Plague reaches the Mediterranean
Plague arrives at Constantinople during 1347 and reaches Messina in Sicily in October, then Genoa and Marseille before the year ends, spreading across Europe through 1348 to 1351. It travelled the same corridors, and by the same shipping, that carried the trade. Ancient DNA published in 2022 places the source population of the Black Death lineage in the Tian Shan, in burials of 1338 and 1339.
Historical — it happened, and the record is settled.
Subjects
- Constantinople · city · Türkiye
- Mongol Empire · empire · not located
- Maritime Silk Road · route · Indian Ocean, South China Sea, Persian Gulf, Red Sea · not located
Evidence
Verified — Every field is supported by a cited authoritative source. This is the standing of the weakest source, not an average.
The source of the Black Death in fourteenth-century central Eurasia
Ancient DNA from burials dated 1338 and 1339 at Kara-Djigach in the Chüy valley, Kyrgyzstan, yields a Yersinia pestis genome ancestral to the strain responsible for the Black Death, placing the source population in the Tian Shan region on the northern trade corridors.
Nature · 2022 · Verified
Spyrou, Musralina, Gnecchi-Ruscone et al., Nature, 2022
Historia de Morbo
The best-known account of plague at the siege of Kaffa in the Crimea and its carriage west by Genoese shipping. De' Mussi was not present and wrote at second hand shortly afterwards; the account is near-contemporary testimony rather than eyewitness record, and the catapulted-corpses detail in particular is debated as a transmission mechanism.
Gabriele de' Mussi, notary of Piacenza · ~1348 · Verified
Written c. 1348-1350
Recorded on Constantinople
- Dedication of Constantinople
- Administrative division of the empire on the death of Theodosius I
- Odoacer deposes Romulus Augustulus - the contested 'fall' of the Western Roman Empire
- Mongol destruction of Merv
- Plague strikes the besieging army at Kaffa
- Plague reaches the Mediterranean
- Ottoman capture of Constantinople
Related
Related because they share a subject in the Atlas — never because the text looks similar.
- Ottoman capture of Constantinople · 1453-05-29
- Plague strikes the besieging army at Kaffa · 1346
- Mongol destruction of Merv · 1221
- Odoacer deposes Romulus Augustulus - the contested 'fall' of the Western Roman Empire · 0476-09-04
- Administrative division of the empire on the death of Theodosius I · 0395
- Dedication of Constantinople · 0330-05-11