What caused the change?
Labs / History
The Black Death
Plague lands at a busy port and races along the trade routes of medieval Europe, killing over half of everyone it reaches. Pick the entry port, dial the contagiousness, and click or drag across cities to throw up quarantine cordons — then watch the epidemic curve and the death toll respond.
Labs / History / The Black Death
The Black Death
Plague lands at a busy port and races along the trade routes of medieval Europe, killing over half of everyone it reaches. Pick the entry port, dial the contagiousness, and click or drag across cities to throw up quarantine cordons — then watch the epidemic curve and the death toll respond.
Why it matters
Why explore this?
History is about change over time and the choices that shape it. This model helps you compare causes, consequences, and patterns without treating the past as a list of dates.
Explore
Try the model
Oct 1347dead 0lost 0.0 %hover a city
Investigate
Questions to test
Predict first, try it in the model, then use what you observe to answer.
What to try
- Start the plague at Caffa versus Messina — does the entry port change how fast all of Europe is engulfed, or only where it begins?
- Can you save London by quarantining just one or two cities upstream? Which links matter most — the sea lanes or the inland roads?
- Drop R₀ from 6 down toward 2. At what point does the outbreak fizzle before it crosses the Alps?
- Hover a distant city like Novgorod or Bergen. How many years pass before the frontier finally arrives there?
- Quarantine a city only after it is already infected. Does sealing it off still protect its neighbours, or is it too late?
Explain
Make sense of what happened
Build an explanation with a cause, a change, and a consequence. Then identify evidence from the model and one limitation of what the model can show.
Check
Before you leave
Who or what was affected?
What can this model not tell us?
If you can answer all three using evidence from the model, you understand the main idea. If not, return to Explore and change one setting at a time.