The Great Mortality of the Pestilence

The Great Mortality was used to describe the pandemic a couple of centuries after it happened. It wouldn't be for another 500 years actually, half a millennium that the transmission cycle of plague from rat to human would be described. There were many popular hypotheses as to what was causing the plague. The most damaging and widespread was that it was Jews. Cats were also blamed. Maybe they had something to do with it, but it wasn't their fault.