The new millennium brought other challenges to the Black Death-bubonic plague link, such as an unknown and probably unidentifiable bacillus, an Ebola-like haemorrhagic fever or, at the pseudoscientific fringes of academia, a disease of interstellar origin. Aware that fourteenth-century eyewitnesses described a disease more contagious and deadlier than bubonic plague ( Yersinia pestis), the bacillus traditionally associated with the Black Death, dissident scholars in the 1970s and 1980s proposed typhus or anthrax or mixes of typhus, anthrax, or bubonic plague as the culprit. In spite of enduring fascination with the Black Death, even the identity of the disease behind the epidemic remains a point of controversy. Despite growing understanding of the Black Death’s effects, definitive assessment of its role as historical watershed remains a work in progress. Its gruesome symptoms and deadliness have fixed the Black Death in popular imagination moreover, uncovering the disease’s cultural, social, and economic impact has engaged generations of scholars. From its arrival in Italy in late 1347 through its clockwise movement across the continent to its petering out in the Russian hinterlands in 1353, the magna pestilencia (great pestilence) killed between seventeen and twenty-eight million people. The Black Death was the largest demographic disaster in European history.
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