Flea

Fleas are presented as the vectors through which the Black Death, carried by rats, spread from the port of Tana into the Mediterranean world. Their role links a small living carrier to a catastrophe that killed about half the population of each area it reached.

Role in the Plague’s Spread

The account traces the plague to Tana, at the mouth of the Don on the Black Sea, in 1346. Traders traveling the Silk Road brought it from China; rats living with fleas carried it onward. Genoese traders helped spread the rats and fleas from Tana across the Mediterranean, turning a local arrival into a rapidly expanding epidemic.

Scale and Consequences

The plague reached Constantinople by early 1347 and, by spring 1348, was spreading through France and North Africa and up the Italian peninsula. Wherever it struck, it killed about half the population. The fleas appear in this history not as an isolated curiosity but as part of the mechanism connecting commercial routes, animal hosts, and mass human mortality.