Black Death Timeline: How the Plague Crossed Europe, 1338 to 1351
Black Death timeline with 77 dated events on a map, each with a source: the 1338 graves in Kyrgyzstan, Caffa, Messina, Florence, Cairo, London and Bergen, the massacres of 1349, the wage laws that followed, and how quarantine began in Ragusa and Venice.
1338 (approx.): Graves at Lake Issyk-Kul name an unspecified pestilence
Tombstones in the Kara-Djigach and Burana cemeteries in the Chüy Valley, near Lake Issyk-Kul in present-day Kyrgyzstan, record an unusually high number of burials in 1338 and 1339. Some inscriptions give pestilence as the cause of death. The cemeteries served a Christian community in central Eurasia. Researchers sequenced DNA from their dead nearly seven centuries later and found Yersinia pestis in three of the seven people tested.
1346: Mongol army besieges the Genoese port of Caffa
A Mongol army lays siege to Caffa, a Genoese trading colony on the Crimean coast, for about a year. Plague breaks out in the besieging force. According to the History.com chronology, the attackers catapult infected corpses over the walls and the Genoese inside fall ill. Gabriele de’ Mussi, a chronicler from Piacenza, is the main contemporary source for the plague ships that left the Black Sea for Italy.
1346: Plague is carried west along the steppe to the Black Sea
A strain of Yersinia pestis moves west from central Asia along the trade routes that link the Mongol lands to Sarai and the Black Sea, according to the History.com chronology. Sarai, on the lower Volga, is the capital of the Golden Horde and a stop on the caravan road to the Italian ports on the Crimean coast. Goods and people travelling this road also carry the disease.
May 1347: Plague reaches Constantinople, capital of the Byzantine Empire
The disease reaches Constantinople after the flight from Caffa. The History.com chronology says the city loses as much as 90 percent of its population. A Wikipedia account of the migration of the plague cites reports of disease at Constantinople and Trebizond as early as 1344, three years before the ships left Caffa.
May 1347: Survivors of the siege flee Caffa by sea
Genoese survivors leave Caffa on ships in May 1347 and sail for the Mediterranean, according to the History.com chronology. The crews carry the infection with them. Ships out of the Black Sea have to pass the Bosporus, which puts Constantinople directly on the route between the Crimean colonies and the ports of Italy, Sicily and southern France.
Autumn 1347: Florence hears the rumours and orders the streets cleaned
News of the epidemic reaches Florence in autumn 1347, months before the disease. The city orders the streets cleaned, refuses entry to sick travellers, keeps animals out, imposes hygiene rules on butchers, bans prostitutes and homosexuals and holds public prayer processions. These measures do not keep the plague out. It arrives in March 1348.
Autumn 1347: A plague ship lands at Alexandria in Egypt
A ship carrying the plague arrives at Alexandria in autumn 1347. The port is the main link between the Mediterranean and the Mamluk Sultanate, and the disease reaches the rest of northern Egypt by the following spring. Egypt then faces repeated outbreaks. One count finds the country was struck 58 times between 1347 and 1517.
October 1347: Twelve Genoese ships bring the plague to Messina
Twelve Genoese ships from the East reach Messina in Sicily in October 1347 with their crews sick or dead. The Genoese are banished from the port but the disease spreads through the city. Some scholars give September as the month of arrival. The Messina landing is the usual starting point for the plague’s spread through western Europe.
November 1347: Refugees from Messina carry plague to Catania
People fleeing Messina reach Catania, further down the east coast of Sicily, in November 1347. Catania becomes the second centre of the epidemic on the island. The refugees carry the disease with them, and within six months it has run through Sicily from end to end. The last recorded victim on the island dies in April 1348.
November 1347: A ship from the East brings plague to Marseille
Plague reaches France at Marseille in November 1347, carried by sea. Louis Heyligen, a musician at the papal court in Avignon, dates the arrival to December instead. Marseille opens the Rhône valley to the disease. Within six months it has travelled up to Lyon and west to Toulouse, and Avignon is reporting executions over poisoned wells.
January 1348: Plague reaches Carcassonne in southern France
Two months after Marseille, the plague is at Carcassonne, on the corridor between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. The disease is present in Toulouse and Lyon by April and is probably at Bordeaux by March, though Bordeaux is not confirmed until June. It reaches some remote parts of the kingdom only in 1351.
January 1348: Venice sets up a crisis committee as plague arrives
Medievalists.net dates the plague’s arrival in Venice to January 1348, when the city council appoints a committee to deal with the crisis. A Wikipedia account places arrival in April. The first epidemic kills an estimated one third of the Venetian population. The History.com chronology gives 60 percent. Burials at the cemetery near the Rialto run at 25 to 30 a day.
January 1348: Plague enters Genoa, the home port of the Caffa fleet
Plague reaches Genoa at the start of 1348. The History.com chronology describes this as a second line of infection into Europe, separate from the Sicilian landing. Gabriele de’ Mussi’s chronicle says plague ships went directly to Genoa and Venice. By the turn of the year both of Italy’s great maritime republics are exposed.
January 1348: Plague moves from Genoa along the coast to Pisa
The Sienese chronicler Agnolo di Tura records the plague moving from Genoa to Pisa in January 1348. Pisa is the seaport of Tuscany, and the road from there runs inland to Lucca and Florence. The disease now has a foothold on the Italian mainland three months after the Messina landing, and it reaches Lucca the following month.
February 1348: Plague reaches Lucca and Piombino in Tuscany
The epidemic moves through Tuscany in February 1348, reaching Piombino on the coast and Lucca, a short distance inland from Pisa. Both towns lie on the routes between the port of Pisa and the Tuscan interior. Florence, which has been preparing since the autumn of 1347, is struck the following month and loses people until July.
March 1348: Plague strikes Bologna and its university for six months
The plague is in Bologna from March to September 1348. The University of Bologna, the leading law school in Europe, loses many of its academics. Among the dead is Giovanni d’Andrea, a teacher of canon law. The epidemic in Bologna runs for six months, twice as long as the worst weeks reported in many smaller towns.
March 1348: The plague reaches Florence and kills until July
Plague arrives in Florence in March 1348 and lasts until July. Victims die within three days of the first symptoms. Giovanni Boccaccio, who lived through it, claims more than 100,000 dead. Historians reject that figure because the city never held that many people. The loss was nonetheless very large, and Boccaccio makes these months the frame of The Decameron.
April 1348: Plague reaches Siena, Perugia and Orvieto
Plague spreads through central Italy in April and May 1348. The Sienese chronicler Agnolo di Tura claims only eight people were left alive in the city when it passed, a figure that cannot be literal. The painters Ambrogio and Pietro Lorenzetti die, along with many of the rulers of Siena. Perugia and Orvieto are struck in the same weeks.
April 1348: The plague reaches Toulouse and Lyon
The epidemic reaches Toulouse and Lyon in April 1348, five months after Marseille. Toulouse sits on the Garonne road to Bordeaux, and Lyon on the Rhône road to Burgundy and Paris. From these two cities the plague moves into the interior of France along river valleys. A second line of infection arrives by land from Genoa in May.
April 1348: John, Duke of Randazzo, is the last recorded victim in Sicily
John, Duke of Randazzo, a member of the royal house of Sicily, is recorded as the last plague victim on the island in April 1348, six months after the Messina landing. The epidemic has run through Sicily in a single winter, by which time it is established in Tuscany and on the coast of France.
April 1348: The plague reaches Gaza and the road to Syria
Plague reaches Gaza in April or May 1348. Residents flee to the countryside. Criminals who loot the empty houses die in them, and peasants are reported to have collapsed in their fields while ploughing. Gaza is the first town on the road from Egypt into Palestine and Syria, and news of its losses travels north ahead of the disease.
April 1348: Avignon executes people accused of poisoning wells
Louis Heyligen, writing from the papal court at Avignon, reports executions in April 1348 of people accused of poisoning wells. The accusation of well poisoning spreads north through France and the Rhineland over the following year. Pope Clement VI, at Avignon, will issue two bulls against the charge later in 1348.
April 1348: Forty Jews are murdered at Toulon as rumours spread
A mob sacks the Jewish quarter of Toulon in April 1348 and kills about 40 Jews in their homes. Violence follows within weeks in Barcelona and other Catalan cities. The massacre is among the first in which Jewish communities are blamed for the plague. Anti-Jewish riots in Provence peak in April and May.
May 1348: A second wave enters France overland from Genoa
A second line of infection enters France by land from Genoa in May 1348, joining the wave that had moved north from Marseille since the winter. The kingdom has between 16 and 20 million people. Philip VI had convened the Estates General in November 1347 to fund the war with England, which was already straining the royal finances.
June 1348: Bordeaux is confirmed infected on the Atlantic coast
Plague is confirmed in Bordeaux in June 1348, after probably being present from March. Bordeaux is the chief port of English Gascony and the main link between the wine trade of south-west France and the ports of England. The same month it reaches Roissy, near Gonesse, north of Paris, and Rouen on the lower Seine.
Summer 1348: Damascus runs out of funerals as deaths mount
Plague reaches Damascus in the summer of 1348. Deaths soon exceed what funerals can handle, and bodies are stacked in gardens and streets. Muslims, Christians and Samaritans take part in joint prayer processions. The chronicler Ibn al-Wardi argues openly that the plague is God’s punishment for sin. A count from October records 263 bodies in a single day at the Umayyad Mosque.
Summer 1348: Flagellants appear in Germany in bands of 50 to 500
Groups of flagellants, who whip themselves in public as penance, first appear in Germany in the summer of 1348, in bands of 50 to 500 people, according to the History.com chronology. The movement spreads west to the towns of the Low Countries, where processions are recorded at Tournai in 1349. It has largely disappeared by 1350.
June 1348: Ibn Battuta hears of the plague at Aleppo and travels south
The traveller Ibn Battuta is in Aleppo in June 1348 when he learns the plague has reached Gaza. He goes south through Homs to Jerusalem. The epidemic has already passed through Jerusalem by the time he arrives. He records that nearly everyone he knew from his last visit is dead.
June 1348: Plague lands in England at Melcombe Regis, Dorset
A sailor from Gascony brings the plague to Melcombe Regis on the Dorset coast shortly before 24 June 1348, according to the Grey Friars’ Chronicle of King’s Lynn. If that chronicle recorded the first outbreak and not the first arrival, the true date may be around 8 May. The chronicle says the men of Melcombe were the first in England to be infected.
Summer 1348: Half of Avignon dies and Clement VI withdraws on medical advice
The History.com chronology says 50 percent of the population of Avignon dies in the summer of 1348. The papal city had drawn clerics and merchants from all over Europe. Pope Clement VI arranges religious processions. On the advice of his physician Gui de Chauliac he withdraws to Étoile-sur-Rhône and survives.
June 1348: Plague is noted at Tunis after a Marinid army retreats there
Plague is recorded at Tunis in June 1348. Two months earlier the Marinid sultan Abu al-Hasan had been defeated by Arab tribes near Kairouan and retreated toward Tunis. The disease is believed to have travelled with his army when it later returned to Fez, carrying the epidemic across North Africa.
24 June 1348: Plague reaches Rouen on the feast of St John
Plague is recorded at Rouen on 24 June 1348, the feast of John the Baptist. The Norman capital is the main port on the lower Seine. Paris lies upstream on the same river and will be hit hard by autumn. In England, the Dorset coast has been infected for only a few weeks at this date.
July 1348: Padua loses two rulers in succession
Plague reaches Padua in July 1348. Two of the city’s rulers die in succession. Padua lies between Venice and Bologna, both already infected. The epidemic in Bologna runs from March to September, and the Venetian council issues its ban on leaving the city in the same month that Padua is struck.
July 1348: Venetian council bans citizens from leaving the city
In July 1348 the surviving members of the Venetian council forbid citizens to leave the city, on pain of losing position and status. Many officials have already died or fled. The order is an attempt to keep a government functioning in a city where the cemetery near the Rialto is burying 25 to 30 people a day.
6 July 1348: Clement VI issues a bull rejecting the well-poisoning charge
Pope Clement VI issues a bull on 6 July 1348 stating that those who blame Jews for the plague have been seduced by that liar, the Devil. He places Jews under papal protection in Avignon. Some sources date the bull to 5 July, and one to 6 July 1349. The killings continue in the Rhineland and Switzerland.
August 1348: Plague reaches Rome
The epidemic reaches Rome in August 1348, ten months after the Messina landing, by a Wikipedia account of the spread through Italy. By this point the disease has passed through Sicily, Tuscany, the Veneto and Emilia. It has reached the Atlantic coast of France and southern England, and it is still moving north through the Rhône valley.
August 1348: Givry in Burgundy begins to lose half its people
The Burgundian village of Givry loses about half of its population between August and November 1348. Givry lies between Lyon and Paris, on the roads the plague followed north through the kingdom. Paris is struck in the autumn, and Jean de Venette reports 800 deaths a day there in November and December.
15 August 1348: Plague begins at Bristol, says Geoffrey le Baker
Geoffrey le Baker dates the outbreak at Bristol to 15 August 1348, the feast of the Assumption. Bristol is the first major English city struck after the Dorset landing and one of the kingdom’s busiest ports. From there the disease moves north to Gloucester and Oxford, where le Baker writes that grass grew high in the High Street and Broad Street.
September 1348: Plague reaches Cairo and kills about 200,000
Plague reaches Cairo in September 1348. The city is the largest in the Middle East and Mediterranean. The sultan An-Nasir Hasan leaves for his residence at Siryaqus from 25 September to 22 December. About 200,000 people die by early 1349, roughly a third of the population. Several quarters remain depopulated ruins for the next century.
2 September 1348: Princess Joan of England dies near Bordeaux
Joan, the daughter of Edward III of England, dies on 2 September 1348 in a village near Bordeaux. She had been moved there after plague broke out in her household on her way to marry Pedro of Castile. The death of a king’s daughter is one of the first signs for the English court of how far the disease has come.
26 September 1348: A second papal bull orders clergy to protect Jews
Clement VI issues a second bull on 26 September 1348, urging clergy to protect Jews and offering them papal protection in Avignon. The bull has little effect in the German lands and Switzerland, where the largest massacres take place in the winter and spring that follow, at Basel, Strasbourg, Cologne, Mainz and Erfurt.
29 September 1348: Plague reaches London, says Geoffrey le Baker
Geoffrey le Baker dates the arrival of plague in London to around Michaelmas, 29 September 1348. Robert of Avesbury dates it to around 1 November. It is certainly in the capital by November. London has perhaps 70,000 inhabitants. The epidemic is fully felt there early in 1349, when Avesbury counts more than 200 burials almost daily at Smithfield.
31 October 1348: Ibn Abi Hajalah counts 263 bodies at the Umayyad Mosque
The scholar Ibn Abi Hajalah records 263 bodies stacked in the Umayyad Mosque of Damascus on 31 October 1348. The figure is one of the few exact daily counts from the Syrian cities during the epidemic. Plague peaks in northern Egypt in the same months, from October 1348 to January 1349.
November 1348: Jean de Venette reports 800 deaths a day in Paris
The Carmelite friar Jean de Venette reports 800 deaths a day in Paris in November and December 1348, with up to 500 bodies carried daily to mass burial sites. Paris loses about 50,000 people, roughly half of its residents. Philip VI orders the University of Paris to write the Compendium de epidemia on the plague that year.
1349: Boccaccio begins writing The Decameron in Florence
Giovanni Boccaccio begins The Decameron in 1349, the year his father probably dies of plague, and works on it until 1353. Its hundred stories are told by ten young people who leave Florence during the epidemic of 1348. Boccaccio’s introduction describes the deaths in the city from March to July of that year.
Early 1349: Plague reaches Asyut, where taxpayers fall from 6,000 to 116
The epidemic reaches the region of Asyut in southern Egypt in early 1349. The number of taxpayers there falls from 6,000 to 116. Plague had peaked in northern Egypt from October 1348 to January 1349. In Cairo, downriver, about 200,000 people die between September 1348 and early 1349, roughly a third of its people.
1349: Massacre of the Jewish community of Basel
The Jewish community of Basel is destroyed in 1349, one of the massacres that move through Switzerland and down the Rhine. Accusations of well poisoning spread from town to town. Strasbourg kills about 2,000 Jews on 14 February of the same year, before the plague has reached the city. Cologne and Mainz follow in the spring.
1349: Edward III issues the Ordinance of Labourers
Edward III issues the Ordinance of Labourers in 1349 to hold wages and prices at their levels before the plague. The ordinance restricts a tenant’s right to leave his manor, requires workers to accept work when it is offered and forbids employers to pay higher wages than those in force before the epidemic. Parliament writes it into statute two years later.
1349: Leicester parishes bury 380, 400 and 700 in a single year
Henry Knighton, a canon of Leicester, counts more than 380 dead in the parish of St Leonard, more than 400 in Holy Cross and more than 700 in St Margaret’s in 1349. He records that more than 5,000 sheep die in one pasture the same year, and that livestock and goods become very cheap while the wages of reapers and mowers rise.
1349: Massacre of the Jewish community of Erfurt
The Jewish community of Erfurt, in Thuringia, is killed in 1349 during the wave of massacres across the German lands. The building known as the Old Synagogue survives in the city today. It is one of the oldest standing synagogue buildings in central Europe and a record of the community that lived there before 1349.
2 February 1349: Smithfield burial ground takes 200 bodies a day
Robert of Avesbury reports that from Candlemas, 2 February, to Easter, 12 April 1349, more than 200 corpses are buried almost daily in a new burial ground at Smithfield, outside the walls of London. That count excludes the city’s other graveyards. Pits hold 20, 40, 60 or more bodies, he writes.
14 February 1349: About 2,000 Jews are burned at Strasbourg
About 2,000 Jews are burned alive in Strasbourg on 14 February 1349, Saint Valentine’s Day. The plague has not yet reached the city. Christian residents collect the valuables that survive the fires. The killing is one of the largest of the massacres carried out across the Rhineland and Switzerland in 1349.
Spring 1349: The Jews of Mainz fight back and are killed
The Jewish population of Mainz, about 3,000 people, initially holds off its attackers in spring 1349. The assailants overwhelm the ghetto and kill all of its Jews. The killing follows the destruction of the Frankfurt and Cologne communities in the same season. King Casimir III of Poland offers refuge to Jews from western Europe in these years.
Spring 1349: The Jewish community of Cologne is destroyed
The Jewish community of Cologne is destroyed in spring 1349, after the massacre at Frankfurt and before the one at Mainz. Cologne is the largest city on the lower Rhine. Together with Strasbourg, Basel, Erfurt and Mainz, it is one of the towns where Jewish settlements dating back centuries end within a few months.
March 1349: Welsh poet Jeuan Gethin describes the swellings, then dies
Jeuan Gethin, a Welsh poet, describes plague symptoms including painful swellings under the arms. He dies between March and April 1349. Geoffrey le Baker says the plague struck the Welsh in 1349, the year after it reached England. The History.com chronology dates its arrival in Wales to April 1349 and puts deaths there at about 100,000.
May 1349: Plague reaches York and spreads across the north of England
Plague reaches York in May 1349, three months after entering Yorkshire in February, and ravages the north through June, July and August. Archbishop Zouche of York had warned his diocese of great mortalities as early as July 1348. Some parts of the archdiocese may lose up to 48 percent of their clergy.
July 1349: An English ship brings plague to Askøy and Bergen in Norway
A ship from England lands at Askøy in western Norway in 1349 and the plague moves on to Bergen, known at the time as Bjørgvin. The History.com chronology dates the arrival to July. The disease spreads to Denmark and Sweden, where it kills two of the king’s brothers. North-eastern Russia is not reached until 1351.
August 1349: Plague reaches Tournai, recorded by abbot Gilles Li Muisis
Plague reaches Tournai in August 1349 and lasts until November. The town is in the Low Countries, a late stage on the route north from France. The miniature of Tournai citizens burying the dead, from the chronicle of the abbot Gilles Li Muisis, is one of the best known images of the epidemic.
December 1349: The epidemic subsides in England after about 500 days
The plague covers all of England by summer 1349 and subsides by December, having taken about 500 days to cross the country. A mortality of 40 to 60 percent is widely accepted. Ole Benedictow’s 2004 estimate of 62.5 percent would mean about 3.75 million deaths from a population of 6 million.
February 1350: 166 priests are ordained in a single session
A single ordination session in February 1350 produces 166 priests. Earlier records name 299 priests and 683 acolytes recruited in 1349, against 111 priests and 337 acolytes in 1346. Some parts of the York archdiocese may have lost up to 48 percent of their clergy in the epidemic, and the numbers show how fast the church has to replace them.
March 1350: Plague kills 5,000 Scottish troops on the English border
The History.com chronology says 5,000 Scottish troops die of infection on the border in March 1350, and that the retreating soldiers carry the disease north. A third of Scotland dies, by this account. John of Fordun, a clerk of Aberdeen, writes that victims died within about two days of falling ill.
1351: The plague subsides after killing 25 to 50 million in Europe
The first wave of the Black Death subsides in 1351. The History.com chronology gives 25 to 50 million deaths and 210 Jewish community massacres, with Europe losing about half of its people. Other estimates vary: Wikipedia cites 75 to 200 million across Eurasia, and over a third of Europe’s population.
1351: Plague reaches north-eastern Russia
The epidemic reaches north-eastern Russia in 1351, moving east after its passage through Germany and Scandinavia between 1348 and 1350. Poland is largely spared, and King Casimir III offers refuge to Jews fleeing western Europe. The first wave is by then dying out in the west, where the History.com chronology dates its end to the same year.
9 February 1351: The Statute of Labourers takes effect in England
The Statute of Labourers takes effect on 9 February 1351. It sets maximum wages at the rates of 1346 and requires able-bodied people under 68 to serve whoever requires them. Refusal can bring prison. A first conviction for idleness carries 40 days. Enforcement is weak, and farm wages in England on average double between 1350 and 1450.
1352: Tonnerre, the last part of France, is reached
The plague reaches Tonnerre in Burgundy in 1352, the last part of France to be touched. Some remote districts had been reached only the previous year. The passage through the kingdom began at Marseille in late 1347, more than four years earlier. Brittany and the Auvergne were infected in 1349, and Paris lost about half of its residents.
1357: Plague reaches the native Irish in the uplands
Geoffrey le Baker writes that the plague crossed to Ireland after England and Wales and killed many English settlers, leaving the Irish of the mountains and uplands scarcely touched. In 1357, he writes, it reached them and annihilated them everywhere. In England the disease had subsided by December 1349, about 500 days after the Dorset landing, and returned in 1361.
1358: The Jacquerie uprising breaks out in northern France
Peasants rise against the nobility in northern France in 1358, in the revolt known as the Jacquerie. It is put down with great violence. The Collector’s account lists the rising alongside the English revolt of 1381 and the Ciompi of Florence as examples of the unrest that followed the labour shortage after the Black Death.
1361: The second pestilence kills about 20 percent in England
Plague returns to England in 1361 and 1362. The pestis secunda kills around 20 percent of the population. Britannica lists further European recurrences in 1369 to 1371, 1374 to 1375, 1390 and 1400. In England the 1369 outbreak kills another 10 to 15 percent, and plague returns in force between 1430 and 1480.
1370: The Jewish community of Brussels is wiped out
The Brussels massacre of 1370, about twenty years after the first wave of the Black Death, ends the Jewish community of the region. Earlier killings across the Rhineland and Switzerland had destroyed communities at Basel, Strasbourg, Cologne, Mainz and Erfurt in 1349. The History.com chronology counts 210 Jewish community massacres in the years of the first wave.
1377: Ragusa establishes a temporary lazaret against the plague
Ragusa, the Adriatic port now called Dubrovnik, sets up a temporary lazaret in 1377, the first of its kind, according to Medievalists.net. Isolating arrivals before they enter a city becomes the central public-health tool against plague. Italian cities impose quarantine rules on travellers and ships in the same decades, and Venice assigns a hospital island in 1423.
1378: Florence’s Ciompi wool workers seize a share of government
The Ciompi, the wool workers of Florence, rise in 1378 and briefly restructure the city’s government, winning political rights and guild recognition that last just over three years. The Collector’s account places the rising among the labour conflicts that followed the Black Death, alongside the Jacquerie of 1358 and the English revolt of 1381.
May 1381: The English Peasants’ Revolt begins in Kent and Essex
The Peasants’ Revolt begins in Kent and Essex in late May 1381 and marches on London. Its leader is killed and the Crown carries out mass executions. The Statute of Labourers of 1351 is one of the causes of the rising. The revolt is linked to the slow decline of serfdom in England.
1423: Venice assigns Lazzaretto Vecchio as a plague hospital
Venice assigns the island of Lazzaretto Vecchio, near the Lido, as a hospital for plague patients in 1423, according to Medievalists.net. It takes the sick out of the crowded city. Northern Italian cities had been imposing quarantine rules on travellers and ships since the second half of the fourteenth century. A second island follows in 1468.
1468: Venice opens Lazzaretto Nuovo to hold ships for forty days
Lazzaretto Nuovo, on the island of Vigna Murada, becomes a second Venetian detention centre in 1468 and serves as a quarantine station. Ships are held there for forty days. The word quarantine comes from the Italian for forty days. The station falls out of use in the eighteenth century, and Venice creates a permanent health board in 1485.
1485: Venice installs a permanent health board
Venice sets up the Magistrata alla Sanità, a permanent health board, in 1485. It absorbs the duties of the crisis committee created in January 1348. The city has by then dealt with plague for 137 years. Its lazarettos at Lazzaretto Vecchio and Lazzaretto Nuovo are already in use, and Lazzaretto Nuovo holds ships for forty days.
1665: The Great Plague of London kills about 100,000
The Great Plague of 1665 and 1666 kills about 100,000 people in London, roughly 20 percent of the capital. It is the last major outbreak of plague in England, 317 years after the Melcombe landing. Bristol sets up its Forlorn Hope pesthouse in the same years, and its mortality that year is about 0.6 percent.
15 June 2022: DNA from Kyrgyz graves traces the Black Death to central Eurasia
A team led by Maria Spyrou, Philip Slavin and Johannes Krause publishes ancient DNA from the Kara-Djigach and Burana cemeteries in Nature on 15 June 2022. Three people at Kara-Djigach carried Yersinia pestis. Two genomes represent the most recent common ancestor of the four branches linked to the second pandemic. The authors find support for an early fourteenth-century source in central Eurasia.