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

by John Kelly

by the autumn of 1347 it was in Europe.

that packs of wolves came down from the hills to attack the living and feed on the dead.

the Black Death had circumnavigated Europe in a little less than four years.

the latter, the Roman tribune Cola di Rienzo, possibly the silliest man in Europe.

carp

trivially complain

“a city of sea without fish, . . . men without faith, and women without shame,”

quays

concrete or stone inlet for loading or unloading boats

brocades

woven fabric with a raised floral design

deliver a traveler from the Crimea to China in eight to twelve months.

nothing would ever change, except that the city

would grow ever bigger and wealthier.

vulnerability to ecological disaster extended no farther than the few thousand meters of the Black Sea its fishermen fished and the half moon of sullen, windswept hills behind the city.

To the Mongols, the Genoese seemed vainglorious, supercilious, and deeply duplicitous,

a knife flashed, and a Muslim fell to the ground, dead.

a response, insolent even by Genoese standards, was sent back.

Most modern historians believe that what we call the Black Death originated somewhere in inner Asia, then spread westward to the Middle East and Europe and eastward to China along the international trade routes.

three hundred tribes perished without apparent reason in their summer and winter encampments

Subsequently, China was depopulated while India was damaged to a lesser extent.”

across the Don and Volga to the Crimea, came up behind the Tartar army in the hills above Caffa, and bit it in the back of the neck.

The Almighty had dispatched a heavenly host of warrior angels to slay the infidel Mongols with golden arrows, they told one another.

Janibeg has been proclaimed the father of biological warfare by several generations of historians,

may have invented some of the more lurid details of his story to resolve an inconvenient theological dilemma.

plague attacked the Tartars because the...

Historian Ole Benedictow thinks de’ Mussis may have fabricated the catapults and flying Mongols to explain this more theologically sensitive part of the story—God did not abandon the gallant Genoese, th...

The scenes in the harbor, the only means of escape in besieged Caffa, would have been especially horrific:

the Genoese, the people who brought the disease to Europe.

The Genoese wrought far more slaughter and cruelty . . . than even the Saracens.”

No people who looks upon me is ever the same.”

the medieval plague is the second greatest catastrophe in the human record.

only WWII claimed more lives and wrought more destruction

Today a demographic disaster on the scale of the Black Death would claim 1.9 billion lives.

riders of the Mongol express, who could travel up to a hundred miles a day on the featureless, windswept prairies of the northern steppe.

However, since the medieval world viewed natural disasters as portents and expressions of Divine Wrath, these accounts have to be read with caution.

invented or exaggerated beyond recognition after the fact to provide the Black Death with a suitably apocalyptic overture.

most severe periods of environmental stress in the last two thousand years—perhaps due to unusual seismic activity in the world’s oceans.

malnutrition in utero damages the developing immune system, creating a lifelong vulnerability to illness in general.

a crumbling Roman Europe lost as much as one-half to two-thirds of its population. From

it would have failed as miserably as it did in the streets of Victorian San Francisco.

offal

variety meat dish of animal organs

. . . am waiting among the dead for death to come.”

seabed baked dry by a billion years of sun.

with sex tips—“the merchant who wishes to take a woman with him from Tana can do so”

Beyond Arabia, everything faded into a myth wrapped in a fable.

As agricultural productivity improved, living standards rose, producing a baby boom of historic proportions.

by 1212, only Grenada on the southern tip of Iberia failed to fly the flag of the “Reconquista.

The ubiquitousness of one species in particular struck him. “There are great numbers of Pharaoh’s rats in burrows on [these] plains,” he noted. “Pharaoh’s rat” was a medieval term for the tarabagan.

the day after his death an abbey official would be at the door to claim his best horse or cow from his widow as a heriot, or death tax.

Good weather—and good soil—made it relatively easy to grow surplus crops, and the booming towns provided an eager market,

Between 1250 and 1270 the long medieval boom sputtered to an end.

Some of the good land brought into service during the Great Clearances of the twelfth century had been overfarmed,

marginal land, which never should have been cleared in the first place, was giving out entirely.