The Black Death

The story

The ships at Messina

In October 1347 some Genoese galleys entered the port of Messina. They came from the Black Sea, where Genoa had colonies and warehouses, and carried sailors who were sick and dying. A Sicilian chronicler, the friar Michele da Piazza, tells that within a few days the illness passed from the sailors to the townspeople: those who fell ill had a very high fever, pains and swellings as big as an egg under the armpits or in the groin, and often died in three or four days. The people of Messina drove the ships away, but it was too late.

It was the plague, a disease that had not been seen in Europe for centuries. In the following four years it would kill one person in three, perhaps even more. Historians have called it the “Black Death”; those who lived through it called it simply “the great mortality”.

Where it came from

The plague was not born in Europe. In 2022 a group of scientists analysed DNA found in the teeth of people buried in 1338-1339 near Lake Issyk-Kul, in present-day Kyrgyzstan, in Central Asia: their gravestones say that they died of “pestilence”. The bacterium found is the ancestor of the one that, a few years later, devastated Europe.

From Central Asia the disease travelled along the trade routes, with the caravans, the goods and the rats. In 1346 the Mongol army of the Golden Horde was besieging Caffa, a Genoese town in Crimea. According to the account of the notary Gabriele de' Mussi of Piacenza, the besiegers, struck down by the plague, hurled the bodies of the dead over the walls with catapults. We do not know whether it really happened like that, but it is certain that from Caffa and the ports of the Black Sea ships carried the contagion to Constantinople, Egypt and Italy.

The contagion runs through Europe

From Messina the plague reached Genoa, Venice, Pisa and Marseille within a few weeks. In the spring of 1348 it arrived in Florence, then in Paris, in Spain and, in the summer, in England. In 1349 it reached Germany, Scandinavia and Ireland; between 1351 and 1353, Russia. It travelled at the speed of ships and carts: where merchants arrived, the disease arrived.

The towns, where people lived crowded together and rats were everywhere, were the worst hit. In Florence perhaps more than half the inhabitants died. Among the victims were famous people too: the Florentine chronicler Giovanni Villani, who broke off in the middle of a sentence in his chronicle, and Laura, the woman loved by the poet Francesco Petrarch: he himself noted that she had died at Avignon on 6 April 1348.

A disease nobody understood

Today we know that the plague is caused by a bacterium, Yersinia pestis, discovered only in 1894. It lives in rodents, especially black rats, and passes to humans through the bites of their fleas. In the “bubonic” form it makes the lymph nodes swell (the buboes); in the “pneumonic” form it attacks the lungs and is passed from person to person by coughing, and is almost always fatal if untreated.

In the 1300s nobody knew about bacteria. The doctors of the University of Paris, questioned by the King of France in 1348, explained that the fault lay with a conjunction of the planets and with a “corrupted air” that rose from the earth. People burned scented herbs, fled to the countryside, prayed. Some groups, the flagellants, went from town to town whipping themselves in public to ask God's forgiveness.

Fear also looked for people to blame. In many towns of Germany, Switzerland and France the Jews were falsely accused of poisoning the wells, and whole communities were killed. Pope Clement VI wrote that the accusation was absurd, because the Jews died of plague like everyone else, but it was not enough to stop the massacres.

Boccaccio and the Decameron

In Florence the writer Giovanni Boccaccio saw all this with his own eyes. A few years later he wrote the Decameron: in the introduction he describes the city full of the dead, abandoned houses, relatives who no longer dared to care for one another. Then he imagines ten young people, seven girls and three boys, who meet in the church of Santa Maria Novella and decide to leave Florence for a villa in the country. For ten days they each tell a tale a day: a hundred stories, funny, sad and cunning, which are one of the masterpieces of Italian literature.

After the storm

Around 1352 the great wave died down, but the plague did not disappear. It came back many times, every ten or twenty years, for more than three centuries: in 1630 it struck Milan (it is the plague told by Alessandro Manzoni in The Betrothed) and the last great epidemic in western Europe was that of Marseille, in 1720.