The Black Death

Timeline

430 B.C.- During the second year of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides writes about a disease that is believed to have been the Plague

540 A.D.- An outbreak of Plague occurs at Pelusium, Egypt.

542 A.D.- Plague reaches Constantinople.

1334- Plague occurs in Constantinople

1339-1346- The famine occurs. This goes on for seven years and is known as “the famine before the plague.”

1347- The Black Plague began spreading through Western Europe

Fall 1347- Reports of the plague are recorded in Alexandria, Cyprus, and Sicily.

Winter 1347- Plague then reaches Italy.

Jan. 1348- Next, the plague reaches France and Germany.

1349- 1/3 of the population in Western Europe was dead from the plague. That is roughly 25 million people.

May 1349- It then reaches Norway.

1350- Afterwards the plague reaches Eastern Europe. More specifically, it reaches London, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland.

1351- The plague reaches Russia.

1353- Giovanni Boccaccio finishes writing The Decameron, a fictional narrative that opens with a description of the 1348 outbreak of Black Death in Florence, Italy.

March 1665- The Great Plague of London begins, and 43 people died by May.

June 1665- 6,137 people die by June.

July 1665- 17,036 people die by July.

Aug. 1665- 31,159 people die by August.

1666- The Great Fire of London destroys most of the rats and fleas that carry the plague bacillus.

1679- The plague devastates central Europe.

1711- Plague breaks out in Austria.

1722- Daniel Defoe publishes A Journal of the Plague Year, a fictional recounting of the great Plague of London in 1665.

1770- The Balkans battle the Plague for two years.

1877: The pandemic starts up again and flares up in Russia, China, and India.

1889: The Pandemic begins to near an end.

1894: Working independently, bacteriologists Alexandre Yersin and Shibasaburo Kitasato both isolate the bacterium that causes the Black Death. Yersin discovers that rodents are the mode of infection. The bacterium is named Yersina Pestis after Yersin.

1896: The pandemic in China and India is over.

1947: Albert Camus publishes The Plague, a novel about a fictional outbreak of plague in Oran, Algeria.

Sept. 2005: Three mice infected with Bubonic Plague disappear from a laboratory at the Public Health Research Institute in New Jersey.