Black Death

Plague swept across Europe, killing a third or more of the population.

Plague is a bacterial disease spread by fleas that live on rats and other animals. Apparently emerging in inner Asia in the mid-14th century, it travelled along trade routes that had flourished under the Mongol Empire to the Black Sea, and in 1347, it is said, reached Messina in Sicily aboard Genoese ships from Caffa in the Crimea.

Within little more than four years it spread through Italy, France and England to northern Europe and Russia. Between a third and nearly half of Europe’s population is estimated to have died, and Egypt, Syria and the wider Islamic world also suffered heavily. Seeing it as God’s punishment, some joined processions of flagellants, while rumours that Jews had poisoned wells led to massacres of Jews in many places.

With labour now scarce, surviving peasants won higher wages and better status. When lords tried to hold them down, peasant revolts broke out, such as the Jacquerie in France (1358) and Wat Tyler’s Rebellion in England (1381). The manorial system weakened and the end of serfdom accelerated.

The authority of a Church that seemed powerless before the disaster was shaken too. The Black Death is seen as hastening the decline of feudal society and the transition to the modern era, and plague kept returning for centuries afterwards.