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Most of us learned the Black Death as one terrible event. It swept across Europe in the middle of the 1300s, killed a huge share of the people there (a third or more, by the usual estimates), and then it was over.
Except it wasn’t over. A new study of ancient DNA shows the plague after the Black Death kept coming back, again and again, for about four hundred years. It was less like a single storm and more like a neighbor who never really moved away.
And that raises a very human question. If a deadly sickness keeps returning to your town, what do you owe the people around you? May you run? Or must you stay?
In 1527, with the plague back in his own town, someone put exactly that question to Martin Luther. His answer is more careful, and more surprising, than most people expect.
What the New Study Found About the Plague After the Black Death
The research was led by the University of Tartu in Estonia and published this month in the journal PNAS. The team pulled the DNA of the plague bacterium, Yersinia pestis, out of old skeletons. They rebuilt 26 new plague genomes from 11 burial sites in Estonia, Russia, England, the Netherlands and Switzerland. The samples run from the 1300s into the 1700s.
Here is what that DNA shows:
- It came back from outside, more than once. The evidence points to plague being brought into places like Estonia again and again from the late 1300s on, rather than one local outbreak simply smouldering for centuries.
- It changed as it travelled. Around 1450 to 1500, the bacterium spread out and split into three main branches. The researchers think it may also have settled into new wild rodent populations around then, which would give it new places to hide between outbreaks.
- It moved with people. Armies, refugees and traders carried it. The team tied some genomes to outbreaks during the Thirty Years’ War (1618 to 1648) and the Great Northern War, including the 1710 siege of Tallinn, when soldiers on both sides and ordinary townspeople fell sick.
“We see how Yersinia pestis splits into new branches during periods of conflict,” said Dr. Christiana L. Scheib, one of the researchers behind the study.
The team also built a new way of dating old genomes. Radiocarbon dates on bones are often fuzzy, with ranges wider than a hundred years. By looking at where each genome sits on the bacterium’s family tree, the researchers could narrow those ranges and match the DNA to outbreaks that were written down at the time. The researchers are also honest about the limits. Old remains will never give the sharp, day-by-day picture scientists had for a modern pandemic like COVID-19. (You can read the university’s summary of the study here.)
If you want to go much further back, this site has also written about the oldest known plague, which reached Siberian hunter-gatherers about 5,500 years ago. That was a different study, with a different story in its graves.
What It Meant to Live With a Plague That Kept Returning
Put yourself inside that picture for a moment. You don’t live through one plague. Your grandparents remember one. Your parents remember another. You wonder when the next one will come, and whether it will come for your children.
That kind of fear doesn’t end. It just waits. And every time the sickness came back, every family faced the same choice all over again. Leave the town and save yourself? Or stay with the people who are sick?
People with money often left. Doctors sometimes left. Even whole universities packed up and left.
1527: The Plague Comes to Wittenberg
In early August 1527, the plague reached the German town of Wittenberg. Martin Luther lived there and taught at its university.
The local ruler, Elector John, was worried about his professors. He ordered Luther to leave for the city of Jena. Within days the university did move away, and it stayed away until the following spring.
Luther didn’t go. He stayed in town with his fellow pastor Johannes Bugenhagen to care for the sick and the frightened. And it was not a safe or easy stay. His wife, Katharina, was pregnant. Two women in his own household fell sick. The mayor’s wife died, historians note, almost in Luther’s arms. Bugenhagen and his family later moved into Luther’s house so the two families could hold each other up.
Around this time a pastor named Johann Hess, in the city of Breslau (today Wrocław, in Poland), wrote to Luther. His question was simple and hard: may a Christian run from a deadly plague?
Luther’s reply became a small booklet with a plain title: Whether One May Flee From a Deadly Plague. The quotes below come from the standard English translation by Carl J. Schindler.
Luther admitted he was slow to answer. He wrote that he “should have answered long ago,” but that God had “for some time disciplined and scourged me so severely that I have been unable to do much reading or writing.” He was writing while unwell himself, from inside a town full of sickness.
The Answer Nobody Expects
Here is the surprise. Luther stayed. You might expect him to tell everyone else to stay too, and to call leaving a failure of faith.
He didn’t.
He said that running from death is not wrong in itself. He pointed to great figures from his own scriptures who fled danger. “Abraham was a great saint,” he wrote, “but he feared death and escaped it.” Isaac, Jacob, David and Moses fled too, and he said they did it “without depriving their neighbors of anything.”
That last phrase is the whole key. Luther’s line was not “stay” or “go.” It was: who needs you?
Pastors, city officials, doctors, and anyone caring for a sick family member had people depending on them, so they should stay. As he put it, “those who are engaged in a spiritual ministry such as preachers and pastors must likewise remain steadfast before the peril of death.” But where nobody depended on you, he wrote, people had “an equal choice either to flee or to remain,” and each could “come to their own decision and conclusion.”
The man who stayed would not make his own choice into a rule for everyone else. That is rare, then and now.
Take the Medicine. Stay Away If You Aren’t Needed.
Luther was just as firm on the other side. Some people in his day said real faith meant ignoring the sickness. No medicine, no care, just trust. Luther called that “not trusting God but tempting him.”
This is his most famous paragraph, and it is worth reading slowly:
“I shall ask God mercifully to protect us. Then I shall fumigate, help purify the air, administer medicine, and take it. I shall avoid places and persons where my presence is not needed in order not to become contaminated and thus perchance infect and pollute others, and so cause their death as a result of my negligence. If God should wish to take me, he will surely find me and I have done what he has expected of me and so I am not responsible for either my own death or the death of others. If my neighbor needs me, however, I shall not avoid place or person but will go freely.”
Notice what that paragraph says about moving around. Now read it next to the new DNA study. The genomes show plague riding along with armies, refugees and traders. It spread because people moved. Luther, with no germ theory at all, told his readers to stay away from “places and persons where my presence is not needed.” Don’t move without a reason. And then, when someone does need you, go.
He had practical advice for the town, too. He urged cities to set up “municipal homes and hospitals staffed with people to take care of the sick.” He told them to “bury the dead outside the town.” And he had hard words for people who knowingly carried the sickness into other people’s homes. He said the authorities should treat them as “outright and deliberate murderers.”
In other words: faith and caution were not enemies. Luther asked for both at once.
Why Luther’s Question Still Matters
Most of us will never face bubonic plague. But the shape of Luther’s question keeps coming back, just like the plague did.
A parent is sick and needs care. A friend is in a crisis you’d rather avoid. A neighbor is alone through a hard winter. Fear says: protect yourself first. And Luther would say that is not always wrong. Being careful is not a sin.
But then comes his question. Who needs me? If the answer is “no one,” take care of yourself with a clear conscience. If the answer is someone, then you go, carefully, with the medicine, with your eyes open.
If you are the one who stayed, the one caring for someone right now, that kind of love can wear you down. This free caregiver burnout check can help you see how you’re really doing.
There is a reason Luther’s answer lands the way it does. He was not inventing a new idea. He was reaching back to one of the oldest instructions there is: love your neighbor as yourself. Not instead of yourself. As yourself. That one old line holds both halves of his letter. It lets you take the medicine and guard your own life. And it sends you through the door when someone on the other side of it needs you. Luther seemed to believe that God is not less present on the plague street than anywhere else, and that knowing it frees a person to be careful and brave on the same day.
What the Returning Plague Leaves Us With
For four hundred years the plague kept coming back. Each time, ordinary people had to decide again what kind of neighbor to be. The new genomes tell us how the bacterium travelled. They can’t tell us who carried bread to a sick house, or who stayed up with a dying stranger. But those people were there too, in every outbreak.
In December 1527, after the sickness had faded from Wittenberg, Katharina Luther gave birth to a baby girl, Elizabeth. Life went on in the town that had been told to empty out.
Fear will always come back in some form. So will the question underneath it. It helps to know somebody answered it well, a long time ago, from inside the danger.
Novels have wrestled with the same question. José Saramago’s Blindness imagines a city struck by a sudden epidemic, and one woman who can still see. We looked at what that novel is really about, and why she treats her sight as a job rather than a rescue.
Discussion Question
Luther said leaving a dangerous place is not wrong, unless someone there truly depends on you. Do you think he drew the line in the right place? Or should the rule be stricter, or looser? Tell us what you think in the comments below.
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Post 1: The plague didn’t end with the Black Death. New ancient DNA shows it kept coming back to Europe for about 400 years. And in 1527 Martin Luther gave an answer about whether you may run from it that still holds up. https://bgodinspired.com/index.php/bgodinspired-news/bgodinspired-science-news/plague-after-the-black-death-luther/
Post 2: Luther’s 1527 plague advice, in one line: take the medicine, avoid places where you aren’t needed, and if your neighbor needs you, go. Hard to improve on it. https://bgodinspired.com/index.php/bgodinspired-news/bgodinspired-science-news/plague-after-the-black-death-luther/
Post 3: The most surprising part of Luther’s plague letter? He stayed in a plague town against orders, but he refused to call leaving a sin. His only question was: who needs you? https://bgodinspired.com/index.php/bgodinspired-news/bgodinspired-science-news/plague-after-the-black-death-luther/
Questions People Ask
Did the plague come back after the Black Death?
Yes. The Black Death of the mid-1300s was only the start of what historians call the second plague pandemic. A 2026 ancient-DNA study led by the University of Tartu, published in PNAS, rebuilt 26 plague genomes from 11 sites in Estonia, Russia, England, the Netherlands and Switzerland. It found that plague was brought back into Europe many times over roughly four centuries, into the 1700s, and that the bacterium kept evolving into new branches as it spread.
Why did the plague keep returning to Europe for centuries?
The 2026 University of Tartu study suggests two reasons. First, plague was repeatedly reintroduced from outside rather than just lingering in one place, and it travelled with armies, refugees and traders during events such as the Thirty Years’ War and the Great Northern War. Second, around 1450 to 1500 the bacterium split into three main branches and may have settled into new wild rodent populations, which could hold it between human outbreaks.
What did Martin Luther say about fleeing the plague?
In his 1527 booklet “Whether One May Flee From a Deadly Plague,” written to pastor Johann Hess of Breslau, Martin Luther said fleeing a deadly plague is not wrong in itself. But people others depend on, such as pastors, officials, doctors and those caring for sick family, should stay. Anyone with no one depending on them could choose freely to leave or remain. He also urged using medicine, fumigating, and avoiding places where one is not needed so as not to infect others.
Did Martin Luther stay in Wittenberg during the plague of 1527?
Yes. When plague reached Wittenberg in August 1527, Elector John ordered Martin Luther to leave for Jena, and the university relocated. Luther stayed with fellow pastor Johannes Bugenhagen to care for the sick, even though his wife Katharina was pregnant and two women in his household fell ill. The outbreak faded by late 1527, and in December Katharina gave birth to a daughter, Elizabeth.
Did Martin Luther believe in using medicine during a plague?
Yes. In his 1527 plague letter, Martin Luther wrote that refusing medicine and ignoring precautions was “not trusting God but tempting him.” He said he would fumigate, help purify the air, give and take medicine, and avoid people and places where he was not needed, so he would not spread the sickness to others. He also urged towns to build hospitals and to bury the dead outside the town.
