The Black Death Reaches Europe

During the late 1340s, a devastating pandemic swept across western Eurasia and North Africa, drastically reducing regional populations. Contemporary European observers described the crisis through Latin terms such as pestis, epidemia, and magna mortalitas, rather than the modern label of the Black Death, which only gained currency centuries later. The catastrophe followed decades after the Great Famine of 1315 to 1317, compounding a broader era of turmoil in the late Middle Ages. Modern analyses of ancient DNA recovered from the remains of medieval plague victims have established that the bacterium Yersinia pestis caused the epidemic, and genetic studies link the outbreak to a major diversification of the bacterium's strains.

The territorial beginnings of the epidemic remain a subject of active historical and genetic inquiry. Proposed source regions have ranged from western Eurasia to East Asia. Genetic material recovered from cemeteries in the Chuy Valley near Lake Issyk-Kul in modern Kyrgyzstan reveals that an ancestral strain was present during an outbreak of pestilence in 1338 and 1339. Reports indicate that the contagion reached European traders at the Genoese trading station of Kaffa in Crimea, which the Golden Horde army had besieged in 1345 and 1346. Shipping then carried the infection, probably in stages, through Constantinople to Sicily in 1347, from where it entered mainland Italy.