Black Death
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The Black Death was the most destructive pandemic in European history, and one of the few events to halve a continent's population within a single generation. It reached the Mediterranean in October 1347, when grain ships from the Crimea brought infected rats and fleas to Messina and Genoa, and within four years it had killed perhaps a third of the continent's people. From the Italian ports it followed pilgrim and commercial roads into France, Iberia, the Empire and England. The disease, caused by Yersinia pestis, took three forms: bubonic, killing within days; pneumonic, spread by coughing; and septicemic. Contemporaries had no theory of infection and blamed bad air, planetary conjunctions, wells poisoned by lepers, or the Jews, massacred in dozens of towns along the Rhine and in Switzerland between 1348 and 1351. The preaching friars were nearly wiped out, courts stopped sitting and harvests rotted for want of hands. Labour grew scarce, wages rose, and the English Statute of Labourers of 1351 tried to hold them down; the resentment that followed fed the Peasants' Revolt of 1381. Plague returned in 1361, 1369 and 1375, keeping Europe's population low until the sixteenth century. Even so, it weakened serfdom, reshaped society and accelerated the shift towards wage labour and pastoral farming.