The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time

by John Kelly

the financial catastrophe of 1346, when Edward III of England, who was using Florentine money to fight the Hundred Years’ War, defaulted on his loans to local banks to the tune of 1,365,000 florins—a sum the horrified Villani described as the “value of an entire kingdom.”