difficulties and set-backs which, taken together and feeding off each other as they did, give the appearance of a society in crisis. The fourteenth has rightly been called 'the calamitous century', and the Mediterranean saw its share of the problems as much as northern Europe. It remains a puzzle for historians, a phenomenon that all can observe but for which no single explanation or system of explanations will suffice. In any case, could it be an optical illusion? Do these apparent crises not conceal positive developments, as crises often do? All that the historian can do with any confidence is to describe the problems and, by examining them one by one, observe the changes brought about with their resolution.
If one were looking for a symbol of the phenomenon one would inevitably choose the Black Death. In a sense the culprit for the introduction to Europe of the most devastating disease since late Roman times was the west's very success in developing trading relations with the east, and especially with the Mongols. Bubonic plague has its origins in the Far East, and is transmitted by fleas who in turn live on rats, and it was these, making their way on the ships of Italian merchants, which first brought the plague to Europe. By the autumn of 1347 it had reached Byzantium, Rhodes, Cyprus, and Messina in Sicily, by winter Venice, Genoa, Marseilles, by the spring of 1348 Tuscany and central Italy. The plague raged through the Mediterranean world in 1348-9, at the same time spreading northwards. Victims of the bubonic strain developed swellings at the point of the flea bite and in nearby lymph nodes; purplish blotches--'buboes'--followed and from there the disease attacked the nervous system, resulting in death in over half of all cases. The pneumonic strain, in which the disease also attacked the respiratory system, was almost invariably fatal, and also much more contagious--it could be passed by coughing--and resistant to climatic change. Most deadly of all was the rare septicaemic form, in which the bacilli attacked the bloodstream directly and death followed before any visible symptoms had time to form.
The epidemic was terrifying in its novelty, its symptoms, the speed with which it swept Europe, and the number of victims it
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