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Unusual Historic Crises and Calamities

Khalid Elhassan April 16, 2020 34 min

33. The Recurring Plague

Illustration from the medieval Liber Chronicarum 1, CCLXIIII, depicting skeletons rising from the grave for the Dance of Death. Live Science

By 1352, the worst of the Black Death was over, and the pandemic had mostly burned itself out. Mostly, but not completely. Like a persistent ex turned crazy stalker, the Yersinia pestis bacterium kept coming back to wreak more havoc in subsequent decades. There were further outbreaks in 1361 to 1363, 1369 to 1371, 1374 to 1375, 1390, and 1400. None of the recurrences were as horrific 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.

All in all, 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.

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.