History is usually messier than we like to admit. If you look up dates for the Black Death in a standard school textbook, you’ll probably see 1347 to 1351. That’s it. Four years. A neat little window where the world fell apart and then magically put itself back together.
But that’s not really what happened. Honestly, it's barely even the half of it.
The plague didn't just vanish in 1351 like a flame being blown out. It lingered. It came back in waves for centuries, fundamentally reshaping European and Asian society until the 1700s. To understand the actual timeline, we have to look at the precursor events in Central Asia, the terrifying speed of the initial 14th-century outbreak, and the long, agonizing tail of the "Second Pandemic" that kept humanity looking over its shoulder for three hundred years.
When did it actually start?
The "official" start date of 1347 is a bit Eurocentric. If you were living in the Mongol Empire or along the Silk Road, the dates for the Black Death start much earlier. Chroniclers in the East were reporting massive die-offs in the 1330s.
Historian Ole J. Benedictow, who has done some of the most exhaustive mapping of the plague's spread, suggests the biological "start" was likely in the late 1330s or early 1340s around the Caspian Sea region. By the time it hit the Mediterranean port of Messina in October 1347—carried by Genoese galleys fleeing the siege of Caffa—the disease had already been traveling for years.
Think about that. The world was dying, and the people in London or Paris had no idea it was even coming. They didn't have Twitter. They had rumors. They had stories of "monstrous deaths" in the East that sounded like biblical myths until the rats actually started dying in their own cellars.
The peak years and the 1348 explosion
- That’s the big one. If 1347 was the spark, 1348 was the forest fire.
The plague hit Italy first, then scorched through France and Spain. By the summer of 1348, it crossed the English Channel. It’s hard to wrap your head around the mortality rates. We're talking 30% to 60% of the entire population of Europe wiped out in a matter of months. In places like Florence, the social fabric didn't just tear; it disintegrated. Giovanni Boccaccio wrote about how brothers abandoned brothers and wives abandoned husbands because the fear was so visceral. It wasn't just about dying; it was about the way people died—covered in agonizing buboes, coughing blood, and usually alone.
The spread followed trade routes with terrifying precision. It moved about two miles a day on average. It followed the rivers. It hitched rides on grain ships. By 1349, it reached Scandinavia and Scotland. By 1350, it was in Scotland and Scandinavia. By 1351, it had reached northwestern Russia.
This is the period most people mean when they talk about dates for the Black Death. It was a singular, catastrophic event that ended the Middle Ages as people knew them. Labor became scarce. Feudalism began to crack because, suddenly, a peasant’s work was worth a lot more when half the village was in a lime pit.
Why 1351 wasn't the end
People think 1351 is the end date because the initial, massive mortality rate slowed down. The "Great Mortality" was over. But the bacteria—Yersinia pestis—didn't go anywhere. It just took a breather.
In 1361, the plague returned. They called it the pestis secunda (the second pestilence). This one was particularly cruel because it seemed to target children and young people who hadn't been exposed during the first wave and thus had no immunity. It happened again in 1369. And 1374. And 1390.
The dates for the Black Death actually extend into what historians call the Second Pandemic, which lasted until the 18th century. We often forget that. We treat the 1347 outbreak as an isolated tragedy, but for a person living in the 15th or 16th century, the plague was just a fact of life. It was a seasonal threat. You’d go five years without it, then boom—half your town is dead again.
The long timeline of major recurrences
It helps to see how frequent these "aftershocks" were. They weren't minor.
- 1460s-1470s: Massive outbreaks across England and France that hampered the recovery from the Hundred Years' War.
- 1563: A London outbreak so bad that Queen Elizabeth I moved her court to Windsor Castle and set up a gallows to hang anyone who followed her from the city.
- 1630: The Great Plague of Milan, which killed roughly 25% of the population.
- 1665-1666: The Great Plague of London, the last major flare-up in England, famously documented by Samuel Pepys.
- 1720-1722: The Great Plague of Marseille. This is generally considered the "end" of the Second Pandemic in Western Europe.
Mapping the movement across borders
The plague didn't hit everyone at once. That's a huge misconception. If you were in Poland or parts of the Pyrenees, you might have escaped the first wave almost entirely. Why? It's a mix of quarantine, trade volume, and sheer luck.
The dates for the Black Death in Russia are different than in Italy. While Italy was burying its dead in 1347, Russia didn't see the full brunt until 1352. The disease had to circle back through the north. It was like a slow-motion pincer movement.
The environment played a massive role too. We now know, thanks to climate data and dendrochronology (tree ring dating), that the 14th century was a time of "global cooling" and crop failures. People were already malnourished. Their immune systems were junk. When the plague arrived, it found a population that was basically a tinderbox.
How we know these dates (The Science)
We aren't just guessing based on old monks' diaries. Modern paleogenomics has changed everything. By extracting DNA from the "dental pulp" of skeletons in plague pits—like the East Smithfield burial ground in London—scientists have confirmed it was definitely Yersinia pestis.
This scientific evidence has refined our understanding of the dates for the Black Death. We can now track the mutation of the bacteria. We can see how it evolved from the 1340s to the 1600s. It turns out the bacteria didn't change all that much; it was our response to it that changed. We got better at ship fruit inspections. We invented the word "quarantine" (from the Italian quaranta giorni, meaning forty days). We started cleaning up the streets, though mostly because the smell was bad, not because we understood germs.
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The legacy of the 1347-1351 window
Even though the plague lasted centuries, those four years remain the most significant. They changed the "why" of human existence.
Before 1347, the Church was the undisputed authority. After 1351, when people saw priests dying just as fast as sinners, that authority started to wobble. It paved the way for the Renaissance. It forced technological innovation because there weren't enough people to do manual labor.
If you're looking for the dates for the Black Death because you're studying history or just curious about how humanity survives the impossible, the takeaway is that 1347-1351 was the "event," but the 1300s-1700s was the "era."
Actionable insights for history buffs and researchers
If you want to dig deeper into the specific chronologies, don't just look at general "World History" books. They simplify too much.
- Check Local Parish Records: If you’re researching a specific region, parish records (where they exist) are far more accurate for pinpointing the arrival of the plague than general historical overviews. Look for sudden spikes in death entries over a 3-month period.
- Cross-reference with Climate Data: If you see a major outbreak date, look at the weather for the preceding two years. Plague peaks often followed unusually wet springs that boosted rodent and flea populations.
- Study the "Plague Tractates": These were the "how-to" guides written by doctors at the time. They are fascinating primary sources that show exactly when a city realized it was in trouble.
- Use Digital Mapping Tools: Projects like the Black Death Digital Archive allow you to see the spread day-by-day based on the latest archaeological and textual data.
The timeline of the plague is a timeline of human resilience. We lost. We learned. We hid. And eventually, we outlasted it. Understanding the dates for the Black Death isn't just about memorizing years; it's about seeing the pattern of how a global society reacts when the floor falls out from under it.