How to Memorize the Black Death: 40 Flashcards from Kaffa 1347 to Moscow 1353

The Black Death is one of those topics where every number seems to come with a range attached. The 40 cards in deck RT3076 – The Black Death & Medieval Epidemics give you the dates, the death tolls, the bacterium and the route — but they are cut from an encyclopedia article in the order it was written, not the order the plague travelled. Fixing that order is most of the work.

A sample of the deck

What you'll cover: Yersinia pestis, fleas and black rats, the second plague pandemic, pestis, pestilentia and mortalitas, the 1755 English coinage from Danish den sorte død, the siege of Kaffa and Jani Beg's Golden Horde, catapulted corpses, Genoese galleys, Alexandria and Cairo, Paris and Florence, buboes, bubonic, pneumonic and septicemic plague, purpura, Chalmel de Vinario's falling death rates, and the Great Famine of 1315–1317.

Rebuild the map before you drill

Cards 14–28 trace the spread, but scattered. Tag them and you get one clean itinerary:

Kyrgyzstan, late 1330s → Kaffa (1346–47) → Constantinople (summer 1347) → Sicily and Alexandria (autumn 1347) → Cairo (1348) → France, Iberia, England (June 1348) → Germany, Scotland, Scandinavia (1348–50) → northern Russia (1352) → Moscow (1353).

Learn it as a single chain card first, then let the individual date cards confirm each link. Card 18 is worded confusingly: the 2022 finding is ancient DNA from graves near Lake Issyk-Kul (1338–39) that pinpointed the outbreak's likely source strain in Central Asia — rewrite the back that way.

Settle the conflicting numbers

The deck gives three different answers to "how deadly": 50 million deaths and "perhaps 50%" (card 2), 30–60% (card 19), and start dates of both 1346 and 1347 (cards 1 and 6). None of these is wrong; they reflect different estimates. Keep one card: "1346–1353, 30–60% of Europe, roughly 25–50 million", and suspend the rest so you are not rewarded for whichever version you saw last.

Also make a three-column card for the forms of plague — bubonic (buboes, ~80% untreated deaths in 8 days), pneumonic (lungs, person to person, 90–95%), septicemic (purpura, ~100%). Cards 29–34 split this across six cards; the comparison is what exams ask.

What the deck doesn't teach

There is nothing on consequences: flagellants, the 1349 massacres of Jewish communities, the Ordinance of Labourers (1349), quarantine (Ragusa, 1377) or the Peasants' Revolt of 1381. Add four or five cards if you need the social history.

For context before and after, pair it with our Medieval Europe study guide and the Crusades deck guide.

Find deck RT3076 in the library on Flip It.