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.
