Lord Byron, who had gone to Greece in 1823 to support the Greek War of Independence against the Ottoman Empire, died at Missolonghi on 19 April 1824, most probably from malarial fever complicated by the medical treatment of his physicians (repeated bloodletting). Missolonghi was a malarial swampland on the Gulf of Patras, notorious for its insect-borne fevers. Byron had suffered from repeated fevers throughout his travels in the Mediterranean, and his final illness is now generally attributed to malaria.

Byron's death from mosquito-borne fever at Missolonghi, sacrificed in the cause of Greek independence, was one of the most celebrated literary deaths of the nineteenth century and generated an enormous outpouring of elegy and tribute across Europe. For the Romantic movement, Byron's malaria-likely death represented the ultimate sacrifice of the poet-hero to a cause greater than himself. His death transformed him into a legend and gave subsequent poets — from Tennyson to Browning — a model of the engaged poet destroyed by the combination of political passion and biological vulnerability.