While the decline of the kingdom can be traced to a multitude of factors, one of the most devastating losses for Gondor occurred hundreds of years before The Lord of the Rings: the Great Plague.

pestis periodically burned through communities or whole regions. When English diarist Samuel Pepys wrote about the Great Plague of London in 1666, he was describing a later wave of the same ...

The strain of bacteria that caused the Great Plague of London in 1665 has been identified for the first time. Scientists recovered DNA of Yersinia pestis—known to have been responsible for the ...