20 Black Death “Facts” Historians Now Say Are Actually Myths

The costume with the long bird’s beak is what people usually think of when they picture medieval plague doctors. But Charles de Lorme, the physician to French king Louis XIII, didn’t design his bird-beaked costume until 1619, for outbreaks that struck Paris and Italy more than two centuries after the Black Death arrived in Europe. Doctors during the actual 1347-1351 pandemic wore simple academic or religious clothing and carried scented pomanders close to their noses.

The usual explanation of the “Ring Around the Rosie” rhyme is that the “rosie” or “roses” referred to the plague rash, while the “posies” were herbs held to the nose to mask the odor of death. And “all fall down” meant dying of the plague. The folklorists Iona and Peter Opie note that the first printed version was in Kate Greenaway’s Mother Goose in 1881, and that it seems to have evolved from Protestant ring games with no reference to disease. It wasn’t until the 1960s that the plague reference was added.

A 1233 letter by Pope Gregory IX called Vox in Rama is often cited online as evidence that the medieval church commanded the killing of cats throughout Europe, leaving rats and their fleas to breed unhindered. However, it wasn’t actually about cats. It was sent to a German official named Heinrich von Mainz in connection with a specific heresy. There is no evidence that cats were wiped out en masse on a continental scale. And, of course, the Black Death didn’t arrive in Europe until 1347, which was 114 years after the letter.

Most textbooks teach that the Black Death wiped out 40 to 60% of Europeans everywhere, but hidden in the soil lies a different history. Pollen experts Adam Izdebski and Timothy Newfield took samples from all over Europe and used farmland left fallow after the arrival of the disease as a proxy for population decline. They found deep declines in Italy, England, and France, but little or no effect in Bohemia, Poland, and some parts of Iberia. In other words, the impact of the Black Death differed significantly from place to place.

The popular image of medieval peasants as unwashed and filthy, and of their supposed grime as a cause of the spread of the plague, is nothing more than a misconception. Before the Black Death, public bathhouses called stufas existed in cities across France, Germany, and northern Italy, and regimina sanitatis, or hygiene guides, recommended that the faithful wash themselves daily. The practice of bathing had no bearing on the contraction of the bacterial infection. Ironically, the use of bathhouses fell out of favor after 1351, as doctors came to believe that open skin pores exposed people to disease-carrying bad air.

According to some accounts, when the Mongols under Khan Jani Beg laid siege to the Black Sea port of Caffa in 1346, he flung dead bodies infected with bubonic plague over the town’s walls, thereby starting Europe’s plague pandemic. This is what Gabriele de’ Mussi described in his account. He was an Italian notary writing from Piacenza, Italy, not from Caffa itself. But as historian Hannah Barker pointed out in 2021, the more likely culprits were the rats that rode on grain-carrying ships along Crimean trade routes.

When the bubonic plague reduced the European labor supply, peasants in the regions west of the Elbe River saw wages increase, serfdom weaken, and rebellion increase, such as the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381 in England. Conversely, in lands east of the Elbe River like Poland and Prussia, lords sought to tighten their grip on the peasantry with a regime called the Second Serfdom, which lasted for several hundred years.

When the plague struck dioceses such as York and Lincoln in 1348 and 1349, many of the parish priests remained at their posts, tending to the sick and dying in their parishes by hearing their last confessions and administering the last sacraments. Some 50 to 60% of them died as a result. Meanwhile, some of the higher-ranking bishops chose to withdraw to the relative safety of their country manors.

A Syrian scribe from the city of Aleppo, Ibn al-Wardi, penned a famous 1348-49 description of the plague’s swift journey along the Silk Road, just before he succumbed to the disease. Arabic literary historians have long understood that his text is a maqama, a type of rhymed, fictive, episodic tale told by a wandering storyteller, and not a genuine travelogue. Yet as historians Nahyan Fancy and Inas Omar demonstrated in 2025, generations of Western historians have overlooked that fact and consequently overstated the speed with which the bubonic plague spread overland.

Historians Samuel Cohn Jr. and Graham Twigg had long suggested that the Black Death could have been caused by something other than the plague, perhaps an Ebola-like virus or even anthrax. But those debates ceased in 2010 and 2011 when geneticists Kirsten Bos and Johannes Krause succeeded in recovering bacterial DNA from skeletal remains unearthed in the East Smithfield cemetery in London, which was established in 1348 and expanded through 1350 by Sir Walter Manny. It was Yersinia pestis, the same bacterium that still causes plague today and whose strains all evolved from the one responsible for the Black Death.

Street fires were lit in the city with pine, rosemary, and juniper in 1348 because, at the time, it was believed that bad-smelling air transmitted disease. Pope Clement VI in Avignon followed the advice of his physician, Guy de Chauliac, by sitting between two large fires. Burning resins release terpenes, which are repellent to fleas and mosquitoes, so smoke actually kept the insect carriers of plague away from people, but could not cure those already infected.

A doctor and scholar named Ibn al-Khatib, working in Granada, compiled a treatise between 1348 and 1349, in which he noted that the healthy had become ill after handling the garments or possessions of the infected, or merely visiting a home in which there were plague victims. Another doctor, Gentile da Foligno, working in Perugia, Italy, observed the disease passing from person to person. Still, neither doctor rejected the era’s belief in bad air, instead incorporating their observations into it.

Nobody living through the pandemic in 1348 called it the Black Death. Latin writers of the time usually referred to it as magna mortalitas, the Great Mortality. The name Black Death was first used by Scandinavian chroniclers in the 1500s. It reappeared in an 1823 English textbook by Mrs. Markham. It was then popularized by the German historian J.F.C. Hecker’s 1832 study and translated into English in 1833 by Benjamin Guy Babington.

In the throes of the plague, groups of Flagellants marched through the towns of Europe, whipping themselves in public as a form of penance, which they believed was an act of piety. They were uncontrolled by the Church, granted absolution on their own authority, and contributed to mob violence against the Jews. Pope Clement VI wrote a bull on October 20, 1349, condemning the Flagellants as heretics, and commanded civil authorities to act against them. Some local clergy may have allowed the marches prior to this edict.

In the Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio writes that plague victims’ bodies were dumped into great trenches like garbage, an impression that endures. But excavations of London’s East Smithfield epidemic cemetery, established in 1348 and expanded through 1350, have uncovered rows of bodies that were buried wrapped in shrouds or placed in coffins, oriented east to west, as was the Christian burial tradition. Mass trenches happened too, but only because space ran out when deaths peaked, not out of neglect.

Textbooks have long held that the plague was spread solely by black rats and their fleas. But a 2018 modeling study by researchers Dean and Stenseth suggested that rat populations were too scarce and slow in the rural areas of northern Europe to have allowed such rapid spread of plague. It seems more likely that human lice and fleas were largely responsible for plague transmission in these rural areas. Rat fleas would still have been key to maintaining plague in heavily trafficked port towns.

In May 1348, the city council of Pistoia, a self-governing Tuscan city-state, enacted a highly specific set of public health laws. They mandated cleanliness in butcher shops, banned travel from areas where the disease had spread, required that graves be dug to a depth of no less than six feet, and outlawed the trade of second-hand clothing. It didn’t halt the spread of the bacterium, but it demonstrates a government that was busy trying to legislate against catastrophe instead of falling to pieces.

The rumor was that, because Jewish communities practiced ritual hand-washing, they were exempt from the plague. The result of this belief was that Jews were accused of poisoning wells. Demographers have demonstrated that Jews suffered as many deaths as did Christians. Fear, debts, and confessions extorted by torture led to pogroms in many cities, such as Strasbourg, Mainz, and Basel in 1348 and 1349, often before the plague had even reached those places. Pope Clement VI wrote two bulls that defended Jewish communities and pointed out that Jews had perished as much as Christians.

This European outbreak in the mid-1300s was merely the first chapter of the Second Plague Pandemic, a series of recurring plagues that would continue until about the 18th century. About 10 years later, when the Black Death returned, it killed far more children, according to Samuel Cohn Jr., a historian who studies plague burial records. These children were born after the first wave and had no natural immunity to the disease. It came to be known as Pestis Puerorum, the Children’s Plague.

Until recently, historians thought the Black Death originated somewhere in eastern China in the 1330s. In 2022, archaeogeneticists Maria A. Spyrou and Johannes Krause, alongside historian Philip Slavin, obtained bacterial DNA from 1338-1339 Syriac tombstones near Lake Issyk-Kul in what is now Kyrgyzstan, which documented a fatal epidemic in the area at the time. The genetic material proved to be ancestral Y. pestis. So the evidence strongly points to the plague having begun in the Tian Shan mountains of Central Asia.

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