The Black Death...

..puts even the 20th century into perspective.

Anyone reading this survived a good deal of the bloodiest century in history, and the numbers killed and murdered by governments last century dwarf anything previous, but the Black Death was all by itself:

"How many people perished in the Black Death is unknown; for Europe, the most widely accepted mortality figure is 33 percent. In raw numbers that means that between 1347, when the plague arrived in Sicily, and 1352, when it appeared in the plains of Moscow, the continent lost twenty-five million of its seventy-five million inhabitants."

My recollection is that by century's end Europe's population had been reduced by half.

Jonathan Yardley reviews John Kelly's The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time"

Click here: 'The Great Mortality' (washingtonpost.com)

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