The Black Death Plague of 1347 has taken a myth-like proportion of a near-death of the human race. It was the first great plague in 800 years and it was quickly followed by others, so the myth of the big plague was to a degree a composite of plagues from 1347 and on. Whether the first one really was the biggest ever is doubtful as reliable data is scarce. 90% of the populace were peasants and the statistics points to only half the deathrate among these than the 50% death-toll of city-dwellers and priests. Some contemporary writers suggested a deathtoll at several times the population of their cities; in medieval Europe nobody checked anyway. The alarmist stories of the plague were written by upper-class city-dwellers and were seized upon in later times to demonstrate God´s apocalyptic wrath upon the dark, medieval world before the Renaissance. Later the Romantics reveled in the doom and gloom of Medieval Europe. The real number of deaths were rather a quarter or maybe a third of the populace. In later centuries the statistics get more reliable and here the death-rates of epidemics are as bad as those claimed by the first. The epidemics in the years from 1600-1750 were among the worst in human history. In context with later epidemics it seems that the first plague was probable a "normal" one in size and effect.

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