claimed. The feeling of helplessness and despair it caused is well instanced by the Sienese chronicler Agnolo di Tura del Grasso:
The plague began in Siena in May, a horrible and cruel event. I do not know where to begin describing its relentless cruelty; almost everyone who witnessed it seemed stupefied by grief. It is not possible for the human tongue to recount such a horrible thing, and those who did not see such horrors can well be called blessed. They died almost immediately; they would swell up under the armpits and in the groin and drop dead while talking. Fathers abandoned their children, wives left their husbands, brothers forsook each other; all fled from each other because it seemed that the disease could be passed on by breath and sight. And so they died, and one could not find people to carry out burials for money or friendship. People brought members of their own household to the ditches as best they could, without priest or holy office or ringing of bells, and in many parts of Siena large deep ditches were dug for the great number of dead; hundreds died day and night, and all were thrown into these pits and covered with layers of earth, so much that the pits were filled, and more were dug.
And I, Agnolo di Tura, known as the Fat, buried five of my children with my own hands. And there were those who had been so poorly covered with earth that dogs dragged them from there and through the city and fed on corpses. Nobody wept for the dead, since each was awaiting death; and so many died that everyone thought that the end of the world had come.
Chroniclers are much less helpful in telling us how many died. As always with large figures, they are prone to exaggeration, and the problem is difficult for historians to assess; but one contemporary estimate which has found favour is that 30 per cent of the population at least was wiped out in Europe, and recent researh suggests a similar proportion in the Near East. The mortality rate was not even, though; the figure is probably higher in urbanized Italy, certainly in the Tuscan towns where much research has been done, although Milan escaped lightly, possibly because of rapid preventative measures; while in Spain there is a contrast between Aragon and Castile, the latter's denser population suffering greater losses.
That plague must have had deep psychological effects is obvious; but historians have not found it easy to describe exactly
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