1346 – 1353
Counting the dead
By the end of 1353 the plague has killed between 24 and 46 million people in the lands on this map, by the figure at the top of the map. Nobody at the time counts the dead of a whole country. Historians rebuild the toll from records kept for other purposes.
Tax lists count the people who pay. In the district of Asyut in Upper Egypt, 6,000 people pay the land tax before the plague and 116 after it. Bishops keep registers of the priests they appoint, and a new priest in a parish usually means that the old one has died. By these registers about four in ten parish priests in England die. At Givry in Burgundy the parish priest buries 615 people in fourteen weeks of 1348, where an ordinary year sees about 30. Towns keep counts too. Bremen lists 6,966 dead in its book of citizens, and chroniclers in Florence think that half the city has died. Most of these records count adults with property and miss many of the poor and many children.
Where few records survive, historians disagree. Some read the silence around Milan, Prague and Poland as a sign of a light plague, others as a sign of lost documents.
The figure on these pages adds up the regions that the plague has reached. For each region it multiplies the people who live there about 1346 by the share that dies, low and high, and by the part of the epidemic past by the page’s date. Most regions of Europe take a third as the low share, the estimate of older histories. The high share is 60 percent, as Ole Benedictow estimates. Egypt takes a third to half, as Michael Dols estimates. Syria takes a quarter to 38 percent and the Maghreb a quarter to a third. Central Asia, the Golden Horde, Iraq and Arabia stay out of the sum, because no figure for their people survives.
For Europe alone, historians give between 25 and 50 million dead, a third to 60 percent of about 80 million people.
Sources
- Ole J. Benedictow, The Complete History of the Black Death (2021).
- Michael W. Dols, The Black Death in the Middle East (1977).
- Stuart J. Borsch, The Black Death in Egypt and England (2005).
- Philip Ziegler, The Black Death (1969).
- John Kelly, The Great Mortality (2005), on the deaths of English priests.
- Pierre Gras, “Le registre paroissial de Givry (1334–1357) et la peste noire en Bourgogne”, Bibliothèque de l’École des chartes 100 (1939).
- Adam Izdebski and others, “Palaeoecological data indicates land-use changes across Europe linked to spatial heterogeneity in mortality during the Black Death pandemic”, Nature Ecology & Evolution 6 (2022).
- The figure on the map: content/black-death/.front/README.md.
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