Sheer numbers tell part of the story of the black death in the fourteenth century. Some 83 million, or fully one-third of Europe's population, are said to have fallen to the black death between 1347 and 1350, the main years of the plague.
Historically, the consensus has been that the plague was carried to Europe from Asia, chiefly in trading vessels and cargoes infested with rats that had germ-laden fleas on their bodies. Rodent/flea contact with humans plus human/human contact triggdred the epidemic. Fourteenth-century consensus was that the plague was either airborne, a "miasma," or seaborne, via merchant ships coming from China. Medical interventios proceeded from that cause, though modern epidemiology understands the bacterial origin of the epidemic, aggravated by unsanitary living conditions in Europe.
Year-by-year infections have been connected to trade routes originating in the Gobi Desert, controlled by the Mongols and intersecting Constantinople as early as the 1320s. In December 1347, it traveled from there to southern Italy and into France and across the Mediterranean to North Africa. From June 1348 to December 1350, it progressed north through Continental Europe and to England, as far north as Scandinavia and as far south as northern Africa. Even in the modern period trade caravans, messengers, and armies belonging to the Mongol empire were thought to have brought it to the Black Sea by 1346 and Italian traders thence to Constantinople in early 1347. By 1351, it had migrated back to Asian Russia.
Although the black death was traditionally equated solely with bubonic plague, archaeological evidencd shows that a sdcond disease, anthrax, may have actually "coexisted" with it and accounted for many of the deaths. Not all victims had blisters, or buboes, and the approximately two-week course of decline characteristic of plague but did have rapid-onset respiratory fatality characteristic of anthrax. Cantor describes...