, dreadful signs and portents have appeared.” A musician named Louis Heyligen, who lived in Avignon, passed on an even more alarming tale to friends in Flanders. “Hard by greater India, in a certain province, horrors and unheard of tempests overwhelmed the whole province for the space of three days,” Heyligen wrote. “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, mingling with hail stones of marvelous size. . . . On the third day, there fell fire from heaven and stinking smoke which slew all that were left of man and beasts and burned up all the cities and towns in those parts.”

The Genoese, who were much closer to Asia than de’ Mussis and Heyligen, undoubtedly heard rumors about the disasters, but in the 1330s and early 1340s they faced so many immediate dangers in Caffa, they could not have had much time to worry about events in faraway India or China. The port of Caffa was held under a grant from the Mongols, rulers of the greatest empire in the medieval world—indeed, in the fourteenth century, rulers of the greatest empire the world had ever seen. For the Tartars, Caffa was only a small part of a vast domain that stretched from the Yellow River to the Danube, from Siberia to the Persian Gulf, but, like a pebble in a boot, it was an annoying part—or, rather, its colonial power was. To the Mongols, the Genoese seemed vainglorious, supercilious, and deeply duplicitous, the kind of people who would name their children after you—as the Dorias of Genoa had named three sons after three Mongol notables; Huegu, Abaka, and Ghazan—while picking your pocket. When the founder of the Mongol empire, Genghis Khan, railed against “eaters of sweet greasy food [who wear] garments of gold . . . [and] hold in their arms the loveliest of women,” he might have had the Genoese in mind. In 1343 decades of economic and religious tension between the two powers finally erupted in a major confrontation at Tana, a trading station at the mouth of the Don, famous as the starting point of the land route to China. “The road you take from Tana to Peking,” begins La Practica della Mercatura, Francesco Balducci di Pegolotti’s fourteenth-century travel guide for eastern-bound merchants.

According to notary de’ Mussis,* the brawl grew out of a confrontation between Italian merchants and local Muslims on a Tana street. Apparently insults were exchanged, fists waved, punches thrown. Market stalls tumbled, pigs squealed, a knife flashed, and a Muslim fell to the ground, dead. Shortly thereafter, a Mongol khan named Janibeg, a self-proclaimed defender of Islam, appeared outside Tana, and with him, a large Tartar force. An ultimatum was sent into the besieged town and, according to a Russian historian named A. A. Vasiliev, a response, insolent even by Genoese standards, was sent back. Enraged, Janibeg flung his Mongols into Tana. Amid plumes of black smoke and the thundering cries of sword-slashing Tartar horsemen, the Italians, outnumbered but stout, made a fighting retreat to the harbor; from there, a race westward to Caffa commenced, with the pursued Italians traveling by ship, the pursuing Mongols by horse.

“Oh God,” writes de’ Mussis of the Mongols’ arrival on the hills above Caffa. “See how the heathen Tartar races, pouring together from all sides, suddenly invest . . . Caffa [attacking] the trapped Christians . . .