This gif seems to be misleading. Poland (and Milan) were not "spared", they actually simply took less of a hit from the plague - Poland only seems to have lost a quarter of its population and Milan lost only around 15%. That said, I don't know why they took less of a hit.

Edit: have been reading on the topic and it seems as though Poland was less affected by the plague because it was more sparsely populated and the disease could not spread so easily between towns. Someone who caught the plague in one town was likely to die before they reached the next, so it couldn't spread nearly as easily. Also note that in rural areas like this, records were not kept so well and so you can imagine that a lot of the records may have lost or damaged, even not kept in the first place, so reports of death tolls will be more inaccurate.

On Milan, it appears that the officials in the city were very strict to keep the disease away and quickly acted to quarantine areas where there were outbreaks. This happened in a lot of Italian cities but I'm not sure why Milan in particular had more success. It could have been that they were just stricter, or were simply lucky.

Also to add on to this question, between 1350 - 1353, it seems to show the Faroe Islands as being infected, as well as Scotland, If this Gif is correct why wasn't Iceland infected at all?

fyi, there's a section on this in the FAQ; check it out for previous answers

The Black Death and Poland/Milan:

• Why did certain regions of Europe escape the Black Death?

• Why did the Black Death largely avoid Poland and Milan?

• Why did the black death largely avoid Poland?

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The .gif is wrong.

The plague arrived in Poland in the summer of 1349 as King Casimir ─ who had a Jewish mistress, Esther ─ offered asylum to Jews fleeing the pogroms and persecution of Central and Western Europe. I'm going to suggest you pick up The Great Mortality by John Kelly. It's about 10 years old, but it's a good general history that does a good job of debunking a lot of the popular myths associated with the Black Death, the term used to describe the outbreak of Yersinia pestis that reached Europe in the middle of the 14th century. Ole Jorgen Benedictow's The Black Death, 1346-1353 has a more complete account of Poland's state on pages 218-222.

In July 1349, the plague entered Poland near Danzig. This was followed by waves of plague that advanced from the south through Hungary. Smaller infestations came from the east and the marshes that separate Poland from Russia. In 1351, a fourth wave of plague spread across the Oder from Frankfurt-alte-Oder. There aren't reliable death figures from Poland, which is why it seems to evade the effect of the Black Death in some accounts.

Furthermore, the study of the Black Death was largely neglected by Marxist historians, which retarded Eastern European coverage of the disaster. Historical demography (upon which much of our Black Death history is based) and Malthusian theory were rejected by Marxist historians and neglected in Poland's communist period.

In 1938, however, an economic historian named Pelc analyzed price developments in Krakow and southern Poland during the time of the Black Death and found that development of prices and wages was the same in Krakow as in England, France or Germany, places that suffered vast consequences as a result of the population decline wrought by the Black Death.

Follow up question: Why was Milan free of any plague in the gif and could that have led to the Renaissance being started there?

First Milan, Milan had a somewhat cruel approach, if they found out anyone was sick, they would board them up in their houses until they died."They took measures to quarantine the infection by walling up homes that had members with disease."(http://academic.mu.edu/meissnerd/plague.htm paragraph 10, line 5) The transmission of the disease was hampered greatly with this method, but that's not to say no one got sick, Milan was still ravaged by the disease, just less so than the other Italian cites else.

Poland now, the Polish people mostly lived outside of the large cities like Krakow, and instead lived in Rural communities, the less dense population prevented the quick spread of the Black death. "About 1370, the Kingdom of Poland had 2 million inhabitants with a population density of 8.6 persons per square kilometere. By contrast with western Europe, which was adversely affected demographically and economically by the Black Death, the outbreak of plague in Poland did no have the character of a catastrophe, as can be seen from the increase in internal developments and quite intensive colonisation of the fourteen and fifteenth centuries" (The New Cambridge medieval history, p727)(https://www.worldcat.org/title/new-cambridge-medieval-history/oclc/29184676/viewport)

Another thing I see a lot is that Polish people didn't kill as many cats as Western Europe, so rodent populations stayed low and prevented transmissions. I can't find a good source for this though, so this one is unclear.

The king of Poland at the time was Casimir III "The Great" and he allegedly set up an internal system of quarantines in large cities and major trade routes on the boarders. Travelers were held in houses for a few days to see if they had any sort of symptoms, and only then could they be let in. Again, I can't find a good source on this, though if I could read Polish I might have been able to find something But sadly, google translate does not really work well enough for me to go though those sources.

Also, in addition to Poles not murdering as many cats, there are a variety of sources that point out that Polish lords made their peasants bath more than the avg. feudal society. Unfortunately this was in one of my history textbooks from college at UCSB, so I dont remember the specific source.

Follow up. Why is Turkey included?

EDIT: what did I do wrong again?