The Black Death

The Arrival of the Black Death in Europe

In October 1347, twelve Genoese galleys entered the harbour of Messina in northeastern Sicily. The ships had come from the Black Sea port of Caffa, fleeing the siege and plague that had devastated the Genoese trading colony. What they brought with them would alter the course of European history. The Franciscan friar Michele da Piazza, who recorded the event decades later, wrote that the sailors were so afflicted that “they bore in their bones a sickness that spread to everyone who came near them.” Within days, the people of Messina began to die.

The Sicilian Landfall

The precise details of the plague’s arrival in Messina are reconstructed from several contemporary and near-contemporary sources, none of which is entirely reliable. Michele da Piazza’s account, written in the 1360s, is the most detailed but was composed at least fifteen years after the events it describes. The chronicler Giovanni Villani of Florence, who died of plague in 1348, recorded the arrival of infected ships in Sicily in his Nuova Cronica, though his information was secondhand.

What is clear from these sources is that the Genoese ships carried both bubonic and pneumonic plague. The sailors exhibited the characteristic symptoms: swollen lymph nodes (buboes) in the groin and armpit, high fever, vomiting of blood, and dark patches on the skin. The disease spread with extraordinary speed through the port city, which had a population of perhaps 40,000 to 50,000.

The Messinese authorities, recognising the danger, expelled the Genoese ships from the harbour — an act that may have slowed the spread of plague to other ports but did nothing to save Messina itself. The expelled ships sailed to other Sicilian ports and to the Italian mainland, carrying the infection with them. By the end of 1347, plague had spread to Catania, Palermo, and Syracuse, and had crossed the Strait of Messina to Reggio di Calabria on the Italian mainland.

The Spread Through Southern Italy

From Sicily and Calabria, the plague moved northward through the Italian peninsula during the winter and spring of 1347–1348. The Kingdom of Naples, which ruled southern Italy, was struck in early 1348. Naples, with a population of perhaps 60,000, was one of the largest cities in Europe, and its crowded, unsanitary conditions provided ideal terrain for the disease.

The plague in Italy spread along the commercial routes that linked the southern ports to the cities of Tuscany and the Po valley. Pisa, a major maritime republic with extensive trading connections, was struck in the spring of 1348. From Pisa, the disease reached Florence, Siena, and the other cities of central Italy, where it would produce some of the most vivid contemporary accounts of the pandemic, including Giovanni Boccaccio’s celebrated description in the Decameron.

The Mediterranean Corridor

While the plague advanced through Italy by land and coastal shipping, it also spread westward across the Mediterranean by sea. Genoese and Venetian ships carried the disease from Sicily to the ports of southern France. Marseille was infected by November or December 1347, likely through ships arriving from Sicily or directly from the Black Sea. The city’s position as the principal port of the Provençal coast, with connections to the Rhône valley and the interior of France, made it a critical node in the maritime transmission of the disease.

From Marseille, the plague moved up the Rhône corridor to Avignon — the seat of the papacy — where it arrived in January 1348. Pope Clement VI remained in the city throughout the epidemic, consecrating the Rhône as a burial ground for the dead and issuing papal bulls condemning the persecution of Jews that accompanied the plague’s spread through the Rhineland.

The Iberian Peninsula was reached in early 1348, when plague struck the ports of the Crown of Aragon — Barcelona, Valencia, and Palma de Mallorca — through ships arriving from Marseille and Italy. The plague in the Iberian Peninsula spread rapidly through the coastal cities and then inland, reaching Castile by the summer of 1348. King Alfonso XI of Castile became the only reigning European monarch to die of the plague, perishing at the siege of Gibraltar in March 1350.

The Alpine Crossings

The plague crossed the Alps into Central Europe through the mountain passes that connected northern Italy to the German-speaking lands. The Brenner Pass, the most important commercial route between Italy and the Holy Roman Empire, carried infected travellers and merchants from the plague-stricken cities of the Po valley into the Tyrol and Bavaria. By the summer of 1348, the disease had reached Carinthia, Styria, and the upper Rhineland.

The timing of the plague’s arrival in different regions was largely determined by the geography of trade routes. Cities that lay on major commercial arteries — river ports, mountain passes, and coastal harbours — were infected first. Remote communities, particularly those in mountainous or poorly connected regions, sometimes escaped the initial wave entirely, only to be struck by subsequent outbreaks in the following years or decades.

The Channel Crossing

The plague reached England in the summer of 1348, arriving at the Dorset port of Melcombe Regis (modern Weymouth) in late June or early July. The disease was likely carried by a ship from Gascony, the English-held territory in southwestern France, or possibly from Calais. The English chronicler Henry Knighton, writing in the 1390s, recorded that the plague arrived “first at Melcombe in Dorset, and then it spread from place to place and killed a great number of people.”

From Dorset, the plague moved through the West Country — Devon, Somerset, and Cornwall — and reached Bristol by August 1348. Bristol, the second-largest city in England with a population of perhaps 12,000, was a major port with trading connections to Ireland, Wales, and the Continent. From Bristol, the disease spread to London by November 1348 and to the rest of England, Wales, and Ireland over the following year.

The Northern Advance

Scandinavia was the last region of Europe to be struck. Norway was infected in 1349, traditionally through a ship that arrived at Bergen from England carrying a cargo of woollen cloth — and, presumably, infected fleas concealed in the fabric. From Norway, the plague spread to Sweden and Denmark in 1350. Iceland, isolated by the surrounding ocean, escaped the Black Death entirely, though it would be struck by plague in the fifteenth century.

Eastern Europe was affected somewhat later and, in some regions, less severely than the west. Poland, Bohemia, and Hungary were struck in 1349–1351, and the plague reached Russia in the early 1350s. The relative sparsity of population and the less developed commercial networks of Eastern Europe may have limited transmission, though the evidence is patchy and the mortality rates remain debated.

The Speed of Transmission

One of the most striking features of the Black Death was the speed with which it spread across Europe. From its arrival in Messina in October 1347 to its presence in northern Norway in late 1349, the disease covered roughly 3,000 miles in approximately two years — an average rate of advance of about four to five miles per day. This rate is consistent with the movement of infected humans and rodents along trade routes and maritime networks, and it exceeds the speed at which purely rodent-borne plague would be expected to spread.

The speed of transmission has been one of the arguments used by scholars who question whether the Black Death was caused solely by bubonic plague transmitted by fleas. The involvement of pneumonic plague, which spreads directly between humans through respiratory droplets, would explain the rapidity of the disease’s advance, particularly during the winter months when flea activity is reduced. The co-circulation of multiple clinical forms of plague — bubonic, pneumonic, and septicemic — is now widely accepted as the most likely explanation for the pandemic’s extraordinary speed and lethality.