Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 59.djvu/413

Rh the Minors and the convent of Kilkenny, have written down in this book these wonderful occurrences of our time as I have seen them with my eyes or heard them from credible witnesses; and lest such strange things should perish with the passage of time and should pass from the memory of men who are to come, watching these many evils and the whole world fallen into sickness, and waiting among the dead till death shall come, I have put into writing what I have heard truthfully and observed carefully. And lest the writing should perish with the writer and the labor should fail with the laborer, I leave parchment to continue the work, if it should chance that any man should survive, or any of the race of Adam succeed in escaping this pestilence, to continue the work which I have begun." Then follow two or three confused sentences, when his expectation of death must have been justified, for there is nothing more of the chronicle except an annotation by a later hand, videtur quod auctor hic obiit, 'it seems that the author here died.' Another chronicler lays down his pen at the onset of the plague, and long afterward when resuming his narrative, sick at heart, perhaps, or feeling his skill inadequate to the description of such a period of confusion, enters in the appropriate place only the words magna mortalitas, 'the great mortality.'

This great mortality came 'from the north and east.' On the confines of Asia and Europe, at the mouth of the Sea of Azov, lay the medieval trading city of Kaffa. Here goods were brought from Persia, from India and from China to be handed over by men of the east to men of the west. Genoese and Venetian bought from Tartar and Arab silk, cotton, spices, precious stones and metals, gums, woods and sugar, and carried them through the Black Sea and the Mediterranean to be distributed finally among all the countries of Europe. In the year 1347 a war broke out in the Crimea between these men of the west and of the east, and the Italian inhabitants of Kaffa were besieged by the Tartars. In the midst of the hostilities a terrible pestilence broke out among the besiegers, which devastated their hordes like the hand of the destroying angel in the camp of the Assyrians. In their frenzy the survivors threw numbers of the bodies of those who had died of the plague from their catapults into the besieged city and thus carried infection to those within. The siege was soon raised, and the Genoese merchants and sailors, resuming their trading, set sail toward the west. But they took with them on their voyage, along with the luxuries from the far east, a new scourge for Europe, the contagion of the plague—the Black Death, as it has been called in modern times.

The symptoms of the disease were obscure and varying, and so remained through successive attacks, until only too abundant opportunities for observation have recently enabled modern medical observers to