Prologue • 7Whatever the “plague” disease of the second pandemic was, it remained
the most dreaded malady known to early modern Europeans. Survivors of its
first appearance in Padua in 1348 called it worse than Noah’s flood. Later
generations invented the term Black Deathfor this epidemic; perhaps, histo-
rians conjecture, they had in mind the dark blotches on the skin from he-
morrhaging, or maybe a “black” death was the only way to picture so calami-
tous an event.^11
Historians think the Black Death’s most likely source was the steppes of
Asia, from which it traveled westward along the Silk Road of merchant
travel to the Black Sea and Constantinople, one of the greatest cities of the
medieval world. From there it reached Sicily in 1347. In 1348 staggering fatal-
ities were reported around the Christian and Muslim shoreline of the Med-
iterranean Sea, from Marseilles to Alexandria, as well as in the interior of
Italy and France.
As the infection spread west, north, and east through the rest of Europe, it
devastated capital cities and the remotest of villages. No place was safe. In
Italy, Spain, France, Germany, the British Isles, the Low Countries, Scandi-
navia, and Eastern Europe, community after community braced itself for the
onslaught, warned by graphic descriptions of the epidemic from elsewhere.
Guarded, walled towns tried to keep the plague away but to no avail. Not
even Venice, which responded more swiftly and thoroughly than most en-
dangered centers, could cope with the huge numbers of sick, dying, and
dead. This thriving Adriatic port may have lost 90 , 000 of an estimated pop-
ulation of 150 , 000 during its eighteen-month siege, an astounding 60 per-
cent.^12 In Florence the dead were piled up in pits—“like cheese between lay-
ers of lasagna,” an eyewitness said.^13 Historical demographers, who once
thought contemporaries exaggerated the mortality, are now taking their fig-
ures seriously, saying that Europe may have lost close to half of its population
to the Black Death.^14
Today’s readers may recall the nursery rhyme:
Ring around a Rosie
A pocket full of Posy
Atchoo! Atchoo!
We all fall down!“Ring around the Rosie” characterized the red tokens of plague that ap-
peared on the chest. The “pocket full of Posy” was a satchel of herbs worn as
protection against infectious air. “Atchoo” was the sound of sneezing that