The Black Death was a plague pandemic that devastated Europe, killing an estimated 75 to 200 million people, and peaked in Europe between 1348 and 1350. Europe experienced the deadliest outbreak of the disease in history when it was struck in 1347 and was one of the most devastating pandemics, killing an estimated 25 to 30 million people. The bacterial disease, which is transmitted by fleas and rodents, originated in Central Asia and was brought there from Crimea by Mongolian warriors and traders. In 1347, a bubonic plague broke out in Italy, probably spread mainly by rats and fleas. The plague arrived in Europe in 1348, when Genoese merchant ships crossed the Black Sea.
Recent mortality evidence suggests that the disease has killed up to 10 million people in a few years, the number of people about whom historians have the most information. The ancient plague that struck Rome, the Black Death as it was called, was the deadliest of all the ancient plagues that plagued Rome in the Middle Ages.
The Black Death was a disease caused by bubonic plague, a common disease of wild rodents, where they live in large numbers and density. It originated as a plague in humans in the Middle Ages, when a small number of rats, mice and other wild animals became infected. Somewhere around the early 13th century, the bacterium Yersinia pestis, which causes bubonic plague, mutated into a much more virulent form than man, and remained for centuries in wild rodent colonies in Central Asia.
Black rats (also called house rats or ship rats) like to live near people, exactly the qualities that make them dangerous. Brown and gray rats keep their distance, except in canals and cellars, but black rats do not, and they live in large numbers. Normally it takes ten to fourteen days for the plague to destroy most of the infected rat colonies, making it easy for a large number of fleas that are left to die soon – too – to find new hosts. Modern bubonic plague, the most common form of plague in the United States and Europe, spreads from one rat colony to another within a few days.
The Black Death, the deadliest plague attack, disappeared regularly until just before the Great Plague of 1665. But she returned to Britain in 1361, when she was mainly of young and old age, and was seen again in England in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, before disappearing regularly and reappearing in Britain shortly afterwards. The disease reemerged in Asia in the 1890s and spread to Europe, where it was found in England, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. It is estimated that more than 50 million people died as a result of this deadly plague. The story of the Black Death has been in the headlines again in recent years after a new strain of the disease, known as coronavirus, was discovered.
In the Middle Ages, the various epidemics and diseases that our contemporaries called “Black Death,” “Black Plague” and “Black Plague of the West” were among the worst disasters in history. The Black Death was the catastrophe of medieval Europe, in which almost half the population was killed and more than half of the European population and most towns and cities were destroyed.
The bubonic plague outbreak, caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, killed tens of millions of people in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Europe and North America. This epidemic has inspired the development of modern medicine, medical education, health care and health policy, and is now of real relevance. Even if the Black Death may seem very different today, it happened in the Middle Ages, at a different time and place from today.
The Black Death is one of the most devastating and life-threatening events in human history. The first signs of a Black Plague in Europe were in the autumn of 1347, but it was the bubonic plague that crossed Asia and Europe in the mid-14th century. Within three years, the Black Death killed one third of all people in Europe, and by 1352 more than half of Europe’s 1.5 billion people had died.
It devastated Athens in 430 BC, devastated the Roman Empire under Justinian in 542 AD and was possibly responsible for the deaths of more than 1.5 billion people in the Middle East. But during a plague wave in Asia in 1894, a Swiss-French bacteriologist named Alexandre Yersin discovered that the bacterium Yerinia pestis was the devil’s plague.