-term effects and how they differed by place.

People interpreted plague through the medical and religious ideas available to them. English records preserve both practical attempts to control contagion and remedies based on contemporary beliefs; neither reflected modern knowledge of infection. The crisis also intensified antisemitism: Jewish communities were falsely accused of causing or spreading the disease, and many people were attacked or killed. These accusations were scapegoating, not an explanation for the epidemic.