The Bubonic Plague was first recorded in the 6th century when what we today call the plague of Justinian tore through

the Mediterranean, Europe, and what we would today call the Middle East, including the capital

of what was then the Byzantine Empire, Constantinople, which was where this particular

run of this plague gets its name.

Justinian was the Byzantine Empire at the time, and the plague of

Justinian lasted at its height from the 6th into the 7th century, though it also continued to reemerge

periodically into the mid-8th century. This plague is thought to have been one of the deadliest in history,

killing an estimated 15 to have been one of the deadliest in history, killing an estimated

15 to 100 million people over the course of those two primary centuries, which added

up at the time to somewhere between a fourth to over one half of the population of this

European and Middle Eastern region. Though the numbers are somewhat controversial, as there's a chance of the population of this European and Middle Eastern region.

Though the numbers are somewhat controversial, as there's a chance that what we know about

this first bubonic plague-based pandemic is exaggerated because of the shock of how bad it was

compared to what came before.

But when compared to what came later, it actually maybe wasn't quite as bad in that

larger context. The third bubonic plague pandemic was far more recent. It started in China,

in 1855, and though the majority of deaths were in Asia, with about 10 million people killed in India, and somewhere

between 2 and 5 million in China. This pandemic was a worldwide thing, and the World Health

Organization didn't declare it officially over until 1960, at which point deaths from the bubonic

plague, supposedly stemming from that original mid-19th-century origin point,

finally dropped to a mere 200 deaths per year.

The Great Plague of London was an extension of a larger, far more chronologically expansive boobonic plague pandemic, the second bubonic plague pandemic.

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