[Ansteorra] The Coming of the Plague...again

[Darnell Daniels]

It begins,

This first account is from Messina, and it described the arrival and initial progress of "the disease".

It is the beginning of October, in the year of the incarnation of the Son of God 1347, twelve Genoese galleys have entered the harbor of Messina. In their bones they bear so virulent a disease that anyone who only speaks to them is seized by a mortal illness and in no manner can evade death. The infection is spreading to everyone who has any contact with the diseased. Those infected feel themselves penetrated by a pain throughout their whole bodies and, so to say, undermined. Then there develops on the thighs or upper arms a boil about the size of a lentil which the people now call "burn boil". This infects the whole body, and penetrates it so that the patient violently vomits blood. This vomiting of blood continues without intermission for three days, there being no means of healing it, and then the patient expires. 

The people of Messina have dispersed over the whole island of Sicily and with them the disease, so that innumerable people have died. The town of Catania has lost all its inhabitants. Here not only the "burn blisters" appeared, but there developed gland boils on the groin, the thighs, the arms, or on the neck. At first these were of the size of a hazel nut, and developed accompanied by violent shivering fits, which soon rendered those attacked so weak that they could not stand up, but were forced to lie in their beds consumed by violent fever. Soon the boils grew to the size of a walnut, then to that of a hen's egg or a goose's egg, and they were exceedingly painful, and irritated the body, causing the sufferer to vomit blood. The sickness lasts three days, and on the fourth, at the latest, the patient will succumb. As soon as anyone in Catania was seized with a headache and shivering, he knew that he was bound to pass away within the specified time. 

"The disease" has claimed Catania, the patriarch endowed all ecclesiastics, even the youngest, with all priestly powers for the absolution of sin which he himself possessed as bishop and patriarch. But the pestilence has raged from October 1347 to April 1348. The patriarch himself was one of the last to be carried off. He died fulfilling his duty. At the same time, Duke Giovanni, who had carefully avoided every infected house and every patient, has died.


This account is from Michael Platiensis (1357), quoted in Johannes Nohl, The Black Death, trans. C.H. Clarke (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1926), pp. 18-20.


As more news of this vile disease comes I will relay it progression to the populace of Ansteorra. Take heart citizens, we will endure this calamity and celebrate our survival at the end.

Lord Robert of Coleford
Autocrat, "Bring Out Your Dead 2.0 Plague Rats Revenge" 
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