The Venetians: A New History: from Marco Polo to Casanova Read Online Free PDF

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    Survivors and Losers
    T HE V ENETIANS DID not have long to enjoy the fruits of their financial chicanery. It was as if the wrath of God himself had been incurred, prompting Him to awesome retribution. All who witnessed the events of the ensuing years would come to see them in such biblical terms. In the beginning came the first rumblings. Just a year or so after the collapse of banks across Europe in the middle of the fourteenth century, Venice would suffer a serious earthquake, which caused the bells of St Mark’s to toll and clang in discordant fashion, while chunks of masonry fell from other chiming church towers into the canals. This was followed by another earthquake the following year, when there were such low tides that the Grand Canal was barely navigable and the citizens watched fearfully as the mainland mudflats crept closer and closer to their naked, wall-less defenceless city.
    Meanwhile, far away in the northern Black Sea, the Golden Horde of the advancing Mongol army that had swept into Russia began laying siege to the Genoan trading outpost of Kaffa (modern Feodosiya) on the coast of the Crimea. By now many of the Golden Horde had begun to suffer from a mysterious and hideous disease, which according to information gathered from merchants by the contemporary Arab writer Ibn al-Wardi had originated in the ‘Land of Darkness’ (now thought to have been central Asia). The contemporary Italian chronicler Gabriele de Mussis, piecing together first-hand reports, recorded how in 1347:
    the Tartars, worn out by this pestilential disease, and falling on all sides as if thunderstruck, and seeing that they were perishinghopelessly, ordered the corpses to be placed on their engines and thrown into the city of Kaffa.
    Some historians have seen this as the first recorded instance of germ warfare. The disease was soon so rampant within the city walls of Kaffa that the inhabitants:
    were not able to hide or protect themselves from this danger, although they carried away as many dead as possible and threw them into the sea. But soon the whole air became infected, and the water poisoned, and such a pestilence grew up that scarcely one out of a thousand was able to escape.
    Those lucky enough to escape set sail for home. Yet by the time they had crossed the Black Sea and reached Constantinople symptoms of the illness had begun to appear. These were recorded by the Byzantine emperor himself, John VI Cantacuzenus:
    Sputum suffused with blood was brought up, and disgusting and stinking breath from within. The throat and tongue, parched from the heat, were black and congested with blood. It made no difference if they drank much or little. Sleeplessness and weakness were established forever.
    Abscesses formed on the upper and lower arms, a few also in the maxillae [upper jawbone], and in other parts of the body. In some they were large and in others small. Black blisters appeared. Some people broke out with black spots all over their bodies.
    Little wonder this pandemic would later be christened the Black Death. Cantacuzenus recognised it as the Athenian plague that had been described by Thucydides in 300 BC, and most medical historians now agree that this medieval outbreak was a virulent and extremely contagious strain of the bubonic plague (so called because it gave rise to buboes or boils). All Cantacuzenus could do was describe its symptoms, and the course it took: ‘some died the same day, a few even within the hour. Those who couldresist for two or three days had a very violent fever’; those who survived ‘were no longer possessed by the same evil, but were safe. The disease did not attack twice in order to kill them.’ Yet despite the emperor’s meticulous attention to detail, no physician could discover a cure: ‘There was no help from anywhere.’ Only now do we know that this pandemic almost certainly arose from a bacillus passed on by the bite of a flea ( Xenopsylla cheopis ) carried by the black rat (