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    The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time
    The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time
    The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time
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    The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time

    By John Kelly

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    “Powerful, rich with details, moving, humane, and full of important lessons for an age when weapons of mass destruction are loose among us.” — Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb 

    The Great Plague is one of the most compelling events in human history—even more so now, when the notion of plague has never loomed larger as a contemporary public concern.

    The plague that devastated Asia and Europe in the 14th century has been of never-ending interest to both scholarly and general readers. Many books on the plague rely on statistics to tell the story: how many people died; how farm output and trade declined. But statistics can’t convey what it was like to sit in Siena or Avignon and hear that a thousand people a day are dying two towns away. Or to have to chose between your own life and your duty to a mortally ill child or spouse. Or to live in a society where the bonds of blood and sentiment and law have lost all meaning, where anyone can murder or rape or plunder anyone else without fear of consequence.

    In The Great Mortality, author John Kelly lends an air of immediacy and intimacy to his telling of the journey of the plague as it traveled from the steppes of Russia, across Europe, and into England, killing 75 million people—one third of the known population—before it vanished.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateAug 21, 2012
    ISBN9780062243218
    Author

    John Kelly

    John Kelly is the author/illustrator of picture books such as The Beastly Pirates and Fixer; the author of picture books Can I Join Your Club and Hibernation Hotel and the illustrator of fiction series such as Ivy Pocket and Araminta Spook. Monster Doctor is his first author/illustrator middle-grade fiction.

    Read more from John Kelly

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    Reviews for The Great Mortality

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    • 4/5
      The Great Mortality is a synthesis of more specialized scholarly texts using some of the latest creative non-fiction techniques to make it more accessible for the general reader. Due to the nature of the sources, the Black Death is actually a very difficult subject matter to turn into a readable narrative - as so many failed past attempts can attest - and this is probably the best there is at the moment. Kelly covers the main themes: outbreak and origins, biology, depopulation, social and economic effects, persecutions, religion. There are end-notes (no in-line footnote), but oddly no bibliography, or no Further Reading, such as a list of modern literature about the Black Death. Kelly makes some large leaps towards the end about the consequences of the Black Death, namely, by de-populating Europe, the Black Death ushered in the Early Modern Era with an emphasis on labor saving devices. Although this conclusion seems like common sense, it is problematic on a number of fronts - not the least being the Black Death was only one of many reasons for a demographic decline in the Late Middle Ages. As well, scholarship is actually divided if the Black Death really had any major consequences at all - it is one of the great questions of history. For the most part things just continued on as they had - the Hundred Years War took a short break then picked right back where it left off, etc.. Kelley doesn't question or go into all the finer details of his conclusions. It's very easy, too easy in a popular history book, to reach sweeping conclusions about the books subject matter "changed the world" (so many books have sub-titles to that effect), the difficult part is to prove it and I'm not sure Kelly has fully represented the scholarship. He does do an excellent job of representing the most recent debate about what caused the Black Death (plague or some other disease).Overall I found the book highly readable, but nothing particularly new and some of the conclusions are sweeping in what was a very complex period. I've read much about it already in survey texts and encyclopedia articles, but Kelly goes into enough detail, with quotes from primary sources, to make it more tangible. If you want a "one book" on the subject without needing specialized knowledge of the Middle Ages this is probably the best there is.
    • 5/5
      Kelly explains the plague in incredible detail, I learned more about the plague from this book than any other reading I've done on the subject.
    • 5/5
      Kelly explains the plague in incredible detail, I learned more about the plague from this book than any other reading I've done on the subject.
    • 3/5
      Devastating!
    • 4/5
      An extremely readable look at the Black Death (called the Great Mortality at the time) as it spread across Europe from historical, geographical and medical viewpoints. There are plenty of telling quotes from contemporary sources and when these are not available, Kelly uses quotes from subsequent appearances of the plague in the same location. This is not original research however, it is a composite of the work of others.The introduction to emergence of the plague in the 1340's and the probable different types (bubonic, pneumonic and septicemic) is extremely useful to someone, like myself, who was not previously aware of the medical analysis.The background to the historical period is good, but did sometimes feel as if Kelly were adding the background as he had researched it and found it interesting, rather than it being particularly relevant to the story he was telling.There were two factors that detracted from my overall enjoyment of the book. Firstly, at times, particularly near the beginning, it felt as you were jumping back and forth in time and space as the background was being developed. This part could have done with tighter editing. Secondly, Kelly enjoys the use of metaphor to describe the movement of the plague, which makes for a readable book, but I felt overdid this, especially when he anthropomorphises the plague; it just jarred.But these are minor criticisms of the style and the author must be congratulated for making such a tragic tale, so interesting whilst maintaining your consciousness that this was a catastrophe for those involved.I end with the heart breaking quote that Kelly considers most haunting in all the literature of the Black Death, perhaps because it is as he say plain spoken "And I, Agnolo di Tura, called the fat, buried my wife and five children with my own hands."
    • 5/5
      One of the best examinations of the Black Death I have read. The detailed navigation of the plague was fascinating.
    • 5/5
      This book is, quite simply, the best of its kind. If you love history and enjoy dramatic non-fiction, you will not find a better book.
    • 5/5
      Full of interesting anecdotal accounts of the Back Death. Not a scientific book though. Very fluid and enjoyable reading.
    • 3/5
      This is the most accessible of the plague histories I’ve been reading recently. The book jacket describes author John Kelly as a “storyteller”, and that’s pretty accurate; Kelley intersperses his narrative with vignettes, like describing feelings of a couple who die together in their peasant hut and the anguish of a shoemaker who has to bury his wife and five children with his own hands to keep them out of a plague pit. While this makes the book very readable, Kelly is not particularly careful to distinguish between events that can be documented from contemporary records and scenes he’s making up for narrative effect. He covers a greater time period then the actual plague years, fitting the plague into the larger context by discussing the destruction of the Templars, the Avignon Papacy, and the Hundred Years War. In this way, The Great Mortality is reminiscent of Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror, which also covers the 14th century.Kelly also owes a lot to Ole Benedictow’s The Black Death, including copying Benedictow’s slightly annoying habit of referring to the plague as a conscious entity. Kelly is also very much on Benedictow’s side in believing that the plague was caused by Yersina pestis, and devotes a whole chapter to a pro-and-con discussion of various alternate theories - pulmonary anthrax, an Ebola-type hemorrhagic fever, and an unknown “Disease X”. He does not, however, agree with Benedictow’s belief that plague mortality approached 75%, sticking with the more traditional 25-30%.
      No maps or other illustrations, but a pretty good bibliography. Not a bad choice for an introduction to the plague years and the 1300s in general.
    • 3/5
      Having read a couple of historical fiction novels with the Black Death aka the Great Mortality as the book’s backdrop, I picked this book up to read to understand this apocalyptic-like event. Between the years of 1346 and 1353, the Black Death creeped across Eurasia, initially along major trade routes and later inland, killing one-third of the area’s population.I had to slog through the initial chapters that described the plague cause, Yersinia pestis and its vector, the rat flea, which were carried on rodents such as rats and marmots. However, after this introduction, the author communicated the impact of the pandemic, chapter by chapter as the plague spreads east to west and south to north.Lacking knowledge of today’s epidemiological studies, a panicked mankind behaved in irrational behaviors including the extermination of groups of people thought to be the cause of the disease, including Jews, lepers and gypsies. Others, believing this calamity to be the act of a vengeful God, hoped to atone for their sins through self-flagellation with whips that might have included metal hooks on the ends.When the plague burned itself out, its departure triggered major historical changes, including the Renaissance. Clergy, being one the hardest hit group, resulted in citizens believing that the ordained were not needed as a go-between with God sowing the seeds of the Reformation a couple of centuries later. Additionally, the depopulation of the workforce spurred technological advances in the invention of labor-saving devices. One invention included the Gutenberg printing press.I would recommend this book to anyone seeking to understand the impact of the Black Death and its ramification on public health, society, religion, and technological innovation. This event and its subsequent plague years were true history makers.
    • 4/5
      This is a fascinating and in-depth look of the Black Plague that swept through Constantinople, Asia Minor, North Africa, and all of Europe in the 14th Century. It seemed fitting to read it now in 2021, in part to remind myself that we've been here before, and to understand more of what went on way back then.Kelly does a phenomenal job with explaining where the Plague came from, which rodent on the plains of Mongolia carried the flea, and how there were really two kinds of Plague: pneumonic and Bubonic. I had no idea. He also uses contemporary sources as a way to point out that what was "every living soul" in medieval writing was, in truth, closer to 30 percent or 40 percent and why. Because there were different death rates in different areas.And how the plague spread from Mongolia through trade routes (think: bags, packs, pack animals, minimal hygiene) to Caffa on the Black Sea, and then from there to Constantinople. Again, the hyperbole of "everyone on board the ship was dead when it was in port" gets a modern historical review. The amount of death and destruction, though, is immense. Town by town and city by city he leads us, up water routes and across land routes, and writings by those who survived and those who didn't. Also part of the history are the economic and ecological disasters that happened in different parts of Europe; England was especially hard hit with torrential rains that resulted in widespread famine 20 years before the Plague, with resulting lowered immune systems of the children who survived the famine only to die so quickly of the Plague.What kept me from giving this book the full 5 stars was the author's commentary and interjections of "he must have thought" and occasional pulling together of threads that too jumbled to make a great deal of sense.
    • 4/5
      In the midst of our pandemic, I decided to read about the granddaddy of all pandemics -- the Black Death of the Middle Ages, that wiped out somewhere around half the population of many areas it touched.As I listened, I found my brain making strange connections between then and now. For instance, conspiracy theories flourished. People behaved in counterproductive ways. There were other things that struck me, but my retention of details isn't as good as it used to be. It was an interesting book. I could have been happy with few less details about rats and fleas . . . He spent a lot of time putting things in context, sometimes with details that caused me to lose the train of thought. It was important that he pointed out the persecution of the Jewish people during the plague (conspiracy theory was that they caused the plague!) but a history of anti-Semitism from the time of the Gospel accounts through Nazi Germany seemed a bit out of place -- that could be a book in and of itself.
    • 2/5
      Bf zb ooomIf you will have me back I will apologise to the team for letting them down and can work tommorow for fd
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    • 5/5
      Excellent and entertaining!
    • 5/5
      A well written and very entertaining chronicle of the Black Death's visit in the mid-1300s. Maybe a little more detailed than I would have liked. Opened my eyes to the sweeping positive effect such an event can have on the planet. The Plague opened the doors for huge leaps forward in industrial modernization (like the printing press), radically changed the political and economic landscape, and transformed social and gender roles. Medicine had been inching slowly toward science, and way from astrology, and the Plague helped spur vast changes to the entire medical community - doctors, hospitals, and medical education. Maybe it's just me, but I rarely find so detailed an historical take as this. Hard to put it down.
    • 3/5
      Though on 18 April 1970 I read Philip Ziegler's book on the Black Death i thought I would read this book to see if it told the story better. The Black Death was brought to Europe on a ship which had been in the Crimea and in 1347 came to Europe and spread the plague, which raged through nearly every place in Europe till about 1351. There are a lot of horrendous accounts of the deaths and the evil things people did to those they suspected of having something to do with the plague--but apparently the rats, who had much to do with it were not suspected particularly. Some localities saw half or even more of the population die. Europe was outrunning its resources so in a way the plague made Europe more livable for those fortunate enough to survive. The accounts of the mistreatment of Jews show where Hitler maybe leaarned some of his evil ways. I was pleased to see that the Pope did condemn such mistreatment. Also of interest was the account of the Flagellants who mistreated themselves in mass marches in 1348 and 1349--and people stood and watched! It was a fearsome time and this book does a fair job on the subject.
    • 3/5
      Well. You certainly can't claim that John Kelly wasn't thorough.At first I really did find the book interesting and the writing engaging. But after about a hundred pages, it just got really old. Kelly's writing is certainly pretty and elaborate, but after a while it gets really hard to keep track of whatever he's talking about. Sentences get really wordy.For my purposes, the book was -too- thorough. I only wanted to know about the Black Death, honestly. I'm not a big history buff, so the centuries worth of flashbacks and backstories were unnecessary, in my opinion. Kelly also referenced more modern happenings, which might have seemed like a clever idea at the time, but only served to confuse me as I tried to make the connection.Maybe I'm just not enough of a historian to appreciate a masterpiece, so I'm sorry. The Great Mortality is HIGHLY informative, covering all bases of every tiny village affected by the plague along with the history and future of every tiny village. Add in some Jewish history and the arguments of the plague deniers (who, despite the misleading name, don't believe that the plague was a giant conspiracy), and you've got a very detailed book about ... a lot of things.
    • 3/5
      I’d give it a 3-½. It seems the author wanted make an accessible, reader friendly book about the Black Death and mostly succeeded. There’s a good amount of information and I really got a sense of the time and places.

      Like others here, I was put off by some of the writing. For the most part he writes well and it’s a good read, but it seems like he was trying too hard to put some poetry in it. He personifies the virus constantly (the virus stopped outside of London and shot a game of pool and had a couple beers before heading into town) and throws awkward overwrought descriptive passages in whenever he can.

      He does attempt to tell personal stories that I assume are pieced together from records, and they’re mostly interesting, though it seems like he must be filling in a lot of blanks. He also goes into the ways the plague affected politics, society, and the economy of Europe. For me that was one of the most interesting parts of the book. There’s not a lot about the rest of the world, but that is partly due to lack of records.

      The whole thing could have been a little shorter. It seems like there’s a fair amount of repetition, and toward the middle it gets a little slow when he gives the play by play of how the plague entered what seems like every town in England. With some better editing this would be a much better book, but it’s still worth reading for a good overview of a turning point in history that’s not too bogged down in academics.
    • 3/5
      This may well be the funniest book I've ever read about the Black Death. Kelly's a good writer with a wry sense of humor. I also enjoyed the way he personified the plague- it's something I've always done in my head, too. I can just see Yersinia pestis striding through the countryside, scythe in hand.

      I've read a lot of plague books, so much of the information was familiar to me- but there's a lot of fascinating first-hand reporting from various sources, much of it new to me. The last chapter, about the revisionist theories regarding the actual identity of the plague-causing organism, was entirely riveting.

      Recommended, if you like this sort of thing.
    • 3/5
      Kelly lays out a very detailed, sometimes too detailed, history of the plague. While I found parts of the book very redundant, there were interesting stories mixed throughout the book. I particularly enjoyed reading about the correlation between the plague and weather trends, war, and diets. Even after reading the book, it is hard to comprehend how people dealt with not only the physical demand of disposing of thousands of bodies, but also the emotional trauma of losing so many family members. I wanted to like this book more, but became too sidetracked by all the rambling stories that often left we wondering how they related to the chapter.
    • 4/5
      Kelly takes us on a tour of Europe during the Black Death of 1348-49, during which death rates from the disease ranged from 20% in areas that "got off easy" to 70% in areas that were hit particularly hard. Most of the book's chapters examine the plague on a city by city basis. We see how people here reacted differently than people there. The only weakness in the book is that after a few chapters, it gets a bit repetitious. Though there are interesting differences in the way the death played out in London vs. Paris, there is enough similarity (naturally) to get a little tedious.
    • 3/5
      A well written account of the devastation of this plague that ravaged most of the world. And what a horrible time it must have been to have lived through it much less died from it. Kelly seems to have researched the subject well and intersperses it with historical connections of the time. Of particular note is the continued persecution of the Jews as scapegoats for this also. I can't help to think hundreds of years from now readers, if they read, will be shaking their heads about our time of horror dealing with cancer.
    • 4/5
      If you are interested in the Black Death and have never read a general history of it, Kelly is as good a place to start as any. It’s as well-written and full of anecdote as Norman F. Cantor’s shorter In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death & the World It Made and has not dated as much in its biological speculations. It ranges farther in space and time than Philip Ziegler’s mostly England-bound The Black Death. While it has almost has many stats as Robert Gottfried’s The Black Death: Natural and Human Disaster in Medieval Europe, it thins them out with more prose.If you fancy yourself a bit of an amateur plague enthusiast, this book is an enjoyable read. Kelly has an eye for interesting people affected by the plague. We not only hear about Boccacio, but Joanna Queen of Naples and Sicily, beautiful defendant in a 1348 murder trial during the height of the plague in Avignon. We trace the final days of Joan Plantagenet, daughter of Edward III, who died of the plague while traveling to take marriage vows in Spain. We hear how the vermin “boiled over like water in a simmering cauldron” when the clothes were stripped off the body of the murdered Thomas Becket.Kelly bounces around a great deal in time and space to set the context for his plague tales. Thus, we don’t just hear about Mongol plague dead being catapulted over the walls of the Genoese colony at Caffa but also how there came to be such a settlement on the shores of the Black Sea. We don’t just hear of the murder of half of Strassbur’s Jews on Feb. 14, 1349 but how Europe’s anti-Semitism may have pushed into a deadlier form by an intra-faith dispute among Jews in the mid-13th century. We learn that the roving bands of Flagellants actually date back to a movement in 1260.Besides his literary style, Kelly does put some interesting emphasis on areas not dealt with extensively by the above plague authors. He shows how some of the Great Mortality’s first victims may have been from the Christian Nestorian colony around Lake Issyuk Kul in Mongolia. While other historians have noted the generally terrible conditions in 14th century Europe – constant warfare, failing crops, and the Malthusian trap of population outstripping resources, Kelly interestingly develops these notions. Kelly, more than any of the above authors, looks at other instances of the plague in history besides just the so-called second panemic of 1347. Thus he draws analogies between the unsanitary conditions fostered by medieval sieges and the counter-tactic of chevauchee (in essence, giant search-and-destroy missions conducted against civilians to force feudal lords out of their fortresses to defend them) with the presence of bubonic plague among the unhygienic Russian soldiers occupying Afghanistan. Kelly speculates, with some medical support, that the malnutrition of the Great Famine, which lasted from 1315-132,2 weakened the immune systems of some survivors who were at a vulnerable age. That is the explanation he offers for a high rate of mortality among adults in their 30s and 40s during the Great Mortality. And he devotes some time to speculation that the vector of the Great Mortality may not have been just the rat flea, X. cheopis, but also the human flea, pulex irritans. That may explain why so few contemporary accounts note the mass amounts of dead rats you would expect during a plague pandemic.Along with other historians, he notes the many effects the plague had on European culture including a decaying infrastructure due to lack of young workers, a result that inspired a contemporary bit of homework when students were asked to translate ”The roof of an old house had almost fallen on me yesterday” into Latin. And he notes that frequent reappearances of the plague may have indirectly helped push Europe away from its Malthusian trap. While subsequent plague epidemics were never as deadly, they, coupled with other diseases like flu, smallpox, syphilis, typhus, and the sweating sickness, kept the population from quickly bouncing back. The survivors, though, were wealthier than the pre-plague days.While he doesn’t go off on the improbable speculation that the Great Mortality, as its contemporaries dubbed it, was not plague but anthrax – a major part of Cantor’s work, some of his speculations on how the disease has mutated since 1347 or the Plague of Justinian in the sixth century AD, have dated. The most recent evidence, using DNA analysis of plague victims in England, shows little mutation of the bacteria yersina pestis since the 14th century. There also is little direct evidence linking yersina pestis to the Justinian’s Plague.
    • 4/5
      Non-fiction that reads almost like fiction. Not difficult or grim.
    • 5/5
      Terrific summary of the black plague and its impact on history. Not strictly historical, as the author provides his imaginings about what might have happened or how individuals may have behaved. These sometimes add, and sometimes distract, from the narrative. Weaves in a number of diverse literatures to explain the disease and it's travels.
    • 5/5
      Excellent study of the bubonic plague that ravaged the medieval world during the mid-14th century. Kelly traces the lineage of the disease, its origins and the way it traveled all over the known world. Beginning in Asia and making its way to Italy, Kelly shows its progression through Europe chapter by chapter, discussing how the plague affected politics, economics and social patterns and traditions. Kelly gives an excellent overview of the devestation the Black Death had on the population, and how it changed the world.
    • 5/5
      In the bonus section of The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, The Most Devastating Plague of All Time author John Kelly discusses three people who brought the period of Europe's Black Death to life for him. The first is Jacme De Podio, a peasant from Marseille. After Jacme's son, grand-daughter and daughter-in-law all died from the plague, he decided he should inherit his daughter-in-law's estate. To do so he had to find two witnesses who would swear out in court that she had died. Jacme spent two years searching the plague ravished city of Marseille, finally found the witnesses he needed and inherited the estate. Carpe Diem.The second was Queen Joanna of Naples and Sicily. One of the major celebrities of 14th century Europe, Queen Joanna stood accused of murdering her husband so she could marry her lover. Her trial in the Papal court at Avignon was the must see event of the day, drawing a crowd from every corner of the continent in spite of the plague that ravaged the land. She was found innocent, though later her former in-laws invaded her kingdom forcing her to flee to Provence where she was reuinted with her lover. The third is Agnolo di Tura called Agnolo the Fat. Agnolo, a hard-working man who rose from the lower classes to the upper middle class prior to the plague, wrote one of the better chronicles of the Black Death which sums up the plagues full horror, "And I, Agnolo di Tura, called the fat, buried my wife and five children with my own hands."The Black Death, called the Great Mortality by those who lived through it, was the greatest tragedy ever to befall Europe. (Whether or not its death toll was worse than that of World War II depends in part on how you manipulate the statistics.) While it brought about an end to the lives of millions, the Black Death changed the course of European history and laid the groundwork for the Renaissance.Mr. Kelly's book is a thorough and entertaining account of the Black Death from its origins to its after effects. While he presents the historical facts and the scientific details along with the numbers needed to understand the profound effects the Black Death had, Mr. Kelly's focus on the individual people of the time brings the story home as it brings the story to life. The story of the Black Death is full of scoundrals, heroes and everyone in between. Agnolo di Tura will be familiar to anyone who remembers what they studied in middle school, but others, like Queen Joanna of Naples have been kept out of the history books for one reason or another. Hers is one of many fascinating stories in The Great Mortality.The Great Mortality is a history book for both lovers and non-lovers of history. While there is enough detail in The Great Mortality to answer all but the most obscure questions anyone might have about the Black Death, the book never becomes lost in arcane information or bogged down in academic language. The story of The Great Mortality is always interesting, often moving, and at times inspiring. That all of Agnolo di Tura's children died moves the reader, but so does the knowledge that he carried on in spite of this. In fact, he remarried and became successful enough to complain about his worker's demands for higher wages.
    • 4/5
      An interesting synthesis of the research on the Black Death that swept through Europe and Asia in the 1300s and devastated the world economy and society. Ultimately Kelly's conclusions are not earth-shattering, but the book is an accessible, scholarly read. For those of you who enjoy books on the plague, or history, this is recommended.
    • 4/5
      Good description of the plague's travel through the old world, All the gorey details. Explores ordinary lives.
    • 4/5
      Kelly's sweeping popular look at the cause, course and story of the Black Death doesn't break new academic ground so much as it filters and beautifies the centuries of discoveries by plague scholars. Through evocative description and very human narrative, Kelly builds an immediacy of the horrendous experience: bursting buboes, violent, bloody vomiting and, at times, the near extinction of towns and cities, the love and chaos of family members and the clergy.The first third of the book is nothing short of fascinating as Kelly winds back the clock and the geography of the origins of Y. pestis, the plague bacteria. It starts in the high steppes of central Asia, among lands and peoples he describes with enough care and detail that one feels almost present in the high grasses with the lurching, infectious "tarabagans," marmot-like rodents that may have been the source of the scourge.We as readers get to watch, as a terrified audience, as Kelly brings the "death and death and death" (so described by Elizabethan playwright John Ford) barreling down on western Europe. Individual stories: a physician, Petrarch, a Roman usurper, a reeve, royals--these tragedies unfold nuanced and detailed. Occasional rollicking asides are so fun that one hardly notices the digressions.Towards the last third of the book, some of the focus is lost, or perhaps the structure (following the plague's geographic sweeps, generally chronologically) has become a bit too fixed. Kelly's explanation of the dreadful anti-semitic pogroms carried out by misled, angry Christians are interesting (and important) as part of the plague's tragedy, but a 20-page full history of Jewish persecution seemed a bit long-winded. Occasionally he repeats himself, telling snippets of the same story multiple times--it's surprising that a sharp-eyed editor didn't pick those out.All in all, Kelly isn't posing a new thesis as to the cause or havoc of the Black Death. What he does, and does well, is synthesize the story into something approachable by all. A very enjoyable read.

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    The Great Mortality - John Kelly

    The Great Mortality

    An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time

    John Kelly

    Dedication

    FOR SUZANNE, JONATHAN, AND SOFIYA—

    TO A FUTURE WITHOUT PLAGUE

    Contents

    Title Page

    Dedication

    Introduction

    Chapter One - Oimmeddam

    Chapter Two - They Are Monsters, Not Men

    Chapter Three - The Day Before the Day of the Dead

    Chapter Four - Sicilian Autumn

    Chapter Five - Villani’s Last Sentence

    Chapter Six - The Curse of the Grand Master

    Chapter Seven - The New Galenism

    Chapter Eight - Days of Death Without Sorrow

    Chapter Nine - Heads to the West, Feet to the East

    Chapter Ten - God’s First Love

    Chapter Eleven - O Ye of Little Faith

    Chapter Twelve - Only the End of the Beginning

    Afterword - The Plague Deniers

    Index

    Acknowledgments

    P.S. - Insights, Interviews & More . . .

    About the author

    About the book

    Read on

    Notes

    PRAISE FOR - The Great Mortality

    Credits

    Copyright

    About the Publisher

    Introduction

    THIS BOOK BEGAN AS AN INQUIRY INTO THE FUTURE AND ENDED as an investigation of the past.

    Five years ago, when I first began thinking about writing a book on the plague, I had in mind plague in the generic sense of a major outbreak of epidemic disease, and I was looking ahead to the twenty-first century, not backward toward the fourteenth. From an earlier book on experimental medicine, Three on the Edge: The Story of Ordinary Families in Search of a Medical Miracle, I had gotten a glimpse of the power of unfettered pandemic disease. One of the people I wrote about was an AIDS patient. During the two years I followed him in the early 1990s—a time when effective HIV treatments were rare—the man lost a former lover, three friends, and a colleague at work. A hallmark of pandemic disease is its ability to destroy worlds, not just individuals, but it was one thing to know that, quite another to witness it.

    In 1995, the year I finished the book, Jonathan Mann, a professor at the Harvard University School of Public Health, warned that AIDS was the beginning of a frightening new era. The history of our time will be marked by recurrent eruptions of newly discovered diseases, he predicted. Two years later, 1997, the New England Journal of Medicine issued a similar warning when a virulent new strain of bubonic plague was identified. The finding of multi-drug-resistant [strain of plague] reinforces the concern . . . that the threat from emerging infectious diseases is not to be taken lightly, declared the Journal. Scarcely twenty years after the eradication of smallpox in 1979, an accomplishment widely described in the media as humanity’s ultimate triumph over infectious disease, we seemed to be slipping back into the world of our ancestors, a world of sudden, swift, and uncontrollable outbreaks of epidemic illness. The book I was thinking about would explore the nature of this threat, and in particular the danger posed by newly emerging illnesses such as Ebola fever, Marburg disease, hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, SARS, and avian flu.

    The book I ended up writing is quite different, though, indirectly, it rehearses many of the same themes. Its subject is an outbreak of a particular infectious disease in a particular time and place. Seven hundred years after the fact, what we call the Black Death—and what medieval Europeans called the Great Mortality, and medieval Muslims, the Year of Annihilation—remains the greatest natural disaster in human history.

    Apocalyptic in scale, the Black Death affected every part of Eurasia, from the bustling ports along the China Sea to the sleepy fishing villages of coastal Portugal, and it produced suffering and death on a scale that, even after two world wars and twenty-seven million AIDS deaths worldwide, remains astonishing. In Europe, where the most complete figures are available, in many places the plague claimed a third of the population; in others, half the population; and in a few regions, 60 percent. The affliction was not limited to humans. For a brief moment in the middle of the fourteenth century, the words of Genesis 7—All flesh died that moved upon the earth—seemed about to be realized. There are accounts of dogs, cats, birds, camels, even of lions being afflicted by the boil, the telltale bubo of bubonic plague. By the time the pestilence ended, vast stretches of the inhabited world had fallen silent, except for the sound of the wind rustling through empty, overgrown fields.

    What led me from the book I planned to the book I wrote was an encounter with the literature of the Black Death. Before plunging into a book about the future of epidemic disease, I wanted to acquaint myself with its past, and the medieval plague, as the most famous example of the phenomenon, seemed the appropriate place to start. Thus, in the autumn of 2000 I began shuttling between the main reading room of the New York Public Library and Butler Library at Columbia University. I read a number of excellent academic histories, but it was the original source material, the literature of the Great Mortality—the chronicles, letters, and reminiscences written by contemporaries—that turned my gaze from the future to the past. I had approached this material with some trepidation. If, as an English writer once observed, the past is a foreign country, no part of the past seems more foreign, more otherly, to a modern sensibility than the Middle Ages.

    My wariness proved unwarranted. Much has changed since the 1340s, the decade the Black Death arrived in Europe, but not human nature. The plague generation wrote about their experiences with a directness and urgency that, seven hundred years after the fact, retains the power to move, astonish, and haunt. After watching packs of wild dogs paw at the newly dug graves of the plague dead, a part-time tax collector in Siena wrote, This is the end of the world. His contemporaries provided vivid descriptions of what the end of the world looked like, circa 1348 and 1349. It was corpses packed like lasagna in municipal plague pits, collection carts winding through early-morning streets to pick up the previous day’s dead, husbands abandoning dying wives and parents abandoning dying children—for fear of contagion—and knots of people crouched over latrines and sewers inhaling the noxious fumes in hopes of inoculating themselves against the plague. It was dusty roads packed with panicked refugees, ghost ships crewed by corpses, and a feral child running wild in a deserted mountain village. For a moment in the middle of the fourteenth century, millions of people across Eurasia began to contemplate the end of civilization, and with it perhaps the end of the human race.

    The medieval plague was one of the seminal events of the past millennium. It cast a deep shadow across the centuries that followed, and it remains part of the collective memory of the West. In discussions of AIDS and other emerging infectious diseases, the Black Death is constantly evoked as a warning from the past, something humanity must avoid at all costs. Yet, as a historical event, the medieval plague remains little known. It originated in inner Asia, somewhere in the still-remote region between Mongolia and Kirgizia, and might well have remained there, had not the Mongols unified much of Eurasia in the thirteenth century, thereby facilitating the growth of three activities that continue to play an important role in the spread of infectious disease: trade, travel, and larger and more efficient communications. In the Mongols’ case, the improvement in communication was the Yam, the Tartar version of the pony express. From inner Asia, one prong of the plague swept eastward into China, another westward across the steppe into Russia. Sometime in the mid-1340s the western wing reached Italian trading outposts in Crimea; from there, fleeing sailors carried the disease to Europe and the Middle East.

    Despite the enormous size of Eurasia and the slowness of medieval travel—in 1345 it took eight to twelve months to travel from the Crimea to China overland—the plague spread to almost every corner of the continent within a matter of decades. It seems to have erupted in inner Asia sometime in the first quarter of the fourteenth century, and by the autumn of 1347 it was in Europe. In late September Sicily was infected by a fleet of Genoese galleys. One chronicler reported that the Genoese tumbled off the infected ships with sickness clinging to their very bones. From Sicily the pestilence moved swiftly northward to continental Europe. By March of 1348 much of central and northern Italy was or soon would be infected, including Genoa, Florence, and Venice, where gondolas slipped through wintery canals to collect the dead; by spring the plague was in Spain, southern France, and the Balkans, where one contemporary reports that packs of wolves came down from the hills to attack the living and feed on the dead. By summer the disease had reached northern France, England, and Ireland, where it took a great toll among the English in port towns like Dublin, but left the native Irish in the hills relatively unscathed. By the late autumn of 1348 the plague was in Austria and menacing Germany, and by 1349 and 1350 it had infected the regions along the European periphery: Scotland, Scandinavia, Poland, and Portugal. In a century when nothing moved faster than the fastest horse, the Black Death had circumnavigated Europe in a little less than four years.

    To many Europeans, the pestilence seemed to be the punishment of a wrathful Creator. In September 1349, as the disease raced toward an anxious London, the English king Edward III declared that a just God now visits the sons of men and lashes the world. To many others, the only credible explanation for death on so vast a scale was human malfeasance. Evildoers were using poisons to spread the plague, warned Alfonso of Cordova. To many of Alfonso’s contemporaries, that could only mean one thing. The Great Mortality occasioned the most violent outburst of anti-Semitism in the Middle Ages, a period already marked by violent anti-Semitic outbursts.

    Few events in history have evoked such extremes of human behavior as the medieval plague. There was the horrendous brutality of the Flagellants, who trampled the roads of Europe, flailing their half-naked bodies and murdering Jews, and the sweet selflessness of the sisters of Hôtel-Dieu, who sacrificed their own lives to care for the plague victims of Paris. There was the fearfulness of Pope Clement VI, who fled Avignon, seat of the medieval Church, a few months after the pestilence arrived, and the fearlessness of his chief physician, Gui de Chauliac, who stayed in the afflicted city until the bitter end, so as to avoid infamy. The Great Mortality produced many examples of great cunning and compassion, charity and greed, and, in a testimonial to the stubbornness—some would say the irredeemable wickedness— of human character, it also provided a backdrop for both the most notorious royal murder trial and greatest comic opera of the Middle Ages, the former featuring, as defendant, the beautiful Queen Joanna of Naples; the latter, the Roman tribune Cola di Rienzo, possibly the silliest man in Europe. Throughout the worst months of the plague, somewhere in Europe men were always waging war on one another.

    The Great Mortality attempts to bring alive the world described in the letters, chronicles, and reminiscences of contemporaries. It is a narrative of a supreme moment in human history told through the voices, personalities, and experiences of the men and women who lived through it. However, since it is impossible to understand the pestilence without understanding its historical context, it is also a book about a time as well as an event. As the British historian Bruce Campbell has observed, the decades preceding the plague were exceptionally hazardous and unhealthy for both humans and domesticated animals. Almost everywhere in Europe there was war, overpopulation (relative to resources), economic stagnation and decline, filth, overcrowding, epidemic (nonplague) disease, and famine, as well as climatic and ecological instability.

    In retrospect, contemporaries interpreted the reign of woe as a portent of the coming apocalypse, and in a sense it was. The economic and social conditions of the early fourteenth century, and the environmental instability of the period, made Europe an unhealthy place to live.

    The Great Mortality also looks at new theories about the nature of the medieval plague. For well over a century, it has been considered settled fact that the pestilence was a catastrophic outbreak of bubonic plague and a variant called pneumonic plague, which attacks the lungs. However, since in modern settings neither form of plague looks or acts much like the illness described in the Black Death literature, a number of historians and scientists have recently begun to argue that the mortality was caused by a different infectious illness, perhaps anthrax, perhaps an Ebola-like ailment.

    While history may never repeat itself, man, as Voltaire once observed, always does. The factors that allowed the Black Death to escape the remoteness of inner Asia and to savage the cities of medieval Europe, China, and the Middle East still operate. Except, of course, today they operate on a vastly larger scale. Trade and human expansion, the twin anthems of modern globalization, have opened up ever more remote areas of the globe, while transportation has enhanced the mobility of both men and microbes incalculably. A journey that took the plague bacillus decades to complete in the fourteenth century today takes barely a day. And for all the triumphs of modern science, infectious disease retains the ability to render us as impotent as our medieval ancestors.

    In the spring of 2001 English journalist Felicity Spector was reminded of that fact when an epidemic of hoof-and-mouth disease spun out of control and the British government, helpless to contain the outbreak, was forced to resort to methods that made Britain seem suddenly, shockingly medieval. We thought, wrote Spector in the New York Times, that modern medicine had brought us beyond the days when the only solution to an infectious disease was to burn entire herds of livestock, to close vast swaths of countryside, to soak rags and spread them on the roads. . . . [M]odernity, it seems, is a very fragile thing.

    Chapter One

    Oimmeddam

    FEODOSIYA SITS ON THE EASTERN COAST OF THE CRIMEA, A RECTANGULAR spit of land where the Eurasian steppe stops to dip its toe into the Black Sea. Today the city is a rusty wasteland of post-Soviet decay. But in the Middle Ages, when Feodosiya was called Caffa and a Genoese proconsul sat in a white palace above the harbor, the city was one of the fastest-growing ports in the medieval world. In 1266, when the Genoese first arrived in southern Russia, Caffa was a primitive fishing village tucked away far from the eyes of God and man on the dark side of the Crimea—a collection of windswept lean-tos set between an empty sea and a ring of low-rising hills. Eighty years later, seventy thousand to eighty thousand people coursed through Caffa’s narrow streets, and a dozen different tongues echoed through its noisy markets. Thrusting church spires and towers crowded the busy skyline, while across the bustling town docks flowed Merdacaxi silks from Central Asia, sturgeon from the Don, slaves from the Ukraine, and timber and furs from the great Russian forests to the north. Surveying Caffa in 1340, a Muslim visitor declared it a handsome town of beautiful markets with a worthy port in which I saw two hundred ships big and small.

    It would be an exaggeration to say that the Genoese willed Caffa into existence, but not a large exaggeration. No city-state bestrode the age of city-states with a more operatic sense of destiny—none possessed a more fervent desire to cut a bella figura in the world—than Genoa. The city’s galleys could be found in every port from London to the Black Sea, its merchants in every trading center from Aleppo (Syria) to Peking. The invincible courage and extraordinary seamanship of the Genoese mariner was legendary. Long before Christopher Columbus, there were the Vivaldi brothers, Ugolino and Vadino, who fell off the face of the earth laughing at death as they searched for a sea route to India. Venice, Genoa’s great rival, might carp that she was a city of sea without fish, . . . men without faith, and women without shame, but Genoese grandeur was impervious to such insults. In Caffa, Genoa built a monument to itself. The port’s sunlit piazzas and fine stone houses, the lovely women who walked along its quays with the brocades of Persia on their backs and the perfumes of Arabia gracing their skin, were monuments to Genoese wealth, virtue, piety, and imperial glory.

    As an Italian poet of the time noted,

    And so many are the Genoese

    And so spread . . . throughout the world

    That wherever one goes and stays

    He makes another Genoa there.

    Caffa’s meteoric rise to international prominence also owed something to geography and economics. Between 1250 and 1350 the medieval world experienced an early burst of globalization, and Caffa, located at the southeastern edge of European Russia, was perfectly situated to exploit the new global economy. To the north, through a belt of dense forest, lay the most magnificent land route in the medieval world, the Eurasian steppe, a great green ribbon of rolling prairie, swaying high grass, and big sky that could deliver a traveler from the Crimea to China in eight to twelve months. To the west lay the teeming port of Constantinople, wealthiest city in Christendom, and beyond Constantinople, the slave markets of the Levant, where big-boned, blond Ukrainians fetched a handsome price at auction. Farther west lay Europe, where the tangy spices of Ceylon and Java and the sparkling diamonds of Golconda were in great demand. And between these great poles of the medieval world lay Caffa, with its worthy port and phalanx of mighty Russian rivers: the Volga and Don immediately to the east, the Dnieper to the west. In the first eight decades of Genoese rule the former fishing village doubled, tripled, and quadrupled in size. Then the population quadrupled a second, third, and fourth time; new neighborhoods and churches sprang up; six thousand new houses rose inside the city, and then an additional eleven thousand in the muddy flats beyond the town walls. Every year more ships arrived, and more fish and slaves and timber flowed across Caffa’s wharves. On a fine spring evening in 1340, one can imagine the Genoese proconsul standing on his balcony, surveying the tall-masted ships bobbing on a twilight tide in the harbor, and thinking that Caffa would go on growing forever, that nothing would ever change, except that the city would grow ever bigger and wealthier. That dream, of course, was as fantastic a fairy tale in the fourteenth century as it is today. Explosive growth—and human hubris—always come with a price.

    Before the arrival of the Genoese, Caffa’s vulnerability to ecological disaster extended no farther than the few thousand meters of the Black Sea its fishermen fished and the half moon of sullen, windswept hills behind the city. By 1340 trade routes linked the port to places half a world away—places even the Genoese knew little about—and in some of the places strange and terrible things were happening. In the 1330s there were reports of tremendous environmental upheaval in China. Canton and Houkouang were said to have been lashed by cycles of torrential rain and parching drought, and in Honan mile-long swarms of locusts were reported to have blacked out the sun. Legend also has it that in this period, the earth under China gave way and whole villages disappeared into fissures and cracks in the ground. An earthquake is reported to have swallowed part of a city, Kingsai, then a mountain, Tsincheou, and in the mountains of Ki-ming-chan, to have torn open a hole large enough to create a new lake a hundred leagues long. In Tche, it was said that 5 million people were killed in the upheavals. On the coast of the South China Sea, the ominous rumble of subterranean thunder was heard. As word of the disasters spread, the Chinese began to whisper that the emperor had lost the Mandate of Heaven.

    In the West, news of the catastrophes evoked horror and dread. Gabriel de’ Mussis, a notary from Piacenza, wrote that in the Orient at Cathay, where the world’s head is . . . , dreadful signs and portents have appeared. A musician named Louis Heyligen, who lived in Avignon, passed on an even more alarming tale to friends in Flanders. Hard by greater India, in a certain province, horrors and unheard of tempests overwhelmed the whole province for the space of three days, Heyligen wrote. On the first day, there was a rain of frogs, serpents, lizards, scorpions, and many venomous beasts of that sort. On the second, thunder was heard, and lightning and sheets of fire fell upon the earth, mingling with hail stones of marvelous size. . . . On the third day, there fell fire from heaven and stinking smoke which slew all that were left of man and beasts and burned up all the cities and towns in those parts.

    The Genoese, who were much closer to Asia than de’ Mussis and Heyligen, undoubtedly heard rumors about the disasters, but in the 1330s and early 1340s they faced so many immediate dangers in Caffa, they could not have had much time to worry about events in faraway India or China. The port of Caffa was held under a grant from the Mongols, rulers of the greatest empire in the medieval world—indeed, in the fourteenth century, rulers of the greatest empire the world had ever seen. For the Tartars, Caffa was only a small part of a vast domain that stretched from the Yellow River to the Danube, from Siberia to the Persian Gulf, but, like a pebble in a boot, it was an annoying part—or, rather, its colonial power was. To the Mongols, the Genoese seemed vainglorious, supercilious, and deeply duplicitous, the kind of people who would name their children after you—as the Dorias of Genoa had named three sons after three Mongol notables; Huegu, Abaka, and Ghazan—while picking your pocket. When the founder of the Mongol empire, Genghis Khan, railed against eaters of sweet greasy food [who wear] garments of gold . . . [and] hold in their arms the loveliest of women, he might have had the Genoese in mind. In 1343 decades of economic and religious tension between the two powers finally erupted in a major confrontation at Tana, a trading station at the mouth of the Don, famous as the starting point of the land route to China. The road you take from Tana to Peking, begins La Practica della Mercatura, Francesco Balducci di Pegolotti’s fourteenth-century travel guide for eastern-bound merchants.

    According to notary de’ Mussis,* the brawl grew out of a confrontation between Italian merchants and local Muslims on a Tana street. Apparently insults were exchanged, fists waved, punches thrown. Market stalls tumbled, pigs squealed, a knife flashed, and a Muslim fell to the ground, dead. Shortly thereafter, a Mongol khan named Janibeg, a self-proclaimed defender of Islam, appeared outside Tana, and with him, a large Tartar force. An ultimatum was sent into the besieged town and, according to a Russian historian named A. A. Vasiliev, a response, insolent even by Genoese standards, was sent back. Enraged, Janibeg flung his Mongols into Tana. Amid plumes of black smoke and the thundering cries of sword-slashing Tartar horsemen, the Italians, outnumbered but stout, made a fighting retreat to the harbor; from there, a race westward to Caffa commenced, with the pursued Italians traveling by ship, the pursuing Mongols by horse.

    Oh God, writes de’ Mussis of the Mongols’ arrival on the hills above Caffa. See how the heathen Tartar races, pouring together from all sides, suddenly invest . . . Caffa [attacking] the trapped Christians . . . [who] hemmed in by an immense army, could hardly breathe. To the Genoese caught inside the city, the siege seemed like the end of the world, but they were wrong. In 1343 the end of the world was still several thousand miles away, on the eastern steppe.

    Medieval Europeans like de’ Mussis and musician Louis Heyligen were aware that plague as well as ecological upheaval raged in Asia. The new global economy had made the world a little smaller. In his account of the siege of Caffa, de’ Mussis writes: In 1346, in the countries of the East, countless numbers . . . were struck down by a mysterious illness. Heyligen, too, mentions the plague in his account of unheard of calamities . . . hard by Greater India. The musician says that the terrible events in India culminated in an outbreak of the pestilence that infected all neighboring countries . . . by means of the stinking breath. However, the best medieval guide to the Black Death’s early history in Asia is Ibn al-Wardi, an Arab scholar who lived in the Syrian town of Aleppo, an important international trading center and listening post in the Middle Ages.

    Al-Wardi, who like de’ Mussis also got his information from merchants, says that the pestilence raged in the East for fifteen years before arriving in the West. This timeline fits the plague’s pace of dissemination, which is relatively slow for an epidemic disease. A 1330s starting date would also explain the references to a mysterious illness that begin to appear in Asian documents around the same time. Among them are the Chronicles of the Great Mongol Khanate of Mongolia and Northern China, which state that, in 1332, the twenty-eight-year-old Mongol Great Khan Jijaghatu Toq-Temur and his sons died suddenly of a mysterious illness. In 1331, the year before the Great Khan’s death, the Chinese records also make reference to a mysterious illness; this one, a treacherous epidemic, swept through Hopei province in the northeast region of the country and killed nine-tenths of the population.

    Most modern historians believe that what we call the Black Death originated somewhere in inner Asia, then spread westward to the Middle East and Europe and eastward to China along the international trade routes. One frequently mentioned origin point is the Mongolian Plateau, in the region of the Gobi desert where Marco Polo says the night wind makes a thousand fantasies throng to mind. In an account of the pestilence, the medieval Arab historian al-Maqrizi seems to speak of Mongolia when he says that before the Black Death arrived in Egypt, it had raged a six month ride from Tabriz [in Iran, where] . . . three hundred tribes perished without apparent reason in their summer and winter encampments . . . [and] sixteen princes died [along with] the Grand Khan and six of his children. Subsequently, China was depopulated while India was damaged to a lesser extent.

    Another often mentioned origin point is Lake Issyk Kul, where medieval travelers would come to pick up the fast road into China. Surrounded by dense forest and snow-capped mountains, in Kirgizia, near the northwest border of China, the lake region is located close to several major plague foci. (Foci are regions were plague occurs naturally.) More to the point, something terrible happened around the lake a few years before the pestilence arrived in Caffa. In the late nineteenth century a Russian archaeologist named D. A. Chwolson found that an unusually large number of headstones in local cemeteries bore the dates 1338 and 1339, and several of the stones contained a specific reference to plague. One reads:

    In the year . . . of the hare [1339]

    This is the grave of Kutluk.

    He died of the plague with his wife Magnu-Kelka.*

    After Issyk Kul, the Black Death remains a shadowy presence for the next several years; there is no reliable information on its movements, except that it always seems to be glimpsed moving westward through the steppe high grass. The year after Kutluk and his wife, Magnu-Kelka, died, one account puts the disease in Belasagun, a rest stop to the west of Issyk Kul where riders of the Yam, the Mongol pony express, changed mounts and Marco Polo’s father, Niccolo, and uncle Maffeo stopped on their way into China. A year or so later, the plague is spotted in Talas, to the west of Belasagun, and then to the west of Talas in Samarkand, a major Central Asian market town and crossroads where medieval travelers could pick up the road south to India or continue onward toward the Crimea. But only in 1346 do the first reliable accounts become available. That year one Russian chronicle speaks of the plague arriving on the western shore of the Caspian Sea and attacking several nearby cities and towns, including Sarai, capital of the Mongol Principality of the Golden Horde and home to the busiest slave market on the steppe. A year later, while Sarai buried its dead, the pestilence lurched the final few hundred miles westward across the Don and Volga to the Crimea, came up behind the Tartar army in the hills above Caffa, and bit it in the back of the neck.

    The Genoese, who imagined that God was born in Genoa, greeted the plague’s arrival with prayers of thanksgiving. The Almighty had dispatched a heavenly host of warrior angels to slay the infidel Mongols with golden arrows, they told one another. However, in de’ Mussis’s account of events, it is Khan Janibeg who commands the heavenly host at Caffa. Stunned and stupefied by the arrival of the plague, the notary says that the Tartars ordered corpses to be placed in catapults and lobbed into the city in hopes that the intolerable stench would kill everyone inside. . . . Soon rotting corpses tainted the air . . . , poisoned the water supply, and the stench was so overwhelming that hardly one man in several thousand was in a position to flee the remains of the Tartar army.

    On the basis of de’ Mussis’s account, Janibeg has been proclaimed the father of biological warfare by several generations of historians, but the notary may have invented some of the more lurid details of his story to resolve an inconvenient theological dilemma. Self-evidently—to Christians, at least—the plague attacked the Tartars because they were pagans, but why did the disease then turn on the Italian defenders? Historian Ole Benedictow thinks de’ Mussis may have fabricated the catapults and flying Mongols to explain this more theologically sensitive part of the story—God did not abandon the gallant Genoese, they were smitten by a skyful of infected Tartar corpses, which, not coincidentally, was just the kind of devious trick good Christians would expect of a heathen people. Like most historians, Professor Benedictow believes the plague moved into the port the way the disease usually moves into human populations—through infected rats.* What the besieged would not notice and could not prevent was that plague-infected rodents found their way through the crevices in the walls or between the gates and the gateways, says the professor.

    The siege of Caffa ended with both sides exhausted and decimated by war and disease. In April or May of 1347, as the hills above Caffa turned green under a soft spring sun, the dying Tartar army faded away, while inside the pestilential city, many of the Genoese defenders prepared to flee westward. There are no accounts of life in the besieged port that fateful spring, but we do have images of Berlin in 1945 and Saigon in 1975, enough information to suggest what Caffa’s final days may have looked like. As the death toll mounted, the streets would have filled with feral animals feeding on human remains, drunken soldiers looting and raping, old women dragging corpses through rubble, and burning buildings spewing jets of flame and smoke into the Crimean sky. There would have been swarms of rodents with staggering gaits and a strange bloody froth around their snouts, piles of bodies stacked like cordwood in public squares, and in every eye, a look of wild panic or dull resignation. The scenes in the harbor, the only means of escape in besieged Caffa, would have been especially horrific: surging crowds and sword-wielding guards, children wailing for lost or dead parents, shouting and cursing, everyone pushing toward teeming ships, and beyond the melee, on the departing galleys, prayerful passengers hugging one another under great white sheets of unfurling sail, ignorant that below deck, in dark, sultry holds, hundreds of plague-bearing rats were scratching themselves and sniffing at the cool sea air.

    Caffa was almost certainly not the only eastern port the plague passed through en route to Europe, but for the generation who lived through the Black Death, it would forever be the place where the pestilence originated, and the Genoese, the people who brought the disease to Europe. The chronicler of Este spoke for his contemporaries when he wrote that Genoa’s accursed galleys [spread the plague] to Constantinople, Messina, Sardinia, Genoa, Marseilles and many other places. . . . The Genoese wrought far more slaughter and cruelty . . . than even the Saracens.

    Plague is the most famous example of what the Pima Indians of the American Southwest call oimmeddam, wandering sickness; and an ancient Indian legend evokes the profound dread oimmeddam produced in premodern peoples.

    Where do you come from? an Indian asks a tall, black-hatted stranger.

    I come from far way, the stranger replies, from . . . across the Eastern Ocean.

    What do you bring? the Indian asks.

    I bring death, the stranger answers. My breath causes children to wither and die like young plants in the spring snow. I bring destruction. No matter how beautiful a woman, once she has looked at me she becomes as ugly as death. And to men, I bring not death alone, but the destruction of their children and the blighting of their wives. . . . No people who looks upon me is ever the same.

    Plague is the most successful example of oimmeddam in recorded history. Worldwide, the disease has killed an estimated 200 million people, and no outbreak of plague has claimed as many victims or caused as much anguish and sorrow as the Black Death. According to the Foster scale, a kind of Richter scale of human disaster, the medieval plague is the second greatest catastrophe in the human record. Only World War II produced more death, physical destruction, and emotional suffering, says Canadian geographer Harold D. Foster, the scale’s inventor. Harvard historian David Herbert Donald also ranks the Black Death high on a list of history’s worst catastrophes. However, the greatest—if most backhanded—tribute to the plague’s destructiveness comes from the United States Atomic Energy Commission, which used the medieval pestilence to model the consequences of all-out global nuclear war. According to the commission’s Disaster and Recovery, a Cold War–era study of thermonuclear conflict, of all recorded human events, the Black Death comes closest to mimicking nuclear war in its geographical extent, abruptness of onset and scale of casualties.

    The sheer scope of the medieval plague was extraordinary. In a handful of decades in the early and mid-fourteenth century, the plague bacillus, Yersinia pestis, swallowed Eurasia the way a snake swallows a rabbit—whole, virtually in a single sitting. From China in the east to Greenland in the west, from Siberia in the north to India in the south, the plague blighted lives everywhere, including in the ancient societies of the Middle East: Syria, Egypt, Iran, and Iraq. How many people perished in the Black Death is unknown; for Europe, the most widely accepted mortality figure is 33 percent.* In raw numbers that means that between 1347, when the plague arrived in Sicily, and 1352, when it appeared in the plains in front of Moscow, the continent lost twenty-five million of its seventy-five million inhabitants. But in parts of urban Italy, eastern England, and rural France, the loss of human life was far greater, ranging from 40 to 60 percent. The Black Death was particularly cruel to children and to women, who died in greater numbers than men, probably because they spent more time indoors, where the risk of infection was greater, and cruelest of all to pregnant women, who invariably gave birth before dying.

    Contemporaries were stunned by the scale of death; almost overnight, it seemed, one out of every three faces vanished from the human community, and on the broad shires of England, the little villages along the Seine, and the cypress-lined roads of Italy—where the afternoon light resembles time thinking about itself—one out of two faces may have disappeared. Where are our dear friends now? wrote the poet Francesco Petrarch. What lightning bolt devoured them? What earthquake toppled them? What tempest drowned them. . . . There was a crowd of us, now we are almost alone.

    In the Islamic Middle East and North Africa, mortality rates also were in the one-third range. To the Muslim historian Ibn Khaldun, it seemed as if the voice of existence in the world had called out for oblivion. In China the presence of chronic war makes it difficult to assess plague mortalities, but between 1200 and 1393 the population of the country fell 50 percent, from about 123 million to 65 million. Today a demographic disaster on the scale of the Black Death would claim 1.9 billion lives.

    The Black Death would be an extraordinary accomplishment for any wandering sickness, but it is an especially extraordinary one for a sickness not even native to humans. Plague is a disease of rodents. People are simply collateral damage, wastage in a titanic global struggle between the plague bacillus Yersinia pestis and the world’s rodent population.* Y. pestis’s natural prey are turbots, marmots, rats, squirrels, gerbils, prairie dogs, and roughly two hundred other rodent species. For the pathogen to ignite a major outbreak of human disease on the scale of the Black Death, a number of extraordinary things had to have happened. And while we will never know what all of them were, from about 1250 onward, social, economic, and perhaps ecological changes were making large parts of Eurasia an increasingly unhealthy place to live.

    One new risk factor was increased mobility. Along with facilitating international trade, the Mongol unification of the steppe brought merchants, Tartar officials, and armies into proximity with some of the most virulent, and heretofore isolated, plague foci in the world. Rodents (and more to the point, their fleas) that once would have died a lonely, harmless death on a Gobi sand dune or Siberian prairie now could be transported to faraway places by caravans, marching soldiers, and riders of the Mongol express, who could travel up to a hundred miles a day on the featureless, windswept prairies of the northern steppe.

    Environmental upheaval may also have played a role in the origin of the plague. Like a vain old matinee idol, Y. pestis is fond of ecological drum rolls. In the mid-sixth century, during the pestilence’s first (documented) visit to Europe, the Plague of Justinian, there were reports of blood-colored rain in Gaul, of a yellow substance running across the ground like a shower of rain in Wales, and of a dimming of the sun everywhere

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