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Many people overlook the connection between the Mongol empire and the Black Death. However, the great Eurasian empire may have been responsible for this epidemic.

The international effects of Black Death Death and disease were familiar features of life in the Middle Ages, but previous epidemics were dwarfed by the arrival of the Black Death. It erupted out of central Asia to create a pandemic greater even than the Plague of Justinian 800 years earlier. Present in bubonic, pneumonic and septicaemic forms, the Black Death had killed millions by the time it finally declined. Europe may have lost a third of its people, China perhaps half. Besides death, the disease brought fear, panic and very often a complete breakdown of society.

Plague germs extracted from medieval corpses in a London cemetery have shed light on why the bacterium that unleashed the Black Death was so lethal and spawned later waves of epidemics.

The Black Death of the Middle Ages was a truly devastating pandemic - a pandemic being the Military-Industrial Full Blown Version of an epidemic. In the mid-1300s, the Black Death killed at least one third of the European population, so it was truly horrible. So most people think that the Black Death began in Europe - but it didn't.

A third of Europe's population died over four years due to the Black Death. But was it really spread by rats and fleas? Could it have been caused by a virus? And what has that got to do with the modern-day spread of HIV?