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20th Century’s Deadliest Disasters

Khalid Elhassan October 26, 2020 32 min

1976 Tangshan earthquake - Tangshan — A bridge destroyed by the Tangshan Earthquake. China Underground

14. History’s Most Tragic Plague

‘The Triumph of Death’ by Pieter Bruegel, reflecting the terror and upheaval caused by The Black Death. Wikimedia

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.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.