10 Medieval Plagues That Wiped Entire Kingdoms Off The Map

#History #MedievalHistory #BlackDeath What if the maps in your school textbook were lying to you? What if the plague the books say "stopped at the Sahara" actually erased entire African kingdoms whose names no human being alive will ever know? And what if a single flea bite, in a single palace, ended a 400-year empire faster than any invading army ever could? This is the medieval world your history class never had room for, a countdown of ten plagues that didn't just kill people but moved borders, ended dynasties, created caliphates, and quietly redrew the map we still live on today. ⏱ TIMESTAMPS 0:00 — The Plagues Your Textbook Never Had Room For 0:42 — No. 10: The Plague of 664 & the Kingdom That Quit Christianity 4:44 — No. 9: The Yellow Plague & the King Who Died at the Keyhole 8:43 — No. 8: The Iceland Plague That Arrived Without Rats 12:33 — No. 7: The Pestis Secunda, the Children's Plague 16:03 — No. 6: The Plague of Sherwe That Toppled the Persian Empire 20:07 — No. 5: The Plague of Amwas & the Caliphate Built on Dead Generals 24:13 — No. 4: The English Sweating Sickness, the 24-Hour Killer 28:25 — No. 3: Saint Anthony's Fire & the Hospitals of the Dismembered 32:32 — No. 2: The Black Death in Sub-Saharan Africa & the Lost Kingdoms 41:01 — No. 1: The Plague of Justinian & the Roman Restoration That Never Happened 42:55 — Did We Get the Ranking Right? 📌 KEY TOPICS COVERED: ✅ The solar eclipse of May 664 and the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Essex that renounced Christianity ✅ The Yellow Plague of 547 and the death of Maelgwn Gwynedd, the most powerful king in Wales ✅ How a pneumonic plague crossed the North Atlantic to Iceland in 1402 with no rats, dooming the Greenland Vikings ✅ The Pestis Secunda of 1361, the "mortality of the children" that may have damaged Europe more than the Black Death itself ✅ How the Plague of Sherwe shattered the Sasanian succession and opened Persia to conquest ✅ The Plague of Amwas of 639 and how it cleared the path for Muawiya and the Umayyad Caliphate ✅ The English Sweating Sickness, the only major epidemic whose pathogen has never been identified ✅ Ergotism, Saint Anthony's Fire, and the medieval dancing manias explained by a fungus ✅ New archaeology rewriting the Black Death's reach into Ghana, Nigeria, Burkina Faso and South Africa ✅ How the Plague of Justinian ended the last realistic chance at a unified Roman world ⚠️ DISCLAIMER: This video is for educational and historical purposes. Mortality figures, attributions, and disease identifications for the medieval period are drawn from chronicles and ongoing scholarly research, and many remain debated among historians. 🔔 Subscribe for more deep dives into the parts of history that don't make it into textbooks. #MedievalHistory #BlackDeath #PlagueOfJustinian #History #Plague #DarkAges #AncientHistory #SweatingSickness #RomanEmpire #HistoryDocumentary #ForgottenHistory #Pandemic