In October 1347, twelve Genoese trading galleys tied up in the harbour of Messina, in Sicily, carrying a cargo no one had ordered. Most of the sailors aboard were already dead or dying, their bodies covered in black swellings that oozed blood and pus. The horrified authorities ordered the ships back out to sea, but it was far too late. Within a few years the pestilence that arrived on those galleys — the Black Death — had swept across the entire continent and killed a staggering share of everyone alive in it.
The culprit, identified only in the modern era, was a bacterium called Yersinia pestis. It normally lives in rodents and is spread by fleas; when the fleas' usual hosts die off, they turn to humans. The most common form, bubonic plague, produced the agonising swollen lymph nodes, or buboes, that gave the disease its horror and its name. A second form, pneumonic plague, attacked the lungs and could pass directly from person to person on the breath, which helped it move with terrifying speed. Once the first symptoms appeared, victims often died within a matter of days, and the sheer swiftness of it deepened the terror in every town it reached. Medieval doctors, knowing nothing of germs, blamed poisoned air, an unlucky alignment of the planets, or the sins of mankind.
A continent emptied
The numbers are almost too large to grasp. Historians generally estimate that the Black Death killed somewhere between a third and a half of Europe's population between 1347 and 1351 — tens of millions of people in four years. Whole villages were abandoned. In the worst-hit cities the dead were tipped into mass graves faster than priests could bless them. The plague had travelled west along trade routes from Central Asia, and once in Europe it respected no boundary of wealth or piety: it took peasants and archbishops alike, and reached from Sicily to Scandinavia within a couple of years.
Society strained and sometimes cracked under the horror. Bands of flagellants roamed from town to town whipping themselves to appease a wrathful God. Jewish communities were savagely and falsely blamed for poisoning wells, and thousands were murdered in pogroms across the Rhineland and elsewhere. More practically, the port cities of the Mediterranean began experimenting with isolating arriving ships. The Adriatic city of Ragusa, modern Dubrovnik, imposed a mandatory waiting period on incoming vessels, and Venice used a period of forty days — quaranta giorni in Italian, the origin of the word "quarantine".
The end of an old order
The most far-reaching consequences were economic. Before the plague, much of Europe ran on feudal labour: peasants were tied to the land and owed service to their lords, and there were always more workers than jobs. The Black Death inverted that almost overnight. With a third or more of the workforce gone, surviving labourers were suddenly scarce and valuable. They could demand higher wages, better terms, or simply walk to the next estate that would pay more. The old bonds of serfdom began to dissolve.
Landowners fought back through the law. In England, the Statute of Labourers of 1351 tried to freeze wages at pre-plague levels and forbid workers from leaving their parishes in search of better pay. It largely failed, and the resentment it stoked helped feed the Peasants' Revolt of 1381. Across Western Europe the long-term trend was clear: labour had gained bargaining power it would not fully surrender, and the rigid manorial system that had ordered life for centuries never recovered. It is too simple to say the plague single-handedly abolished feudalism, but it delivered a blow the old system could not absorb.
One popular belief should be treated with care. The nursery rhyme "Ring a Ring o' Roses" is often said to describe plague symptoms, with the "ring" a rash and the closing "all fall down" a mass death. Folklorists are sceptical: the rhyme was not written down until the nineteenth century, and no version links it to plague before then. It is almost certainly a later myth. The real story needs no embellishment. A microbe too small to see, carried by a flea on a rat on a ship, killed more Europeans in four years than any war before or since, and quietly loosened the chains that had bound the poor to the land.
Quiz nuggets
- The Black Death reached Europe in October 1347, arriving on Genoese trading ships at Messina in Sicily.
- It is caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, spread by fleas, and its bubonic form produces swollen lymph nodes called buboes.
- The plague is estimated to have killed roughly a third to a half of Europe's population between 1347 and 1351.
- The word "quarantine" comes from the practice of isolating arriving ships for forty days — quaranta giorni in Italian.
- England's Statute of Labourers (1351) tried to cap post-plague wages and helped provoke the Peasants' Revolt of 1381.