The Black Death on a map: plague in Europe, 1347–1900

Where the Black Death began

Ancient DNA has pushed the story east. Genomes from a cemetery at Kara-Djigach, in present-day Kyrgyzstan, dated 1338–1339, sit close to the origin of the strain that caused the Black Death a decade later. The map shows this site as early evidence, just before the Black Death reached Europe.

From the Black Sea, plague reached Mediterranean ports in 1347 and moved across Europe over the next four years. Estimates of how many people died vary widely. Figures of a third to a half of Europe’s population are often quoted, but they rest on patchy local evidence. The dataset lists 110 places with plague in 1348, its second-busiest year.

Four centuries of return visits

The Black Death was the beginning, not a single event. Plague came back again and again for about 400 years. Grouped by half-century, the records climb from 392 in 1350–1399 to a peak of 1,769 in 1600–1649.

The single busiest year is 1630, during the Italian plague of 1629–1631 that struck Milan and Venice, with outbreaks across France at the same time. 1665, the year of London’s Great Plague, has 75 records. London has more records than any other place (132), followed by Algiers (112), Paris, Toulouse and Izmir.

Why the map empties after 1720

Marseille’s outbreak of 1720–1722 was the last major epidemic in western Europe. The record thins out quickly: 158 mentions in 1700–1749, 127 in 1750–1799 and 80 in 1800–1849. Most late records come from the Ottoman Mediterranean and North Africa.

Why plague withdrew from Europe is still debated. Explanations include quarantine and military sanitary cordons, changes in rat and flea populations, housing and trade, and changes in the bacterium itself. No single cause is generally accepted, and the map cannot settle the question.

What the dots mean, and what they don’t

The records come from a digitized catalogue of historical plague outbreaks, compiled from chronicles, parish records and other written sources. Coverage is heavily European because those archives were searched most thoroughly. A blank area means no surviving record in this catalogue, not that plague was absent.

Historical diagnoses are not laboratory confirmations. Outbreaks named “plague” in old sources may occasionally have been other diseases. The map colours countries by the number of records inside today’s borders. Those borders are a geographic reference only, not historical states.

Plague did not disappear

A third pandemic spread from southwestern China in the second half of the nineteenth century and reached Hong Kong in 1894, where the bacterium Yersinia pestis was identified. It later reached ports on every inhabited continent. Plague still occurs today. According to WHO, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Madagascar and Peru are the most endemic countries, and it can be treated with antibiotics if caught early. The map’s plague layer stops at 1900 and does not include this pandemic.

Common questions