Black Death Map: 11 Maps of Plague Pits, Spread and Quarantine

Plague maps are small and handmade, and many are written in the language of a city the plague reached. The largest Black Death map holds 156 objects and tells the story in Spanish, in 22 scenes; a French one dates its arrival year by year from Lake Issyk-Kul to Moscow; a German one cites the laboratory papers that found the bacterium in old graves. The rest stay close to the ground: 35 suspected plague pits under London, a rat laboratory in San Francisco, the quarantine islands of Marseille and a stone wall in Provence built to keep the sick out.

1. London Plague Pits Map: 35 Burial Grounds, Rumour and Fact

   A digging machine building the Victoria line in the 1960s “chewed straight into a forgotten plague pit” under Green Park, and the map’s 35 sites keep that tone. Charterhouse Square took more than 50,000 bodies in 1348, was used again in 1361 and the early 1400s, and gave up remains to Crossrail workers in 2013. Excavations at the Royal Mint suggest a planned cemetery of 1348–1350 rather than a hastily dug pit, and 26 monks of Westminster who died in 1348 lie under the abbey’s cloisters. The author sorts rumour from record: Blackheath was a plague burial ground, but did not get its name from the Black Death; pits under Hyde Park, Liverpool Street and a Whitechapel Sainsbury’s are marked unconfirmed. Behind the back wall of a Bakerloo line runaway tunnel, the note says, lies a plague pit.

   

   Objects

   3535 points

   Countries

   United Kingdom

   Made with

   Google My Maps

2. Black Death Spread Map: The Plague in 22 Scenes

   This Spanish map tells the Black Death as a story in 22 scenes, each a layer. It opens in Florence, jumps to Lake Issyk-Kul, then shows the horsemen that rode before the plague: war at Crécy, hunger in the English vineyards. Trade routes of the Pax Mongolica reopen across the steppe, a Mongol army besieges Caffa, and 19 markers trace the ships that fled Caffa and carried the plague around the Mediterranean to Messina. Later scenes go looking for a culprit in Freiburg, turn to the Rhineland “when rage heals more” and find that not even the cold of Scandinavia protects. Underneath lies a layer of polygons with the realms of the 1340s, from the Crown of Aragon and the Duchy of Naxos to the Golden Horde, the Ilkhanate and the Chagatai Khanate.

   

   Objects

   15673 points, 9 lines, 74 areas

   Countries

   GreeceItalySpainand 58 more

   Made with

   OpenStreetMap uMap

3. San Francisco Plague Map: Chinatown, Rats and Cover-Ups, 1900–1908

   The steamer Australia came from plague-infected Honolulu on New Year’s Day 1900, passed inspection at Angel Island, and its rats went ashore; on 6 March Wong Chut King died at the Globe Hotel in Chinatown. Sixteen stops, most notes marked with a rat, follow what came next: police roping off Chinatown at night, with the Presbyterian mission placed outside the line because white women ran it; the Tung Wah Dispensary that Chinatown opened when hospitals turned Chinese patients away; newspapers at the Call Building that ridiculed the story. After the 1906 earthquake the plague returned to the refugee camps, and in 1908 the shacks of Lobos Square were raised on stilts. At “The Rattery” on Fillmore Street, rats were disinfected, disembowelled and tested, and 350,000 were trapped in all.

   

   Objects

   1616 points

   Countries

   United States

   Made with

   Google My Maps

4. Yersinia Pestis Map: Where Plague DNA Was Found

   Each of the nine pins is a scientific paper. At Aschheim and Altenerding in Upper Bavaria, sixth-century skeletons yielded the DNA of the Justinianic plague; from the dead of London’s Smithfield in 1349 came “a draft genome of Yersinia pestis from victims of the Black Death”, published in Nature in 2011. Montpellier marks the 2000 study that identified the bacterium in medieval graves by “suicide PCR”. Hereford, Bergen op Zoom and Saint-Laurent-de-la-Cabrerisse belong to a 2010 paper on distinct clones of the Black Death, and Augsburg and Parma carry the trail into the 17th century.

   

   Objects

   99 points

   Countries

   GermanyFranceUnited Kingdomand 2 more

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   Google My Maps

5. Marseille Plague Map: A Walk to the Quarantine Islands

   A day’s route through the city’s plague history, half of it on water. It starts at the Hôtel de Ville, passes the Consigne sanitaire, the statues of the Chevalier Roze and Bishop Belsunce and the Vieille Charité, then takes the boat to the Frioul islands. There, after a picnic stop on the beach of Sainte-Estève, the path leads past the Lazaret Caroline and the site of the Ratonneau lazaret with its chapel, over the Digue Berry to the quarantine harbour of Pomègues.

   

   Objects

   2018 points, 2 lines

   Countries

   France

   Made with

   Google My Maps

6. Black Death Timeline Map: From Issyk-Kul to Moscow, 1331–1352

   Jean-Charles Desquiens files the Black Death in layers by year. A layer called “Origine probable” puts its start at Lake Issyk-Kul around 1340, with China in 1331 and Lake Balkhash in 1338 on the way. Caffa and the Black Sea are 1346, Genoa, Marseille and Reggio Calabria “end of 1347”, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Lyon and Paris 1348. In 1349 come Weymouth, Ireland, Scotland, the Low Countries and Germany, Scandinavia in 1350, and the last layer, 1352, holds Kyiv and Moscow.

   

   Objects

   2525 points

   Countries

   FranceItalyUnited Kingdomand 11 more

   Made with

   OpenStreetMap uMap

7. Plague Column Map: 78 Monuments From Bavaria to Transylvania

   This map pins 78 plague columns across Central Europe, coloured by country. The brown pins of Bohemia and Moravia crowd together from Carlsbad to the Polish border; Austria’s dark red runs down to Carinthia, Slovakia is orange, Hungary red around Budapest and Pécs. Blue pins stand in southern and eastern Germany, two purple ones reach into Transylvania and the Banat, and a lone green one sits on the Swiss-Italian border. The pins carry no names, so the map shows the reach of the custom rather than the single monuments.

   

   Objects

   7878 points

   Countries

   CzechiaAustriaGermanyand 5 more

   Made with

   OpenStreetMap uMap

8. Modern Plague Map: Outbreaks Around the World Since 2005

   Plague is not history. On 15 February 2005 the Bas-Uélé region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo counted 61 suspected deaths from a high fever with a violent cough, and samples sent to Kinshasa confirmed pneumonic plague. This French map gives 13 outbreaks since then a dated account each. In Kyrgyzstan, untouched for some thirty years, a 15-year-old died of bubonic plague in August 2013 and 160 people were isolated; in Yumen, China, 151 contacts of a 38-year-old man were quarantined in 2014. Peru’s La Libertad counted pneumonic, bubonic and septicaemic cases in 2010, the American West 11 cases in 2015 against a yearly median of 3. In Antananarivo in 2017 the first symptoms looked like malaria, and the Seychelles suspended flights to Madagascar.

   

   Objects

   1313 points

   Countries

   MadagascarCongo, The Democratic Republic of theChinaand 4 more

   Made with

   OpenStreetMap uMap

9. Bombay Plague Quarantine Map: British India's Rules of 1897

   A research map built from the Government of India’s records of the 1897 plague: each of the 43 pins is one line of text around the word “quarantine”, placed at the town it names. Telegrams of June 1897 ask to quarantine ships from Cutch to “prevent re-infection of Bombay”; Aden quarantines arrivals from Bombay and Karachi; ships coming from Bombay wait eight days at Colombo. Inland, the quarantine at Deesa and Abu Road Station is called a “good result”, the attempt at Sukkur is abandoned, and the news that Mahabaleshwar would quarantine visitors stops the plague-stricken of Poona from flocking up the hill. At Kokine, a veterinary surgeon worries about the depot mules kept in quarantine through the monsoon.

   

   Objects

   4343 points

   Countries

   IndiaYemenSri Lankaand 5 more

   Made with

   Google My Maps

10. Plague Wall Map: Walking the Mur de la Peste in Provence

    When plague reached Marseille, the Comtat built a wall of 20 kilometres from Cabrières to Monieux in 17 months so that the sick could not pass, and according to this map the plague never crossed it. The circuit from Cabrières-d’Avignon follows the wall for a good kilometre, guided by stone blocks engraved “Mur de la Peste”, and climbs to a view over the Luberon and the hill villages of Gordes, Bonnieux and Lacoste. Back in the village: a church reconsecrated in 1587 after the wars of religion and a wash house of 1849.

    

    Objects

    2019 points, 1 line

    Countries

    France

    Made with

    Google My Maps

11. Plague Play Map: Santa Maria d'Arenys Stages Its Epidemic

    The Catalan village of Santa Maria d’Arenys turns its streets into a plague, scene by scene, and this map places each one. The authorities and an apparition open the play, followed by the landing, the morberia where the sick were kept, the hospice and the fairground. The muleteers, the healers and the “widows of the sea” each have a spot, then the cemetery and the final act. Each pin links to the scene’s page on the village’s site.

    

    Objects

    1111 points

    Countries

    Spain

    Made with

    Google My Maps