The Black Death

Sailors, rats and cargo arriving in Sicily from the eastern Mediterranean brought plague into Europe in 1347. It ran through Italy, cutting down the populations of Florence, Venice and Genoa, passed from Italian ports to France and Spain, and crossed the Alps into Austria and central Europe.

The dead may have numbered up to 25 million people, about a third of Europe's population. Later studies of plague burials confirmed Yersinia pestis as the cause. The epidemic was the European peak of the second plague pandemic, between 1348 and 1350, and outbreaks kept striking European cities for the next 350 years.

Physicians had nothing that worked. At the request of King Philip VI of France, 49 masters of the Paris medical faculty issued an explanation in October 1348: a conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter and Mars in 1345 had corrupted the air, with foul vapors from swamps and unburied corpses adding to the danger. Their advice covered the air, exercise and baths, food and drink, and sleep.

Towns acted on the one protection anyone could see, keeping away from the sick and from things they had touched. Some city-states shut out strangers, especially merchants, and minority groups such as Jews and people with leprosy. Armed guards held sanitary cordons along roads and at city gates, and breaking them was punishable by death. The sick were separated from the healthy in makeshift camps. Within a few decades came the first formal quarantine, at Ragusa in 1377, and in 1423 Venice opened the first permanent plague hospital.