What is the history of the Black Death?

The earliest account of plague was in the First Book of Samuel in the Old Testament. The epidemic was called the plague of Ashdod, after the city where it began in 1000’s B.C. Again in A.D. 542, the plague struck Constantinople (Istanbul) and had probably killed about half the population. Outbreaks of plague were frequent in the Mediterranean region throughout the remainder of the 500’s. Historians later called this the first pandemic (worldwide occurrence) of plague. A second pandemic swept across Asia and Europe in the mid- 1300’s. From Asia, the plague ended up spreading throughout most of Europe. By 1400, the disease had killed about 40 Europeans. A third pandemic began in China in the mid-1800’s killing about 20 million people within 75 years. Later in 1884, two doctors independently identified the bacteria causing the plague. Because of this information, in 1896 a Russian scientist developed the first plague vaccine which helped a lot of people.