# Black Death The **Black Death** was the plague pandemic that reached Europe in 1347 and killed perhaps a third of its population within six years, with comparable or worse mortality across parts of the Middle East and Central Asia. It travelled the trade network the Mongols had secured: plague moved west along the caravan routes, reached the Genoese trading colony at Kaffa in the Crimea during a siege in 1346, and arrived at Messina aboard Genoese galleys in October 1347. Its place on the Silk Road Trade Route Timeline is as the network's defining paradox. The road's greatest achievement was connecting the ends of Eurasia into one circulation system; that same integration was the mechanism of the deadliest catastrophe in European history, and the epidemiological unification of the Old World is arguably the Silk Road's single most consequential legacy. The demographic shock also reorganized European labor, landholding, and wages in ways that shaped everything after it. > [!note] Stub > Spine stub. Expand: the Yersinia pestis evidence and the origin debate, the transmission chronology, mortality estimates by region, the pogroms and social response, and the long economic aftermath.