What was happening during the Black Death?

As plague killed much of Europe between 1346 and 1353, the Hundred Years' War raged on and Iberia fought its own battles — the map shows it all together.

Explore the plague years →

The Black Death did not arrive into a peaceful Europe. By the time plague reached the continent — Annalium dates the pandemic from 1346, in line with the standard timeline of 1346 to 1353 — much of the West was already at war. The Hundred Years' War was in full swing: the naval Battle of Sluys in 1340 and the Battle of Crécy in 1346 both fall inside this view, the latter in the same year plague began spreading through Europe. The war did not pause for the dying; the Siege of Calais ran into 1347 even as the disease moved through France.

The map also surfaces a haunting link in the chain of transmission. The Siege of Caffa, on the Crimean coast, appears in 1346 — the Genoese trading colony besieged by Jani Beg of the Golden Horde. From Black Sea ports like Caffa, ships carried the plague west into the Mediterranean, which is part of why the pandemic took hold so fast across Italy and beyond.

Look outside the war zone and the simultaneity widens. In Iberia, the Battle of Río Salado in 1340 pitted Castile and Portugal against the Marinids and Granada, one of the last great battles of the Reconquista, fought just before the plague crossed into the peninsula. Scan into the 1340s and you also find pogroms against Jewish communities — the Erfurt massacre of 1349 among them — a grim feature of how some societies responded to the catastrophe. Reading the years side by side, the Black Death stops being an isolated medical event and becomes one force among war, religion, and politics, all unfolding at once.

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Events from Wikipedia/Wikidata (CC-BY-SA); boundaries from OpenHistoricalMap (ODbL). Spotted a mistake? Email [email protected].