20th Century’s Deadliest Disasters

34. Communist Propaganda Sets the Stage for a Tragic Letdown

By the 1970s, Mao’s strain of communism had dealt China setback after setback. Mao believed that revolutionary zeal could substitute for proper planning, and even rational thinking. The result was a series of debacles such as the poorly named Great Leap Forward, which actually ended up setting China back. As many as 50 million Chinese ended up starving to death. Then came Mao’s Cultural Revolution, which again assumed that revolutionary zeal and people power – in this case, the power of young fanatical people – could propel China into modernity and prosperity. The result was even more chaos and suffering.

By 1976, Mao, accurately reflecting his regime and brand of communism, was a debilitated and dying old man. However, he and his hardcore followers still believed that Maoist revolutionary zeal – Mao Zedong Thought – could work miracles. Maoist revolutionary zeal extended to a Chinese system of earthquake prediction that was touted as infallible. As seen below, it was not.

33. The Chinese Had to Believe in Mao Zedong Thought – or Else

Among the many kooky ideas propagated during the Cultural Revolution, was the belief in socialist science. That extended to a belief in a Chinese scientific system for earthquake prediction, whose accuracy was questionable. In 1975, the system actually did provide a timely warning of an upcoming earthquake, allowing for preventative measures that led to a remarkably low death toll. As subsequent events proved, however, that was a fluke.

China’s earthquake prediction system was held up as an example of the superiority of Chinese communism under Mao. Questioning that was to question Mao, and questioning Mao was ill-advised. Like other things touted by Mao’s regime as indicators of its superiority, belief in the earthquake prediction system had nothing to do with science and facts. Not that facts mattered much to Mao and his followers, who routinely dismissed contrary evidence as fake news. Instead, belief in China’s earthquake prediction system became a litmus test to separate “true party liners” from “right-wing deviationists”.

32. The People of Tangshan Experienced Strange Phenomena and Omens Before a Tragic Disaster

Tangshan, a coal mining and industrial city, is about 70 miles east of Beijing. In late July, 1976, people in and around the city began noticing that there was some weird stuff going on. Chicken refused to eat. Rats were spotted running in panicked packs in daylight. The water level in wells rose and fell. On the evening of July 27^th, and through the early morning hours of the 28^th, fireballs and flashes of colored lights were seen.

While such phenomena were strange, people still had lives to live and work to do. So in the wee morning hours of July 28^th, 1976, most of Tangshan’s residents were sound asleep, resting from the toil of the day that had gone by, and recharging for the toil of the day to come. Then at 3:42 AM, disaster struck.

31. The Twentieth Century’s Deadliest Earthquake

At 3:42 AM, July 28^th, 1976, a massive earthquake of between 7.8 to 8.2 on the Richter Scale hit Tangshan. It lasted for less than half a minute – 23 seconds, to be exact. During that short span of time, 90% of Tangshan’s buildings were leveled. Because almost everybody was asleep in their beds – in homes that were decidedly not earthquake-resistant – the death toll was horrific.

Stunned survivors crawled out of their homes, many of them naked, covered only in blood and dust. The seismic upheaval started fires, set off explosives in Tangshan’s factories, spilled toxic chemicals, and released poisonous gasses. Water and electricity were cut off, while road and rail links were severed. Between the initial earthquake and subsequent aftershocks, an estimated 655,000 people were killed, and another 700,000 were seriously injured.

30. Official Incompetence Added Unnecessary Suffering to an Already Tragic Disaster

The Chinese government was not prepared for such a tragic event. 100,000 soldiers, 30,000 medical personnel, and another 30,000 construction workers were mobilized, and ordered to Tangshan to assist with rescue and recovery. However, just getting them there proved to be a challenge. Road and rail links to the stricken region had been severed, so rescuers had to walk to get there – some covering almost 200 miles on foot.

When they got there, many of the rescuers lacked the training for pulling survivors out of the rubble, and there was little effective oversight on the ground to coordinate their efforts. Mao’s government, embarrassed and unwilling to let outsiders witness the incompetence of its response, refused all offers of foreign assistance. As a result, during the crucial first few days after the disaster, many died from lack of adequate care.

29. The Tangshan Disaster Discredited Mao and Mao Zedong Thought

The vaunted Chinese earthquake prediction system, touted by Mao’s communist followers, had not predicted the Tangshan disaster. The complete lack of warning, combined with a horrific death toll in the hundreds of thousands, was hard to ignore.

It was a stark failure that demonstrated to all – even if none dared say so – that the claims of the superiority of Chinese methods and communist science touted by Mao were ludicrous. It was against that backdrop of yet another demonstrable failure that an aged and ailing Mao went into his final decline, and died a month and a half later, on September 9^th, 1976.

28. The Ancient World’s Most Famous Tragic Disaster

One of antiquity’s most famous and tragic natural disasters was Mount Vesuvius’ eruption around noon on August 24^th, 79 AD. It was one of Europe’s most powerful volcanic explosions. Vesuvius blew its top with a force 100,000 times greater than that of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs. The eruption tossed deadly debris mixed with a cloud of poisonous gasses over 20 miles up into the air. As it spewed gasses into the skies, lava and hot pumice poured out of the volcano’s mouth at a rate of 1.5 million tons per second. The scorching mixture raced down Vesuvius’ side to devastate the surrounding region and destroy nearby towns, of which Pompeii and Herculaneum are the best known.

Pliny the Younger, a Roman author and magistrate, was 15 miles away at Cape Misenum, visiting his uncle, Pliny the Elder. The elder Pliny was a Roman admiral, who ended up losing lose his life during the course of rescue efforts. Pliny the Younger penned a detailed description of the events he saw and those told him by first-hand witnesses. Pliny’s account is the best-written and most thorough narrative of the event, and history is deeply indebted to him.

27. Vesuvius Vomited Lava That Incinerated All That it Encountered

There had been tremors for days, but they were not unusual. The tragic episode kicked off around noon on August 24^th, when a cloud appeared atop Vesuvius. About an hour later, the volcano erupted and ash began to fall on Pompeii, 6 miles away. By 2 PM, pumice, or volcanic debris, begin to fall with the ash. By 5 PM, sunlight had been completely blocked and roofs in Pompeii began collapsing under the accumulating weight of ash and pumice.

Panicked townspeople rushed to the harbor seeking any ship that would take them away. By midnight, the volcano was spewing a hot deadly column over 20 miles up into the air. In the meantime, lava flowed down the mountainside in six major surges, as Vesuvius vomited molten rock in a rapid flow that incinerated all that it encountered.

Also Read: Interesting thing about the Tragic Town of Pompeii and the Volcanic Eruption.

26. Tragic as it Was, History is Deeply Indebted to the Vesuvius Eruption

Vesuvius’ lava flow did not reach Pompeii or Herculaneum. However, it sent heat waves of more than 550 degrees Fahrenheit into those towns. It turned them into ovens, and killed any who had not yet escaped and had not already suffocated from the fine ash. About 1500 bodies were found in Pompeii and Herculaneum when they were unearthed centuries later. They were recovered from just a small part of the area impacted by the volcano’s eruption. Extrapolating from those figures to the surrounding regions, total casualties are estimated to have been in the tens of thousands.

Pompeii and Herculaneum, whose populations at the time numbered about 20,000, were buried beneath up to 20 feet of volcanic ash and pumice. Tragic and terrifying as that was, the ash deposits did a remarkably effective job of preserving those towns nearly entire. That gave future historians an unrivaled snapshot of 1^st century AD Roman architecture, city planning, urban infrastructure, and town life in general.

25. Of History’s Most Tragic Disasters, Floods are Usually the Deadliest

Sudden tragic events grab our attention, and dramatic natural disasters such as volcanic eruptions and earthquakes are usually what most grip the imaginations. They are the types of violent events that unleash immediate and massive amounts of mayhem in a short amount of time.

However, history’s deadliest disasters – and by a long shot at that – are a bit more prosaic. Historically, when Mother Nature sets out to inflict the most suffering upon us, she has done so not with volcanoes or earthquakes, but with floods. Indeed, as seen below, history’s deadliest flood was almost five times as deadly as the deadliest earthquake (the 1556 Shaanxi Earthquake, with 830,000 deaths), and over fifty-six times as deadly as the deadliest volcanic eruption (the 1815 Tambora eruption, with 71,000 fatalities).

Related: The World’s Deadliest Earthquake in History (1556)

24. The Tragic Yellow River Has Long Been a Blessing and Curse for China

The Yellow River is probably the world’s most tragic river. Making its way through northern China, the Yellow River has been the cradle of that country’s civilization. Frequently, however, it has also been China’s curse: another name for the Yellow River is “The River of Sorrows“. The river, which got its name from the yellow loess silt that it carries and that gives it a distinctive color, is lined with dikes to keep it from overflowing its banks. Those dikes have failed on numerous occasions, with disastrous consequences.

From time to time throughout China’s history, sudden heavy rainfalls have caused the Yellow River’s water level to rise rapidly. Sometimes that leads to the river topping and overflowing the protective dikes, or breaching them outright. In 1887, one such episode led to the Yellow River’s deadliest flooding, and history’s second deadliest natural disaster.

23. Much of China’s History Has Revolved Around a Tragic Struggle to Control the Yellow River

The Yellow River carries massive amounts of silt – about 1.5 billion tons each year. Throughout most of China’s history, it was not dredged. The result was a steady accumulation of silt at the river’s bottom, causing the riverbed to rise steadily. A rising riverbed is bad news for those living and farming along its banks. The shallower the river gets, the wider it becomes, threatening to flood adjacent lands.

Much of China’s history has been about preventing that from happening, usually with massively labor-intensive projects to line the Yellow River with protective dikes. As the river rose over the years, so did the dikes. This went on for thousands of years, until China ended up with a river flowing along at an elevated level, often higher than the adjacent land. So when the dikes failed, the results were tragic. As in the catastrophic type of tragedy. Unlike with most other rivers, when the Yellow River floods, the floodwaters don’t rise gradually. Instead, they come crashing down from on high, sweeping all in their path with great violence.

22. The Tragic Yellow River Flood of 1887

September of 1887 was a particularly wet time in northern China and along the Yellow River valley. Towards the end of the month, heavy rains that went on for days caused the river to swell rapidly. On September 28^th, the rising waters overcame the dikes and broke through them near the city of Zhengzhou in Henan Province – a flat plain near the river mouth. Many people ran upstream, trying to reach a level above that of the rapidly flooding area, but were caught in the fast-moving torrent and drowned.

Within an hour, a lake as big as Lake Ontario had formed. People from drier areas tried to save as many as they could by rowing around in small boats. Some survivors reached and clung to terraces slightly higher than the water level, and waited for rescue. Others desperately clung to anything that could float. One family, knowing that it had no chance of surviving, placed a baby on top of a wooden chest, along with some food and a note bearing its name. The baby was saved. The family was never found.

21. The Incompetence of the Chinese Government Made the 1887 Yellow River Flood Even More Tragic

When the Yellow River’s flood finally receded, survivors were left with loess mud as far as the eye could see, up to eight feet deep. As it dried out, the region looked more like the Sahara Desert than the green and fertile agricultural plain it had been just a few days earlier. What made things even more tragic was that China in 1887 was ruled by a hapless and wholly inept imperial government on its last legs. It lacked both the organizational skills and resources for the massive rescue, recovery and rebuilding effort necessary to restore things to normal.

Nonetheless, the farmers were familiar with the routines of dike repair, and they came together by the hundreds of thousands. They used whatever tools they could lay their hands on, and their bare hands when tools were unavailable, to repair the dikes before the next rainy season. It was not until early 1889 that the dikes were finally closed. By then, between drowning, diseases, and famine, the Yellow River flood had killed over 900,000 people.

20. The Tragic Town That Was Destroyed Twice In a Single Lifetime

Coringa, on the Bay of Bengal, is one of India’s most tragic settlements. Until 1839, it was a bustling port city, near the mouth of the Godavari River as it emptied into the Bay of Bengal on India’s east coast. It had a population numbering in the hundreds of thousands, and a harbor that hosted thousands of ships annually, busily loading and unloading goods and produce.

Today, Coringa is a tiny village near the coast, of no distinction or note, with a population of no more than a few thousand. The drastic decline in its population and fortunes was caused by a pair of devastating cyclones. The first occurred in 1789, and destroyed the town. Coringa bounced back, bigger, better, and more prosperous than ever. Then an even more destructive struck fifty years later, in 1839.

19. The First Cyclone That Wrecked Coringa in 1789

After centuries of prosperity, Coringa’s fortunes took a tragic hit in 1789. In December of that year, fairly late in the cyclone season by Bay of Bengal standards, a storm that came to be called The Great Coringa Cyclone developed. It produced severe storm-tide conditions. Witnesses described a succession of three giant waves striking Coringa. The first storm-tide drove ashore all the ships in anchorage. Then the second and third waves, even bigger than the first, flowed inland to inundate with salt water the fertile fields of the Godavari River’s delta. Coringa was almost completely destroyed, and around 20,000 people were killed.

The disaster was named the Great Coringa Cyclone. It was somewhat like when the 1914 – 1918 global war was initially called “The Great War” because nobody suspected that an even greater one would soon follow. Those who named the 1789 storm the “Great Coringa Cyclone” did not suspect that an even bigger and far more devastating cyclone would strike Coringa within a lifetime. When it arrived fifty years later, in 1839, Coringa had recovered from the 1789 disaster and bounced back, better than ever.

18. A Second Cyclone Disaster Even More Tragic and Devastating than the First

On November 25^th, 1839, again unusually late in the Bay of Bengal’s cyclone season, a gigantic cyclone struck Coringa. It brought with it a 40-foot storm surge. The extensive damage of the earlier 1789 cyclone paled in comparison to this one. It completely demolished Coringa, destroyed all ships in the harbor, carried their wreckage miles inland, and killed over 300,000 people.

This time the damage was so extensive that the few survivors made no effort to rebuild. Most upped stakes and scattered to pursue their lives elsewhere, putting distance between themselves and what was seen as a cursed city. The few who remained, some of whom were old enough to have experienced both devastating cyclones during their lifetimes, abandoned the coast altogether and rebuilt their community miles inland.

17. Of All of History’s Tragic Natural Disasters, None Were Deadlier Than the 1931 Central China Floods

The 1887 Yellow River Flood was just as deadly as it was tragic. However, even with its estimated 900,000 fatalities, the 1887 Yellow River Flood was “only” history’s second deadliest natural disaster. Its death toll was eclipsed by yet another tragic Chinese riverine calamity: the 1931 Central China Flood.

That year, the Yangtze and Huai rivers experienced disastrous flooding that submerged about 70,000 square miles. That is an area as big as England, plus half of Scotland tossed in. 53 million people were impacted, and up to 4 million were killed in the catastrophe.

16. A Tragic Coming Together of Unusual Weather Phenomena at the Worst Possible Time

The 1931 Central China Flooding, history’s worst natural disaster, was caused by a perfect storm of extreme weather phenomenon, all coming together at the worst possible time. It began with a severe drought that hit China from 1928 to 1930. That was followed by an exceptionally severe winter in 1930. It deposited unusually massive amounts of snow and ice in the mountainous areas upstream from the Yangtze and Huai rivers.

In the early spring of 1931, all that snow and ice melted, and flowed downstream into the Yangtze and Huai rivers. It reached the middle Yangtze just as the region was experiencing exceptionally heavy spring rains. Things were made worse still by an unusually high number of cyclones. On average, the region experiences two cyclones a year. In 1931, it was hit by nine cyclones. All of those factors came together to cause a catastrophe.

15. The 1931 Central China Flooding Was a Catastrophe That Killed Millions

Things took a turn for the horrific in central China in 1931. Between snow and ice melt, heavy rains, and a seemingly ceaseless sequence of cyclones, the Yangtze and Huai rivers underwent disastrous flooding. Downstream, the waters rose nearly 6 feet above the Shanghai Bund – the waterfront area in the city’s center. Upstream, in the region of Wuhan, the water level rose an incredible 53 feet above the yearly average. Significant but relatively less disastrous flooding also occurred in the Yellow River basin and along China’s Grand Canal.

Farmlands and housing along the rivers were devastated. 15% of the rice and wheat crops were destroyed, in a country that had little margin to spare. 53 million people were impacted, and casualties were enormous. About 150,000 people were directly drowned, while millions more died from starvation and in the subsequent diseases and epidemics. All in all, up to 4 million people perished, making the 1931 China Floods history’s deadliest natural disaster.

14. History’s Most Tragic Plague

Deadly as history’s worst floods were, their death toll pales in comparison to the lethality of plagues. Ask most people to name a plague, and the first one that usually comes to mind is the Black Death, history’s most tragic and famous pandemic. Also known by a variety of other names, such as the Great Mortality, the Great Bubonic Plague, the Great Plague, or just plain The Plague, the Black Death ravaged Eurasia in the mid-fourteenth century.

The Black Death peaked in Europe from 1347 to 1351 and killed one-third to two-thirds of Europeans. It took 200 years for the continent’s population to bounce back to pre-plague levels. In some parts of Europe, such as Florence, it took 500 years for the population to return to what it had been before the Black Death. In Eurasia, an estimated 75 million to 250 million people perished in the plague, making the Black Death history’s deadliest pandemic.

13. History’s Most Lethal Bacterium

Yersinia pestis, a bacterium with no spores, has been fingered by modern research and scholarship as the culprit responsible for the tragic disaster that was the Black Death. According to genetic analysis, a strain of Yersinia pestis that emerged during the Black Death caused that plague. However, it did not die off at the end of that pandemic. Instead, it has lingered around ever since, mutating and reemerging periodically to cause further illnesses and plague outbreaks.

The most recent major outbreak, known as the Modern Plague or the Third Pandemic, erupted in China in the mid-nineteenth century. It was carried by rats aboard steamships all over the world, and killed an estimated 10 million people.

12. The Black Death’s Tragic Origins Trace Back to Thousands of Years Before it Struck

The tragic pandemic that came to be known as the Black Death first appeared in Mongol-ruled China and Central Asia in the 1330s. Traveling along the Silk Road with merchants and Mongol armies, the disease took about fifteen years to reach Europe in 1347. However, although the plague itself first erupted in China, the culprit bacteria might have originated in Europe, thousands of years earlier.

In 2018, researchers found evidence of Yersinia pestis in a Swedish tomb dating back to 3000 BC. It may have caused a devastating plague thousands of years ago that led to the Neolithic Decline three millennia before Christ, when Europe’s population took a nosedive. It also caused Justinian’s Plague, a sixth-century pandemic that, as seen further down this list, rivaled the Black Death in lethality and devastation.

11. The Mongols Catapulted Plague-Infected Bodies Into a Besieged City

The Black Death first reached Europe because of a siege in the then-distant Crimean Peninsula in the Black Sea. All sieges are tragic for the besieged inhabitants, but this one was even more so, with tragic consequences not just for the people besieged, but for many more people far away. In 1346, the Mongols besieged Caffa, now Feodosiya, in the Crimea. In an era of poor sanitation and medical knowledge, sieges were often as deadly for the besiegers as the besieged, because the armies encamped around the targeted city often came down with illnesses.

That happened during the Mongol Siege of Caffa, and the illness the besiegers came down with was the Black Death. The Mongol commander, Jani Beg, decided to share the misery by catapulting plague-infected corpses over the walls into Caffa, to infect the inhabitants. Some Genoese traders in the city fled, and carried the plague with them to Mediterranean ports. They arrived in Sicily in 1347, which they infected. From there, the Black Death spread north to the Italian mainland, and thence swiftly to the rest of Europe.

10. The Tragic Swift Spread of the Black Death

When the Black Death hit Europe and the Mediterranean, it spread swiftly, carried by fleas that fed on rats, and jumped from rats to humans, infecting them with Yersinia pestis. The Genoese traders who had carried the plague with them when they fled from Caffa stopped in Constantinople along the way. In tragic fashion, they gifted it and the rump Byzantine Empire with the pandemic before they continued on to Sicily.

From Sicily in 1347, the plague quickly reached the islands of Sardinia and Corsica, plus Naples in Italy, that same year. The following year, it spread to the rest of mainland Italy, France, two-thirds of the Iberian Peninsula, southern England, the Balkans, Egypt, Anatolia, and the Eastern Mediterranean. In 1349, the Black Death arrived in Germany and Central Europe, most of Ireland, plus the rest of England, the Middle East, and North Africa. In 1350, Scotland, Scandinavia, and the Baltic shores were hit. By 1351, the plague had ravaged all of Europe, except for a relatively unaffected pocket in Poland, plus western Belarus and Ukraine.

9. Dying of the Black Death Was Not Just Tragic, but Gruesome and Painful as Well

The Black Death was a terrible way to go. Especially its most common form, the Bubonic Plague, which was named after the buboes, or swellings, that marked its victims. Painful swellings, or buboes, first appeared in the groin and armpits, where plague-infested fleas gravitated. The first swellings usually occurred near the site of the initial infection, caused by the flea’s bite, or by the victim’s scratching of the bite site. From there, the buboes spread to the rest of the body.

Then came a high fever, and the vomiting of blood. Muscle cramps, chills, decomposing skin, and severe seizures, were also among the plague’s symptoms. Burning up with a steadily worsening fever, the victims tossed and turned in the throes of agonized delirium. If the victim lasted for more than a few days, he or she might get to experience the plague’s final ravages: gangrene eating away at the extremities, blackening fingers, toes, lips, and nose tip. Few lasted more than a few days, with some dying within half a day of the appearance of the first symptoms.

8. The Deadly Varieties of the Black Death

The most common, tragic, and painful, form of the Black Death was the bubonic plague. However, the pandemic had two other deadly strains: the septicemic and pneumonic plagues. The differences were in the affected body parts. The bubonic plague hit the lymph nodes, the pneumonic targeted the lungs, while the septicemic infected the blood.

The septicemic plague was a blood infection that caused clotting in the veins. Victims suffered from abdominal pains, bleeding under the skin, blood pouring out of all orifices, vomiting of blood, fever, shortness of breath, and gangrene. The pneumonic plague struck the lungs, causing symptoms such as chest pains, shortness of breath, coughs, headaches, and high fevers. It could follow an initial bubonic or septicemic plague infection, killing those lucky enough to have survived one of the other Black Death varieties, only for their luck to run out when they came down with the pneumonic plague. It could also be caught from airborne particles exhaled by infected humans or cats.

7. The Black Death Kept Coming Back, In Tragic Wave After Tragic Wave

The Black Death had mostly burned itself out by 1352, and the worst was over. However, there would be tragic recurrences, and in subsequent decades, the Yersinia pestis would return time and time again, to wreak more havoc. New outbreaks flared up in 1361 to 1363, 1369 to 1371, 1374 to 1375, 1390, and 1400. None of the recurrences were as deadly as the original mid-century one, but they were still pretty bad: each time they hit, they killed about 10% to 20% of the population.

A death toll of 10% to 20% every few years for half a century adds up. During the second half of the fourteenth century, the plague was introduced and reintroduced to Europe numerous times, arriving along the trade routes from China and Central Asia in multiple waves. Modern research suggests that climate fluctuations played a key role in those recurrences, as they affected populations of rats and other rodents infested with the plague-carrying fleas.

Read too: Thousands Died From the Black Death in 1666, Leaving Behind Haunted Plague Pits in London.

6. The Black Death’s Ebb and Flow Was Greatly Impacted by the Weather

Weather fluctuations in the fourteenth century played a key role in the Black Death’s recurrences. Yersinia pestis, thrives on fleas that are usually hosted by ground rodents such as marmots – which don’t mingle with humans. However, bouts of bad weather in the 1300s struck those rodents’ habitats and decimated their populations. So their plague-infected fleas fled to alternate hosts such as rats – which do thrive amidst human populations.

A tragic cycle developed, driven by weather fluctuations. Bad weather kills off the usual rodents – which don’t live amongst humans – that host the fleas that host Yersinia pestis. So the fleas flee to rodents like rats that live among humans. Then a Black Death outbreak ensues. While killing humans, the infected fleas also wipe out their rat hosts, extinguishing the plague. Ten or fifteen years later, bad weather again decimates the usual rodents that typically host the plague-infected fleas. The fleas flee to rats, whose populations by then have recovered. The rats reintroduce the flea plagues to humans, and another Black Death outbreak occurs, lasting until the rats die off.

5. People Eventually Adapted to the Tragic Consequences of History’s Greatest Plague

Take the experience of the world’s reaction to Covid-19, and multiply it many times over, to get an idea of how contemporaries felt about and reacted to the Black Death. The shock of a plague that wiped out up to two-thirds of the population – which is what the Black Death did – was great, to say the least. The economy contracted sharply, as trade came to a standstill, and wars came to a halt. However, people are adaptable, and adapt to the tragic just as they adapt to everything else.

Medieval people soon adjusted to the Black Death, grew accustomed to the plague, and took its frequent recurrences in stride. The immediate reaction to the first and deadliest wave was only temporary: the dead died, but life went on for the survivors. Within a few years, trade had resumed, the economy picked up, and the survivors went back to waging wars and settling their disputes and differences by killing each other.

4. The Tragic Events of the Black Death Shaped the World

The Black Death’s longer-term consequences revolved around the sudden impact of a significantly reduced population. In many parts of Europe, the land under cultivation shrank because many serfs and laborers had died. However, that often led to an increase in productivity in the land that was cultivated. With more land available than could be cultivated, people focused on cultivating the best agricultural lands, abandoning more marginal lands or turning them into pastures.

The shortage of labor was great new for surviving laborers. Faced with a labor scarcity, landowners and employers had to compete for workers by offering them better wages and working conditions. Those changes brought new fluidity to a stratified society. The land economy survived, but was weakened, as a new money economy – which ultimately replaced it – emerged. Psychologically, the shock of the Black Death caused more people to ask more questions to which the Catholic Church had few answers. That served to speed up and fuel the budding Renaissance. The world would never be the same.

3. Before the Black Death, There Was Justinian’s Plague

The Black Death was history’s deadliest plague. Tragic and lethal as it was, Justinian’s Plague, 541 – 542 AD, gives it a run for its money in deadliness and long-lasting consequences. It was named after the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I, during whose reign it occurred – and who came down with it, but survived. Justinian’s Plague is history’s first known recorded pandemic, because it swept across three continents, Europe, Asia, and Africa.

Like the Black Death, Justinian’s Plague was caused by the Yersinia pestis bacterium. Also like the Black Death, Justinian’s Plague struck with a devastating initial outbreak, followed by several recurrences in succeeding years. By the time the last recurrence ended, Justinian’s Plague had killed an estimated 25 million to 100 million people.

2. Black Rats Carried the Plague Across the World of Late Antiquity

The strain of Yersinia pestis bacterium responsible for Justinian’s Plague originated near Central Asia, near the border between modern China and Kyrgyzstan. Like the Black Death, Justinian’s Plague was mainly bubonic, felling its victims with all the bubonic plague’s tragic horrors. It first struck China and northern India, made its way via trade routes to the Great Lakes region of Africa, then down the Nile to Egypt.

Like the Black Death, Justinian’s Plague was transmitted by infected fleas carried by black rats. Egypt was the Byzantine Empire’s granary, and from its seaports, ships laden with grain – and also rats hosting infected fleas – sailed across the Mediterranean. From Egypt, the plague rapidly spread to the rest of the Middle East, the Eastern Mediterranean, and Constantinople, which served as both capital and commercial center for the Byzantine Empire. From Constantinople, the plague swiftly spread through the rest of Europe.

1. Justinian’s Plague Ended the Classical Age, and Kick Started the Feudal Era

Justinian’s Plague hit Europe hard: an estimated 40% to 50% of the continent’s population perished during the pandemic’s tragic course and aftermath. However, not all parts of Europe were equally hard-hit. The plague followed the established trade routes, so ports and cities got the worst of it. By contrast, the countryside and the parts of Europe of the established trade routes got off relatively lightly.

That uneven death toll, heavy in the cities and relatively light in the countryside, transitioned Europe out of what was left of the Classical Age, and ushered in the Feudal Era. The Classical Age had been marked by a significant urban culture. Justinian’s Plague – on top of Justinian’s many wars – put paid to that, devastating the cities and an economy built around sustaining urban life. The center of power shifted from the cities to the countryside, and rural strongmen emerged as the founders of feudalism. One era and way of life ended, and another one began.

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Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources and Further Reading

Cantor, Norman F. – In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World it Made (2002)

Cracked – 6 Historical Tragedies That Were Way Worse Than You Thought

Crawford, Dorothy – Deadly Companions: How Microbes Shaped Our History (2018)

History Collection – Historic Disasters That Were Way Worse Than People Think

Devastating Disasters – Yellow River Flood, China, 1887 AD

Disaster History – Central China Flood, 1931

Encyclopedia Britannica – Huang He Floods

Encyclopedia Britannica – Tangshan Earthquake of 1976

History Collection – Unusual Historic Crises and Calamities

Facts and Details – Yellow River

Flood List – Central China Flood, 1931

Hurricane Science – 1839 Coringa Cyclone

Live Science – Mount Vesuvius & Pompeii: Facts & History

Live Science – What Was the Black Death?

History Collection – 16 Dreadful Details about the Black Plague

McNeil, William H. – Plagues and People (1976)

National Geographic, September, 2007 – Vesuvius, Asleep for Now

New York Times, September 15^th, 1996 – China’s Endless Task to Stem Centuries of Floods

Rosen, William – Justinian’s Flea: Plague, Empire, and the Birth of Europe (2007)

History Collection – Seven Deadliest Plagues in History

Sigurosson, Haraldur, and Carey, Steven – The Eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79 (2002)

Time Magazine, October 15^th, 1956 – Science: Man of Pompeii

Wikipedia – 1976 Tangshan Earthquake