History books usually give you a single number. If you’re looking for a quick answer to what year did the Black Death start, the most widely accepted date for its arrival in Europe is 1347. That is when the nightmare truly went viral. But history is messy. It’s never just one date.
It actually began earlier. Much earlier.
If you were a merchant in a Central Asian trading post in 1346, you were already hearing rumors of a "great death" moving along the Silk Road. By the time those infamous Genoese galleys docked in Sicily in October 1347, the plague had already been refining its killing edge for years. It wasn’t a sudden spark; it was a slow-motion explosion that eventually wiped out nearly half of the known world. Honestly, the scale of it is hard to wrap your head around even today. Imagine every second person you know just... gone.
The 1347 Arrival and the Siege of Caffa
The most famous "start" happens at a place called Caffa, a Genoese trading port on the Crimean Peninsula. This is where things get kinda cinematic and gruesome. In 1346, the Golden Horde, led by Jani Beg, was besieging the city. His army was dying of the plague. Instead of just retreating, they supposedly used catapults to hurl plague-infected corpses over the city walls.
Biological warfare in the 14th century? Maybe. Some historians like Mark Wheelis have argued this was a primary transmission point. Others think it was just the rats doing what rats do—slipping through the cracks of the city walls while everyone was distracted by the catapults.
Either way, when the Italian ships fled Caffa to head home, they brought the Yersinia pestis bacterium with them. They stopped at Messina, Sicily, in late 1347. The port authorities saw the "death" on the ships—men dying at their oars, covered in black boils—and tried to drive them away. It was too late. The fleas had already jumped ship.
Tracking the Genetic Origins
Science tells a slightly different story than the history books. If we look at the genetic "Big Bang" of the plague, researchers like those at the Max Planck Institute have traced the lineage of the bacteria back to the Tian Shan mountains in modern-day Kyrgyzstan.
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Archaeologists found gravestones there dating back to 1338 and 1339. The inscriptions mentioned a "pestilence." When scientists analyzed the teeth of the people buried there, they found the ancestral strain of the Black Death. So, if you want the biological answer to what year did the Black Death start, you're looking at the late 1330s in Central Asia. It took about a decade for that local outbreak to become a global apocalypse.
Why 1348 Was the Year the World Broke
While it arrived in late 1347, 1348 is the year that actually broke society. This was the year the plague hit the major hubs: Florence, Paris, and London.
In Florence, the writer Giovanni Boccaccio watched it happen. He described how "brother abandoned brother" and "fathers and mothers refused to nurse and assist their own children." It sounds like an exaggeration, but the records of the time back it up. The sheer speed of the mortality was something humanity hadn't seen since the Plague of Justinian back in the 6th century.
- January 1348: The plague hits Marseille.
- June 1348: It reaches Melcombe Regis in England.
- Autumn 1348: London begins to pile up bodies in "plague pits" because the churchyards were full.
The mortality rate was staggering. In some places, 60% of the population died within months. You have to realize that people back then had zero idea about bacteria. They thought it was "miasma"—bad air—or a punishment from God. Some people thought it was caused by the alignment of Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars in the sign of Aquarius. Weirdly specific, but that’s what the medical faculty in Paris actually reported in 1345.
The Long Shadow: It Didn't End in 1351
Most people think the Black Death was a one-and-done event from 1347 to 1351. That’s a mistake. While the initial "Great Mortality" peaked during those years, the plague didn't just pack up and leave. It became endemic. It stayed.
For the next 300 years, the plague would vanish for a decade and then strike again. Every generation lived in fear of the "return." There was a major outbreak in 1361 (the pestis secunda) that specifically targeted children who hadn't built up any immunity from the first wave. It hit again in 1369, 1374, and 1390.
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The Great Plague of London didn't happen until 1665. That’s over three centuries after the initial "start" date. We only really got a handle on it when we figured out that hygiene, quarantine, and eventually antibiotics were the keys to stopping the cycle.
Real World Evidence: What the Soil Tells Us
We don't just rely on dusty old scrolls anymore. We have the DNA.
Bioarchaeology has changed everything. By digging up mass graves in places like East Smithfield in London, scientists have been able to sequence the entire genome of the 1348 plague. What they found was surprising: the bacteria hasn't actually changed that much. The Yersinia pestis that killed millions in the 1340s is genetically very similar to the plague that still exists in wild rodent populations today.
The reason it doesn't kill us by the millions now isn't because the bug got weaker; it’s because our living conditions got better. We don't live on top of rats anymore. We have soap. We have floors that aren't made of rushes and old food scraps.
The Economic Ripple Effect
The year the plague started was also the year the old world died. Because so many peasants died, the ones who survived suddenly had something they never had before: leverage.
Before 1347, Europe was overpopulated and workers were cheap. After 1350, labor was scarce. Survivors started demanding higher wages. They moved to different manors for better deals. This basically killed the feudal system. In England, the government tried to pass the Statute of Labourers in 1349 to force wages back down to pre-plague levels. It didn't work. You can't fight supply and demand, even with a king's decree.
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What You Can Actually Learn From This
Looking back at what year did the Black Death start isn't just a history lesson. It’s a study in human resilience and the way global systems can collapse overnight. The plague moved along the trade routes of the 14th century exactly like modern viruses move through international airports today.
If you're looking to dive deeper into this or understand the impact on your own ancestry, here are the logical next steps for a history buff or a researcher:
1. Check the "Plague Pits" near you. If you live in an old European city, look up local archaeological maps. Many modern parks and squares are actually built over 14th-century mass graves. It’s a sobering way to connect with the timeline.
2. Read the primary sources. Skip the textbooks for a second. Go find a translation of The Decameron by Boccaccio or the Chronicle of Jean de Venette. Hearing the "voice" of someone living through 1348 is a completely different experience than reading a Wikipedia summary.
3. Study the "Great Divergence." If you're into economics, look at how the 1347 start date correlates with the rise of the middle class in Western Europe. The plague was a tragedy, but it was also the catalyst for the Renaissance.
4. Track the modern strains. The plague is still here. Check the CDC or WHO maps for Yersinia pestis in the 21st century. It pops up in the American Southwest and parts of Africa regularly. Understanding that "start" date in 1347 helps explain why we still monitor it so closely today.
The Black Death was a turning point that redefined human history. It started with a flea in the steppes of Asia, but it ended up shaping the modern world we live in now. Every time you get a paycheck or live in a city with a sewer system, you're living in the aftermath of what started in those crucial years of the 1340s.