12/17/2023 0 Comments Medieval gothic artMost historians today generally agree that the plague was likely spread through Eurasia via these trade routes by parasites carried on the backs of rodents. Italian city-states such as Venice and Genoa had trading ports in the eastern Mediterranean and the Black sea-trade that made these cities among the wealthiest cities in Europe. Growing stability in Europe in the late middle ages made possible extensive trade between East and West and within Europe itself. The Florentine author Boccaccio recounts how that city’s citizens “dug for each graveyard a huge trench, in which they laid the corpses as they arrived by hundreds at a time, piling them up tier upon tier as merchandise is stowed on a ship. From his native Picardy, Jean witnessed the disease’s impact in northern France Normandy, for example, lost 70 to 80 percent of its population. People lay ill little more than two or three days and died suddenly….He who was well one day was dead the next and being carried to his grave,” writes the Carmelite friar Jean de Venette in his 14th century French chronicle. A victim first experiences flu-like symptoms, and then sees a “swell beneath their armpits and in their groins.” Agnolo himself buried his five children with his own hands. The contemporary Sienese chronicler, Agnolo di Tura del Grasso, described its terror. In 1362, 1368, and 1381, it struck again-as it would periodically well into the 18th century. By 1350, the year it retreated, it had felled a quarter to half of the region’s population. The Black Death arrived on European shores in 1348.
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