The Black Death полностью

Certainly things seemed to have gone badly wrong. An imposing series of disasters studded the history of the previous years.^{1} In 1333 parching drought with consequential famine had ravaged the plains watered by the rivers Kiang and Hoai. Then had come floods in which four hundred thousand were said to have died, as a result of which, presumably, the mountain Tsincheou ‘fell in’, causing great chasms in the earth. In 1334 there was drought in Houkouang and Honan followed by swarms of locusts, famine and pestilence. An earthquake in the mountains of Ki-Ming-Chan formed a lake more than a hundred leagues in circumference. In Tche the dead were believed to number more than five million. Earthquakes and floods continued from 1337 to 1345; locusts had never been so destructive; there was ‘subterraneous thunder’ in Canton.

But these were mere curtain-raisers for the real calamity. Several contemporary accounts exist of the earliest days of the Black Death, so similar in detail as to suggest that they may well have come from the same source. Almost the only man known to have been at or near the spot, Ibn-Bātuta, ‘The Traveller’ is disappointingly reticent.^{2} An anonymous Flemish cleric, on the other hand, was fortunately unfettered by the restrictions imposed on those who have actually seen what they describe. Basing himself on a letter from a friend in the papal curia at Avignon he recounted how: ‘in the East, hard by Greater India, in a certain province, horrors and unheard of tempests overwhelmed the whole province for the space of three days. On the first day there was a rain of frogs, serpents, lizards, scorpions, and many venomous beasts of that sort. On the second, thunder was heard, and lightning and sheets of fire fell upon the earth, mingled with hail stones of marvellous size; which slew almost all, from the greatest even to the least. On the third day there fell fire from heaven and stinking smoke, which slew all that were left of men and beasts, and burned up all the cities and towns in those parts. By these tempests the whole province was infected; and it is conjectured that, through the foul blast of wind that came from the South, the whole seashore and surrounding lands were infected, and are waxing more and more poisonous from day to day…’^{3}

This concept of a corrupted atmosphere, visible in the form of mist or smoke, drifting across the world and overwhelming all whom it encountered, was one of the main assumptions on which the physicians of the Middle Ages based their efforts to check the plague. For one chronicler the substance of the cloud was more steam than smoke.^{4} Its origin was to be found in a war which had taken place between the sea and the sun in the Indian Ocean. The waters of the ocean were drawn up as a vapour so corrupted by the multitude of dead and rotting fish that the sun was quite unable to consume it nor could it fall again as healthy rain. So it drifted away, an evil, noxious mist, contaminating all it touched. For the Chronicler of Este, however, this cloud of death owed nothing to the sea:

By the end of 1346, therefore, it was widely known, at least in the major European seaports, that a plague of unparalleled fury was raging in the East. Fearful rumours were heard of the disease’s progress: ‘India was depopulated, Tartary, Mesopotamia, Syria, Armenia were covered with dead bodies; the Kurds fled in vain to the mountains. In Caramania and Caesarea none were left alive…’^{6} But still it does not seem to have occurred to anyone that the plague might one day strike at Europe.

The most circumstantial account of how the disease made this fatal leap comes from Gabriel de Mussis. At one time, indeed, it was thought that the writer had himself visited Asia Minor and had been a passenger on the ship which carried the plague to Europe.^{7} A subsequent editor, however, has reluctantly but decisively established that de Mussis, during the critical period, never stirred from his native town of Piacenza.^{8}