The Black Death

In October 1347, a Genoese trading fleet sailed into the harbor at Messina, Sicily. The sailors on board were already dying. Authorities ordered the ships out immediately, but it was too late. Within weeks, the disease had reached Catania. By January it was in Marseilles. By summer it had crossed the Alps.

The The catastrophic pandemic of 1347–1353 that swept through Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe, killing an estimated 75 to 200 million people worldwide. The name came later — contemporary Europeans called it the "great pestilence" or "great mortality." The term "Black Death" appears in Scandinavian sources in the 1550s, likely referring to the dark skin discoloration caused by subcutaneous bleeding. arrived in Europe during a period of existing fragility. The century before had seen a series of crop failures and famines — the Great Famine of 1315–1322 had already killed millions. Populations were weakened, harvests were thin, and the infrastructure of medieval life was stretched. The plague found a continent primed for catastrophe.

What followed was unlike anything Europe had ever experienced. Contemporary accounts reached for the language of apocalypse because nothing else seemed adequate. The Florentine chronicler Giovanni Villani started writing a history of the plague in 1348. He never finished it. He died of it in June.