Black Death Timeline: From Central Asia to England and Beyond

Written by Simon Williams

Timelines of the Black Death tend to begin at Kaffa in 1346 and end somewhere around England in 1349. That compressed picture misses the full shape of the catastrophe: the decade of incubation in Central Asia before Europe heard a word of it, the speed with which it crossed an entire continent, and the long tail of recurrences that prevented demographic recovery for over a century. What follows is an attempt to lay the chronology out in full, not as a list of dates, but as a sequence of events that illuminate how the pandemic unfolded and why it moved the way it did.

I have always found chronology one of the most under-rated tools in historical understanding. When you read about the Black Death section by section, you absorb facts about mortality rates, flea biology, and social upheaval. When you read it as a timeline, you begin to feel something different: the relentlessness of it. The way each wave arrived before the previous one had finished being mourned.

Before Europe Knew: Central Asia, 1338 to 1346

The Black Death did not emerge from nowhere in 1347. Eight years before the Genoese ships carried it to Sicily, the bacterium was killing people in the Tian Shan mountains of Central Asia.

The evidence comes from two cemeteries near Lake Issyk-Kul in modern Kyrgyzstan: Kara-Djigach and Burana. Tombstone inscriptions from 1338 and 1339 explicitly record "pestilence" as the cause of death, using the Syriac word mawtana. The number of burials in those two years is markedly elevated compared to surrounding years. Genomic analysis of DNA extracted from the cemetery remains, published in Nature in 2022, identified the Kara-Djigach strain as the direct ancestor of the bacterial lineage that would sweep the world.

This was a community on the Silk Road: merchants, traders, and their families living at a crossroads of continental commerce. The plague appears to have originated in a spillover from marmot or other Central Asian rodent populations, the reservoir hosts where Yersinia pestis persists between pandemic episodes. From the Tian Shan cemeteries, it moved, slowly at first, along trading routes through the territories of the Mongol Golden Horde toward the Black Sea.

In 1343, the plague reached the Golden Horde's lands around the Sea of Azov. By 1345 it was killing in the Caspian region. In 1346, the Mongol army of Janibeg Khan was besieging the Genoese trading post of Kaffa on the Crimean coast. When plague broke out among the Mongol forces, Janibeg ordered the bodies of plague victims catapulted over the city walls. Whether this biological warfare was the decisive event or simply one of several routes of entry, the outcome was the same. The Genoese abandoned Kaffa and sailed west, carrying the disease with them.

Sicily and the Italian Cities: Late 1347

Twelve Genoese trading ships docked at Messina in Sicily in October 1347. The Sicilian authorities, who met them at the harbour, immediately ordered the fleet to leave. The sailors, what few were still alive, were described as covered in black swellings in the armpits and groin from which oozed blood and pus. The local authorities' reaction tells you that word of a terrible disease somewhere in the east had preceded the ships. It did not matter. The disease was already ashore.

By the end of 1347, Messina was devastated. Catania fell next, then the rest of Sicily. Mainland Italy followed with terrible speed. Genoa, Venice, Pisa, and Florence were all struck in the autumn and winter of 1347 to 1348. Boccaccio, writing in Florence during the outbreak, described a city in which the dead were piled in the streets and the social bonds of centuries were dissolving in weeks. His estimate that the city lost over 100,000 people has been revised by later historians, but the scale of mortality in Florence, one of the richest and most densely populated cities in Europe, was catastrophic by any measure.

The Italian cities mattered disproportionately because they were the nodes of medieval European commerce. Florentine and Genoese merchants had trading partners, employees, and correspondent banks across the continent. Whatever moved through their harbours tended to move everywhere else. The plague was no different.

The Spread Across Western Europe: 1348

The year 1348 is when the Black Death became a pan-European catastrophe. The speed with which it moved across such distances remains one of the most debated questions in the history of the pandemic.

January to March 1348: Marseille, Avignon, and the southern French coast. Pope Clement VI was at Avignon when the plague arrived. His physician advised him to sit between two large fires, which he did for weeks, on the theory that the heat would purify the air. He survived. Much of Avignon did not. The papal court's chronicler, Louis Sanctus of Beringen, wrote that the dying filled the streets and that graveyards were consecrated and filled within days of opening.

Spring 1348: The plague crossed the Pyrenees into the Iberian Peninsula and moved northward through France. The Iberian mortality was severe. Barcelona lost perhaps a third of its population. Valencia, a major Mediterranean port, was struck so hard that trade collapsed for years afterward.

Summer 1348: The plague reached the northern French coast and crossed the English Channel. The traditional account places its entry into England at the port of Weymouth in Dorset in June or July 1348, via a ship from Gascony. From Weymouth it moved rapidly northeast along the main roads toward Bristol, which was hit in August, and onward toward London.

Autumn and winter 1348 to 1349: London. The city's population in 1348 was probably somewhere between 60,000 and 80,000 people. Contemporary chronicles estimated deaths in the tens of thousands. The Churchyard of the Hospital of St James by Cripplegate ran out of space. New burial grounds were consecrated at East Smithfield and Clerkenwell. The city functioned, after a fashion, but the death toll was appalling.

For a detailed account of how England experienced the arrival and spread of the disease, The Labour Machine covers the economic and social transformation that followed the mortality crisis in England.

The British Isles and Northern Europe: 1349

By early 1349, the plague was moving through England with an efficiency that shocked even those who had heard about events on the Continent. The episcopal registers, which recorded clerical vacancies as priests died and were replaced, provide some of the most granular demographic data we have for any medieval epidemic.

The Diocese of Winchester recorded over 45 per cent clerical mortality in 1349. The Diocese of Bath and Wells exceeded 50 per cent. In some rural deaneries, the records show every incumbent dying within a matter of months. The Bishop of Bath and Wells, Ralph of Shrewsbury, issued an emergency decree in January 1349 permitting laypeople to hear deathbed confessions if no priest could be found. That this was necessary tells you about the collapse of normal ecclesiastical functioning.

Wales was struck in the spring of 1349. The Welsh poet Ieuan Gethin, writing in Glamorgan, produced one of the most vivid firsthand accounts of plague symptoms in the medieval period, describing the swellings and the black discolouration of the skin in terms that leave no doubt about what he was witnessing. Scotland and Ireland followed later in 1349. Ireland was struck particularly hard in the densely populated towns along the eastern coast: Dublin, Drogheda, and Dundalk all suffered severe mortality.

Scandinavia received the plague via Bergen in Norway, where a ship arrived from England carrying what the Norwegian chronicles describe as a crew almost entirely dead, with only a few survivors still alive at the quayside. From Bergen, the disease spread to Oslo, then into Sweden and Denmark. The Scandinavian mortality appears to have been comparable to England's: between 30 and 50 per cent in most affected communities.

Germany and the Low Countries were struck across 1348 and 1349. It was in Germany that the flagellant movement reached its greatest intensity, with processions of self-flagellating penitents passing through major cities and the persecution of Jewish communities reaching its most violent expression. The Rhineland cities, Cologne, Mainz, Frankfurt, and Strasbourg, saw both the worst plague mortality and the worst antisemitic violence in the same months.

The Eastern Spread and Later Waves: 1349 to 1353

While western Europe was in the grip of the first wave, the plague continued to move in all directions from its Italian point of entry. Poland and parts of central Europe seem to have been less severely affected in the first wave than western Europe, for reasons that remain debated. Some historians have pointed to lower population density, different trade route patterns, or simply the random geography of outbreak.

By 1350 to 1351 the plague was moving through Russia and the Baltic states. Pskov, Novgorod, and Moscow were all struck in this period. The Russian chronicles record the same horrific scenes as western European sources: priests dying faster than they could be replaced, gravediggers unable to keep up, communities emptying out.

By 1353, the initial pandemic wave had burned through virtually the entire known world from the Tian Shan to Iceland. The bacterium retreated into its rodent reservoirs, the immediate crisis passed, and Europe began the slow and incomplete process of reckoning with what had happened.

The Price of Survival examines the human experience of the aftermath, tracing how communities navigated the transformed social and economic world that the plague left behind.

The Recurrences: 1361 to 1375

The Black Death did not end in 1353. It returned.

The plague of 1361 to 1362 is known in English sources as the Pestis Puerorum, the Children's Plague, because it struck with particular ferocity among the young: those born after 1348 who had no acquired immunity from surviving the first wave. Contemporaries noticed that this second outbreak seemed to spare many adults while killing children at terrible rates. The demographic impact was serious enough to prevent the population recovery that might otherwise have begun in the 1350s.

Further outbreaks followed in 1369 and 1374 to 1375. Each wave killed a new cohort of the immune-naive and prevented sustained demographic recovery. England's population in 1377, the year of the first reliable poll tax record, was probably around 2.5 million, compared to an estimated 4 to 5 million before 1348. The gap represents both the initial mortality and the death toll of three decades of recurrences.

The plague continued to recur in England and across Europe at irregular intervals throughout the fifteenth century and into the sixteenth. The Great Plague of London in 1665 was an episode of the same Second Pandemic that had begun at Kaffa in 1346. It was not until after 1679, when a major epidemic struck Vienna for the last time, that the Second Pandemic can be said to have ended in western Europe. The bacterium that had arrived in Sicily in October 1347 had spent over three centuries working its way through the European population.

Why the Chronology Matters

Reading the Black Death as a timeline rather than as a series of thematic facts changes how you understand it. The compression is striking: less than a year from Sicily to London. Less than two years to reach Scandinavia. The disease moved at the speed of medieval commerce, which was faster than most people imagine.

The recurrences matter too, and they are often absent from popular accounts. The story of the Black Death is not a single catastrophe followed by recovery. It is a catastrophe followed by further catastrophes, each one preventing the recovery that might otherwise have occurred. The English population needed 150 years to return to pre-plague levels. That timeline shapes everything that happened in the intervening period: the labour relations, the religious upheaval, the artistic preoccupation with death, and the slow restructuring of the English economy from arable to pastoral farming.

The Central Asian origin matters most of all. The eight-year gap between the Kara-Djigach cemetery burials in 1338 and 1339 and the arrival at Messina in 1347 is not empty time. It is the period during which the disease was moving, slowly and then faster, along the trade routes that connected the Silk Road to the Mediterranean. Understanding that gap is understanding how a local marmot-spillover event in the Tian Shan mountains became the deadliest pandemic in recorded human history.

This article is part of the Black Death series. Explore all articles at https://historiesandcastles.com/blogs/the-black-death.

Deepen Your Understanding

→ Origins of the Black Death: The routes and mechanisms by which the plague travelled from Central Asia to the shores of England.

→ The Black Death in Medieval England: How England experienced the plague in 1348 and 1349, and the lasting consequences for English society.

→ Black Death and the Church: How the plague devastated the medieval clergy, triggered the flagellant movement, and shook medieval faith.

→ Black Death Survivors: Who survived the plague, the genetics of resistance, and how communities rebuilt in the aftermath.

→ 5 Surprising Truths About the Black Death: Counter-intuitive findings from modern research, including the true Central Asian origin and the delayed wage revolution.

People Also Ask

When did the Black Death start and end?

The initial wave of the Black Death is conventionally dated from 1347, when plague arrived in Sicily from the Black Sea, to 1353, by which point it had swept through most of Europe and temporarily retreated. However, the disease that caused the Black Death, Yersinia pestis, was already killing people in Central Asia from at least 1338 to 1339, eight years before Europe was aware of it. The pandemic did not truly end in 1353: it returned in waves in 1361, 1369, and 1374 to 1375, and continued to recur across Europe until the Second Pandemic finally ended in western Europe after the 1679 Vienna epidemic.

When did the Black Death arrive in England?

The Black Death reached England in the summer of 1348, most likely through the port of Weymouth in Dorset. Ships from Gascony, where the plague had already been active for months, are the probable source. From Weymouth the disease moved rapidly northeast to Bristol and then toward London, which was struck in the autumn and winter of 1348 to 1349. By the spring of 1349 it had reached the north of England, and by later in 1349 Wales and Scotland had been affected. The first wave in England lasted approximately eighteen months.

How did the Black Death spread so fast?

The speed of the Black Death's spread across Europe remains one of the most debated aspects of the pandemic. The conventional model, which relied on rat fleas as the primary vector, struggles to explain transmission rates that sometimes exceeded what rat-flea biology can support. Modern research increasingly suggests that human ectoparasites, body lice and human fleas living in clothing, played a major role alongside the rat flea, enabling person-to-person spread that was faster and less dependent on rat population dynamics. The pneumonic form of the plague, which spread directly through respiratory droplets, also contributed to rapid spread in densely populated urban areas.

Where did the Black Death originate?

Modern genomic research has established that the Black Death originated in Central Asia, specifically in or around the Tian Shan mountain range of what is now Kyrgyzstan. Cemeteries at Kara-Djigach and Burana near Lake Issyk-Kul show elevated mortality in 1338 and 1339 with inscriptions explicitly recording pestilence as the cause of death. DNA extracted from these burials has been identified as the direct ancestor of the bacterial strain that caused the Second Pandemic. The disease was a marmot or rodent spillover that entered human populations in the Silk Road trading communities of Central Asia before moving westward.

How many people died in the Black Death?

Estimates vary depending on region and methodology, but the scholarly consensus for Europe as a whole is that the Black Death killed between 30 and 60 per cent of the population during the initial 1347 to 1353 outbreak. In England, the most thoroughly documented case, modern demographic analysis suggests a mortality of around 40 to 50 per cent during the first wave. In some urban areas, particularly the cities of Italy and the densely populated towns of England and France, mortality exceeded 50 per cent. Repeated recurrences through the late fourteenth century prevented demographic recovery and compounded the total death toll significantly.

Did the Black Death return after 1353?

Yes. The plague returned to England and much of Europe in 1361 to 1362, in 1369, and in 1374 to 1375. The 1361 to 1362 outbreak was particularly severe among children born after 1348, who had no immunity from surviving the first wave, and is known in medieval sources as the Pestis Puerorum, the Children's Plague. These recurrences prevented sustained demographic recovery and kept England's population well below its pre-plague levels throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The Black Death was the beginning of the Second Pandemic of plague, which continued to affect Europe intermittently until the late seventeenth century.

Primary Sources and Further Reading

• Benedictow, Ole J. (2004): The Black Death 1346 to 1353: The Complete History, Boydell Press: The most authoritative modern account of the pandemic's chronology and geography, with detailed regional analysis.
• Slavin, Philip, and Green, Monica H. (2022): "The Black Death and its Genomic Origins," Nature, vol. 611: The landmark study identifying the Central Asian origin of the pandemic from ancient DNA at the Kara-Djigach and Burana cemeteries.
• Ziegler, Philip (1969): The Black Death, Collins: The foundational English-language account, with strong coverage of the 1348 to 1349 spread through western Europe.
• Hatcher, John (1977): Plague, Population and the English Economy 1348 to 1530, Macmillan: The standard work on demographic recovery, recurrence, and long-term population trends in England.
• Boccaccio, Giovanni (c.1353): The Decameron, particularly the Introduction: An eyewitness account of the Black Death in Florence in 1348, offering the most vivid contemporary description of the early Italian outbreak. Available in many modern translations.
• Ieuan Gethin (1349): Welsh-language poem describing plague symptoms in Glamorgan: One of the most precise firsthand clinical descriptions of the Black Death in the British Isles. Discussed in Ziegler (above) and various Welsh historical sources.

Note: Dates for the Black Death's arrival at specific locations vary between sources depending on which chronicle evidence is weighted most heavily. The dates given here reflect the scholarly consensus but should be understood as approximate. The Kara-Djigach origin, while strongly supported by the 2022 genomic study, represents the current state of an active field of research; earlier scholarly accounts typically placed the pandemic's origin in China or the Gobi Desert, and some researchers continue to debate the precise geographic and ecological circumstances of the initial spillover event.

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