Spring – summer 1347
Constantinople, 1347
In February 1347 John VI Kantakouzenos enters Constantinople and ends six years of civil war. He rules as senior emperor beside the young John V Palaiologos over a small and impoverished empire. The Genoese of Pera, across the Golden Horn, control much of the city’s trade.
By the summer of 1347 ships from Caffa and the other Black Sea ports have brought the plague to the city. From here ships carry it on to the Aegean islands, to Egypt and to Italy.
John VI Kantakouzenos presides over a church council at Constantinople in 1351, in a manuscript of his theological writings, 1370–1375Wikimedia Commons, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Grec 1242, public domain
Kantakouzenos later describes the plague in the history of his reign, which he writes after he gives up the throne in 1354 and becomes a monk. He takes words and phrases from the Greek historian Thucydides, who described the plague of Athens in 430 BC. He writes that the disease began among the Scythians of the north and spread over the Black Sea coasts, Thrace, Macedonia, Greece, Italy, the islands, Egypt and Syria, and nearly the whole world. He describes the swellings, the black blisters, and the sick who cough blood and die within days. “So incurable was the evil,” he writes, “that neither any regularity of life, nor any bodily strength could resist it. Strong and weak bodies were all similarly carried away.”
Among the dead is the emperor’s youngest son, Andronikos, aged about 13. The scholar Nikephoros Gregoras, who lives in the city, also describes the plague in his history of these years.
Sources
- John VI Kantakouzenos, Histories, book 4, ch. 8, trans. Christos S. Bartsocas, “Two Fourteenth Century Greek Descriptions of the ‘Black Death’”, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 21 (1966), 394–400.
- Nikephoros Gregoras, Roman History, book 16.
- Donald M. Nicol, The Reluctant Emperor: A Biography of John Cantacuzene (1996).
- Ole J. Benedictow, The Complete History of the Black Death (2021).
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