A fourteenth-century painting of the people of Tournai carrying coffins to bury victims of the plague
Burying plague victims at Tournai, from the chronicle of Gilles li Muisis, about 1350
Marked Kara-Djigach, Kyrgyzstan

SubjectIn outline · lessons being written

The Black Death

Plague swept from Central Asia and the Black Sea across Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, killing perhaps a third to a half of Europe’s people. Ancient DNA from victims has confirmed the bacterium, Yersinia pestis.

Place
Kara-Djigach, Kyrgyzstan · Caffa · Messina · Florence · LondonEurope, The Middle East, Africa, Asia
Laid out as
A routeA road, a sea lane or a trade network, followed stop by stop.
Lessons
6 planned, none written yet
Image
Unknown artist, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain

The lessons we plan

Titles may change as they are written

  1. Kara-Djigach, Kyrgyzstan
  2. Caffa
  3. Messina
  4. Florence
  5. London
  1. IOut of Central Asia
  2. IICaffa and the ships
  3. IIIFlorence, Cairo and London
  4. IVDoctors and the four humours
  5. VBlame and massacres
  6. VIA world with fewer people

Still to come

The people and objects these lessons will cover

People

  • Giovanni Boccaccio
  • Ibn al-Wardi
  • Agnolo di Tura

Objects

  • The East Smithfield graves
  • Plague tracts

Where it sits

All of human history, era by era

Early human ancestryOur species and the Old Stone AgeFarming and the New Stone AgeFirst cities and the Bronze AgeThe Iron Age and growing statesThe classical worldAfter the empiresMedieval networks and empiresOceans crossedRevolutions and the first factoriesIndustry, empire and world warThe world since 1945

1346 to 1353. Each era is drawn the same width, so the earliest are squeezed: era II alone is over 300,000 years.

Nearby in time and place

This page is an outline. The summary above is a starting point; each lesson, when it is written, will give its sources, its pictures and where historians disagree. Spotted a mistake?