Second plague pandemic

The second plague pandemic was a major series of epidemics of plague that started with the Black Death, which reached medieval Europe in 1346 and killed up to half of the population of Eurasia in the next four years. It followed the first plague pandemic that began in the 6th century with the Plague of Justinian, which ended in the 8th century. Although the plague died out in most places after 1353, it became endemic and recurred regularly. A series of major epidemics occurred in the late 17th century, and the disease recurred in some places until the late 18th century or the early 19th century. After this, a new strain of the bacterium gave rise to the third plague pandemic, which started in Asia around the mid-19th century. By the early 19th century, the threat of plague had diminished, though it was quickly replaced by the spread of another deadly infectious disease in the first cholera pandemic, beginning in 1817, the first of several cholera pandemics to sweep through Asia and Europe during the 19th and 20th centuries. One of the last epidemics to strike the Balkans during the second plague pandemic was Caragea's plague, between 1813 and 1814. The Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt witnessed the plague epidemics that ravaged Hejaz and Egypt between 1812 and 1816. He wrote: "In five or six days after my arrival [in Yanbu] the mortality increased; forty or fifty persons died in a day, which, in a population of five or six thousand, was a terrible mortality." Malta had its second most severe plague epidemic in the epidemic of 1813–1814, which killed around 4,500 people. Plague is caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, which exists in parasitic fleas of several species in the wild and of rats in human society. In an...