The Genoese wrought far more slaughter and cruelty . . . than even the Saracens.”

 

Plague is the most famous example of what the Pima Indians of the American Southwest call oimmeddam, wandering sickness; and an ancient Indian legend evokes the profound dread oimmeddam produced in premodern peoples.

“Where do you come from?” an Indian asks a tall, black-hatted stranger.

“I come from far way,” the stranger replies, “from . . . across the Eastern Ocean.”

“What do you bring?” the Indian asks.

“I bring death,” the stranger answers. “My breath causes children to wither and die like young plants in the spring snow. I bring destruction. No matter how beautiful a woman, once she has looked at me she becomes as ugly as death. And to men, I bring not death alone, but the destruction of their children and the blighting of their wives. . . . No people who looks upon me is ever the same.”

Plague is the most successful example of oimmeddam in recorded history. Worldwide, the disease has killed an estimated 200 million people, and no outbreak of plague has claimed as many victims or caused as much anguish and sorrow as the Black Death. According to the Foster scale, a kind of Richter scale of human disaster, the medieval plague is the second greatest catastrophe in the human record. Only World War II produced more death, physical destruction, and emotional suffering, says Canadian geographer Harold D. Foster, the scale’s inventor. Harvard historian David Herbert Donald also ranks the Black Death high on a list of history’s worst catastrophes. However, the greatest—if most backhanded—tribute to the plague’s destructiveness comes from the United States Atomic Energy Commission, which used the medieval pestilence to model the consequences of all-out global nuclear war. According to the commission’s Disaster and Recovery, a Cold War–era study of thermonuclear conflict, of all recorded human events, the Black Death comes closest to mimicking “nuclear war in its geographical extent, abruptness of onset and scale of casualties.”

The sheer scope of the medieval plague was extraordinary. In a handful of decades in the early and mid-fourteenth century, the plague bacillus, Yersinia pestis, swallowed Eurasia the way a snake swallows a rabbit—whole, virtually in a single sitting. From China in the east to Greenland in the west, from Siberia in the north to India in the south, the plague blighted lives everywhere, including in the ancient societies of the Middle East: Syria, Egypt, Iran, and Iraq. How many people perished in the Black Death is unknown; for Europe, the most widely accepted mortality figure is 33 percent.* In raw numbers that means that between 1347, when the plague arrived in Sicily, and 1352, when it appeared in the plains in front of Moscow, the continent lost twenty-five million of its seventy-five million inhabitants. But in parts of urban Italy, eastern England, and rural France, the loss of human life was far greater, ranging from 40 to 60 percent. The Black Death was particularly cruel to children and to women, who died in greater numbers than men, probably because they spent more time indoors, where the risk of infection was greater, and cruelest of all to pregnant women, who invariably gave birth before dying.

Contemporaries were stunned by the scale of death; almost overnight, it seemed, one out of every three faces vanished from the human community, and on the broad shires of England, the little villages along the Seine, and the cypress-lined roads of Italy—where the afternoon light resembles “time thinking about itself”—one out of two faces may have disappeared. “Where are our dear friends now?” wrote the poet Francesco Petrarch. “What lightning bolt devoured them? What earthquake toppled them? What tempest drowned them. .