I believe most of us have heard about the plague as it is often depicted in pictures and there are also some movies and series that have the black death as their main topic or they at least talk about it. And if you had history classes in middle or high school you definitely had to learn about it too. In this article, I will try to explain to you how the plague spread and also how it got the infamous name “black death”.
Let us get started;
The plague also known as the black death or the great mortality was a bubonic plague taking place from 1346 to 1353. This pandemic caused the death of about 75 to 200 million people all over the world and with that, it is the most fatal pandemic the world has seen since. The plague was caused by a bacterium called yersinia pestis which originally was spread by fleas that lived on black rats but later on, it took on a second form of spreading which was by person to person contact via aerosols which is called the pneumonic plague.
Caused of the plague there were many instabilities in the population, especially in regards to socioeconomic status and religion which had major effects on European history.
Where the plague originated is a highly disputed topic. Professionals are unsure if it came from central or east Asia. But they are sure that from there it spread to the Crimea (Ukrainian peninsula) and it then got spread further by Genoese ships that had black rats on board that were infected with fleas that had the bacterium. These ships then brought the virus to north Africa and western Asia and to the Italian peninsula from where it then started to spread further. On the mainland, the main source of infection then changed from fleas to person to person infection. This does also explain how the plague could spread as fast as it did as this would have not been possible with fleas/rats being the main source of infection.
Between 1315 and 1317 Europe had another natural disaster named the great famine which was the first natural disaster in the late middle ages. Because of the great famine and the black death, Europe did not gain the amount of population from 1300 back till 1500. Although the plague ended in 1353 there were still some outbreaks till in the early 19th century but they never gained the size of the black death plague.
Now let us get to the origin of the name black death:
First, the name black death was not used while the plague was going on, people started using it in English around the 1750s. Before that, each language had a variation of the Latin name Magna mortalitas from which the name the great mortality came. Naming the plague the black death actually came from long before the plague. It probably originated from Homer and his Odyssey where he described Scylla with her mouth full of black death. With that, the association of death being black started. And from there it spread and people started using it in association with the plague.
I hope this article cleared up some questions and you got a small summary of it.