document_title: History of chess

question_text: where did the game of chess originate from

question_tokens: where did the game of chess originate from

text: History of chess

text: Origin

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text: This example uses algebraic notation.

text: Precursors to chess originated in India during the Gupta Empire.[4] There, its early form in the 6th century was known as chaturaṅga, which translates as "four divisions (of the military)": infantry, cavalry, elephantry, and chariotry. These forms are represented by the pieces that would evolve into the modern pawn, knight, bishop, and rook, respectively.[5] According to chess historians Gerhard Josten and Isaak Linder, "the early beginnings" of chess can be traced back to the Kushan Empire in Ancient Afghanistan, circa 50 BCE–200 CE.[6][7]

text: Chess was introduced to Persia from India and became a part of the princely or courtly education of Persian nobility.[8] In Sassanid Persia around 600 the name became chatrang, which subsequently evolved to shatranj, due to Arab Muslims' lack of ch and ng native sounds,[9] and the rules were developed further. Players started calling "Shāh!" (Persian for "King!") when attacking the opponent's king, and "Shāh Māt!" (Persian for "the king is helpless" – see checkmate) when the king was attacked and could not escape from attack. These exclamations persisted in chess as it traveled to other lands.

text: The game was taken up by the Muslim world after the Islamic conquest of Persia, with the pieces largely keeping their Persian names. The Moors of North Africa rendered Persian "shatranj" as shaṭerej, which gave rise to the Spanish acedrex, axedrez and ajedrez; in Portuguese it became xadrez, and in Greek zatrikion, but in the rest of Europe it was replaced by versions of the Persian shāh ("king"). Thus, the game came to be called ludus scacchorum or scacc(h)i in Latin, scacchi in Italian, escacs in Catalan, échecs in French (Old French eschecs); schaken in Dutch, Schach in German, szachy in Polish, šahs in Latvian, skak in Danish, sjakk in Norwegian, schack in Swedish, šakki in Finnish, šah in South Slavic languages, sakk in Hungarian and şah in Romanian; there are two theories about why this change happened:

text:
From the exclamation "check" or "checkmate" as it was pronounced in various languages.
From the first chessmen known of in Western Europe (except Iberia and Greece) being ornamental chess kings brought in as curios by Muslim traders.

text: The Mongols call the game shatar, and in Ethiopia it is called senterej, both evidently derived from shatranj.

text: Chess spread directly from the Middle East to Russia, where chess became known as шахматы (shakhmaty, literally "checkmates", a plurale tantum).

text: The game reached Western Europe and Russia by at least three routes, the earliest being in the 9th century. By the year 1000 it had spread throughout Europe.[10] Introduced into the Iberian Peninsula by the Moors in the 10th century, it was described in a famous 13th-century manuscript covering shatranj, backgammon and dice named the Libro de los juegos.

text: Chess spread throughout the world and many variants of the game soon began taking shape.[11] Buddhist pilgrims, Silk Road traders and others carried it to the Far East where it was transformed and assimilated into a game often played on the intersection of the lines of the board rather than within the squares.[11][12] Chaturanga reached Europe through Persia, the Byzantine empire and the expanding Arabian empire.[13] Muslims carried chess to North Africa, Sicily, and Iberia by the 10th century.[11]

text: The game was developed extensively in Europe. By the late 15th century, it had survived a series of prohibitions and Christian Church sanctions to almost take the shape of the modern game.[14] Modern history saw reliable reference works,[15] competitive chess tournaments,[16] and exciting new variants. These factors added to the game's popularity,[16] further bolstered by reliable timing mechanisms (first introduced in 1861), effective rules,[16] and charismatic players.[17]

text: India

text: The earliest precursor of modern chess is a game called chaturanga, which flourished in India by the 6th century, and is the earliest known game to have two essential features found in all later chess variations—different pieces having different powers (which was not the case with checkers and Go), and victory depending on the fate of one piece, the king of modern chess.[11] The original chess board was mathematically revolutionary, as reported by the infamous Wheat and chessboard problem. A common theory is that India’s development of the board, and chess, was likely due to India’s mathematical enlightenment involving the creation of the number zero.[9] Other game pieces (speculatively called "chess pieces") uncovered in archaeological findings are considered as coming from other, distantly related board games, which may have had boards of 100 squares or more.[11] Findings in the Mohenjo-daro and Harappa (2600–1500 BCE) sites of the Indus Valley Civilization show the prevalence of a board game that resembles chess.[18]

text: Chess was designed for an ashtāpada (Sanskrit for "having eight feet", i.e. an 8×8 squared board), which may have been used earlier for a backgammon-type race game (perhaps related to a dice-driven race game still played in south India where the track starts at the middle of a side and spirals into the center).[19] Ashtāpada, the uncheckered 8×8 board served as the main board for playing chaturanga.[20] Other Indian boards included the 10×10 Dasapada and the 9×9 Saturankam.[20] Traditional Indian chessboards often have X markings on some or all of squares a1 a4 a5 a8 d1 d4 d5 d8 e1 e4 e5 e8 h1 h4 h5 h8: these may have been "safe squares" where capturing was not allowed in a dice-driven backgammon-type race game played on the ashtāpada before chess was invented.[19]

text: The Cox-Forbes theory, proposed in the late 18th century by Hiram Cox, and later developed by Duncan Forbes, asserted that the four-handed game chaturaji was the original form of chaturanga.[21] The theory is no longer considered tenable.[22]

text: In Sanskrit, "chaturanga" (चतुरङ्ग) literally means "having four limbs (or parts)" and in epic poetry often means "army" (the four parts are elephants, chariots, horsemen, foot soldiers).[8] The name came from a battle formation mentioned in the Indian epic Mahabharata.[11] The game chaturanga was a battle-simulation game[8] which rendered Indian military strategy of the time.[23]

text: Some people formerly played chess using a die to decide which piece to move. There was an unproven theory that chess started as this dice-chess and that the gambling and dice aspects of the game were removed because of Hindu religious objections.[24]

text: Scholars in areas to which the game subsequently spread, for example the Arab Abu al-Hasan 'Alī al-Mas'ūdī, detailed the Indian use of chess as a tool for military strategy, mathematics, gambling and even its vague association with astronomy.[25] Mas'ūdī notes that ivory in India was chiefly used for the production of chess and backgammon pieces, and asserts that the game was introduced to Persia from India, along with the book Kelileh va Demneh, during the reign of emperor Nushirwan.[25]

text: In some variants, a win was by checkmate, or by stalemate, or by "bare king" (taking all of an opponent's pieces except the king).

text: In some parts of India the pieces in the places of the rook, knight and bishop were renamed by words meaning (in this order) Boat, Horse, and Elephant, or Elephant, Horse, and Camel, but keeping the same moves.[19]

text: In early chess the moves of the pieces were:

text:
Original name
Modern name
Version
Original move

king
king
all
as now

adviser
queen
all
one square diagonally, only

elephant
bishop
Persia and west
two squares diagonally (no more or less), but could jump over a piece between

an old Indian version
two squares sideways or front-and-back (no more or less), but could jump over a piece between

southeast and east Asia
one square diagonally, or one square forwards, like four legs and trunk of elephant

horse
knight
all
as now

chariot
rook
all
as now

foot-soldier
pawn
all
one square forwards (not two), capturing one square diagonally forward; promoted to queen only

text: Two Arab travelers each recorded a severe Indian chess rule against stalemate:[26]

text:
A stalemated player thereby at once wins.
A stalemated king can take one of the enemy pieces that would check the king if the king moves.

text: Iran (Persia)

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Iranian shatranj set, glazed fritware, 12th century. New York Metropolitan Museum of Art.[27]

Persian manuscript from the 14th century describing how an ambassador from India brought chess to the Persian court.

Shams-e-Tabrīzī as portrayed in a 1500 painting in a page of a copy of Rumi's poem dedicated to Shams.

text: The Karnamak-i Ardeshir-i Papakan, a Pahlavi epical treatise about the founder of the Sassanid Persian Empire, mentions the game of chatrang as one of the accomplishments of the legendary hero, Ardashir I, founder of the Empire.[28] The oldest recorded game in chess history is a 10th-century game played between a historian from Baghdad and a pupil.[13]

text: A manuscript explaining the rules of the game called "Matikan-i-chatrang" (the book of chess) in Middle Persian or Pahlavi still exists.[citation needed]

text: In the 11th century Shahnameh, Ferdowsi describes a Raja visiting from India who re-enacts the past battles on the chessboard.[25] A translation in English, based on the manuscripts in the British Museum, is given below:[28]

text: The Shahnameh goes on to offer an apocryphal account of the origins of the game of chess in the story of Talhand and Gav, two half-brothers who vie for the throne of Hind (India). They meet in battle and Talhand dies on his elephant without a wound. Believing that Gav had killed Talhand, their mother is distraught. Gav tells his mother that Talhand did not die by the hands of him or his men, but she does not understand how this could be. So the sages of the court invent the game of chess, detailing the pieces and how they move, to show the mother of the princes how the battle unfolded and how Talhand died of fatigue when surrounded by his enemies.[29] The poem uses the Persian term "Shāh māt" (check mate) to describe the fate of Talhand.[30]

text: The philosopher and theologist Al-Ghazali mentions chess in The Alchemy of Happiness (c. 1100). He uses it as a specific example of a habit that may cloud a person's good disposition:[31]

text: Indeed, a person who has become habituated to gaming with pigeons, playing chess, or gambling, so that it becomes second-nature to him, will give all the comforts of the world and all that he has for those (pursuits) and cannot keep away from them.

text: The appearance of the chess pieces had altered greatly since the times of chaturanga, with ornate pieces and chess pieces depicting animals giving way to abstract shapes.[32] This is because of a Muslim ban on the game’s lifelike pieces, as they were said to have brought upon images of idolatry.[9] The Islamic sets of later centuries followed a pattern which assigned names and abstract shapes to the chess pieces, as Islam forbids depiction of animals and human beings in art.[32] These pieces were usually made of simple clay and carved stone.[32]

text: East Asia

text: China

text: As a strategy board game played in China, chess is believed to have been derived from the Indian chaturanga.[33] Chaturanga was transformed into the game xiangqi where the pieces are placed on the intersection of the lines of the board rather than within the squares.[11] The object of the Chinese variation is similar to chaturanga, i.e. to render helpless the opponent's king, known as "general" on one side and "governor" on the other.[33] Chinese chess also borrows elements from the game of Go, which was played in China since at least the 6th century BC. Owing to the influence of Go, Chinese chess is played on the intersections of the lines on the board, rather than in the squares. The game of Xianqi is also unique in that the middle rank represents a river, and is not divided into squares.[34] Chinese chess pieces are usually flat and resemble those used in checkers, with pieces differentiated by writing their names on the flat surface.[33]

text: An alternative origin theory contends that chess arose from xiangqi or a predecessor thereof, existing in China since the 3rd century BC.[35] David H. Li, a retired accountant, professor of accounting and translator of ancient Chinese texts, hypothesizes that general Han Xin drew on the earlier game of Liubo to develop an early form of Chinese chess in the winter of 204–203 BC.[35] The German chess historian Peter Banaschak, however, points out that Li's main hypothesis "is based on virtually nothing." He notes that the "Xuanguai lu," authored by the Tang Dynasty minister Niu Sengru (779–847), remains the first real source on the Chinese chess variant xiangqi.[36]

text: Japan

text: A prominent variant of chess in East Asia is the game of shogi, transmitted from India to China and Korea before finally reaching Japan.[37] The three distinguishing features of shogi are:

text:
The captured pieces may be reused by the captor and played as a part of the captor's forces.
Pawns capture as they move, one square straight ahead.[37]
The board is 9×9, with a second gold general on the other side of the king.

text: Drops were not originally part of shogi. In the 13th century, shogi underwent an expansion, creating the game of dai shogi, played on a 15×15 board with many new pieces, including the independently invented rook, bishop and queen of modern Western chess, the drunk elephant that promotes to a second king, and also the even more powerful lion, which among other idiosyncracies has the power to move or capture twice per turn. Around the 14th or 15th centuries, the popularity of dai shogi then waned in favour of the smaller chu shogi, played on a smaller 12×12 board which removed the weakest pieces from dai shogi, similarly to the development of Courier chess in the West. In the meantime, the original 9×9 shogi, now termed sho shogi, continued to be played, but was regarded as less prestigious than chu shogi and dai shogi. Chu shogi was very popular in Japan, and the rook, bishop, and drunk elephant from it were added to sho shogi, where the first two remain today.

text: Chu shogi declined in popularity after the addition of drops to sho shogi and the removal of the drunk elephant in the 16th century, becoming moribund around the late 20th century. These changes to sho shogi created what is essentially the modern game of shogi.

text: Mongolia

text: Chess is recorded from Mongolian-inhabited areas, where the pieces are now called:

text:
King: Noyon – Ноён – lord
Queen: Bers / Nohoi – Бэрс / Нохой – dog (to guard the livestock)
Bishop: Temē – Тэмээ – camel
Knight: Morĭ – Морь – horse
Rook: Tereg – Тэрэг – cart
Pawn: Hū – Хүү – boy (the piece often showed a puppy)

text: Names recorded from the 1880s by Russian sources, quoted in Murray,[19] among the Soyot people (who at the time spoke the Soyot Turkic language) include: merzé (dog), täbä (camel), ot (horse), ōl (child) and Mongolian names for the other pieces. This game is called shatar; a large 10×10 variant called hiashatar was also played.

text: The change with the queen is likely due to the Arabic word firzān or Persian word farzīn (= "vizier") being confused with Turkic or Mongolian native words (merzé = "mastiff", bar or bars = "tiger", arslan = "lion").[19]

text: Chess in Mongolia is now played following standard rules.

text: East Siberia

text: Chess was also recorded from the Yakuts, Tunguses, and Yukaghirs; but only as a children's game among the Chukchi. Chessmen have been collected from the Yakutat people in Alaska, having no resemblance to European chessmen, and thus likely part of a chess tradition coming from Siberia.[19]

text: Arab world

text: Chess passed from Persia to the Arab world, where its name changed to Arabic shatranj. From there it passed to Western Europe, probably via Spain.

text: Over the centuries, features of European chess (e.g. the modern moves of queen and bishop, and castling) found their way via trade into Islamic areas. Murray's[19] sources found the old moves of queen and bishop still current in Ethiopia. The game became so popular it was used in writing at that time, played by nobility and regular people. The poet al-Katib once said, “The skilled player places his pieces in such a way as to discover consequences that the ignorant man never sees... thus, he serves the Sultan’s interests, by showing how to foresee disaster.”[9]

text: Europe

text: Early history

text: This paragraph may be confusing or unclear to readers. Please help us clarify the paragraph. There might be a discussion about this on the talk page. (May 2013) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)

text: Shatranj made its way via the expanding Islamic Arabian empire to Europe.[13] It also spread to the Byzantine empire, where it was called zatrikion. Chess appeared in Southern Europe during the end of the first millennium, often introduced to new lands by conquering armies, such as the Norman Conquest of England.[14] Chess remained largely unpopular in Northern Europe but started gaining popularity as soon as figure pieces were introduced.[14]

text: In the 14th century, Timur played an enlarged variation of the game which is commonly referred to as Tamerlane Chess. This complex game involved each pawn having a particular purpose, as well as additional pieces.[38]

text: The sides are conventionally called White and Black. But, in earlier European chess writings, the sides were often called Red and Black because those were the commonly available colors of ink when handwriting drawing a chess game layout. In such layouts, each piece was represented by its name, often abbreviated (e.g. "ch'r" for French "chevalier" = "knight").

text: The social value attached to the game – seen as a prestigious pastime associated with nobility and high culture – is clear from the expensive and exquisitely made chessboards of the medieval era.[39] The popularity of chess in the Western courtly society peaked between the 12th and the 15th centuries.[40] The game found mention in the vernacular and Latin language literature throughout Europe, and many works were written on or about chess between the 12th and the 15th centuries.[40] H. J. R. Murray divides the works into three distinct parts: the didactic works e.g. Alexander of Neckham's De scaccis (approx. 1180); works of morality like Liber de moribus hominum et officiis nobilium sive super ludo scacchorum (Book of the customs of men and the duties of nobles or the Book of Chess), written by Jacobus de Cessolis; and the works related to various chess problems, written largely after 1205.[40] Chess terms, like check, were used by authors as a metaphor for various situations.[41] Chess was soon incorporated into the knightly style of life in Europe.[42] Peter Alfonsi, in his work Disciplina Clericalis, listed chess among the seven skills that a good knight must acquire.[42] Chess also became a subject of art during this period, with caskets and pendants decorated in various chess forms.[43] Queen Margaret of England's green and red chess sets – made of jasper and crystal – symbolized chess's position in royal art treasures.[41] Kings Henry I, Henry II and Richard I of England were chess patrons.[11] Other monarchs who gained similar status were Alfonso X of Castile and Ivan IV of Russia.[11]

text: Saint Peter Damian denounced the bishop of Florence in 1061 for playing chess even when aware of its evil effects on the society.[14] The bishop of Florence defended himself by declaring that chess involved skill and was therefore "unlike other games," and similar arguments followed in the coming centuries.[14] Two incidents in 13th century London involving men of Essex resorting to violence resulting in death as an outcome of playing chess further caused sensation and alarm.[14] The growing popularity of the game – now associated with revelry and violence – alarmed the Church.[14]

text: The practice of playing chess for money became so widespread during the 13th century that Louis IX of France issued an ordinance against gambling in 1254.[39] This ordinance turned out to be unenforceable and was largely neglected by the common public, and even the courtly society, which continued to enjoy the now prohibited chess tournaments uninterrupted.[39]

text:
Knights Templar playing chess, Libro de los juegos, 1283

Otto IV of Brandenburg playing chess with a woman, 1305 to 1340

A couple playing chess, ivory mirror case c. 1300

text: Shapes of pieces

text: Under Christianity, the shapes of the pieces, originally Islamic nonrepresentational (see piece values in shantranj), changed. Carved images of men and animals reappeared. The shape of the rook, originally a rectangular block with a V-shaped cut in the top, changed; the two top parts separated by the split tended to get long and hang over, and in some old pictures look like horses' heads. The split top of the piece now called the bishop was interpreted as a bishop's mitre or a fool's cap.

text: By the mid-12th century, the pieces of the chess set were depicted as kings, queens, bishops, knights and men at arms.[44] Chessmen made of ivory began to appear in North-West Europe, and ornate pieces of traditional knight warriors were used as early as the mid 13th century.[45] The initially nondescript pawn had now found association with the pedes, pedinus, or the footman, which symbolized both infantry and loyal domestic service.[44]

text: Names of pieces

text: The following table provides a glimpse of the changes in names and character of chess pieces as they crossed from India through Persia to Europe:[46][47]

text:
A comparison of the terms for chessmen in Sanskrit, Bengali, Persian, Arabic, Turkish, Latin, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, and Catalan

Sanskrit
Bengali
Persian
Arabic
Turkish
Latin
English
Spanish
Portuguese
Italian
French
Catalan

Raja (King)
Raja (King)
Shah
Malik
Şah
Rex
King
Rey
Rei
Re
Roi
Rei

Mantri (Minister)
Mantri (Minister)
Vazīr (Vizir)
Wazīr/Firz
Vezir
Regina
Queen
Reina/Dama
Dama
Regina
Dame
Dama/Reina

Gajah (war elephant)
Hati
Pil
Al-Fīl
Fil
Episcopus/Comes/Calvus
Bishop/Count/Councillor
Alfil/Obispo
Bispo
Alfiere
Fou
Alfil

Ashva (horse)
Ghora (horse)
Asp
Fars/Hisan
At
Miles/Eques
Knight
Caballo
Cavalo
Cavallo
Cavalier
Cavall

Ratha (chariot)
Nowka
Rokh
Qal`a/Rukhkh
Kale
Rochus/Marchio
Rook/Margrave/Castle
Torre/Roque
Torre
Torre/Rocco
Tour
Torre

Padati (footman/footsoldier)
Shoinnya
Piadeh
Baidaq/Jondi
Piyon
Pedes/Pedinus
Pawn
Peón
Peão
Pedone/Pedina
Pion
Peó

text: The game, as played during the early Middle Ages, was slow, with many games lasting for days.[14] Some variations in rules began to change the shape of the game by 1300 AD.[48] A notable, but initially unpopular, change was the ability of the pawn to move two places in the first move instead of one.[48]

text: In Europe some of the pieces gradually got new names:

text:
Fers: "queen", because it starts beside the king.
Aufin: "bishop", because its two points looked like a bishop's mitre; In French fou; and others. Its Latin name alfinus was reinterpreted many ways.

text: Early changes to the rules

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a
b
c
d
e
f
g
h

8

8

7
7

6
6

5
5

4
4

3
3

2
2

1
1

a
b
c
d
e
f
g
h

text: Attempts to make the start of the game run faster to get the opposing pieces in contact sooner included:

text:
Pawn moving two squares in its first move. This led to the en passant rule: a pawn placed so that it could have captured the enemy pawn if it had moved one square forward was allowed to capture it on the passed square. In Italy, the contrary rule (passar battaglia = "to pass battle") applied: a pawn that moved two squares forward had passed the danger of attack on the intermediate square. It was sometimes not allowed to do this to cover check.[49]
King jumping once, to make it quicker to put the king safe in a corner. (This eventually led to castling.)
Queen on its first move moving two squares straight or diagonally to a same-colored square, with jump. (This rule sometimes also applied to a queen made by promoting a pawn.)
The short assize. ("assize" = "sitting") Here the pawns started on the third rank; the queens started on d3 and d6 along with the queens' pawns; the players arranged their other pieces as they wished behind their pawns at the start of the game. This idea did not endure.[19]

text: Other sporadic variations in the rules of chess included:

text: Ignoring check from a piece which was covering check, as some said that in theory (in the diagram on the right), Bxe7 would allow Rxc8 in reply.[19]

text: Origins of the modern game

text: The queen and bishop remained relatively weak until[14] between 1475 AD and 1500 AD, in either Spain, Portugal, France or Italy, the queen's and bishop's modern moves started and spread, making chess close to its modern form. This form of chess got such names as "Queen's Chess" or "Mad Queen Chess" (Italian alla rabiosa = "with the madwoman").[50] This led to much more value being attached to the previously minor tactic of pawn promotion.[19] Checkmate became easier and games could now be won in fewer moves.[48][51] These new rules quickly spread throughout Western Europe and in Spain,[52][53] with the exception of the rules about stalemate, which were finalized in the early 19th century.[54] The modern move of the queen may have started as an extension of its older ability to once move two squares with jump, diagonally or straight. Marilyn Yalom says that the new move of the queen started in Spain: see history of the queen.

text: In some areas (e.g. Russia), the queen could also move like a knight.

text: A poem Caïssa published in 1527 led to the chess rook being often renamed as "castle", and the modern shape of the rook chess piece; see Vida's poem for more information.

text: An Italian player, Gioacchino Greco, regarded as one of the first true professionals of the game, authored an analysis of a number of composed games that illustrated two differing approaches to chess.[15] This influential work went to some extent in popularizing chess and demonstrated the many theories regarding game play and tactics.[15]

text: The first full work dealing with the various winning combinations was written by François-André Danican Philidor of France, regarded as the best chess player in the world for nearly 50 years, and published in the 18th century.[15] He wrote and published L'Analyse des échecs (The Analysis of Chess), an influential work which appeared in more than 100 editions.[15]

text:
A woodcut drawn from Caxton's chess book printed in England in 1474

A tactical puzzle from Lucena's 1497 book

A Russian set made of walrus ivory, 1750s

Portrait of François-André Danican Philidor from L’analyse des échecs. London, second edition, 1777

Original Staunton chess pieces by Nathaniel Cook from 1849

text: Writings about the theory of how to play chess began to appear in the 15th century. The oldest surviving printed chess book, Repetición de Amores y Arte de Ajedrez (Repetition of Love and the Art of Playing Chess) by Spanish churchman Luis Ramirez de Lucena was published in Salamanca in 1497.[52] Lucena and later masters like Portuguese Pedro Damiano, Italians Giovanni Leonardo Di Bona, Giulio Cesare Polerio and Gioachino Greco or Spanish bishop Ruy López de Segura developed elements of openings and started to analyze simple endgames. In the 18th century the center of European chess life moved from the Southern European countries to France. The two most important French masters were François-André Danican Philidor, a musician by profession, who discovered the importance of pawns for chess strategy, and later Louis-Charles Mahé de La Bourdonnais who won a famous series of matches with the Irish master Alexander McDonnell in 1834.[55] Centers of chess life in this period were coffee houses in big European cities like Café de la Régence in Paris[56] and Simpson's Divan in London.[57]

text: As the 19th century progressed, chess organization developed quickly. Many chess clubs, chess books and chess journals appeared. There were correspondence matches between cities; for example the London Chess Club played against the Edinburgh Chess Club in 1824.[58] Chess problems became a regular part of 19th century newspapers; Bernhard Horwitz, Josef Kling and Samuel Loyd composed some of the most influential problems. In 1843, von der Lasa published his and Bilguer's Handbuch des Schachspiels (Handbook of Chess), the first comprehensive manual of chess theory.

text: Modern competitive chess

text: Competitive chess became visible in 1834 with the LaBourdonnais-McDonnel matches, and the 1851 London Chess tournament raised concerns about the time taken by the players to deliberate their moves. On recording time it was found that players often took hours to analyze moves, and one player took as much as two hours and 20 minutes to think over a single move at the London tournament. The following years saw the development of speed chess, five-minute chess and the most popular variant, a version allowing a bank of time to each player in which to play a previously agreed number of moves, e.g. two hours for 30 moves. In the final variant, the player who made the predetermined number of moves in the agreed time received additional time budget for his next moves. Penalties for exceeding a time limit came in form of fines and forfeiture. Since fines were easy to bear for professional players, forfeiture became the only effective penalty; this added "lost on time" to the traditional means of losing such as checkmate and resigning.[16]

text: In 1861 the first time limits, using sandglasses, were employed in a tournament match at Bristol, England. The sandglasses were later replaced by pendulums. Modern clocks, consisting of two parallel timers with a small button for a player to press after completing a move, were later employed to aid the players. A tiny latch called a flag further helped settle arguments over players exceeding time limit at the turn of the 19th century.[16]

text: A Russian composer, Vladimir Korolkov, authored a work entitled "Excelsior" in 1958 in which the White side wins only by making six consecutive captures by a pawn.[17] Position analysis became particularly popular in the 19th century.[17] Many leading players were also accomplished analysts, including Max Euwe, Mikhail Botvinnik, Vasily Smyslov and Jan Timman.[17] Digital clocks appeared in the 1980s.[16]

text: Another problem that arose in competitive chess was when adjourning a game for a meal break or overnight. The player who moved last before adjournment would be at a disadvantage, as the other player would have a long period to analyze before having to make a reply when the game was resumed. Preventing access to a chess set to work out moves during the adjournment would not stop him from analyzing the position in his head. Various strange ideas were attempted, but the eventual solution was the "sealed move". The final move before adjournment is not made on the board but instead is written on a piece of paper which the referee seals in an envelope and keeps safe. When the game is continued after adjournment, the referee makes the sealed move and the players resume.

text: Birth of a sport (1850–1945)

text: The first modern chess tournament was held in London in 1851 and won, surprisingly, by German Adolf Anderssen, who was relatively unknown at the time. Anderssen was hailed as the leading chess master, and his brilliant, energetic attacking style became typical for the time, although it was retrospectively regarded as strategically shallow.[59][60] Sparkling games like Anderssen's Immortal game and Evergreen Game or Morphy's Opera game were regarded as the highest possible summit of the chess art.[61]

text: Deeper insight into the nature of chess came with two younger players. American Paul Morphy, an extraordinary chess prodigy, won against all important competitors, including Anderssen, during his short chess career between 1857 and 1863. Morphy's success stemmed from a combination of brilliant attacks and sound strategy; he intuitively knew how to prepare attacks.[62] Prague-born Wilhelm Steinitz later described how to avoid weaknesses in one's own position and how to create and exploit such weaknesses in the opponent's position.[63] In addition to his theoretical achievements, Steinitz founded an important tradition: his triumph over the leading Polish-German master Johannes Zukertort in 1886 is regarded as the first official World Chess Championship. Steinitz lost his crown in 1894 to a much younger German mathematician Emanuel Lasker, who maintained this title for 27 years, the longest tenure of all World Champions.[64]

text: It took a prodigy from Cuba, José Raúl Capablanca (World champion 1921–27), who loved simple positions and endgames, to end the German-speaking dominance in chess; he was undefeated in tournament play for eight years until 1924. His successor was Russian-French Alexander Alekhine, a strong attacking player, who died as the World champion in 1946, having briefly lost the title to Dutch player Max Euwe in 1935, regaining it two years later.[65]

text: Between the world wars, chess was revolutionized by the new theoretical school of so-called hypermodernists like Aron Nimzowitsch and Richard Réti. They advocated controlling the center of the board with distant pieces rather than with pawns, inviting opponents to occupy the center with pawns which become objects of attack.[66]

text: Since the end of 19th century, the number of annually held master tournaments and matches quickly grew. Some sources state that in 1914 the title of chess grandmaster was first formally conferred by Tsar Nicholas II of Russia to Lasker, Capablanca, Alekhine, Tarrasch and Marshall, but this is a disputed claim.[67] The tradition of awarding such titles was continued by the World Chess Federation (FIDE), founded in 1924 in Paris. In 1927, Women's World Chess Championship was established; the first to hold it was Czech-English master Vera Menchik.[68]

text: Post-war era (1945 and later)

text: After the death of Alekhine, a new World Champion was sought in a tournament of elite players ruled by FIDE, who have controlled the title since then, with one interruption. The winner of the 1948 tournament, Russian Mikhail Botvinnik, started an era of Soviet dominance in the chess world. Until the end of the Soviet Union, there was only one non-Soviet champion, American Bobby Fischer (champion 1972–75).[69]

text: In the previous informal system, the World Champion decided which challenger he would play for the title and the challenger was forced to seek sponsors for the match.[70] FIDE set up a new system of qualifying tournaments and matches. The world's strongest players were seeded into "Interzonal tournaments", where they were joined by players who had qualified from "Zonal tournaments". The leading finishers in these Interzonals would go on the "Candidates" stage, which was initially a tournament, later a series of knock-out matches. The winner of the Candidates would then play the reigning champion for the title. A champion defeated in a match had a right to play a rematch a year later. This system worked on a three-year cycle.[70]

text: Botvinnik participated in championship matches over a period of fifteen years. He won the world championship tournament in 1948 and retained the title in tied matches in 1951 and 1954. In 1957, he lost to Vasily Smyslov, but regained the title in a rematch in 1958. In 1960, he lost the title to the Latvian prodigy Mikhail Tal, an accomplished tactician and attacking player. Botvinnik again regained the title in a rematch in 1961.

text: Following the 1961 event, FIDE abolished the automatic right of a deposed champion to a rematch, and the next champion, Armenian Tigran Petrosian, a genius of defense and strong positional player, was able to hold the title for two cycles, 1963–69. His successor, Boris Spassky from Russia (1969–72), was a player able to win in both positional and sharp tactical style.[71]

text: The next championship saw the first non-Soviet challenger since World War II, Bobby Fischer, who defeated his Candidates opponents by unheard-of margins and won the world championship match. In 1975, however, Fischer refused to defend his title against Soviet Anatoly Karpov when FIDE refused to meet his demands, and Karpov obtained the title by default. Karpov defended his title twice against Viktor Korchnoi and dominated the 1970s and early 1980s with a string of tournament successes.[72]

text: Karpov's reign finally ended in 1985 at the hands of another Russian player, Garry Kasparov. Kasparov and Karpov contested five world title matches between 1984 and 1990; Karpov never won his title back.[73]

text: In 1993, Garry Kasparov and Nigel Short broke with FIDE to organize their own match for the title and formed a competing Professional Chess Association (PCA). From then until 2006, there were two simultaneous World Champions and World Championships: the PCA or Classical champion extending the Steinitzian tradition in which the current champion plays a challenger in a series of many games; the other following FIDE's new format of many players competing in a tournament to determine the champion. Kasparov lost his Classical title in 2000 to Vladimir Kramnik of Russia.

text: Earlier in 1999, Kasparov as the reigning world champion played a game online against the world team composed of more than 50,000 participants from more than 75 countries. The moves of the world team were decided by plurality vote, and after 62 moves played over four months Kasparov won the game. The number of ideas, the complexity, and the contribution it has made to chess theory make it one of the most important chess games ever played.[74]

text: The FIDE World Chess Championship 2006 reunified the titles, when Kramnik beat the FIDE World Champion Veselin Topalov and became the undisputed World Chess Champion.[75] In September 2007, Viswanathan Anand from India became the next champion by winning a championship tournament.[76] In October 2008, Anand retained his title, decisively winning the rematch against Kramnik.[77] Anand retained his title until 2013, when he lost it to Magnus Carlsen from Norway, the current World Chess Champion.

text: Rule changes

text: There have been no recent changes to the moves of the pieces, but the wording of some rules were changed. Publicity (e.g. by chess problem setters) showed that the old wording of two rules allowed unintended types of moves:

text:
The promotion rule was found to say that a pawn is to be promoted to "a piece" of unspecified color, thus including an enemy piece (thus on occasion blocking the enemy king in, or preventing stalemate by giving the opponent something to move).
The castling rule was found to allow (White) Ke1–e3 and Re8–e2, and (Black) Ke8–e6 and Re1–e7, if "the rook had not been moved" as a rook because it had been a pawn underpromoted on e8/e1.

text: The wording of both rules was changed to forbid the unintended allowed moves.

text: In recent times, more ways to lose have been brought in:

text:
The 1851 London Chess tournament showed the need for time control, resulting in ability to "lose on time".
If a mobile phone or other electrical device generates sound, the player thereby loses; but if the other player cannot win by any possible sequence of legal moves, the result is a draw.[78]


document_title: To the nines

question_text: where does the term dressed to the nines come from

root

text: To the nines

text: "To the nine" is an English idiom meaning "to perfection" or "to the highest degree" or to dress "buoyantly and high class". In modern English usage, the phrase most commonly appears as "dressed to the nine" or "dressed up to the nine".[1][2]

tag: p

text: Origin[edit]

text: The phrase is said to be Scots in origin.[2] The earliest written example of the phrase is from the 1719 Epistle to Ramsay by the Scottish poet William Hamilton:[3]

text:
The bonny Lines therein thou sent me,
How to the nines they did content me.

text: Robert Burns' "Poem on Pastoral Poetry", published posthumously in 1800, also uses the phrase:[citation needed]

text:
Thou paints auld nature to the nines,
In thy sweet Caledonian lines.

text: The phrase may have originally been associated with the Nine Worthies or the nine Muses. A poem from a 17th century collection of works by John Rawlet contains the following lines:[3]

text:
The learned tribe whose works the World do bless,
Finish those works in some recess;
Both the Philosopher and Divine,
And Poets most who still make their address
In private to the Nine.


document_title: Black Death

question_text: when did the black death start in europe

text: Black Death

text: Chronology

text: Origins of the disease

text: The plague disease, caused by Yersinia pestis, is enzootic (commonly present) in populations of fleas carried by ground rodents, including marmots, in various areas including Central Asia, Kurdistan, Western Asia, Northern India and Uganda.[10] Nestorian graves dating to 1338–1339 near Lake Issyk Kul in Kyrgyzstan have inscriptions referring to plague and are thought by many epidemiologists to mark the outbreak of the epidemic, from which it could easily have spread to China and India.[11] In October 2010, medical geneticists suggested that all three of the great waves of the plague originated in China.[12] In China, the 13th-century Mongol conquest caused a decline in farming and trading. However, economic recovery had been observed at the beginning of the 14th century. In the 1330s, a large number of natural disasters and plagues led to widespread famine, starting in 1331, with a deadly plague arriving soon after.[13] Epidemics that may have included plague killed an estimated 25 million Chinese and other Asians during the 15 years before it reached Constantinople in 1347.[14][15]

text: The disease may have travelled along the Silk Road with Mongol armies and traders or it could have come via ship.[16] By the end of 1346, reports of plague had reached the seaports of Europe: "India was depopulated, Tartary, Mesopotamia, Syria, Armenia were covered with dead bodies".[17]

text: Plague was reportedly first introduced to Europe via Genoese traders at the port city of Kaffa in the Crimea in 1347. After a protracted siege, during which the Mongol army under Jani Beg was suffering from the disease, the army catapulted the infected corpses over the city walls of Kaffa to infect the inhabitants. The Genoese traders fled, taking the plague by ship into Sicily and the south of Europe, whence it spread north.[18] Whether or not this hypothesis is accurate, it is clear that several existing conditions such as war, famine, and weather contributed to the severity of the Black Death.

text: European outbreak

text:
The seventh year after it began, it came to England and first began in the towns and ports joining on the seacoasts, in Dorsetshire, where, as in other counties, it made the country quite void of inhabitants so that there were almost none left alive.
... But at length it came to Gloucester, yea even to Oxford and to London, and finally it spread over all England and so wasted the people that scarce the tenth person of any sort was left alive.

Geoffrey the Baker, Chronicon Angliae

tag: div

text: There appear to have been several introductions into Europe. The plague reached Sicily in October 1347, carried by twelve Genoese galleys,[19] and rapidly spread all over the island. Galleys from Kaffa reached Genoa and Venice in January 1348, but it was the outbreak in Pisa a few weeks later that was the entry point to northern Italy. Towards the end of January, one of the galleys expelled from Italy arrived in Marseille.[20]

text: From Italy, the disease spread northwest across Europe, striking France, Spain, Portugal and England by June 1348, then turned and spread east through Germany and Scandinavia from 1348 to 1350. It was introduced in Norway in 1349 when a ship landed at Askøy, then spread to Bjørgvin (modern Bergen) and Iceland.[21] Finally it spread to northwestern Russia in 1351. The plague was somewhat less common in parts of Europe that had smaller trade relations with their neighbours, including the majority of the Basque Country, isolated parts of Belgium and the Netherlands, and isolated alpine villages throughout the continent.[22][23]

text: Modern researchers do not think that the plague ever became endemic in Europe or its rat population. The disease repeatedly wiped out the rodent carriers so that the fleas died out until a new outbreak from Central Asia repeated the process. The outbreaks have been shown to occur roughly 15 years after a warmer and wetter period in areas where plague is endemic in other species such as gerbils.[24][25]

text: Middle Eastern outbreak

text: The plague struck various regions in the Middle East during the pandemic, leading to serious depopulation and permanent change in both economic and social structures. As it spread to western Europe, the disease entered the region from southern Russia also. By autumn 1347, the plague reached Alexandria in Egypt, probably through the port's trade with Constantinople, and ports on the Black Sea. During 1347, the disease travelled eastward to Gaza, and north along the eastern coast to cities in Lebanon, Syria and Palestine, including Ashkelon, Acre, Jerusalem, Sidon, Damascus, Homs, and Aleppo. In 1348–1349, the disease reached Antioch. The city's residents fled to the north, most of them dying during the journey, but the infection had been spread to the people of Asia Minor.[citation needed]

text: Mecca became infected in 1349. During the same year, records show the city of Mawsil (Mosul) suffered a massive epidemic, and the city of Baghdad experienced a second round of the disease. In 1351 Yemen experienced an outbreak of the plague, coinciding with the return of Sultan al-Mujahid Ali of Yemen from imprisonment in Cairo. His party may have brought the disease with them from Egypt.[citation needed]

text: Signs and symptoms

text: Contemporary accounts of the plague are often varied or imprecise. The most commonly noted symptom was the appearance of buboes (or gavocciolos) in the groin, the neck and armpits, which oozed pus and bled when opened.[26] Boccaccio's description is graphic:

text: In men and women alike it first betrayed itself by the emergence of certain tumours in the groin or armpits, some of which grew as large as a common apple, others as an egg...From the two said parts of the body this deadly gavocciolo soon began to propagate and spread itself in all directions indifferently; after which the form of the malady began to change, black spots or livid making their appearance in many cases on the arm or the thigh or elsewhere, now few and large, now minute and numerous. As the gavocciolo had been and still was an infallible token of approaching death, such also were these spots on whomsoever they showed themselves.[27]

text: The only medical detail that is questionable in Boccaccio's description is that the gavocciolo was an 'infallible token of approaching death', as, if the bubo discharges, recovery is possible.[28]

text: This was followed by acute fever and vomiting of blood. Most victims died two to seven days after initial infection. Freckle-like spots and rashes,[29] which could have been caused by flea-bites, were identified as another potential sign of the plague.

text: Some accounts, like that of Lodewijk Heyligen, whose master the Cardinal Colonna died of the plague in 1348, noted a distinct form of the disease that infected the lungs and led to respiratory problems[26] and is identified with pneumonic plague.

text: It is said that the plague takes three forms. In the first people suffer an infection of the lungs, which leads to breathing difficulties. Whoever has this corruption or contamination to any extent cannot escape but will die within two days. Another form...in which boils erupt under the armpits,...a third form in which people of both sexes are attacked in the groin.[30]

text: Causes

text: Medical knowledge had stagnated during the Middle Ages. The most authoritative account at the time came from the medical faculty in Paris in a report to the king of France that blamed the heavens, in the form of a conjunction of three planets in 1345 that caused a "great pestilence in the air".[32] This report became the first and most widely circulated of a series of plague tracts that sought to give advice to sufferers. That the plague was caused by bad air became the most widely accepted theory. Today, this is known as the miasma theory. The word plague had no special significance at this time, and only the recurrence of outbreaks during the Middle Ages gave it the name that has become the medical term.

text: The importance of hygiene was recognised only in the nineteenth century; until then it was common that the streets were filthy, with live animals of all sorts around and human parasites abounding. A transmissible disease will spread easily in such conditions. One development as a result of the Black Death was the establishment of the idea of quarantine in Dubrovnik in 1377 after continuing outbreaks.[33]

text: The dominant explanation for the Black Death is the plague theory, which attributes the outbreak to Yersinia pestis, also responsible for an epidemic that began in southern China in 1865, eventually spreading to India. The investigation of the pathogen that caused the 19th-century plague was begun by teams of scientists who visited Hong Kong in 1894, among whom was the French-Swiss bacteriologist Alexandre Yersin, after whom the pathogen was named Yersinia pestis.[34] The mechanism by which Y. pestis was usually transmitted was established in 1898 by Paul-Louis Simond and was found to involve the bites of fleas whose midguts had become obstructed by replicating Y. pestis several days after feeding on an infected host. This blockage results in starvation and aggressive feeding behaviour by the fleas, which repeatedly attempt to clear their blockage by regurgitation, resulting in thousands of plague bacteria being flushed into the feeding site, infecting the host. The bubonic plague mechanism was also dependent on two populations of rodents: one resistant to the disease, which act as hosts, keeping the disease endemic, and a second that lack resistance. When the second population dies, the fleas move on to other hosts, including people, thus creating a human epidemic.[34]

text: The historian Francis Aidan Gasquet wrote about the Great Pestilence in 1893[35] and suggested that "it would appear to be some form of the ordinary Eastern or bubonic plague". He was able to adopt the epidemiology of the bubonic plague for the Black Death for the second edition in 1908, implicating rats and fleas in the process, and his interpretation was widely accepted for other ancient and medieval epidemics, such as the Justinian plague that was prevalent in the Eastern Roman Empire from 541 to 700 CE.[34]

text: An estimate of the mortality rate for the modern bubonic plague, following the introduction of antibiotics, is 11% (by the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC)), although it may be much higher in economically or medically underdeveloped regions.[36] Symptoms of the disease include fever of 38–41 °C (100–106 °F), headaches, painful aching joints, nausea and vomiting, and a general feeling of malaise. Left untreated, of those that contract the bubonic plague, 80 per cent die within eight days.[37] Pneumonic plague has a mortality rate of 90 to 95 per cent. Symptoms include fever, cough, and blood-tinged sputum. As the disease progresses, sputum becomes free-flowing and bright red. Septicemic plague is the least common of the three forms, with a mortality rate near 100%. Symptoms are high fevers and purple skin patches (purpura due to disseminated intravascular coagulation). In cases of pneumonic and particularly septicemic plague, the progress of the disease is so rapid that there would often be no time for the development of the enlarged lymph nodes that were noted as buboes.[38]

text: A number of alternative theories – implicating other diseases in the Black Death pandemic – have also been proposed by some modern scientists (see below – "Alternative Explanations").

text: DNA evidence

text: In October 2010, the open-access scientific journal PLoS Pathogens published a paper by a multinational team who undertook a new investigation into the role of Yersinia pestis in the Black Death following the disputed identification by Drancourt and Raoult in 1998. They assessed the presence of DNA/RNA with polymerase chain reaction (PCR) techniques for Y. pestis from the tooth sockets in human skeletons from mass graves in northern, central and southern Europe that were associated archaeologically with the Black Death and subsequent resurgences. The authors concluded that this new research, together with prior analyses from the south of France and Germany,[39] "ends the debate about the cause of the Black Death, and unambiguously demonstrates that Y. pestis was the causative agent of the epidemic plague that devastated Europe during the Middle Ages".[40]

text: The study also found that there were two previously unknown but related clades (genetic branches) of the Y. pestis genome associated with medieval mass graves. These clades (which are thought to be extinct) were found to be ancestral to modern isolates of the modern Y. pestis strains Y. p. orientalis and Y. p. medievalis, suggesting the plague may have entered Europe in two waves. Surveys of plague pit remains in France and England indicate the first variant entered Europe through the port of Marseille around November 1347 and spread through France over the next two years, eventually reaching England in the spring of 1349, where it spread through the country in three epidemics. Surveys of plague pit remains from the Dutch town of Bergen op Zoom showed the Y. pestis genotype responsible for the pandemic that spread through the Low Countries from 1350 differed from that found in Britain and France, implying Bergen op Zoom (and possibly other parts of the southern Netherlands) was not directly infected from England or France in 1349 and suggesting a second wave of plague, different from those in Britain and France, may have been carried to the Low Countries from Norway, the Hanseatic cities or another site.[40]

text: The results of the Haensch study have since been confirmed and amended. Based on genetic evidence derived from Black Death victims in the East Smithfield burial site in England, Schuenemann et al. concluded in 2011 "that the Black Death in medieval Europe was caused by a variant of Y. pestis that may no longer exist."[41] A study published in Nature in October 2011 sequenced the genome of Y. pestis from plague victims and indicated that the strain that caused the Black Death is ancestral to most modern strains of the disease.[5]

text: DNA taken from 25 skeletons from the 14th century found in London have shown the plague is a strain of Y. pestis that is almost identical to that which hit Madagascar in 2013.[42][43]

text: Alternative explanations

text: The plague theory was first significantly challenged by the work of British bacteriologist J. F. D. Shrewsbury in 1970, who noted that the reported rates of mortality in rural areas during the 14th-century pandemic were inconsistent with the modern bubonic plague, leading him to conclude that contemporary accounts were exaggerations.[34] In 1984 zoologist Graham Twigg produced the first major work to challenge the bubonic plague theory directly, and his doubts about the identity of the Black Death have been taken up by a number of authors, including Samuel K. Cohn, Jr. (2002 and 2013), David Herlihy (1997), and Susan Scott and Christopher Duncan (2001).[34]

text: It is recognised that an epidemiological account of the plague is as important as an identification of symptoms, but researchers are hampered by the lack of reliable statistics from this period. Most work has been done on the spread of the plague in England, and even estimates of overall population at the start vary by over 100% as no census was undertaken between the time of publication of the Domesday Book and the year 1377.[44] Estimates of plague victims are usually extrapolated from figures from the clergy.

text: In addition to arguing that the rat population was insufficient to account for a bubonic plague pandemic, sceptics of the bubonic plague theory point out that the symptoms of the Black Death are not unique (and arguably in some accounts may differ from bubonic plague); that transference via fleas in goods was likely to be of marginal significance; and that the DNA results may be flawed and might not have been repeated elsewhere, despite extensive samples from other mass graves.[34] Other arguments include the lack of accounts of the death of rats before outbreaks of plague between the 14th and 17th centuries; temperatures that are too cold in northern Europe for the survival of fleas; that, despite primitive transport systems, the spread of the Black Death was much faster than that of modern bubonic plague; that mortality rates of the Black Death appear to be very high; that, while modern bubonic plague is largely endemic as a rural disease, the Black Death indiscriminately struck urban and rural areas; and that the pattern of the Black Death, with major outbreaks in the same areas separated by 5 to 15 years, differs from modern bubonic plague—which often becomes endemic for decades with annual flare-ups.[34]

text: McCormick has suggested that earlier archaeologists were simply not interested in the "laborious" processes needed to discover rat remains.[45] Walløe complains that all of these authors "take it for granted that Simond's infection model, black rat → rat flea → human, which was developed to explain the spread of plague in India, is the only way an epidemic of Yersinia pestis infection could spread", whilst pointing to several other possibilities.[46] Similarly, Green has argued that greater attention is needed to the range of (especially non-commensal) animals that might be involved in the transmission of plague.[47]

text: A variety of alternatives to the Y. pestis have been put forward. Twigg suggested that the cause was a form of anthrax, and Norman Cantor (2001) thought it may have been a combination of anthrax and other pandemics. Scott and Duncan have argued that the pandemic was a form of infectious disease that they characterise as hemorrhagic plague similar to Ebola. Archaeologist Barney Sloane has argued that there is insufficient evidence of the extinction of a large number of rats in the archaeological record of the medieval waterfront in London and that the plague spread too quickly to support the thesis that the Y. pestis was spread from fleas on rats; he argues that transmission must have been person to person.[48][49] However, no single alternative solution has achieved widespread acceptance.[34] Many scholars arguing for the Y. pestis as the major agent of the pandemic suggest that its extent and symptoms can be explained by a combination of bubonic plague with other diseases, including typhus, smallpox and respiratory infections. In addition to the bubonic infection, others point to additional septicemic (a type of "blood poisoning") and pneumonic (an airborne plague that attacks the lungs before the rest of the body) forms of the plague, which lengthen the duration of outbreaks throughout the seasons and help account for its high mortality rate and additional recorded symptoms.[26] In 2014, scientists with Public Health England announced the results of an examination of 25 bodies exhumed from the Clerkenwell area of London, as well as of wills registered in London during the period, which supported the pneumonic hypothesis.[42]

text: Consequences

text: Death toll

text: There are no exact figures for the death toll; the rate varied widely by locality. In urban centres, the greater the population before the outbreak, the longer the duration of the period of abnormal mortality.[50] It killed some 75 to 200 million people in Eurasia.[1][2][3] According to medieval historian Philip Daileader in 2007:

text: The trend of recent research is pointing to a figure more like 45–50% of the European population dying during a four-year period. There is a fair amount of geographic variation. In Mediterranean Europe, areas such as Italy, the south of France and Spain, where plague ran for about four years consecutively, it was probably closer to 75–80% of the population. In Germany and England ... it was probably closer to 20%.[51]

text: A death rate as high as 60% in Europe has been suggested by Norwegian historian Ole Benedictow:

text: Detailed study of the mortality data available points to two conspicuous features in relation to the mortality caused by the Black Death: namely the extreme level of mortality caused by the Black Death, and the remarkable similarity or consistency of the level of mortality, from Spain in southern Europe to England in north-western Europe. The data is sufficiently widespread and numerous to make it likely that the Black Death swept away around 60 per cent of Europe's population. It is generally assumed that the size of Europe's population at the time was around 80 million. This implies that around 50 million people died in the Black Death.[52]

text: The most widely accepted estimate for the Middle East, including Iraq, Iran and Syria, during this time, is for a death rate of about a third.[53] The Black Death killed about 40% of Egypt's population.[54] Half of Paris's population of 100,000 people died. In Italy, the population of Florence was reduced from 110,000–120,000 inhabitants in 1338 down to 50,000 in 1351. At least 60% of the population of Hamburg and Bremen perished,[55] and a similar percentage of Londoners may have died from the disease as well.[42] While contemporary reports account of mass burial pits being created in response to the large numbers of dead, recent scientific investigations of a burial pit in Central London found well-preserved individuals to be buried in isolated, evenly spaced graves, suggesting at least some pre-planning and Christian burials at this time.[56] Before 1350, there were about 170,000 settlements in Germany, and this was reduced by nearly 40,000 by 1450.[57] In 1348, the plague spread so rapidly that before any physicians or government authorities had time to reflect upon its origins, about a third of the European population had already perished. In crowded cities, it was not uncommon for as much as 50% of the population to die.[34] The disease bypassed some areas, and the most isolated areas were less vulnerable to contagion. Monks and priests were especially hard-hit since they cared for victims of the Black Death.[58]

text: Persecutions

text: Renewed religious fervour and fanaticism bloomed in the wake of the Black Death. Some Europeans targeted "various groups such as Jews, friars, foreigners, beggars, pilgrims",[59] lepers,[59][60] and Romani, thinking that they were to blame for the crisis. Lepers, and other individuals with skin diseases such as acne or psoriasis, were singled out and exterminated throughout Europe.

text: Because 14th-century healers were at a loss to explain the cause, Europeans turned to astrological forces, earthquakes, and the poisoning of wells by Jews as possible reasons for the plague's emergence.[61] The governments of Europe had no apparent response to the crisis because no one knew its cause or how it spread. The mechanism of infection and transmission of diseases was little understood in the 14th century; many people believed only God's anger could produce such horrific displays.[citation needed]

text: There were many attacks against Jewish communities.[62] In February 1349, the citizens of Strasbourg murdered 2,000 Jews.[62] In August 1349, the Jewish communities in Mainz and Cologne were exterminated. By 1351, 60 major and 150 smaller Jewish communities had been destroyed.[63]

text: Recurrence

text: The plague repeatedly returned to haunt Europe and the Mediterranean throughout the 14th to 17th centuries.[64] According to Biraben, the plague was present somewhere in Europe in every year between 1346 and 1671.[65] The Second Pandemic was particularly widespread in the following years: 1360–1363; 1374; 1400; 1438–1439; 1456–1457; 1464–1466; 1481–1485; 1500–1503; 1518–1531; 1544–1548; 1563–1566; 1573–1588; 1596–1599; 1602–1611; 1623–1640; 1644–1654; and 1664–1667. Subsequent outbreaks, though severe, marked the retreat from most of Europe (18th century) and northern Africa (19th century).[66] According to Geoffrey Parker, "France alone lost almost a million people to the plague in the epidemic of 1628–31."[67]

text: In England, in the absence of census figures, historians propose a range of preincident population figures from as high as 7 million to as low as 4 million in 1300,[68] and a postincident population figure as low as 2 million.[69] By the end of 1350, the Black Death subsided, but it never really died out in England. Over the next few hundred years, further outbreaks occurred in 1361–1362, 1369, 1379–1383, 1389–1393, and throughout the first half of the 15th century.[70] An outbreak in 1471 took as much as 10–15% of the population, while the death rate of the plague of 1479–1480 could have been as high as 20%.[71] The most general outbreaks in Tudor and Stuart England seem to have begun in 1498, 1535, 1543, 1563, 1589, 1603, 1625, and 1636, and ended with the Great Plague of London in 1665.[72]

text: In 1466, perhaps 40,000 people died of the plague in Paris.[73] During the 16th and 17th centuries, the plague was present in Paris around 30 per cent of the time.[74] The Black Death ravaged Europe for three years before it continued on into Russia, where the disease was present somewhere in the country 25 times between 1350 and 1490.[75] Plague epidemics ravaged London in 1563, 1593, 1603, 1625, 1636, and 1665,[76] reducing its population by 10 to 30% during those years.[77] Over 10% of Amsterdam's population died in 1623–1625, and again in 1635–1636, 1655, and 1664.[78] Plague occurred in Venice 22 times between 1361 and 1528.[79] The plague of 1576–1577 killed 50,000 in Venice, almost a third of the population.[80] Late outbreaks in central Europe included the Italian Plague of 1629–1631, which is associated with troop movements during the Thirty Years' War, and the Great Plague of Vienna in 1679. Over 60% of Norway's population died in 1348–1350.[81] The last plague outbreak ravaged Oslo in 1654.[82]

text: In the first half of the 17th century, a plague claimed some 1.7 million victims in Italy, or about 14% of the population.[83] In 1656, the plague killed about half of Naples' 300,000 inhabitants.[84] More than 1.25 million deaths resulted from the extreme incidence of plague in 17th-century Spain.[85] The plague of 1649 probably reduced the population of Seville by half.[86] In 1709–1713, a plague epidemic that followed the Great Northern War (1700–1721, Sweden v. Russia and allies)[87] killed about 100,000 in Sweden,[88] and 300,000 in Prussia.[86] The plague killed two-thirds of the inhabitants of Helsinki,[89] and claimed a third of Stockholm's population.[90] Europe's last major epidemic occurred in 1720 in Marseille.[81]

text: The Black Death ravaged much of the Islamic world.[91] Plague was present in at least one location in the Islamic world virtually every year between 1500 and 1850.[92] Plague repeatedly struck the cities of North Africa. Algiers lost 30 to 50 thousand inhabitants to it in 1620–1621, and again in 1654–1657, 1665, 1691, and 1740–1742.[93] Plague remained a major event in Ottoman society until the second quarter of the 19th century. Between 1701 and 1750, thirty-seven larger and smaller epidemics were recorded in Constantinople, and an additional thirty-one between 1751 and 1800.[94] Baghdad has suffered severely from visitations of the plague, and sometimes two-thirds of its population has been wiped out.[95]

text: Third plague pandemic

text: The third plague pandemic (1855–1859) started in China in the mid-19th century, spreading to all inhabited continents and killing 10 million people in India alone.[96] Twelve plague outbreaks in Australia between 1900 and 1925 resulted in well over 1,000 deaths, chiefly in Sydney. This led to the establishment of a Public Health Department there which undertook some leading-edge research on plague transmission from rat fleas to humans via the bacillus Yersinia pestis.[97]

text: The first North American plague epidemic was the San Francisco plague of 1900–1904, followed by another outbreak in 1907–1908.[98][99][100][101][102][103][104] From 1944 through 1993, 362 cases of human plague were reported in the United States; approximately 90% occurred in four western states: Arizona, California, Colorado, and New Mexico.[105]

text: Modern treatment methods include insecticides, the use of antibiotics, and a plague vaccine. The plague bacterium could develop drug resistance and again become a major health threat. One case of a drug-resistant form of the bacterium was found in Madagascar in 1995.[106] A further outbreak in Madagascar was reported in November 2014.[107]

text: Names

text: The 12th-century French physician Gilles de Corbeil's On the Signs and Symptoms of Diseases (Latin: De signis et sinthomatibus egritudinum) uses the phrase "black death" (atra mors) to refer to a pestilential fever (febris pestilentialis).[108]

text: Writers contemporary with the plague referred to the event as the "Great Mortality"[109] or the "Great Plague".[61][clarification needed]

text: The phrase "black death" (mors nigra) was used in 1350 by Simon de Covino or Couvin, a Belgian astronomer, who wrote the poem "On the Judgment of the Sun at a Feast of Saturn" (De judicio Solis in convivio Saturni), which attributes the plague to a conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn.[110] In 1908, Gasquet claimed that use of the name atra mors for the 14th-century epidemic first appeared in a 1631 book on Danish history by J. I. Pontanus: "Commonly and from its effects, they called it the black death" (Vulgo & ab effectu atram mortem vocatibant).[111] The name spread through Scandinavia and then Germany, gradually becoming attached to the mid 14th-century epidemic as a proper name.[112] In England, it was not until 1823, that the medieval epidemic was first called the Black Death.[113]