The plague that killed up to half of Europe had no ‘black’ name then
Between 1346 and 1353 a Yersinia pestis pandemic swept Europe and the Middle East, killing as many as fifty million people—perhaps thirty to sixty percent of Europeans and about a third of Middle Easterners. Contemporaries called it pestilence or the great death; “Black Death” is a later label.
Fleas transmitted the bacterium, though pneumonia could spread it between people too. Historians tentatively slot the outbreak as the second plague pandemic, centuries after the first. It struck a continent already bruised by the Great Famine of 1315–1317, and recurrent waves kept hammering late medieval societies; Europe’s population did not climb back to fourteenth-century levels until the 1500s, while plague itself flickered globally into the early nineteenth century.
Latin writers reached for pestis, epidemia, or mortalitas. English speakers long preferred pestilence, great pestilence, plague, or great death, later “first murrain” to mark the mid-century blow. No European tongue of the 1340s seems to have branded that wave specifically “black.” Scandinavian chroniclers popularised den sorte død in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries; English “Black death” for this pandemic appears only in the 1750s (attested 1755 as a calque), then spread as German schwarze Tod, French mort noire, and kin.
Where it began is still argued over, with evidence pointing variously to China, Central Asia, West Asia and Europe. A 2022 study placed the earliest known victims in two cemeteries in Kyrgyzstan's Chüy Valley near Lake Issyk-Kul, where Syriac tombstones record a surge of deaths from pestilence in 1338 and 1339. Europe's infection is reportedly traced to 1347, when Jani Beg's Golden Horde army besieged the Genoese port of Caffa in Crimea. Drying grasslands in Asia had driven rodents toward crowded settlements, carrying the disease along.
Pinning down the killer took centuries. The Paris medical faculty blamed a planetary conjunction for poisoning the air. Alexandre Yersin identified the bacterium in Hong Kong in 1894, and Paul-Louis Simond worked out in 1898 how fleas with blocked guts pass it on. DNA recovered from tooth sockets in mass graves across Europe confirmed the culprit in 2010, and a 2011 draft genome from London's East Smithfield cemetery showed the medieval strain is ancestral to most modern ones.
Source: Black Death
