The Black Death 1346-1353: The Complete History

“This, then, is the reason the history of the Black Death is important: it made history.”

Although the Black Death impacted Europe from approximately 1347 to 1352, it was not a historical event with a short-term impact. The cataclysmic death toll that the pandemic caused led to long-term consequences that affected Europe and the world into the modern period. These effects include, but are not limited to, the collapse of feudal society, the emergence of capitalism and the growth of industrialized economies, and the creation of public health care.

“Very clearly, neighbors, relatives (inheritors), and other persons like physicians or priests who visited houses where people were sick from plague or people had died from plague, exposed themselves to grave danger.”

Bubonic plague was the primary form of plague that spread during the Black Death. Black rats carry this bacterium, and fleas spread it when they bite and infect humans. Elite homes were built of stone and, thus, less likely to harbor rat colonies that carried plague, while the homes of commoners gave refuge to infected rats and their fleas, which then easily transmitted the plague to those who lived in and visited those homes. When visitors arrived in contaminated households to tend to the sick, they often fell victim to the Black Death when they were bitten in the home or because they transported the infectious rat fleas home in their clothing.

“This finding is of crucial importance: in the mid-fourteenth century, around 90 per cent of the population in Europe, the Middle East or North Africa lived in the countryside with but a small fraction of present-day density; and only an epidemic disease with these disseminative properties could have caused the dramatic population decline in the Late Middle Ages.”

Since bubonic plague is transmitted from rats to humans by fleas, it spreads rapidly in rural areas where there are fewer human hosts. Bubonic plague advances at a slower pace in urban centers where fleas have a larger number of hosts from which to choose. Since medieval life was overwhelmingly rural, smaller villages and towns had higher rates of mortality than cities. The rural nature of medieval society, therefore, explains the Black Death’s high mortality rate of 60%.

“[…] it is conspicuous that there actually are only two references to plague in the seventh century, and, then, there is no further mention for a thousand years.”

Previous scholarship suggests that the Black Death’s place of origin was China. However, no primary source evidence supports this assertion, according to Benedictow. Chinese sources mention plague occurrences only twice in the 600s and then say nothing about the disease for centuries. There are, thus, no Chinese sources that indicate the Black Death began in East Asia.

“Under these circumstances, it must be considered highly unlikely that plague could have been passed on by trade and travel from China to the Italians in the Crimea. No merchant in their senses would risk precious goods and expensive and dangerous transport over thousands of kilometers to the Christian Italian merchants through Muslim states that were increasingly hostile to trade and contact with Christians.”

Evidence fails to support the theory that the Black Death originated in China. Because of the Golden Horde’s conversion to Islam in the early 1300s, travel and trade overland between the East and the West became more difficult for European Christian merchants and their trading partners. It would not have been safe or profitable to rely mostly on the Silk Road’s overland routes to engage in business with the East due to the shifting political and religious situation in Eurasia. Therefore, merchants traveling over land routes linking East and West did not introduce the plague into Europe, and the Black Death did not move westward from China.

“The outbreak of plague in the military camp surrounding Kaffa, and, next, in the town itself had both local and far-reaching historical consequences.”

Benedictow identified modern southern Russia as the focus from which the plague pandemic known as the Black Death erupted. Kaffa was a city along the Caspian Sea and, thus, near this focus. When the city, controlled by the Genoese, was besieged by the Mongol Golden Horde, plague appeared among the Mongol forces outside the city walls and soon penetrated those walls. This event was the spark that ignited the pandemic, since the Genoese fled Kaffa, unaware that they were taking black rats and fleas carrying bubonic plague with them. Merchant ships were excellent vehicles for the transmission of plague: The supplies they carried housed rat colonies and fleas, and they stopped at numerous Mediterranean ports. Plague then contaminated those ports, which became new epicenters for the Black Death’s spread.

“The chronicle-producing social elites lived mainly in large towns and cities. Significantly, as members of the upper classes they did not live in the harbour areas, or in the quarters of the poor. Severe epidemics could have been spreading for some time among the poor before they came to the attention of the upper classes.”

Benedictow explains the gap between the time of the Black Death’s arrival in particular cities, towns, or regions and the chronicling of the pandemic in surviving written sources. Social class explains this gap. Since the poor were subject to higher morbidity and mortality rates due to the living conditions, including the physical locations of their homes, they were more likely to become plague victims first. Elites, however, paid little attention to the lives of the poor unless they affected them, so chroniclers frequently did not mention the plague until it had become more widespread and begun to make elites ill.

“[…] high population density facilitates spread but prolongs the epidemiological processes and expands the time horizon of the epidemic.”

At first glance, one might assume that the denser the population, the more quickly plague, like some other illnesses, might be transmitted. This assumption leads to the conclusion that the Black Death would hit cities the hardest. In fact, the opposite is true, according to Benedictow. If the Black Death was bubonic plague, carried by black rats and spread by fleas, it would more swiftly overwhelm small towns and villages because of their low population density. Once the rat population in an area died off, fleas looked for new hosts, particularly humans, since rat colonies and, thus, fleas were often in homes and other spaces used by humans. In low population areas, fleas carrying yersinia pestis would move through the limited available human host population quickly. In more heavily populated cities, it took longer for fleas to infect the populace because of the abundance of potential human hosts.

“This agricultural proletariat was now reduced twice over, both by plague, as with other people, and by social mobility as survivors moved into the great number of good tenancies vacated by the Black Death.”

The rural peasant population was depleted twice due to the Black Death. First, they were more likely to be infected because they loved in low density areas. Likewise, peasants were subject to what Benedictow calls “supermortality” due to their living conditions. Secondly, peasants who survived the pandemic were subject to upward social mobility due to the labor shortage and better living conditions available to them after the Black Death ran its course. In post-pandemic demographic records then, the number of surviving taxpaying households is frequently obscured because former landless peasants rose in status to occupy abandoned lands and thus these tax brackets.

“The fact that the British Isles are typified by much precipitation and many rivers and waterways affected significantly the Black Death’s pattern and pace of spread.”

Bubonic plague flourishes in damp settings and easily traveled as rats and fleas nestled into goods and luggage carried on ships. This ship transport was not only oceanic but riverine, and the high number of waterways, combined with high precipitation levels in the British Isles, allowed the Black Death to spread easily inland by ship.

“Actually, in the course of 300 years of the history of plague in Norway comprising more than thirty waves of epidemics from 1348 to 1654 there is not a single case of winter epidemic of plague. This constitutes decisive evidence to the effect that plague in Norway was invariably bubonic plague transmitted by rat fleas.”

There is no evidence in the Norwegian sources for an outbreak of plague during the winter months from the era of the Black Death through the smaller epidemics of plague that attacked Europe in the last years of the Middle Ages through the early modern period. This evidence supports Benedictow’s thesis that the Black Death was bubonic plague, since this form does not spread easily in cold weather.

“Medieval people’s profound social values in relation to illness and death and their thirst for inheritance were their worst enemies.”

Household spread of bubonic plague was not uncommon during the Black Death for social reasons. Medieval people cared for the sick, gathered in homes for rituals surrounding death, and gathered at the homes of the dead to claim inheritance. These practices within homes infested with rat colonies and flea vectors carrying bubonic plague, however, only served to further contribute to spreading the disease. Mourners, for example, unknowingly carried fleas home in their clothing and then contaminated their own homes.

“[…] epidemics are peripheral to the humanistic education and culture that have shaped the chronicle-producing men’s minds and social outlook. This is the main reason there are so few chronicles containing information about the Black Death.”

Benedictow explains the absence of plague source material in many medieval chronicles as an issue of class. Since plague was an unpleasant topic, and because the poor were most devastated, elite chronicle writers, educated in the classical tradition, ignored the Black Death. Writing about the pandemic did not align with their educational values and worldview.

“There can hardly be any other explanation for the fact that the Black Death did not move north-westwards into the Russian areas from its original outbreak in the south-eastern lands of the Golden Horde on the Caspian Sea.”

Although the Black Death originated in southern Russia, it did not swiftly move northward from the original epicenter in 1347. Rather, Russia was the last region of medieval Europe to be overwhelmed by plague in the early 1350s. Geopolitical factors explain this development. After the Golden Horde’s conversion to Islam, merchants were less likely to transport goods through territory that might be hostile to trade with Christendom. This development cut off the plague’s spread into northern Russia by land. Instead, the Black Death arrived in northern Russia by ship several years after its initial eruption in the south.

“The more densely settled a rural area or region was, the higher number of houses the Black Death had to enter in relation to the size of the territory in order to blanket it.”

Benedictow maintains that sparsely populated areas were more quickly overrun with plague, since there were fewer people for flea vectors to attack. Dense population, thus, served to offer medieval people some delay in infection or protection from contracting bubonic plague.

“Together with more long-running trends, the Black Death and ensuing plague epidemics moulded [sic] the social formation that constituted the last period of the Middle Ages, namely the Late Middle Ages, and gave dynamic input to profound transitional societal changes leading from medieval to early modern society.”

The Black Death devastated medieval Europe and caused a dramatic decrease in the population. This demographic shift changed the socio-economic landscape of Europe forever by creating a labor crisis and improving peasant economic conditions. These changes gave rise to early industrialization and imperialism that characterized the early modern and modern eras in Europe.

“Lower age at marriage for women and higher fertility mean more pregnancies with reduced immunity to contagious disease and other health hazards, more parturitions with their own hazards and more frequent post-partum exposure to infections. Thus, lower age at marriage and higher reproduction rates for women imply higher mortality for women relative to men.”

To compensate for their overall low life expectancy, medieval people wed earlier than their early modern counterparts so that they had the opportunity to have more children. Thus, the Middle Ages experienced a higher fertility rate than that of early modern Europe. This higher rate, however, was not without consequences and increased vulnerabilities for women, including to the plague.

“Differential mortality according to age, gender, or social class can reveal information on the Black Death’s epidemiology and on the social structures that conditioned the social behaviors of various social groups or segments. Dramatic mortality in the upper classes may affect the mentality of the time and its artistic, cultural, and religious expressions with particular social impact.”

Benedictow shows that members of Europe’s low social classes suffered more than elites during the Black Death. Their higher infection and death rates are due to their unsanitary living conditions, malnutrition, and the fact that their homes were made of materials more conducive to the existence of rat colonies. Benedictow also notes that women and children were particularly likely to suffer “supermortality,” that is, even higher rates of death because they spent more time in contaminated households. Women were also primary caregivers who looked after the ill and dying.

“Many children, especially in the age brackets up to about 10-12 years, would succumb for lack of nourishment and normal care, even if they were not infected.”

Children suffered from supermortality because they fell victim to the plague’s secondary effects. Those who did not die of infection may have, nonetheless, been victims of the plague when care broke down and they succumbed to hunger and/or neglect. This problem was especially acute in rural areas where entire households fell victim to the Black Death, agricultural production came to a halt, economies broke down, and starvation ensued.

“Uncertainty is the steady companion of all attempts to produce demographic estimates on the basis of sources from pre-statistical times, sources that never were intended to be used for this purpose—margins of uncertainty is a key term.”

Benedictow acknowledges throughout the book that the data he provides is based on limited primary sources that are also incomplete. Tax records that provide insight into population numbers, for instance, may leave out those who practiced tax evasion or those too poor to even be recorded because they were not taxable. Therefore, his estimates regarding mortality rates are subject to margins of error.

“The Black Death has often been called ‘a turning point in history’, although usually without persuasive arguments being provided in support of such a sweeping statement.”

In his conclusion, Benedictow indeed suggests that the Black Death was an important turning point in the history of the world because, for example, it encouraged the development of new technologies to compensate for the loss of a large percentage of Europe’s labor force.

“Inevitably, these developments also left losers, all those who possessed or owned more land than they could cultivate themselves with the help of their household, namely the lords of the manor and the ‘village rich’, the yeoman and franklins and the wealthier peasants who had gained greatly from the inexhaustible pool of very cheap manpower before the plague, saw their incomes diminish, and in the long term, fall disastrously.”

Although the lives of the poor and impoverished improved to some degree in the aftermath of the Black Death, conditions for wealthier members of European societies declined. This decline was due to their inability to continue collecting high rents and dues from peasants, vacant lands that they could not exploit, and more costly peasant labor.

“The ‘golden age of bacteria’ and the ‘golden age of the wage worker’ were in a causal relationship.”

Late medieval peasants who survived the Black Death or who were born after this plague pandemic occupied a world in which their living conditions had improved because they earned more. Simultaneously, however, they continued to live in a world in which subsequent plague epidemics threatened their lives. The plague returned in waves after the Black Death, killing some of its survivors or their descendants.