ABSTRACT
The Black Death appeared on the coast of the Crimea in 1347, and in the following winter was carried in the ships of Genoese merchants to Constantinople and on to Italy. By the spring of 1348, the plague had reached the ports of the western Mediterranean, and in the heat of the following summer it spread through much of western Europe. The cold of winter hindered its progress, since the bacilli did not readily multiply in cooler temperatures. In 1349 the plague reached the north of Europe, and in 1350 it died away in Scandinavia and on the borders of Russia. The Black Death was over, but the plague had come to Europe to stay for a long while. Its last serious outbreak in the West was at Marseilles in 1720. But no subsequent outbreak was as virulent or as widespread as that of the mid-fourteenth century, when only parts of eastern and northern Europe, and, strangely enough, of the Low Countries appear to have escaped it. It is doubtful, however, whether any part of Europe was wholly immune to the later epidemics, and many places were repeatedly ravaged; even in the nineteenth century the Austrians continued to maintain a quarantine in the Balkans.
