<P> The disease may have travelled along the Silk Road with Mongol armies and traders or it could have come via ship . 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". </P> <P> 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 . 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 . </P> <P> There appear to have been several introductions into Europe . The plague reached Sicily in October 1347, carried by twelve Genoese galleys, 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 . </P> <P> 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 . 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 . </P>

Where did the black death first start in europe