Black Death

Dave Wilton

09 Oct 2026 • 3 min read

c. 1353 illustration of the citizens of Tournai burying their plague dead, from the Tractatus quartus by Gilles li Muisit

9 October 2026

The Black Death was a pandemic caused by plague (Yersinia pestis) that raged through Europe and the Middle East from 1346–53. In that brief period it killed as many as fifty million people, that is around half the population of Europe and a third of those living in the Middle East. (Exact figures are debated by historians, but all agree that the numbers were huge and devastating. The cause of the pandemic was debated in the past, but recent genetic analysis confirms that it was caused by Yersinia pestis.)

But the moniker Black Death does not appear until some four centuries later. Its first appearance is a calque of the Danish sorte død, and subsequent uses may have stemmed from this use. The Danish term was also calqued in other European languages. Use of black to refer to fourteenth-century pandemic does not occur in any European language prior to the sixteenth century, although the color black has been long associated with death in general, for instance in the classical Latin mors atra (black death).

The first appearance of Black Death in English is in a 1755 translation of Erich Pontoppian’s The Natural History of Norway:

Norway, indeed, cannot be said to be entirely exempt from pestilential distempers, for the Black death, known all over Europe by its terrible ravages, from the years 1348 to 50, was felt here as in other parts, and to the great diminution of the number of the inhabitants.

And later the text reads:

Many considerable colonies have gone away at the latter end of the fourteenth century from hence, as well as from other countries, and a great many were carried off by an epidemical distemper that raged at the time, which the Norvegians called sorte dod, or black death.

But the Danish term, which dates to 1603 in that language, was not the first. The Swedish swarta dödhen appears in the sixteenth century. And the phrase black plague predates Black Death in English. Sampson Price’s 1626 Londons Remembrancer uses the phrase to refer to a recent outbreak of disease in London:

Let not the Merchant burthen his memorie only with his Creditours, nor the Lawyer with his Clyents, nor the Landlord with his Rents, nor the Husbandman with his Cattell, nor the Captaine with his Souldiers, nor the Physitian with his Patients: but let all keepe a Register of this blacke Plague in red letters, in the Ephemerides of their memory, and the staying of it.

And the 1680 English Atlas uses black plague to refer to the fourteenth-century pandemic in a passage about Greenland:

But what the Norwegians conquered, or possessed in this Country, was an inconsiderable corner of that large Continent. Themselves mention a Nation, whom they call Skrelingers, to have inhabited in the middle of the Land, but what they were we know not. But whether their paucity exposed them to the mercilesness [sic] of the Natives: or whether it were an Epidemical disease, which they called the black Plague; which swept away, not only most of that Nation in Groneland, but also the Merchants and Mariners in Norway that maintained that traffique: or whether it were some other reason, which is now forgotten; so it is, that since 1349, little intelligence hath descended to us concerning Groneland, till seeking the North-west passage to China, occasioned more knowledg [sic] of it.

So the specific use of Black Death in English to refer to the fourteenth-century plague comes to us in the eighteenth century from Danish, the association of the color black with plague, and death in general, is older.

Sources:

The English Atlas, vol. 1 of 5. Oxford: At the Theater for Moses Pitt, 1680, 10. ProQuest. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Oxford English Dictionary Online, September 2011, s.v. Black Death, n., black plague, n.

Pontoppian, Erich. The Natural History of Norway. Andreas Bethelson, trans. London: For A. Linde, 1755, 24 and 236. HathiTrust Digital Library.

Price, Sampson. Londons Remembrancer: for the Staying of the Contagious Sicknes of the Plague by Dauids Memoriall. London: Edward All-de for Thomas Harper, 1626, 20. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Image credit: Pierart dou Tielt, c. 1353. Brussels, Bibliothèque royale, Ms. 13076 – 13077, fol. 24v. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image as a mechanical reproduction of a public domain work.