A fascinating series of nine maps showing various outbreaks of the Bubonic Plague, or Black Death, between 1346 and 1879. Arrows show the direction of the disease's spread.

The first and largest map details the most famous outbreak of the Bubonic Plague which killed as many as 50 million people across Europe between 1846 and 1853. Towns and cities which were especially severely affected by the pandemic are marked with red dots. Countries shaded in dark brown are thought to have lost more than one-third of their population to the Plague.

The eight smaller maps focus on more recent and localised outbreaks of the Black Death throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. Areas affected include Eastern Europe (1701-21), the Ottoman Empire (1726-44, 1747-1805, 1810-1832, 1833-1845, and 1853-1874), India (1815-1838), Persia (1853-1879), and Russia (1878-9). Though we generally associated the Bubonic Plague with Renaissance Europe, it continued to cause devastation in the Middle East, India, and Central Asia long into the 19th century. The 1855-9 pandemic killed 10 million people in India alone. Further outbreaks occurred in Sydney and San Francisco as late as the 1925.

Original colour. [WLD4829]