How Did The Black Plague Spread. They didn't know it was spread by fleas, they thought it was spread through the air. Trade suffered for a time, and wars were temporarily abandoned.
Once the plague has killed off a colony of rats, fleas how the disease made its way to mecca is not clear, but both merchants and pilgrims traveled by sea from india to the holy city regularly. The plague never really ended and it returned with a vengeance years later. Everyone in those days had fleas, especially in the cities they were overrun with rats regularly. By way of their fleas, rats—it has long been reasoned—carried the bubonic plague (yersinia pestis), and the theory was that if you got rid of the rats, you wouldn't have.
The spread of the plague during the black death, killing millions, was fueled by humans, not rodents, as previously believed, a new study has found.
Was it bubonic, as historically assumed, or was it an airborne disease? Supposedly it was the bubonic plague spread by fleas on rats. Diagnostic tests rely on culturing the organism. The black death was a plague pandemic which devastated europe from 1347 to 1352 ce, killing although it spread unchecked, the black death hit some areas much more severely than others.
