Evildoers were using poisons to spread the plague, warned Alfonso of Cordova. To many of Alfonso’s contemporaries, that could only mean one thing. The Great Mortality occasioned the most violent outburst of anti-Semitism in the Middle Ages, a period already marked by violent anti-Semitic outbursts.

Few events in history have evoked such extremes of human behavior as the medieval plague. There was the horrendous brutality of the Flagellants, who trampled the roads of Europe, flailing their half-naked bodies and murdering Jews, and the sweet selflessness of the sisters of Hôtel-Dieu, who sacrificed their own lives to care for the plague victims of Paris. There was the fearfulness of Pope Clement VI, who fled Avignon, seat of the medieval Church, a few months after the pestilence arrived, and the fearlessness of his chief physician, Gui de Chauliac, who stayed in the afflicted city until the bitter end, so as “to avoid infamy.” The Great Mortality produced many examples of great cunning and compassion, charity and greed, and, in a testimonial to the stubbornness—some would say the irredeemable wickedness— of human character, it also provided a backdrop for both the most notorious royal murder trial and greatest comic opera of the Middle Ages, the former featuring, as defendant, the beautiful Queen Joanna of Naples; the latter, the Roman tribune Cola di Rienzo, possibly the silliest man in Europe. Throughout the worst months of the plague, somewhere in Europe men were always waging war on one another.

The Great Mortality attempts to bring alive the world described in the letters, chronicles, and reminiscences of contemporaries. It is a narrative of a supreme moment in human history told through the voices, personalities, and experiences of the men and women who lived through it. However, since it is impossible to understand the pestilence without understanding its historical context, it is also a book about a time as well as an event. As the British historian Bruce Campbell has observed, the decades preceding the plague were “exceptionally hazardous and unhealthy for both humans and domesticated animals.” Almost everywhere in Europe there was war, overpopulation (relative to resources), economic stagnation and decline, filth, overcrowding, epidemic (nonplague) disease, and famine, as well as climatic and ecological instability.

In retrospect, contemporaries interpreted the reign of woe as a portent of the coming apocalypse, and in a sense it was. The economic and social conditions of the early fourteenth century, and the environmental instability of the period, made Europe an unhealthy place to live.

The Great Mortality also looks at new theories about the nature of the medieval plague. For well over a century, it has been considered settled fact that the pestilence was a catastrophic outbreak of bubonic plague and a variant called pneumonic plague, which attacks the lungs. However, since in modern settings neither form of plague looks or acts much like the illness described in the Black Death literature, a number of historians and scientists have recently begun to argue that the mortality was caused by a different infectious illness, perhaps anthrax, perhaps an Ebola-like ailment.

While history may never repeat itself, “man,” as Voltaire once observed, “always does.” The factors that allowed the Black Death to escape the remoteness of inner Asia and to savage the cities of medieval Europe, China, and the Middle East still operate. Except, of course, today they operate on a vastly larger scale. Trade and human expansion, the twin anthems of modern globalization, have opened up ever more remote areas of the globe, while transportation has enhanced the mobility of both men and microbes incalculably. A journey that took the plague bacillus decades to complete in the fourteenth century today takes barely a day. And for all the triumphs of modern science, infectious disease retains the ability to render us as impotent as our medieval ancestors.

In the spring of 2001 English journalist Felicity Spector was reminded of that fact when an epidemic of hoof-and-mouth disease spun out of control and the British government, helpless to contain the outbreak, was forced to resort to methods that made Britain seem “suddenly, shockingly medieval.” We thought, wrote Spector in the New York Times, that “modern medicine had brought us beyond the days when the only solution to an infectious disease was to burn entire herds of livestock, to close vast swaths of countryside, to soak rags and spread them on the roads. . . . [M]odernity, it seems, is a very fragile thing.”

Chapter One
Oimmeddam

FEODOSIYA SITS ON THE EASTERN COAST OF THE CRIMEA, A RECTANGULAR spit of land where the Eurasian steppe stops to dip its toe into the Black Sea. Today the city is a rusty wasteland of post-Soviet decay. But in the Middle Ages, when Feodosiya was called Caffa and a Genoese proconsul sat in a white palace above the harbor, the city was one of the fastest-growing ports in the medieval world. In 1266, when the Genoese first arrived in southern Russia, Caffa was a primitive fishing village tucked away far from the eyes of God and man on the dark side of the Crimea—a collection of windswept lean-tos set between an empty sea and a ring of low-rising hills. Eighty years later, seventy thousand to eighty thousand people coursed through Caffa’s narrow streets, and a dozen different tongues echoed through its noisy markets. Thrusting church spires and towers crowded the busy skyline, while across the bustling town docks flowed Merdacaxi silks from Central Asia, sturgeon from the Don, slaves from the Ukraine, and timber and furs from the great Russian forests to the north. Surveying Caffa in 1340, a Muslim visitor declared it a handsome town of “beautiful markets with a worthy port in which I saw two hundred ships big and small.”

It would be an exaggeration to say that the Genoese willed Caffa into existence, but not a large exaggeration. No city-state bestrode the age of city-states with a more operatic sense of destiny—none possessed a more fervent desire to cut a bella figura in the world—than Genoa. The city’s galleys could be found in every port from London to the Black Sea, its merchants in every trading center from Aleppo (Syria) to Peking. The invincible courage and extraordinary seamanship of the Genoese mariner was legendary. Long before Christopher Columbus, there were the Vivaldi brothers, Ugolino and Vadino, who fell off the face of the earth laughing at death as they searched for a sea route to India.