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.

The Geographische Mitteilungen, in which this map was originally published, is the oldest German language geographical journal - its first issue was in 1855 and it finally closed its doors in 2004. The magazine was conceived and edited by August Heinrich Petermann and published by the venerable firm of Justus Perthes in Gotha, Germany.

Its first article reported on an expedition into North Africa and the Sahara by Heinrich Barth and Adolf Overweg. This report was enough to secure a circulation of 4000 for the fledgling magazine and, more importantly, encouraged other important scientist-explorers of the day who were attracted by the magazine’s heavy scientific emphasis to send in their own reports. These included Hans Meyer, the first man to ascend the Kibo crater on Mount Kilimanjaro, Sven Hedin, the Swedish explorer of Central Asia and the Himalayas, and Alfred Wegener, the geoscientist who pioneered the theory of continental shift which led to the modern theory of plate tectonics.

In comparison to its contemporaries, such as the Geographical Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, the Mitteilungen had a far greater interest in ethnography and the physical and natural sciences, leading to the inclusion of many fascinating, but sometimes obscure, maps on the most recent theories related to climatology, meteorology, botany, and zoology.

Original colour. [WLD4829]