Conventional wisdom has it that the medieval era’s Black Death was history’s worst plague. However, it might have been rivaled in lethality and impact by another horrific pestilence, Justinian’s Plague, which swept through the Old World in late Antiquity. Below are seventeen fascinating facts about those two calamities, history’s most lethal plagues.
17. History’s Most Famous Plague
Until the recent Covid-19 pandemic, the first thing that came to most people’s mind when thinking of a plague was the Black Death, history’s most famous pestilence. Also known by various other names, such as the Great Bubonic Plague, the Great Plague, the Great Mortality, or just plain The Plague, the Black Death ravaged Eurasia in the mid-fourteenth century. It 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 plague.
