Black Death

Black Death advances through western Europe and strikes Cairo

This 'event' lasted a year: Paris, southern England, the Alps and Cairo met the moving epidemic at different moments — in the Nile Delta, chroniclers described crops left unharvested.

1348: a year, not a day

Across 1348 the plague advanced through western Europe — affecting France and Iberia, crossing the Channel into several southern English ports, and spreading inland. It was a sequence of local outbreaks over months, not one simultaneous event.

The geography in the old title needs correcting on one point: in 1348 the epidemic reached parts of the Empire's southern approaches, while much of Switzerland, Austria and the Rhineland experienced its principal invasion in 1349.

Cairo in the autumn

In Egypt, plague had reached Alexandria in 1347 and moved through the Nile Delta during 1348, striking Cairo around late September or early October. The epidemic intensified from November into January 1349; al-Maqrizi's account describes the sultan and senior officials leaving the city, mass prayers, and an extraordinary funeral and burial burden.

The reported numbers are chroniclers' figures, not modern statistics: roughly 7,000 deaths per day near Cairo's December peak in a scholarly summary of al-Maqrizi, and the traveler Ibn Battuta transmitted a peak of precisely 1,080 daily deaths at Alexandria. Contemporary and later chroniclers described empty shops and religious buildings, bodies without normal burial permits, and severe disruption of harvesting and urban life.

What the sources cannot say

How the plague moved remains genuinely debated: the mixture of rodent-flea, human-ectoparasite, pneumonic and other transmission pathways in particular medieval outbreaks is unresolved, and claims that person-to-person pneumonic spread was the principal European mechanism are not established.

The route from the pathogen's central Eurasian source near the Tian Shan to the Mediterranean also remains unreconstructed — including the famous corpse-catapult at Caffa, which rests on a non-eyewitness account and which recent scholarship argues was unrelated to the plague's Black Sea dispersal. By late 1348, what is certain is the outcome: mass mortality, overwhelmed burial arrangements, disrupted trade and shortages of labor, with the epidemic continuing into England, central Europe and Egypt during 1349.

Sources

Researched 23 Aug 2026 7 sources 3 audit passes, 1 issue open

How this was checked

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What the sources leave uncertain

Because the entry covers an entire year and a continent-scale movement, it cannot support a single 'that day' narrative.
Cairo itself appears to have been struck in late September or early October 1348. Alexandria—not Cairo—was the Egyptian city reached in 1347.
The phrase 'central Europe' is too broad if it implies simultaneous coverage in 1348. The main epidemic arrived in many central European regions during 1349.
Medieval daily death totals are reported figures rather than modern vital statistics; chroniclers transmitted widely varying Cairo estimates.