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The Black Death was a bubonic plague pandemic that occurred in Europe from 1346 to 1353. It was one of the most fatal pandemics in human history; as many as 50 million people [2] perished, perhaps 50% of Europe's 14th century population. [3] The disease is caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis and spread by fleas and through the air.
The Black Death was a bubonic plague pandemic, which reached England in June 1348. It was the first and most severe manifestation of the second pandemic, caused by Yersinia pestis bacteria. The term Black Death was not used until the late 17th century.
Figures for the death toll vary widely by area and from source to source, and estimates are frequently revised as historical research brings new discoveries to light. Most scholars estimate that the Black Death killed up to 75 million people [5] in the 14th century, at a time when the entire world population was still less than 500 million.
Theories of the Black Death are a variety of explanations that have been advanced to explain the nature and transmission of the Black Death (1347–51). A number of epidemiologists from the 1980s to the 2000s challenged the traditional view that the Black Death was caused by plague based on the type and spread of the disease.
For years it was common for Europeans to assume that the Black Death originated in China. Charles Creighton, in his History of Epidemics in Britain (1891), summarizes the tendency to retrospectively describe the origins of the Black Death in China despite lack of evidence for it: "In that nebulous and unsatisfactory state the old tradition of the Black Death originating in China has remained ...
The persecution of Jews during the Black Death consisted of a series of violent mass attacks and massacres. Jewish communities were often blamed for outbreaks of the Black Death in Europe . From 1348-1351, acts of violence were committed in Toulon , Barcelona , Erfurt , Basel , Frankfurt , Strasbourg and elsewhere.
The Black Death entered Europe from the Golden Horde in Central Asia in 1347, but it did not reach Russia from Central Asia in the southeast. Due to religious reasons, the border between Christian Russia and the Muslim Golden Horde was closed, which may have helped prevent the plague from spreading to Russia through this route.
The Black Death in Paris has been described in the famous chronicle of the Carmelite Jean de Venette, who resided at the Saint-Denis Abbey in Île-de-France, located outside of Paris. At the time, Paris was the biggest city in Europe, with a population between 80,000–200,000 people. [ 9 ]