Its subject is an outbreak of a particular infectious disease in a particular time and place. 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. 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
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