Introduction

At the time of the Black Death, the Kingdom of Hungary was much larger than modern Hungary, which mainly is a creation of the political and military processes in the wake of the First World War. The Kingdom of Hungary stretched broadly northwards from the Dalmatian shores on the Adriatic Sea across the present-day Balkan republics, modern Hungary, and Slovakia to the borders of southern Poland and to the western borders of the contemporary Kingdom of Bohemia, corresponding largely to the territory of the present-day Czech Republic. This kingdom did not last long, being quite an artificial feudal political construction, but it was the political framework of the territory where the Black Death was introduced and spread in these parts of Europe.

It should also be noted that the term Hungary used by scholars before the First World War and afterwards does not refer to an identical territory, which may create problems in this specific context. For the sake of convenience, reference is made to the territory of Hungary proper in the meaning of modern Hungary, ignoring that there are regional problems of ethnicity and national borders. When scholars refer to the spread of the Black Death in Hungary and do not differentiate between Hungary proper/modern Hungary and the contemporary Kingdom of Hungary, it occasionally can give rise to misunderstandings.

The Black Death’s invasion and conquest of Hungary

The Venetian galleys that contaminated a string of port towns along the eastern shores of the Adriatic Sea in November 1347 with the Black Death (see above, Chapter 14) infected several localities and caused the formation of several epidemic epicentres on the southern borders of the then Kingdom of Hungary. The spread of the Black Death from the Dalmatian coastline broadly northwards across these northerly parts of the Balkans and towards Hungary proper is presented and discussed above in Chapter 14. The distance from the Dalmatian shoreline, where Spalato, Trogir, Sebenico and Zara were situated, to modern Croatia’s border with Hungary is roughly 300 km. This Balkan part of the then Kingdom of Hungary was, however, not only politically a weakly integrated feudal political construction it was also a relatively dispersedly settled and economically poorly integrated territory. This would tend to minimize the incidence of metastatic leaps of infection with movement of goods and people.