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. 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 cast a deep shadow across the centuries that followed, and it remains part of the collective memory of the West.

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. 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? 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. 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.

Books to Borrow. The Black Death : the great mortality of 1348-1350 : a brief history with documents @inproceedings{Aberth2016TheBD, title={The Black Death : the great mortality of 1348-1350 : a brief history with documents}, author={John Aberth}, year={2016} }
Much has changed since the 1340s, the decade the Black Death arrived in Europe, but not human nature. 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 Afte… 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. Request a sample or learn about ordering options for Black Death, The Great Mortality of 1348-1350, 2nd Edition by John Aberth from the Macmillan Learning Instructor Catalog.
For a brief moment in the middle of the fourteenth century, the words of Genesis 7—What led me from the book I planned to the book I wrote was an encounter with the literature of the Black Death. 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. 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 Caffa’s meteoric rise to international prominence also owed something to geography and economics.


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