December 1347 – February 1348
Genoa and Pisa, winter 1347–1348
The plague reaches Genoa by January 1348, carried home by the city’s own galleys. Genoa founded Caffa on the Black Sea, where the sickness first met the trade of Italy, and its galleys sail every year between the Black Sea and the Ligurian coast.
A letter written at Avignon in April 1348, probably by Louis Heyligen, tells of three galleys that come into Genoa in January 1348, loaded with spices and with dying men. When the Genoese see how suddenly the sailors die, they drive the galleys out of the harbour with burning arrows. They act too late, because the plague is already in the city.
Genoa and its harbour in 1481, in a copy painted by Cristoforo Grassi in 1597Wikimedia Commons, Cristoforo Grassi, Public domain (Genova 1481 (copy 1597).jpg)
In January 1348 the sickness reaches Pisa, the other great port of Tuscany. The Sienese chronicler Agnolo di Tura writes that it comes from Genoa. From Pisa it moves inland along the roads, to Lucca, about 20 km away, in February, and to Pistoia and Florence in March and April. On land it travels with the people and goods that carry it, a few kilometres a day at most.
In the Camposanto, the walled cemetery beside Pisa cathedral, a great fresco shows the Triumph of Death. A party of riders on a hunt comes upon three open coffins, and Death with a scythe flies over a crowd of the rich. Historians long read it as a picture of the plague. The art historian Luciano Bellosi dates it to about 1336–1341, before the plague came, and many now follow him.
Riders before three open coffins in the Triumph of Death in the Camposanto of Pisa, by Buonamico BuffalmaccoWikimedia Commons, Buonamico Buffalmacco, Public domain (Bounamico Buffalmacco - Triumph of Death (detail) - WGA03674.jpg)
Sources
- Louis Heyligen (attributed), letter from Avignon, April 1348, in Rosemary Horrox, The Black Death (1994).
- Agnolo di Tura del Grasso, Cronaca senese (about 1350).
- Ole J. Benedictow, The Complete History of the Black Death (2021).
- Luciano Bellosi, Buffalmacco e il Trionfo della Morte (1974).
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