4.
SMALL DIFFERENCES AND CRITICAL JUNCTURES:
THE WEIGHT OF HISTORY
T HE W ORLD THE P LAGUE C REATED
I N 1346 THE BUBONIC plague, the Black Death, reached the
port city of Tana at the mouth of the River Don on the Black
Sea. Transmitted by fleas living on rats, the plague was
brought from China by traders traveling along the Silk
Road, the great trans-Asian commercial artery. Thanks to
Genoese traders, the rats were soon spreading the fleas
and the plague from Tana to the entire Mediterranean. By
early 1347, the plague had reached Constantinople. In the
spring of 1348, it was spreading through France and North
Africa and up the boot of Italy. The plague wiped out about
half of the population of any area it hit. Its arrival in the
Italian city of Florence was witnessed firsthand by the Italian
writer Giovanni Boccaccio. He later recalled:
In the face of its onrush, all the wisdom and
ingenuity of man were unavailing … the
plague began, in a terrifying and
extraordinary manner, to make its disastrous
effects apparent. It did not take the form it
had assumed in the East, where if anyone
bled from the nose it was an obvious portent
of certain death. On the contrary, its earliest
symptom was the appearance of certain
swellings in the groin or armpit, some of
which were egg-shaped whilst others were
roughly the size of a common apple … Later
on the symptoms of the disease changed,
and many people began to find dark blotches
and bruises on their arms, thighs and other
parts of their bodies … Against these
maladies … All the advice of physicians and