From Caffa to Vietnam and Afghanistan, no human activity has been more closely associated with plague than war, and few centuries have been as violent as the fourteenth. In the decades before the plague, the Scots were killing the English; the English, the French; the French, the Flemings; and the Italians and the Spanish, each other. More to the point, in those savage decades, the nature of battle changed in fundamental ways. Armies grew larger, battles bloodier, civilians were attacked more frequently, and property was destroyed more routinely—and each change helped to make the medieval
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