TEE GREAT MORTALITY. 403 



the Minors and the convent of Kilkenny, have written down in this 

 book these wonderful occurrences of our time as I have seen them 

 with my eyes or heard them from credible witnesses; and lest such 

 strange things should perish with the passage of time and should pass 

 from the memory of men who are to come, watching these many evils 

 and the whole world fallen into sickness, and waiting among the 

 dead till death shall come, I have put into writing what I have heard 

 truthfully and observed carefully. And lest the writing should perish 

 with the writer and the labor should fail with the laborer, I leave 

 parchment to continue the work, if it should chance that any man 

 should survive, or any of the race of Adam succeed in escaping this 

 pestilence, to continue the work which I have begun." Then follow 

 two or three confused sentences, when his expectation of death must 

 have been justified, for there is nothing more of the chronicle except 

 an annotation by a later hand, videtur quod auctor hie ohiit, 'it seems 

 that the author here died.' Another chronicler lays down his pen at 

 the onset of the plague, and long afterward when resuming his narra- 

 tive, sick at heart, perhaps, or feeling his skill inadequate to the de- 

 scription of such a period of confusion, enters in the appropriate place 

 only the words magna mortalitas, ''the great mortality.' 



This great mortality came 'from the north and east.' On the 

 confines of Asia and Europe, at the mouth of the Sea of Azov, lay 

 the medieval trading city of Kaffa. Here goods were brought from 

 Persia, from India and from China to be handed over by men of the 

 east to men of the west. Genoese and Venetian bought from Tartar 

 and Arab silk, cotton, spices, precious stones and metals, gums, woods 

 and sugar, and carried them through the Black Sea and the Mediter- 

 ranean to be distributed finally among all the countries of Europe. In 

 the year 1347 a war broke out in the Crimea between these men of the 

 west and of the east, and the Italian inhabitants of Kaffa were be- 

 sieged by the Tartars. In the midst of the hostilities a terrible pesti- 

 lence broke out among the besiegers, which devastated their hordes like 

 the hand of the destroying angel in the camp of the Assyrians. In 

 their frenzy the survivors threw numbers of the bodies of those who 

 had died of the plague from their catapults into the besieged city and 

 thus carried infection to those within. The siege was soon raised, and 

 the Genoese merchants and sailors, resuming their trading, set sail 

 toward the west. But they took with them on their voyage, along with 

 the luxuries from the far east, a new scourge for Europe, the con- 

 tagion of the plague — the Black Death, as it has been called in mod- 

 ern times. 



The symptoms of the disease were obscure and varying, and so re- 

 mained through successive attacks, until only too abundant opportuni- 

 ties for observation have recently enabled modern medical observers to 



