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The Day the Black Death Arrived: Messina, 1347
Paperback
Series: Days That Made History
General European HistoryGeneral World History
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Sep 6 2025
Pages: 110
Weight: 0.35
Height: 0.23 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
In October 1347 twelve ships left the harbour at Messina, and the historical record loses them. What they left behind changed Europe.
The Day the Black Death Arrived goes back to the people who wrote it down and tells the story as they tell it, with the arguments left in. Where a chronicler exaggerates, it says so. Where the dates conflict, it shows both.
What you will find inside:
- The gravestones and DNA that point to central Asia, and the siege of Caffa story, with its limits
- Messina, October 1347, and the spread through Sicily, Genoa, Venice and Piacenza
- Spring in Tuscany: Boccaccio's Florence, Siena, and the health rules of Pistoia
- What the doctors of Paris and Avignon said, and what they could not know
- The poison rumour, the confessions under torture, and the burning of the Jews of Strasbourg
- England in 1348 and 1349, from the Dorset coast to the plague in Ireland, Castile and Damascus
- The Church in the plague: dying priests, flagellants and a letter permitting confession to a woman
- The price of labour, the Statute of Labourers and the road to 1381
- How quarantine began at Ragusa in 1377, and why the Black Death did not invent public health
The book names its sources, flags what is reported rather than known, and keeps chronicle apart from fact.
A closing chapter, What We Don't Know, lists the open questions, and Sources and Further Reading points you to the chronicles and modern books to read next.
Written for readers who want the real story told with pace and a plain voice. No medical degree required.
Scroll up and read the first chapter.
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