The Black Death — the 1346–1353 plague that killed perhaps half of Europe — arrived in the Mediterranean on Genoese trading ships in October 1347. The ships had picked up the infection at?
Caffa (modern Feodosia in Crimea) was a Genoese trading colony on the northern Black Sea. The Mongol khan Jani Beg laid siege to it in 1346; plague broke out in his besieging army (probably arriving via the Central Asian caravan routes from the original Yunnan endemic reservoir); the Mongols catapulted infected corpses into the city — an early documented biological-warfare incident; the Genoese garrison broke the siege and fled west by sea, taking the plague with them. The ships reached Messina in October 1347 and Genoa, Marseille, and Venice within weeks. Half of Europe was dead within six years.
Read the full story →Between 1347 and 1351 a pandemic killed somewhere between a third and half of everyone in Europe. Contemporaries called it the Great Mortality. It was the largest single demographic event in recorded human history.
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