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 he soon dethroned Pedro a second time. The Black Prince could not get the money Pedro had promised him to pay his army with, and was obliged to tax Guienne. Guienne revolted, the truce was broken, and war renewed. The English army in Spain was eaten up with disease, and the Prince himself was never the same in body or mind. He died four years later, six years before his father. The long and glorious reign of Edward III. closed in gloom and angry discontent, and the long and disastrous minority of Richard II. was the price that England paid for restoring a tyrant.

The beginning of the Hundred Years' War was marked by a calamity so vast, so universal, that it is impossible to understand the social changes of these times without taking it into account. It was the most frightful pestilence known in history. The terrified peoples of Europe called it the Black Death. It devasted every country from China to Iceland and Greenland. Especially did it fall heavily upon England.

Very little is known about it, except its ravages. It appeared first in China, in the year 1333. It is said to have begun after a parching drought, "in the country watered by the rivers Kiang and Hoai." Next year, it broke out again in the province of Tche—also after a drought. It was everywhere accompanied by great convulsions of nature—earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, droughts, floods. It spread across Asia, depopulating India, Tartary, Mesopotamia, Syria, Armenia. It raged in Egypt. By 1347 it touched Europe, breaking out first in Cyprus—then in Greece, Turkey, and Vienna—where, for some time, 1200 died daily. In Europe, besides earthquakes and other convulsions, there was a pestiferous wind, and in Italy, "a thick, stinking mist" spread before it. Italy lost half her population. It is the plague known to readers of Boccaccio. It spread to Germany. In January of 1348 it was at Avignon. France suffered even more than Germany. It even stopped the war. Just after Calais surrendered, a truce was made—it was impossible to go on fighting in face of the plague. It spread to the north of Europe. Two-thirds of the people of Norway died—the plague was brought to Bergen by a ship from England. Lastly, in 1351, it came to Russia and laid it waste. On the North Sea, in the Mediterranean, ships drove at the will