The Black Death
It killed one in three Europeans. The survivors demanded higher wages
Open
On the fourteenth of February, thirteen forty nine, Strasbourg took its Jewish community to the cemetery and burned two thousand people alive.
The plague had not reached Strasbourg yet. It arrived months later.
That same week the council divided the dead's property among the citizens and cancelled the debts the citizens owed them.
The Black Death is remembered as the moment Europe lost its mind. A panic does not keep a ledger.
Scene 1Messina, October thirteen forty seven
Twelve Genoese trading ships come into the Sicilian port of Messina. Most of the sailors aboard are already dead.
The ones still alive are covered in black boils that ooze blood and pus.
The harbor authorities order the ships back out to sea. It is too late.
Within six months the plague is in Genoa, in Venice, in Marseilles. By thirteen forty nine it is in England, Germany and Scandinavia. By thirteen fifty one, Moscow.
What was moving was a bacterium. Yersinia pestis, identified in two thousand and eleven from teeth in mass graves, carried by fleas that lived on black rats that lived on ships.
It came in three forms. In the lymph nodes it raised the swellings called buboes and killed inside a week. In the lungs it spread on the breath and killed in two to three days.
In the blood it could kill in hours, before a single symptom showed.
Scene 2The arithmetic
Europe held about seventy five million people before the plague. By thirteen fifty three it held between thirty and fifty million.
In Cairo the historian al-Maqrizi records ten to twenty thousand dead a day at the peak.
In Avignon, where the papacy sat, the cemeteries overflowed, and Pope Clement the Sixth consecrated the river Rhone so that bodies could be thrown into it.
In Siena, Agnolo di Tura wrote down what he had done himself, because no gravedigger would come.
· Sienese Chronicle · c. 1348
“And I, Agnolo di Tura, buried my five children with my own hands. And there were also those who were so sparsely covered with earth that the dogs dragged them forth.”
“There was no one who wept for any death, for all awaited death.”
Scene 3Paris, October thirteen forty eight
King Philip the Sixth asks the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Paris to explain the pestilence.
The cause, it reports, is a conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter and Mars in the sign of Aquarius, drawing poisoned vapors up out of the land and the sea.
Behind the astrology sits the real conviction. God has sent this for human sin.
The flagellants cross Germany, the Low Countries and Hungary. Two hundred to three hundred men enter a city, whip themselves bloody for thirty three days, one for each year of Christ's life, then move on.
Scene 4Chillon, and what was copied out of it
In September thirteen forty eight, Jews held in the castle of Chillon on Lake Geneva are tortured until they confess to poisoning the wells.
The confession is taken from a surgeon named Balavigny, then copied and forwarded town to town, and it crosses Europe faster than the plague does.
In Basel the community is locked into a wooden building on an island in the Rhine and burned. In Erfurt three thousand die in one day. In Mainz six thousand fight back and are destroyed.
More than two hundred Jewish communities are annihilated in three years.
The chronicler Jacob von Konigshofen recorded what Strasbourg did next.
· Strasbourg Chronicle · c. 1349
“The money was divided among the artisans. The council took the cash that the Jews possessed and divided the debts owed to the Jews among the citizens.”
Scene 5One to two pence a day
Before the plague an English laborer with no land earned one to two pence a day. There were more people than land, so the lord set the wage.
About four in ten English peasants were villeins. A villein could not leave the manor, or marry, or sell land, without the lord's permission.
Then a third to a half of the country died, and by thirteen fifty one some farm workers were earning double and triple what they had been paid.
Parliament, the landlord class, passed the Statute of Laborers in thirteen fifty one, fixing wages at the thirteen forty six level and making refusal of the old rate a crime.
The manor court records show those same lords competing for workers with higher wages, free meals and lighter obligations, while backing the law in public.
Five accounts
Five accounts of this, and they are not five theories about what killed people. That question closed in a laboratory in two thousand and eleven.
bystanderEuropean Christian: Divine Punishment
The Christian west
The first account is the one the West told about itself, and its strongest evidence is not belief. It is who died.
Parish records in England show clergy mortality of forty to fifty percent, higher than the general population, because a priest was obliged to attend the dying.
Historians run a line from that shortage to John Wycliffe challenging the authority of the Church in the thirteen seventies, and on to the Reformation.
Giovanni Boccaccio survived the plague in Florence and set the collapse down in the opening of the Decameron. The sick were left by their families. Property changed hands by proximity rather than inheritance.
“How many valiant men, how many fair ladies, took breakfast with their kinfolk and that same night supped with their ancestors in the other world!”
Read the full account
Narrative
The dying began before anyone could name the disease. In Siena, Agnolo di Tura buried five of his own children with his hands because no gravedigger would come. "There was no one who wept for any death," he wrote, "for all awaited death." In Avignon, Guy de Chauliac, physician to Pope Clement VI, recorded that at the peak of mortality in early 1348, the pope sat between two enormous fires. His doctors believed heat purified the corrupted air. Clement survived. Two-thirds of the College of Cardinals did not.
The dominant explanation was theological. The Faculty of Medicine at the University of Paris, commissioned by King Philip VI to explain the pestilence, issued its report in October 1348: a conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars in the sign of Aquarius on March 20, 1345, had drawn up noxious vapors from land and sea. Behind the astrology lay the conviction that God had sent the plague as punishment for human sin. Flagellant processions, groups of men who marched through towns whipping themselves bloody in public penance, swept through Germany, the Low Countries, and Hungary. The movement peaked in 1349 with processions of 200 to 300 flagellants entering cities, performing their ritual for 33 days (one for each year of Christ's life), and moving on. Clement VI initially tolerated the movement, then condemned it in a papal bull of October 1349 when flagellant groups began attacking clergy and Jews.
The plague shattered institutional authority. Priests who administered last rites died in enormous numbers. Parish records in England show clergy mortality rates of 40 to 50 percent, higher than the general population because of their obligation to attend the dying. Monasteries were devastated. The resulting shortage of educated clergy led to rapid ordination of poorly trained replacements, feeding a crisis of clerical credibility that historians trace forward to John Wycliffe's challenge to Church authority in the 1370s and, ultimately, to the Reformation.
Boccaccio framed the moral collapse in the Decameron's introduction: laws human and divine dissolved together. The sick were abandoned by family. Bodies lay unburied in streets and houses. Property changed hands not by inheritance but by proximity. Some responded with extreme piety; others, as Boccaccio observed, with extreme indulgence: "drinking excessively, enjoying life to the full, going about singing and merrymaking." The plague did not create atheism, but it created space for questioning whether the institutional Church could explain or prevent suffering on this scale.
Arguments
- The plague was understood as divine punishment for collective sin, reinforcing penitential theology
- Flagellant movements represented popular religious response outside Church control
- Massive clergy mortality undermined institutional Church authority and credibility
- The cultural response of Boccaccio and the danse macabre tradition reflected a transformed relationship with death
Sources
- The Decameron
- The Black Death: A Turning Point in History?
- In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made
academicIslamic Medical: Contagion Before Germ Theory
Islamic medicine
The second account belongs to physicians who had the mechanism right five hundred years before germ theory.
In thirteen forty nine, while Paris read the planets, Ibn Khatima of Almeria wrote that the disease was caused by minute bodies that entered the body and produced infection.
“It has been established by experience that if a person who is sick with this disease is placed near a healthy person, the healthy person will almost certainly fall sick.”
His contemporary Ibn al-Khatib, in Granada, said why the rival theory failed. Corrupted air cannot explain why the plague takes one household and leaves the house beside it.
“The existence of contagion is established by experience, investigation, the evidence of the senses, and trustworthy reports.”
He knew what he was contradicting. A hadith attributed to the Prophet Muhammad holds that there is no contagion, and that disease comes from God alone.
He was accused of heresy and strangled in prison in thirteen seventy four. The charge was political. The unorthodoxy did not help him.
Read the full account
Narrative
In 1349, while European physicians debated whether the plague spread through corrupted air (miasma) or astrological conjunction, Ibn Khatima of Almeria wrote that the disease was caused by "minute bodies" that entered the human body and produced infection. His contemporary, Ibn al-Khatib of Granada, went further: in his treatise Muqni'at al-Sa'il, he argued that the evidence for contagion was empirical and undeniable. People who had contact with the sick fell ill. People who isolated themselves survived. Those who handled the clothing of the dead contracted the disease. The miasma theory could not explain why plague struck one household and spared the one next door.
Ibn al-Khatib was explicit: "The existence of contagion is established by experience, investigation, the evidence of the senses, and trustworthy reports." He knew this contradicted Islamic orthodoxy. A hadith attributed to the Prophet Muhammad stated that there was no contagion ("la adwa") and that disease came from God alone. Ibn al-Khatib acknowledged the theological difficulty and argued that empirical observation must take precedence: "If it were asked, how do we accept the possibility of contagion when the religious law denies it, we reply that the existence of contagion has been established by experience." He was later accused of heresy and strangled in prison in 1374. The reasons were political, though his medical unorthodoxy did not help.
The Islamic world's experience of the plague differed from Europe's in institutional response. Quarantine measures in Mamluk Cairo, while not systematized as in Venice, included the prohibition of public gatherings and the burning of infected clothing. The concept of "tawakkul", trust in God's plan, influenced the response: many Muslim scholars argued that fleeing a plague-stricken area was impermissible, as it implied distrust of divine will. This theological position, based on another hadith ("If you hear of plague in a land, do not enter it; if it is in a land where you are, do not leave"), had the incidental effect of limiting population movement, a crude quarantine by theology.
Al-Maqrizi's account of the plague in Cairo records that by October 1348, the city was burying between 10,000 and 20,000 dead per day. Egypt's agricultural system, dependent on the annual Nile flood and intensive irrigation labor, collapsed as the rural population died. Sugar production in Upper Egypt declined by two-thirds. Tax revenues fell so sharply that the Mamluk state could no longer maintain its military. The long-term consequences were strategic: the weakened Mamluk sultanate fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1517, a conquest that might not have been possible without the demographic catastrophe of the 14th century.
Arguments
- Ibn Khatima and Ibn al-Khatib identified contagion as the mechanism of plague transmission 500 years before germ theory
- Empirical observation was explicitly placed above theological orthodoxy by Islamic physicians
- The Mamluk state's demographic collapse from plague contributed to its eventual Ottoman conquest
- Islamic theological responses to plague inadvertently produced quarantine-like restrictions on movement
Sources
- Islamic Medicine: Tradition, Scholarship, and Science
- The Black Death in the Middle East
- Muqni'at al-Sa'il 'an al-Marad al-Ha'il
vanquishedJewish Community: Scapegoats and Survivors
The Jewish communities
The third account begins with the calendar, and the calendar is the argument.
Many of the massacres came before the plague reached the town, and some came where it never struck hard. The disease was the pretext, not the cause.
What the killings reliably produced was money. Jewish communities were concentrated in moneylending, trade and skilled crafts, because those were often the only occupations legally open to them.
The opposition is on the record too. In July thirteen forty eight Pope Clement the Sixth issued a bull saying Jews were dying of the plague like everyone else and could not be its cause.
“It was brought to our attention by public fame, or more accurately infamy, that certain Christians, seduced by the Devil, blame the pestilence on poisonings carried out by Jews.”
The survivors moved east into Poland and Lithuania, where King Casimir the Third offered them charters and protection.
Read the full account
Narrative
In September 1348, Jews in the Castle of Chillon on Lake Geneva were arrested and tortured until they confessed to poisoning wells. The confession, extracted under duress from a surgeon named Balavigny, spread across Europe faster than the plague itself. It was copied and forwarded from town to town. By November, the city council of Strasbourg had received it. On February 14, 1349, before the plague had even arrived in Strasbourg, the city's 2,000 Jews were taken to the Jewish cemetery and burned alive. Those who agreed to convert were spared. The city council then divided the victims' property among the citizenry and forgave all debts owed to Jews.
The pattern repeated across Central Europe. In Basel, the Jewish community was locked in a wooden building on an island in the Rhine and burned on January 16, 1349. In Erfurt, 3,000 Jews were killed in a single day. In Mainz, the Jewish community (one of the largest in Europe, numbering 6,000) fought back before being overwhelmed and destroyed in August 1349. In total, over 200 Jewish communities were annihilated between 1348 and 1351. The geographic pattern is telling: many massacres occurred before the plague arrived, or in areas where it never struck heavily. The violence was not a spontaneous reaction to disease but an organized campaign that exploited the plague as pretext.
Pope Clement VI intervened. In July 1348, he issued the bull Quamvis perfidiam, declaring that Jews were dying of the plague like everyone else and could not therefore be its cause. He threatened excommunication for anyone who harmed Jews or seized their property. A second bull in September 1348 repeated the prohibition. The papal intervention saved some communities. In Avignon, under the pope's direct protection, the Jewish population survived largely intact. But the bulls had limited effect in the Rhineland and the Holy Roman Empire, where local authorities and mobs acted independently of papal authority.
The well-poisoning accusation had a specific economic function. Jewish communities in medieval Europe were concentrated in moneylending, trade, and skilled crafts, occupations to which they were often legally restricted. Destruction of the Jewish community meant cancellation of debts and seizure of liquid assets. The Strasbourg massacre explicitly included debt forgiveness. In Nuremberg, the city used the cleared Jewish quarter to build a new marketplace, the site of the modern Hauptmarkt. The massacres permanently altered European Jewish geography: surviving communities migrated eastward into Poland and Lithuania, where King Casimir III offered protection and charters. This eastward migration created the Ashkenazi population centers that would endure until the 20th century.
Arguments
- Jewish massacres during the plague were organized economic campaigns, not spontaneous panic
- Many pogroms occurred before the plague arrived, proving the disease was pretext rather than cause
- Papal intervention saved some communities but was insufficient against local anti-Jewish violence
- The massacres permanently shifted European Jewish geography eastward into Poland and Lithuania
Sources
- The Black Death and the Jews, 1348-1349
- European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, 1550-1750
- The Black Death: The Great Mortality of 1348-1350, A Brief History with Documents
revisionistPeasant and Laborer: The Great Leveling
The peasants and laborers
The fourth account says the mass death was a transfer of power, and it can show the transfer.
By fifteen hundred, villeinage had effectively disappeared from England. The law written to prevent that had sat on the books for a century and a half.
Thirty years of wage suppression produced the English Peasants' Revolt of thirteen eighty one. The trigger was a poll tax, a flat charge per head that fell hardest on the poor.
Wat Tyler and John Ball brought perhaps sixty thousand people into London. They burned the Savoy Palace of John of Gaunt, opened the prisons, and cornered the king, who was fourteen, at Mile End.
“When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?”
Richard the Second promised to abolish serfdom. Tyler was killed at a parley at Smithfield, the revolt collapsed, and the king took back every concession.
“Villeins ye are still, and villeins ye shall remain.”
Read the full account
Narrative
Before the plague, a landless laborer in England earned roughly 1 to 2 pence per day. There were more people than available land. Lords set wages; tenants accepted them or starved. Villeinage, a form of serfdom that bound peasants to their lord's manor, attached to roughly 40% of the English peasantry. A villein could not leave the manor, marry, or sell land without the lord's permission. The system had functioned for centuries because demographic pressure ensured a permanent labor surplus.
The plague inverted the equation. By 1350, between one-third and one-half of England's population was dead. Labor became scarce. Wages rose immediately: by 1350-1351, some agricultural workers were earning double or triple their pre-plague rates. Peasants left manors whose lords could not match competing offers. Parliament, dominated by the landlord class, responded with the Statute of Laborers in 1351, which fixed wages at 1346 levels and criminalized the refusal to work at pre-plague rates. Justices of the peace were empowered to enforce wage controls. The statute was widely evaded. Manorial court records show lords competing for workers by offering higher wages, free meals, and reduced obligations, while publicly supporting the legislation.
The tension between economic reality and legal suppression produced the English Peasants' Revolt of 1381. The immediate trigger was a poll tax (a flat per-capita levy that fell disproportionately on the poor), but the underlying cause was thirty years of accumulated rage against wage suppression, labor restrictions, and serfdom itself. Wat Tyler and John Ball led an army of perhaps 60,000 into London. They burned the Savoy Palace of John of Gaunt, opened the prisons, and cornered 14-year-old King Richard II at Mile End. Richard promised to abolish serfdom. When Tyler was killed at a parley at Smithfield, the revolt collapsed. Richard revoked every concession. But the structural transformation was irreversible. By 1500, villeinage had effectively disappeared from England.
The pattern varied across Europe. In Western Europe (France, the Low Countries, parts of Germany), serfdom declined as peasants leveraged their scarcity. In Eastern Europe, the opposite occurred. Polish, Prussian, and Russian landlords tightened labor controls after the plague, binding peasants more firmly to the land to prevent migration. Historians call this the "second serfdom," a divergence between Western and Eastern European labor systems that persisted for five centuries. Robert Brenner and other Marxist historians argue that the plague itself did not determine outcomes: identical demographic shocks produced opposite results depending on the balance of class power. Where peasants were organized and lords were weak, freedom expanded. Where lords controlled state institutions, coercion intensified.
Arguments
- Labor scarcity after the plague doubled wages and gave surviving peasants unprecedented bargaining power
- The Statute of Laborers (1351) attempted to suppress market forces through wage controls and failed
- The English Peasants' Revolt of 1381 was a direct consequence of thirty years of post-plague labor conflict
- Eastern and Western Europe diverged, with the same demographic shock producing opposite outcomes depending on class power
Sources
- The Black Death: Natural and Human Disaster in Medieval Europe
- The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century
- Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe
bystanderMongol Trade Route: The Silk Road Pandemic
The Mongol road
The fifth account says the story starts a long way east, and years earlier than any of this.
A study in Nature in two thousand and twenty two traced the ancestor of every known Black Death strain to graves near Lake Issyk Kul, in what is now Kyrgyzstan, dated thirteen thirty eight.
What carried it west was the Mongol Empire's own infrastructure. The same roads that moved silk, spices, paper and gunpowder moved rats, fleas and Yersinia pestis.
In thirteen forty six the Golden Horde besieged the Genoese post at Caffa, in Crimea. The notary Gabriele de Mussi wrote the account everybody repeats.
“The dying Tartars, realizing that they had no hope of escape, lost interest in the siege and catapulted the infected corpses into the city.”
China's population fell from roughly a hundred and twenty million in thirteen forty to sixty five million by thirteen ninety three. The Middle East lost a third of its people.
Ibn Khaldun, writing from the Maghreb, gave it the sentence it deserved.
“Civilization in both the East and the West was visited by a destructive plague which devastated nations and caused populations to vanish.”
Read the full account
Narrative
The plague did not begin in Europe. It ended there. Yersinia pestis originated in Central Asia. A 2022 study in Nature traced the ancestral strain to burial sites near Lake Issyk-Kul in modern Kyrgyzstan, dating to 1338-1339. The tombstones, inscribed in Syriac, recorded an unusual number of deaths attributed to "pestilence" (mawtana). DNA extracted from the teeth of individuals buried at the site matched the genetic ancestor of all known Black Death strains.
The bacterium traveled the arteries of the Mongol Empire. The Pax Mongolica, the period of relative stability that followed the Mongol conquests of the 13th century, had connected China, Central Asia, Persia, and Europe through a network of caravan routes, postal relay stations (yam), and trading posts more extensive than any previous system. A merchant could travel from Beijing to the Black Sea ports under a single political authority. The same infrastructure that moved silk, spices, paper, and gunpowder moved rats, fleas, and Yersinia pestis.
The siege of Caffa in 1346 provides the most dramatic transmission narrative. The Golden Horde (the Mongol successor state controlling the western steppe) besieged the Genoese trading colony on the Crimean coast. When plague struck the besieging army, the Mongol commander Janibeg reportedly catapulted infected corpses over the walls. The Genoese notary Gabriele de' Mussi wrote the account in his Istoria de Morbo, though modern historians note that de' Mussi may not have been present and that the plague likely entered Caffa through its rat population regardless of the catapults. The fleeing Genoese carried it to Constantinople, where it killed the son of Emperor John VI Kantakouzenos, and from there to every port in the Mediterranean.
The Central Asian origin matters because it reframes the Black Death from a European catastrophe to a Eurasian one. China's population fell from roughly 120 million in 1340 to 65 million by 1393, though separating plague deaths from the violence of the Yuan dynasty's collapse and the wars that produced the Ming dynasty is impossible. The Middle East lost an estimated one-third of its population. Ibn Khaldun, writing from the Maghreb, observed that "civilization in both the East and the West was visited by a destructive plague which devastated nations and caused populations to vanish. It swallowed up many of the good things of civilization and wiped them out." The plague was not a European event that happened to arrive from elsewhere. It was a global catastrophe that struck Europe last.
Arguments
- Yersinia pestis originated in Central Asia (Issyk-Kul, Kyrgyzstan) and traveled the Silk Road to Europe
- The Pax Mongolica's trade infrastructure was simultaneously the plague's transmission network
- The siege of Caffa (1346) is the most narrated transmission event but may overstate intentional biological warfare
- The Black Death was a Eurasian pandemic, not a European one; China and the Middle East suffered comparable losses
Sources
- The Origin of the Black Death: Yersinia pestis at the Crossroads of the Silk Road
- The Black Death in the Middle East
- Istoria de Morbo sive Mortalitate quae fuit Anno Domini 1348
The turn
And here is what each of them cannot account for.
European Christian: Divine Punishment
The Christian account explains the flagellants and the emptied monasteries honestly. It has nothing to say about the physicians in Granada who had the mechanism right while Paris read the planets, and it does not look at what its own cities did in those years.
From the record
Rational medical approaches attempted by Arab and some European physiciansEconomic consequences and labor market transformationPersecution of Jews as a social response to the crisisPlague's origins in Central Asia and its movement along trade routesIslamic Medical: Contagion Before Germ Theory
The Islamic medical account is proud of putting evidence above doctrine, and it has earned that. It passes quickly over the teaching that a Muslim must not leave a plague stricken land, which the same account elsewhere credits as a crude quarantine.
From the record
European medical responses and institutional innovations (quarantine systems)Christian theological frameworks and cultural responsesThe plague's impact on European labor markets and feudalismJewish persecution across Europe during the plague yearsJewish Community: Scapegoats and Survivors
The Jewish account has the fewest survivors and the clearest documents, and it leaves out everything that is not the persecution. The medicine. The labor collapse. The Christians dying in the same streets. Its own record shows a pope ordering the killing to stop, so the Church was never one actor.
From the record
Medical and scientific aspects of plague transmissionChristian suffering and theological crisis during the pandemicLabor market transformation and peasant empowermentNon-European experiences of the plaguePeasant and Laborer: The Great Leveling
The peasants' account has the weakest causation, and its honest version admits it. Robert Brenner's point is that the identical shock produced opposite results. In eastern Europe the landlords tightened the bonds instead, and the second serfdom ran five more centuries. It also tells a whole century with no priest and no burned community in it.
From the record
Religious and theological dimensions of the plague experienceMedical knowledge and public health responsesJewish persecution and scapegoatingUrban and commercial impacts distinct from agricultural laborMongol Trade Route: The Silk Road Pandemic
The Mongol account is the widest and the least certain. Its most repeated scene may not have happened as told. Gabriele de Mussi may never have been at Caffa, and the plague was probably already inside the walls, in the rats.
From the record
European religious, cultural, and theological responses to the plagueJewish persecution and scapegoating across European citiesLabor market transformation and the decline of serfdomLong-term institutional and political changes within European states
Close
Venice set forty days of isolation and called it the quarantina. The practice is still named after the number.
England did not have its people back until the sixteenth century.
And in Nuremberg, the council cleared the ground where the Jewish quarter had been and built a marketplace on it. The market is still there. It is called the Hauptmarkt.
The record
By the numbers
- Span
- 15 yrs1346-1353
- Killed
- 75-200Macross Eurasia and North Africa, estimates vary; recent…
- Displaced
- Killed 30-60% of Europe's population…
- Place
- Multiple
Key figures
- Giovanni BoccaccioFlorentine author who witnessed the plague and recorded it in the Decameron (1353)1313 to 1375
- Ibn KhatimaAndalusian physician who identified contagion as the mechanism of plague transmission (1349)1369 to ?
- Guy de ChauliacPersonal physician to Pope Clement VI in Avignon; treated plague victims and survived1300 to 1368
- Pope Clement VIHead of the Catholic Church during the plague; issued papal bulls against Jewish persecution1291 to 1352
- al-MaqriziMamluk historian who documented the plague's devastation in Cairo and Egypt1364 to 1442
- Ibn al-KhatibAndalusian polymath who argued plague spread by contagion, against prevailing miasma theory1313 to 1374
Primary sources
· The Decameron, Introduction to the First Day · 1353
“How many valiant men, how many fair ladies, took breakfast with their kinfolk and that same night supped with their ancestors in the other world!”
· Muqaddimah · 1377
“The plague penetrated the seas through Crimea and killed most of the people there. It then crossed into Sicily, Sardinia, and the rest of Europe, covering it all.”
· Sienese Chronicle · c. 1348
“There was no one who wept for any death, for all awaited death.”
Threads
- The Silk RoadA Roman woman wore Chinese silk without either empire knowing the other existed.
- The Mongol EmpireHe couldn’t read, but he wrote a legal code that governed more people than Rome ever did.
- The Mongol Conquest of BaghdadThe Tigris ran black with ink from a million manuscripts. Then Hulagu built the world’s finest observatory with the looted books.