Collapse · 1346–1353 CE

The Black Death

Caffa (Feodosia, Crimea)

Plague caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, probably originating in Central Asia, reached the Black Sea in the mid-1340s, when the Golden Horde was besieging the Genoese port of Caffa in Crimea; the famous story of plague corpses catapulted over its walls comes from a single, doubtful source. Genoese ships carried the disease to Constantinople and, in October 1347, to Sicily, and by 1353 it had swept Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, killing an estimated 25–60 percent of Europe's people and more than a third of Cairo's.

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