50 Haunting Facts From the History of Plague

Plague did far more than kill millions. It transformed medicine, labor, religion, art, laws, and the way communities responded to disaster. These 50 stories explore the Black Death and other outbreaks through desperate remedies, remarkable sacrifices, scientific discoveries, and consequences that lasted for centuries.

1 Plague Labor Shortage Raised Wages

The labor shortage that followed the depopulation of Europe by the Black Death in the 14th century allowed surviving workers to demand and receive higher pay. Wage increases for the average worker are estimated at 50 percent. Farmers used their higher earnings to purchase labor-saving machinery, and the productivity gains it generated helped workers keep their higher wages.

2. The Black Death was the start of the end of feudalism and manorialism for much of Western and Central Europe. Lords had to pay higher wages, offer better terms and relax restrictions tying peasants to their traditional lands as there were fewer workers to choose from. This in turn enabled workers to move to better opportunities and rise in society, helping to build a growing trading and middle class.

3. The Black Death relieved the pressure of population on Europe in the 14th century. The result was a labor shortage that raised wages and lowered rents and narrowed the economic gap between landowner and worker. Survivors also found more food, including meat and dairy products, and had better diets, more wealth and longer life expectancies.

4. In May 1666, the plague-stricken English village of Eyam voluntarily quarantined itself inside a perimeter of boundary stones rather than let residents flee and spread the disease. For 14 months, neighboring communities left food at designated points along the boundary, while villagers paid with coins disinfected in running water or vinegar. An estimated 260 villagers, nearly 80 percent of the population, died, but no one crossed the cordon in either direction. The quarantine ended in November 1667 after the plague had run its course, and the villagers’ sacrifice likely saved thousands beyond Eyam.

5. The Black Death killed 25 million to 50 million people, or 30 to 60 percent of Europe’s population, between 1346 and 1353. The first great catastrophe and the subsequent plague epidemics kept the population of the continent below its former level for generations. Europe’s population only recovered to the level of the 14th century in the 16th century.

6 Plague Era Epidemic Devastated Patuxet

European contact unintentionally brought smallpox, bubonic plague, measles, mumps, chickenpox, influenza, cholera, diphtheria, typhus, malaria, leprosy, and yellow fever to the Americas. Many of the indigenous societies had never before been exposed to these diseases, and were extremely vulnerable to epidemics that together killed millions. Prior to the Pilgrims’ arrival in 1620, an unnamed epidemic devastated Wampanoag communities from 1616 to 1619. It also left the former village of Patuxet cleared and with existing cornfields that the new settlers used to establish Plymouth Colony.

7. The protective genetic mutation near the ERAP2 gene that helped people survive the Black Death is now a risk factor for the autoimmune disease Crohn’s disease. In a 2022 study funded by the NIH, researchers analyzed ancient DNA from people who were buried before, during and after the pandemic in London and Denmark. Individuals carrying two copies of the variant were about 40 percent more likely to survive because their immune cells killed Yersinia pestis more effectively. That stronger immune response appears to have carried a lasting cost by increasing susceptibility to autoimmune diseases in modern humans.

8. In England during the Black Death, doctors sometimes treated the painful swellings, called buboes, with young pigeons. They would first smear oils, or press the base of a pigeon’s tail feather against the swelling, trying to draw out what they thought was venom. If the bubo sank, turned black, and became cold, the physician made a final attempt by cutting a young pigeon open from breast to back and pressing the bird against the swelling while it was still alive.

9. Researchers in 2022 traced the likely origin of the Black Death to the Chuy Valley, near Lake Issyk-Kul in modern-day Kyrgyzstan, a Central Asian trading region linked with the Silk Road. Syriac inscriptions found on tombstones at two cemeteries noted a sudden increase in deaths from “pestilence” during 1338 and 1339. DNA from the teeth of seven buried individuals showed the presence of Yersinia pestis. Genetic analysis revealed that the strain was the direct ancestor of those that ravaged Europe and the Middle East from 1346, about eight years later.

10. Before the Black Death reached England, women brewed most ale for domestic and commercial use and dominated its sale, including the management of many alehouses. Since brewing did not need a special place to work, wives, widows and unmarried women could make ale at home and earn an independent living. Following the plague of 1347 to 1350, the demand for beer grew, and more investment in brewing made it a commercialized trade, enabling better-capitalized men to take control and slowly push many women brewers to the margins.

11 Plague Vagrancy Laws Punished Idleness

The Ordinance of Laborers 1349, after the drastic reduction of the workforce in England and Wales following the Black Death, made idleness a crime designed to drive able-bodied people back into employment. Legally, a vagrant was someone who could work but refused to, having no fixed place to live or lawful means of support, and subsisting on begging. The punishment for offenders was branding or flogging. Officials distinguished them from the “impotent poor,” who could not work because of sickness or age. These men had to get beggar licenses under the Vagabonds Act 1530. The able-bodied vagrants were whipped and imprisoned.

12. The idea that graves need to be six feet deep goes back to the Great Plague of London in 1665. As the disease swept England, London’s lord mayor and aldermen ordered that all graves be at least six feet deep because they believed deeper burials would inhibit infection. The rule eventually disappeared in England and its colonies, and many modern American jurisdictions require only 18 inches of soil above a casket or burial vault, allowing a grave to be roughly four feet deep.

13. Roughly three decades before the Black Death, Northern Europe endured the Great Famine of 1315 to 1317. Relentless cold rain prevented grain from ripening, flooded fields, and ruined livestock fodder, while disease eventually reduced sheep and cattle numbers by as much as 80 percent. Starvation grew so bad that contemporary chroniclers wrote of infanticide, grave robbing and cannibalism. Many of the affected cities and towns lost an estimated 10 to 25 percent of their populations, and Europe did not recover until 1322.

14. The Black Death killed around half the population and created a serious labor shortage by the 1370s. This was a huge factor in the rise of English pub culture. The surviving peasants earned better wages, lived better and spent more money and leisure time on better-quality ale. With demand increasing, the homebrew vendors gave way to commercial alehouses run by skilled brewers who offered better fare. These became social spaces for drinking and games, and laid the foundations of the modern British pub.

15. During the mid-to-late 14th century BCE, the Hittite Empire endured a plague that lasted two decades and may have contributed to the wider Bronze Age collapse alongside diseases such as smallpox and bubonic plague. The disease remains unidentified, although some researchers suspect tularemia, and ancient Hittite King Mursili II recorded its devastation in prayers after it killed his predecessors, Suppiluliuma I and Arnuwanda II. An Akkadian tablet written between 1350 and 1325 BCE called the epidemic “The Hand of Nergal.” In 1320 and 1318 BCE, diseased rams apparently sent by the Hittites infected and weakened the attacking Arzawans, creating what some scholars consider the earliest recorded use of biological warfare.

16 Plague Hag Pesta Swept Villages

In Northern European folklore, the Black Death was personified as Pesta, an old, bent woman dressed in a black hood and carrying a rake and broom. Norwegians believed that when she used the rake, some people would survive by slipping between its teeth. When Pesta used the broom, however, she swept away the entire population of the area, and Norwegian artist Theodor Kittelsen later depicted this plague-hag in his work.

17. The Black Death raised the wages and personal wealth of the peasants, and in 1363 the English Parliament passed the Statute Concerning Diet and Apparel to prevent the lower classes from eating, drinking and dressing like the elite. Population loss had consolidated property and liberated many previously bonded laborers, allowing ordinary people to display their new prosperity. The law prescribed what food, drink and clothing might be used by various social groups in an attempt to preserve visible class distinctions. First introduced in England and Wales, Poynings’ Law extended it to Ireland in 1495.

18. After the Black Death, Mediterranean authorities, dealing with recurrent outbreaks of plague, made travelers and arriving ships wait before entering port communities. The Republic of Ragusa, now Dubrovnik in Croatia, introduced a 30-day isolation period called a trentino in 1377. In 1448, the Venetian Senate extended the wait to 40 days, or quarantena in Venetian, giving possible infections time to appear. That 40-day rule gave the English language the word “quarantine.”

19. After the Black Death ended in 1353, plague repeatedly returned across Europe and the Mediterranean through the 17th century. The second plague pandemic became especially widespread in 1360-1363, 1374, 1400, 1438-1439, 1456-1457, 1464-1466, 1481-1485, 1500-1503, 1518-1531, 1544-1548, 1563-1566, 1573-1588, 1596-1599, 1602-1611, 1623-1640, 1644-1654, and 1664-1667. Cairo alone suffered more than 50 plague epidemics within 150 years of the disease’s arrival in 1348. Later outbreaks remained severe, but plague retreated from most of Europe during the 18th century and North Africa during the 19th.

20. In 1346, during the Mongol siege of the Genoese city of Caffa in Crimea, Golden Horde forces reportedly catapulted the bodies of plague-infected soldiers over the walls. The attackers wanted the dead bodies to spread bubonic plague to the defenders.

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21 Newton’s Plague Retreat Produced Calculus

The University of Cambridge temporarily closed in 1665 due to the bubonic plague, and English mathematician Isaac Newton had to work from home. While closed down, Newton developed ideas that established the foundation for calculus and his theory of gravity.

22. In 1382 a physician to the Avignon Papacy, a man named Raimundo Chalmel de Vinario, realized bloodletting could not cure plague but prescribed it for members of the Roman Curia whom he disliked. He also maintained that all genuine instances of plague were due to astrological causes, and he rendered the disease incurable. He never did cure a single patient.

23. Jewish communities reportedly had lower death rates during the 14th century Black Death partly because of better hygiene and their isolation in ghettos. Some Christians took the difference as proof that the Jews were conspiring, and accused them of deliberately poisoning wells so as to destroy European civilization. Mobs attacked Jewish settlements all over Europe, destroying 60 major and 150 smaller communities in over 350 massacres by 1351.

24. Parliament passed the Rebuilding of London Act 1666 following the Great Plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of London in 1666. The law widened streets, created pavements, abolished open sewers, banned wooden buildings, overhanging gables and required builders to use brick or stone. English architect Christopher Wren helped rebuild St. Paul’s Cathedral and more than 50 churches, with rebuilding under the supervision of Surveyor of London Robert Hooke and taking more than 10 years. King Charles II also founded the Royal Observatory and supported the Royal Society, which helped trigger a renaissance in English arts and sciences.

25. The Black Death left Europe’s surviving population and its descendants healthier and longer-lived after killing 30 to 50 percent of the population between 1347 and 1351. The disease disproportionately killed elderly and already unhealthy people. In 2014, a bioarchaeologist compared 464 skeletons from pre-plague London with 133 from people who died between 1350 and the mid-16th century. Her analysis found that post-plague Londoners had significantly better survival rates, with far more people reaching middle age and beyond.

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