The Black Death 1346-1353: The Complete History

When the Black Death landed in the major ports of southern Europe, “It secured bridgeheads of vital strategic importance. It prepared the ground for the Black Death’s multi-pronged invasion of the European continent […]” (69). From Constantinople, plague reached Greece through oceanic and overland trade links and then entered Italian ports, starting with Messina on the island of Sicily, in early August 1347. As plague spread across Sicily, refugees fled in panic, taking the pandemic to surrounding Mediterranean islands and the southern Italian mainland. Ships from Messina probably also carried plague to the French city of Marseilles in autumn 1347. Benedictow notes, “The surprisingly early invasion of Marseilles by the Black Death may have affected profoundly the pattern of strategic advance in Southern and Western Europe, and also, as we shall see, the invasion of the British Isles” (73).

Ships also took plague to the northern Italian port city of Genoa, where sources acknowledged its appearance at the end of 1347. Like the Genoese merchants, Venetian ships also carried plague westward. Venice held territory on the coast of Dalmatia, in modern Croatia, and infected its ports. Observers noted the plague’s arrival in Venice by early 1348. Benedictow asserts, “The invasion of this metropolis, the largest commercial center in Italy, with wide-flung commercial contacts, was a momentous event in the early history of the Black Death’s conquest of Europe” (72). The pandemic was, thus, well-positioned to envelop much of Europe from those epicenters.

The southern Balkans faced attack from Greece, the Dalmatian coast, and contact points with Venice. This area of Eastern Europe was vulnerable because it was “a great crossroads of peoples, cultures, religions, and conquerors where human input from Asia, the Near East/Asia Minor and Europe met, but, for the same reason, also a great crossroads of epidemic disease” (74). Nevertheless, sources for studying the plague in the southern Balkans are lacking.

The Black Death invaded the Hungarian realm (or northern Balkans), perhaps from Croatia where the Venetians controlled several cities as part of a larger trading empire that linked the West with Asia. Several epicenters played a role in the plague’s movement into Hungary. First, Ragusa (modern Dubrovnik) possibly acted as a bridgehead. Second, the plague migrated from Venice into today’s Slovakia, part of medieval Hungary. Finally, transportation of goods along the Danube and into Hungarian lands also acted as a mode of contamination. Knowledge of specific movements and a precise timeline is limited by lack of sources.

Within two years of its arrival in Europe, the Black Death overran the Iberian Peninsula, which comprised a conglomeration of kingdoms that included Portugal, three Spanish kingdoms, and Muslim-ruled Granada. There is a discernable pattern to the way plague spread there: It attacked ports by ship, and those cities became “bridgeheads” for the disease’s growth as it migrated along heavily trafficked roadways. It then “spread to all sides along secondary and tertiary lines […]” (85).

Iberia was attacked on five fronts, all of which were rooted in the plague epicenter of Marseilles. Plague first arrived by ship in Mallorca in late 1347. From there, the outbreak reached Almeria, Tarragona, and Valencia, also in late 1347. The Black Death made its way from those sites inland and south to the kingdom of Granada, where it established a presence by the following year. The Black Death also spread to Iberia from the French city of Bordeaux, where it had arrived from Marseilles. In Spring 1349, plague made a metastatic leap with refugees and pilgrims to the Spanish port of La Coruña and advanced to the popular pilgrimage site Santiago de Compostela. From that point, it covered the north and migrated to the Portuguese kingdom. Finally, the pandemic invaded northwestern Iberia via ships that arrived in Biarritz or San Sebastian—potentially both cities—in May 1349. The Black Death continued the pattern it established in Iberia across Europe.

There was no united Italy during the medieval period; rather, the Italian peninsula consisted of city-states in the north, the Papal States controlled by the church in the central regions, and the Kingdom of Naples in the south. The city-states of Venice and Genoa also controlled areas in Croatia and today’s southern France. By 1348, the plague was established in multiple Italian ports, including Venice and Genoa. As in Iberia, these urban centers acted as “bridgeheads” for further conquest of the peninsula. For example, in 1348 the plague arrived in Tuscany from Pisa via commerce. It made metastatic leaps along roads that linked cities in the area and that were traversed by merchants and plague refugees leaving Florence. By Summer 1348, virtually all of northern Italy was contaminated. Plague spread more slowly to and in the south because it was less commercially developed. Rome was invaded late, in August 1348, because the papacy was not centered in Rome at that time; Avignon, in France, was the papacy’s home during the 1300s. Although some areas of Italy appear to have escaped the pandemic, they eventually succumbed to the disease. Italy’s dense population explains why it took longer for plague to overrun the peninsula and why it lingered in some areas until 1350.

France was the most densely populated medieval European country through which the plague was transmitted. The disease’s appearance in both Marseilles and Genoa in 1347 impacted its spread through the country, which was politically fragmented and devastated by the Hundred Years’ War when the pandemic arrived. One branch of the Black Death ran east from Marseilles while another swept west out of Genoa, merging into a single front that swept north across the southeast. As it did elsewhere, the Black Death moved from large urban centers outward into more rural areas. According to Benedictow, “The spread of plague contagion was hastened by great population density, a high degree of urbanization with several largish cities and numerous towns, and high traffic density and movement of people and goods along roads and tracks” (97). For example, the outbreak spread between the port city of Bordeaux and Narbonne along a major road and hit other, smaller settlements as it migrated. Pilgrims heading to Santiago de Compostela in Spain facilitated the Black Death’s movement along this roadway via metastatic leaps. Plague zigzagged north, eventually entering Paris, Europe’s biggest city, by the summer of 1348. It may have made a metastatic leap to the city from Rouen or up the Seine via shipping. Because the French realm had such a large populace, the plague continued ravaging the inner reaches of the country through 1349, and instances of plague continued into France’s “most peripheral areas in 1351, and even, perhaps, in 1352, when its presence is mentioned in Tonnerre in Burgundy” (109).

The history of the plague in France and its appearance in Belgium are linked. Benedictow defines medieval Belgium as the southern portion of the Low Countries—the other is the Netherlands, which he analyzes separately—“and some adjacent areas.” Medieval Belgium comprised multiple principalities, including the French-controlled county of Flanders and areas that the Holy Roman Emperor possessed, such as the duchies of Luxembourg and Brabant. Today’s Brabant stretches between the nation-states of Belgium and the Netherlands. Thus, medieval Belgium is distinguished from the modern country.

Evidence shows that medieval Belgium had a high population density. As in France, the Black Death circulated in the realm into 1352. While some scholars assert that Belgium was unscathed by the plague, evidence shows the disease did impact the region, although morbidity and mortality rates were lower than in other areas because of its dense population. For instance, demographic evidence shows the city of Mons experienced a dramatic rise in population during the pandemic. This increase indicates that peasants from the countryside fled their homes for the city because the rural areas were more devastated by the disease. Furthermore, evidence indicates that wages rose in the mid-14th century. Increasing wages support the finding that mass death due to plague caused a labor shortage. These demographic and economic factors indicate that the Black Death indeed struck Belgian lands.

From Italy, the plague made its way to Switzerland. In the late medieval period, Switzerland “had quite recently emerged as a loose confederation of a few ‘cantons’” that were “an economically and socially comprehensive integrated territory at a time when many of the present-day constituent parts belonged to other states” (118). Three “armies” of the Black Death overran these cantons from the epicenter of Marseilles, while Italian epicenters impacted the southern and eastern portions. First, infection spread to Switzerland from either Florence or Genoa—or both—as it moved north and invaded the canton of Ticino. The pandemic ravaged the eastern canton of St. Gallen as it migrated out of Venice, while a third force moved along the Rhone from Marseilles and attacked the city of Geneva. Wills that survive from the period show that the plague’s impact began to caused concern among Genevan elites in the late summer of 1348. Once established, the Black Death spread to secondary and tertiary areas along major roads. Although the winter of late 1348 to early 1349 slowed its spread, the Black Death continued to ravage Swiss lands into the spring and had fully covered the country by Autumn 1349.

The British Isles (Ireland, Wales, Scotland, and England) also suffered after the Black Death was imported from the continent. Multiple types of primary sources survive there that shed light on the plague’s spread and its impact on the population in one of late-medieval Europe’s most populated regions. These sources include institutional registers that track clerical vacancies; manorial court rolls and economic records from landed estates that provide information on the people who lived on those estates; and chronicles. They indicate that the Black Death arrived first at the port city of Weymouth in May 1348, likely on a ship from Bordeaux. From there it spread both east and west along coastal areas, probably with contaminated goods. From those secondary areas, it moved inward along waterways. Institutions’ registers show a sharp decline in the number of clerics after the Black Death’s arrival. Indeed, priests were vulnerable to contracting plague because they frequented the homes of its victims to provide services. By early autumn, London was invaded by road from both the southeast and northeast, including from the original epicenter at Weymouth via secondary centers Winchester and Salisbury. The upsurge in wills produced in London in January 1349 shows that plague was well-established by the previous autumn, when elites would have begun to fear for their well-being. Further evidence of the plague’s timing includes the fact that King Edward III also cancelled Parliament’s meeting that month due to concern about rising infections in the city.

England was soon overrun by three fronts. Plague spread into the northern reaches from London by river, where it split into two fronts that moved into the south and southwest and spread to the coastline. Benedictow clarifies that “from the first half of 1349 […] one front moved northwards out of southern England, another moved south-westwards and southwards […] and a third moved north-westwards and northward, also out of Humberside” (140). Eventually, the fronts from the north and the south collided in central England.

The plague made its way into Wales by the spring of 1349, where it landed with ships from Bristol and/or Gloucester. It also entered northwestern Wales after overwhelming the English counties that bordered it. Documentation of the plague in neighboring Ireland is limited and is mostly derived from the chronicle of a churchman named John Clyn. His account suggests that the Black Death arrived there shortly after it reached England and by ships coming to Drongheda and Howth from Weymouth. Irish Archbishop Richard Fitzralph also gave a sermon for the Pope in August 1349 in which he mentioned that the English perished in great numbers while the Irish did not. The archbishop, however, did not mean that the pandemic had not impacted Ireland. Rather, he referenced English colonists, most of whom resided along the eastern coast where the plague first entered Ireland. When Fitzralph gave his sermon, the disease had not yet struck the interior or Ireland. Almost nothing is known about the plague’s epidemiology in Scotland due to lack of sources, but scholars know that much of that territory was affected by 1350.

The Black Death landed in Norway from England. Scandinavia’s population density was much lower than that of Britain, France, or Italy, and Norway was only partly feudal. Thus, peasants there owned their own land, which comprised approximately one third of the arable land in the country. Norway’s mountainous areas, due to their agricultural limitations, were more frequently contaminated than the lowlands through their dependence on trade with multiple populations that spread from their own regions to the coast. By the late medieval era, Norway’s shipping ties to England and to German lands had strengthened. These ties led to metastatic leaps from contaminated ports in England or Germany to Norway. Evidence shows, for instance, that in May 1349 the English crown granted two members of the de Melchebourne family the right to export grain to Norway. Through this trade, the plague arrived in Oslo in the autumn of 1348. From there, it spread inland and north to the smaller cathedral city and pilgrimage site of Hamar. The high rate of travel between Hamar and Oslo and along a major thoroughfare facilitated plague’s spread. As a result, Oslo was the Black Death’s epicenter in Norway.

Of the Scandinavian countries, Denmark was the most densely populated. Contradicting previous scholarship, Benedictow argues that two sources show the plague arrived in Halland (not Jutland), Denmark’s coastal area bordering Sweden on the west, in Summer 1349. Ships arriving from England, via Oslo, may have brought the disease to the area. Alternately, Hanseatic (north German) traders may have unknowingly brought the plague on board their ships as they fled the pandemic’s arrival in London. Church registers that record donations to religious institutions provide insight into the plague’s epidemiology in Denmark. For example, the register belonging to the cathedral at Ribe shows that a total of 34 donors made 34 gifts to the chapter in the 20 years before the pandemic. In 1350, 17 donations were made, which is 10 times the annual average of 1.7 from the preceding two decades. Other registers show similar results. This dramatic increase in charitable giving parallels that of other European sites when the plague reached an area. Therefore, sources support the view that the plague entered Denmark in 1349 and reached its deadly apex the following year.

The Black Death spread similarly in Sweden and Norway. Scholarly analysis of the Black Death’s progress there is limited by the fact that sources for the plague, as it headed into northwestern Europe, become sparse. Like Norway’s, Sweden’s population density was lower, although many people clustered in “areas well suited for arable and animal husbandry” (171). Evidence shows that two plague fronts attacked Norway. The King of Norway and Sweden authored a surviving letter to the diocese of Linköping in September 1349 that provides insight into the Black Death’s presence. The king warned the diocese’s populace that a horrible disease was spreading in regions to their west and that the bishops should come to a meeting in nearby Lödöse to discuss the “religious countermeasures” (152) they should undertake to prevent its spread into Sweden. This indicates that the plague had not yet arrived in Sweden. No other specific sources on the plague in western Sweden exist. Inferences suggest that it appeared later that autumn.

Plague appeared in Sweden’s Baltic area around Easter 1350. The disease, however, must have arrived late in the preceding autumn, gone into hibernation during the winter, and then resurfaced in the town of Visby, which was connected to the Hanseatic trade networks. The plague arrived there, thus, due to German shipping. As in the case of Denmark cited in the previous chapter, one can infer the pattern of the plague’s spread through surviving accounts of religious donations to churches and monasteries. Data shows that donations increased fourfold in 1350. This rise “must be a reflection of people’s overwhelming fear of imminent death” (175). This data demonstrates that “donations to religious institutions start at Västergötland and in western Småland, and end up on the eastern coast, in Uppland, Södermanland and eastern Småland” (175).

Plague swept through Central Europe in a zigzagging wave that moved out of Croatia, Italy, and Marseilles. The Black Death arrived in Austria in the late summer of 1348. Central European secondary locations then served as launch pads for the Black Death’s invasion of Eastern Europe. Medieval Austria was part of the Holy Roman Empire and comprised of duchies that formed modern Austria and part of Slovenia. Tracking the plague’s movements there relies on the fact that the area was economically integrated in the Middle Ages.

Austria was invaded early by plague from Venice. From northern Italy, “people and goods moved in substantial numbers and amounts along the main roads […], over the mountain passes into Austria proper […]” (181). From Venice, the plague headed to the northwest and northeast, gaining the attention of Austrian elites by the early summer 1348 when it struck the duchy of northern Tyrol. By the end of the year, plague was entrenched in “important bridgeheads and deployment areas in Austria” (182), so that the following year was one of deathly devastation there.

Medieval Germany was made up of various principalities and free cities that were loosely consolidated under the Holy Roman Empire. This fragmented state failed to restrict the movement of goods or travelers throughout the realm, thus making it function as an integrated zone through which plague could spread. Surviving sources are limited to brief accounts in chronicles with problematic dating.

The pandemic reached German lands in the spring of 1349 when a front opened in the south that reached out of Basle. This front engulfed northern and western Germany as it moved by metastatic leaps along riverine shipping lines. As it entered smaller urban settlements, these because points of further dissemination to rural areas. By 1350, the north was engulfed. The plague also arrived in northern German coastal ports with ships from abroad during the late autumn of 1349. Offloaded goods then served as vehicles for plague transport. The disease, however, incubated for the winter months before renewal the following spring. Similarly, the plague spread from the east along the Danube River, moving from Passau and entering Regensburg in Bavaria during the summer of 1349. Some scholars have suggested that the disease spared Bavaria; however, they fail to provide epidemiological reasons for its absence. Rather, this view is an argument from silence: Because the chroniclers do not mention the Black Death, they suggest, it was not present in Bavaria. However, medieval chroniclers were steeped in humanistic education and intellectual culture, so that they chose to ignore “information on events that was not entirely in line with their high standards and social ambition” (193). In other words, they deliberately did not write about matters they considered base or crude. The Annals of Mattsee makes clear that the plague also attacked Bavaria from the Austrian province of Tyrol as travelers brought it overland through the mountains.

The Holy Roman Emperor controlled the Netherlands, or Northern Low Countries, during the Middle Ages. It consisted of “a number of dukedoms and countships,” including Utrecht and Holland (203). As was true of Belgium in the north, population density and urbanization were high there. This factor means that mortality rates were muted in the Netherlands when compared to less densely populated regions.

In the 1950s, historian Hans van Werveke argued that the Low Countries experienced minimal impact from the plague. Later studies, including Benedictow’s analysis, however, prove this assertion false. Evidence for an outbreak in the Netherlands starts in 1349 and continues into 1353 for some areas. The Black Death, thus, slowly encroached on Netherlandish lands. Church death registers and legal records show that deaths increased dramatically in some areas of the Netherlands during the early 1350s. The evidence further shows that the plague spread from north to south until the front reached its final destination, the Diocese of Utrecht, in 1352-53. Other scholars believe the plague entered the Netherlands from Germany via the Rhine, although no evidence exists for such movement. Rather, the plague infected the Netherlands, as was true of other parts of Europe, when it arrived via Hanseatic shipping links from places where outbreaks already raged. It is likely that these ships came to the Netherlands from ports in Norway. Moreover, because of these trade links, the plague returned many times over the course of the 1300s and into the early modern period.

Scholars know that the Black Death spread to the Baltic countries—modern Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia, plus historical Prussia—starting in the summer of 1349 and continuing into 1351, but they can discern few specifics. Several important trading cities were in the Baltic, making these countries vulnerable to contamination through their ties to the Hanseatic cities of Germany. The Book of Citizenship from the town of Braunsberg recounts the plague’s appearance in Elbing—modern Elblag, in today’s northern Poland—in the late summer of 1349 and explains that it also spread to other towns on the lagoon of Frisches Haff. These outbreaks persisted the following year, and evidence shows that the Black Death spread through the Baltic slowly, with modern Latvia infected in 1351.

Plague spread to a non-unified Russia, populated by Eastern Slavs, including today’s Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians, over land rather than by ship; it was the last part of Europe reached by plague. What is today Russia was, in the Middle Ages, made up of numerous principalities and a city-state known as Great Novgorod. The Mongol Golden Horde conquered and controlled those lands as tributaries by the 1300s. The population density in the territory was low, and numerous rivers that merchants and travelers used ran through medieval Russia.

The Golden Horde’s conversion to Islam in the early 1300s impacted the Black Death’s history. As a result of this conversion, the khan reduced trade between Russia and the West, and Mongol attacks on Christian traders

severed the lines of trade along caravan routes between China and Italian trading stations on the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea. In 1346, Janibeg’s [the Mongol khan] ambition led to the fateful siege of Kaffa where the Black Death was introduced into the Mongol camp, then slunk into the town. The Italians fled in panic […]. (212)

This shift in trade activity explains why the plague failed to move from its southeastern point of origin in the Golden Horde’s khanate into the northern Russian lands. Rather, it migrated along the trade routes that linked Eurasia with the Mediterranean world. Hence, Russia was first invaded by plague in the northwest and “was the last region of Europe to be attacked by the Black Death rather than the first” (212).

Chronicles are the only primary sources that survive to explain the plague’s entrance and spread in Russia, and the dating provided in these documents is unreliable. Several chronicles mention an outbreak in the border town of Pskov in either 1351 or 1352. Since this town was contaminated before the larger Novgorod was, it must have been infected overland from nearby modern Latvia in 1351. The disease went into winter hibernation and reemerged in spring 1352. It is impossible to derive any knowledge from primary sources about the pattern by which the Black Death swept through Russian lands, and they are also silent about plague in Moscow, although the deaths of the Grand Duke and many of his family members in 1353 indicate that the city was contaminated by that date. Since those lands were vast, the plague likely spread there slowly over the course of several years.

Icelandic primary source evidence explicitly indicated the Black Death did not infect the island. No ships from Norway arrived in 1349, so there was not an opportunity for transmission. Nineteenth-century scholars argued that Finland was not impacted either, and further research suggests it was spared then, albeit impacted by later plague outbreaks. Because Finland was “geographically isolated” with a low population, the country had limited contact with others. This fact, combined with the breakdown of shipping due to the pandemic, resulted in Finland’s exclusion. Later population growth, however, meant that Finland would not escape contamination altogether.

Robert Hoeniger claims that Poland was also spared. Nevertheless, evidence suggests otherwise. Poland was infected with plague early in the Black Death’s timeline, specifically in Summer 1349. Chronicles recount that the plague traveled to Polish lands from Hungary to the south, and by 1350 many had died there. As the plague engulfed Russia to Poland’s east, it almost certainly would have entered Poland in that way, too. Economic data, specifically grain prices, shows that prices fell in Poland, and wages rose, just as they did in England and other countries as plague spread there. These changes happened because of population decline caused by the plague’s high mortality rate. Thus, economic evidence from Poland confirms that the Black Death negatively affected the country.

Bohemia, a kingdom within the Holy Roman Empire, consisted of two areas, Bohemia and Moravia, which stretch across today’s Czech Republic and part of modern Poland. Prague was the kingdom’s major administrative center, and by the Late Middle Ages many German migrants populated the kingdom. This demographic shift led to rising agricultural output and growing urbanization, both of which increased commerce. Although Hoeniger suggests that Bohemia was mostly untouched by the Black Death, this theory is not sound epidemiologically. In fact, the Chronicle of Prague tells the story of a group of Bohemian university pupils who traveled home from Italy. Along the way, they witnessed the death and destruction that the pandemic caused, and the chronicler says only one of the students survived. Furthermore, evidence indicates that in 1351, the margrave of Moravia granted four years of tax exemptions to new settlers who would populate Brno and Znojmo, both settlements that plague had almost wiped out. Only Finland and Iceland were exempt from the ravages of the Black Death.