It was about the beginning of September, 1664, that I, among the rest of my neighbors, heard in ordinary discourse that the plague was returned again in Holland; for it had been very violent there, and particularly at Amsterdam and Rotterdam, in the year 1663, whither, they say, it was brought, some said from Italy, others from the Levant, among some goods which were brought home by their Turkey fleet; others said it was brought from Candia; others from Cyprus. It mattered not from whence it came; but all agreed it was come into Holland again.

I just finished Daniel Defoe’s a journal of the plague year.
2014-09-30: this is an awesome poster visualizing the plague, walking you through how real science is done, in an entertaining and informative way.

2015-10-06: Plague is one of the most virulent pathogens.

the acquisition of a single gene named pla gave Y. pestis the ability to cause pneumonia, causing a form of plague so lethal that it kills essentially all of those infected who don’t receive antibiotics. In addition, it is also among the most infectious bacteria known. “Yersinia pestis is a pretty kick-ass pathogen. A single bacterium can cause disease in mice. It’s hard to get much more virulent than that.”

2021-03-30: Pushing the Black Death origin back.

Monica Green published a landmark article, The 4 Black Deaths, in the American Historical Review, that rewrites our narrative of this brutal and transformative pandemic. In it, she identifies a “big bang” that created 4 distinct genetic lineages that spread separately throughout the world and finds concrete evidence that the plague was already spreading from China to central Asia in the 1200s. This discovery pushes the origins of the Black Death back by over 100 years, meaning that the first wave of the plague was not a decades-long explosion of horror, but a disease that crept across the continents for over 100 years until it reached a crisis point.

2022-02-16: Black Death mortality rates varied widely.

“The data is sufficiently widespread and numerous to make it likely that the Black Death swept away 65% of Europe’s population”. But those figures, based on historical documents from the time, greatly overestimate the true toll of the plague. By analyzing ancient deposits of pollen as markers of agricultural activity, researchers found that the Black Death caused a patchwork of destruction. Some regions of Europe did indeed suffer devastating losses, but other regions held stable, and some even boomed. It’s possible that the ecology of rats and fleas that spread the bacteria was different from country to country. The ships that brought Yersinia to Europe may have come to some ports at a bad time of the year for spreading the plague, and to others at a better time.

2022-08-12: The plague may have had a role in the collapse of Egypt’s Old Kingdom and the Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia

During the late 3rd millennium BCE, the Eastern Mediterranean and Near East witnessed societal changes in many regions, which are usually explained with a combination of social and climatic factors. However, recent archaeogenetic research forces us to rethink models regarding the role of infectious diseases in past societal trajectories. The plague bacterium Yersinia pestis, which was involved in some of the most destructive historical pandemics, circulated across Eurasia at least from the onset of the 3rd millennium BCE but the challenging preservation of ancient DNA in warmer climates has restricted the identification of Y. pestis from this period to temperate climatic regions. As such, evidence from culturally prominent regions such as the Eastern Mediterranean is currently lacking. Here, we present genetic evidence for the presence of Y. pestis and Salmonella enterica, the causative agent of typhoid/enteric fever, from this period of transformation in Crete, detected at the cave site Hagios Charalambos. We reconstructed 1 Y. pestis genome that forms part of a now-extinct lineage of Y. pestis strains from the Late Neolithic and Bronze Age that were likely not yet adapted for transmission via fleas. Furthermore, we reconstructed 2 ancient S. enterica genomes from the Para C lineage, which cluster with contemporary strains that were likely not yet fully host adapted to humans. The occurrence of these 2 virulent pathogens at the end of the Early Minoan period in Crete emphasizes the necessity to re-introduce infectious diseases as an additional factor possibly contributing to the transformation of early complex societies in the Aegean and beyond.