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COPYRIGHT 2005 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
The Black Death, the pandemic of bubonic plague that hit Europe in the mid-fourteenth century, is like a disaster movie: a menace stalks the land; cries go up in the streets; millions of people die, not including you and me. Therefore, like disaster movies, the Black Death is very popular. Its bibliography is long. A new title has now been added to the list, "The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time" (HarperCollins; $25.95), by the science writer John Kelly.
The Black Death seems to have originated in Asia, probably on or near the Central Asian steppe, home to large rodent populations carrying the plague bacillus. In the early decades of the fourteenth century, Asia reportedly suffered a series of ecological upheavals--storms, floods, earthquakes--and these disturbances may have forced the rodents out of their holes and into contact with human beings. In any case, a mysterious illness swept through Asia in those years, and eventually it reached Crimea. On the eastern coast of Crimea, there was a city, Caffa (today, Feodosiya), that was an important trading hub, with a large community of Genoese merchants dispatching silks, sturgeon, timber, fur, and slaves from east to west. In the early thirteen-forties, Caffa was attacked by Mongols, and the conflict dragged on until, in 1347, it took an unexpected turn: the Mongol soldiers started sickening and dying. Their general, Khan Janibeg, ordered his men's corpses to be flung over the walls of Caffa, in the hope that they would infect the city. The plan apparently worked. The people of Caffa began to fall ill, at which point a number of the Genoese decided, "Let's get out of here," and ran for their ships. Belowdecks, Kelly writes darkly, "hundreds of plague-bearing rats were scratching themselves and sniffing at the cool sea air."
In those days, it was the practice of trading vessels to stick close to the coast, and to dock every three or four days. The ships from Caffa most likely did so, thereby delivering bubonic plague to port after port along the Black Sea. From those places, it seems, the plague swung inward, by land, and outward, as other ships set off. Soon, to the west, Greece, Bulgaria, and Romania were stricken; to the south, Egypt and the Levant. In October of 1347, twelve ships, whether from Caffa or (probably) elsewhere, arrived in the Sicilian port of Messina. Shortly afterward, many people in the city came down with fevers and began to spit blood. The Messinese expelled the ships. Other port cities, once they got the news, turned back arriving vessels; the townspeople shot flaming arrows at them. But the boats found harbors eventually. The Black Death had entered Europe.
It now moved through Italy, France, and Spain. By 1348, it had jumped to England. Also in that year, it crossed the Alps, and began its sweep through Germany, Austria, and Hungary. (In some places, it moved as fast as two and a half miles a day.) By 1349, it had reached Scandinavia. From there, one front hit the ice walls of Greenland and came to a stop. Another circled back to Russia, north of Caffa. "Having closed the noose," Kelly writes, "the hangman rested." In four years, the plague had killed at least...
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