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Before coronavirus there was the Black Death, the greatest pandemic in human history and Europe’s greatest tragedy.
It too emerged in the east and travelled along the roads and sea lanes of world commerce to northern Italy.
From there it spread like a giant creeping sludge of death and despondency to envelope the whole of Europe and much of the Middle East in the terrible years between 1347 and 1351.
The plague travelled with the Mongol Empire from Asia to the Genoese port of Caffa in the Crimea.
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According to a contemporary chronicle, the Mongols besieged the city and catapulted diseased corpses into the city, although it is more likely the port residents became infected by rats.
The bubonic plague (Yersinia Pestis or Y.Pestis) was a deadly disease spread by fleas that infect rats. Where there were rats, there was bubonic plague, and the plague thrived in the holds of ships, in the filthy streets and bodies of medieval Europe, in farmhouses and grain stores.
The bubonic plague was so-called because of the presence of buboes or infected swellings which appeared in the groin and on the neck near the lymph nodes.
Once they appeared the symptoms were swift and brutal with fever, muscle cramps, vomiting and death within days. In the case of pneumonic and septicemic plague, death usually occurred within 24 hours. Deaths were agonising and people died alone, abandoned by the living.
Coronavirus is not the plague. It will not kill tens of millions of people like the Black Death even in a worst-case scenario. It is far less deadly than plague, which was a death sentence for those afflicted by it in the days before modern antibiotics.
We know our enemy and we know how to contain it. The fear of medieval world was compounded by ignorance. They did not know the cause of the plague, blaming it on God’s wrath, a malign planetary conjunction or the fetid air. Neither did they know how to ameliorate its deadly spread.
The Black Death killed at least a third of Europe’s population. The first half of the 14th century was already a time of climate change, famine and war.
The expanding population lived on the edge of what could be sustained given the resources of the time. It took centuries for the European population to recover. The psychic scars were even greater.
A more vengeful Europe emerged from the Black Death or, as it was known at the time, the Great Mortality.
The Genoese sailors carried the plague first to Constantinople and then Messina in Sicily. When they returned to Genoa, frightened locals refused to let them berth, but one slipped in under the cover of darkness and that was enough.
The plague soon spread to Venice, where bodies were thrown from balconies into passing gondolas and then to Florence, the loveliest city of the medieval world.
One of the most vivid accounts of the plague was from the Italian writer Boccaccio, whose Decameron was one of the great works of literature of the period.
The plague brought out the best and worst in humanity. People risked their own lives to help the sick and dying.
On the other hand, the terror was such, that a “brother even fled from his brother, a wife from her husband, and, what is more uncommon, a parent from his own child”.
After ravaging Italy, the plague spread northwards to France where the exiled Pope Clement VI in Avignon consecrated the whole Rhone river as a burial ground for plague victims.
From there it travelled to England, where the plague was initially greeted with an insouciance.
“With every kind of human intercourse rendered perilous by the possibility of infection,” the plague historian Philip Ziegler observed, “the medieval Englishman obstinately carried on in his wonted way.”
The plague arrived in Ireland in July 1348, six months after it first appeared in Italy.
One of the most vivid contemporary accounts in Ireland is from the Kilkenny-based Franciscan friar John Clyn.
It affected the east coast ports of Drogheda, Howth and Dublin first, then the southern ports, and made its way inland during the winter of 1348 along the rivers, the main arteries of commerce at the time.
Everywhere the result was the same.
“There was hardly a house in which one only had died, but as a rule man and wife with their children and all the family went the common way of death,” Clyn recorded of his hometown, further stating that 14,000 people died in Dublin from plague by the end of 1348.
Clyn meticulously recorded the deaths of clergy who were affected and often infected in trying to help the dead and dying, 25 of his comrades in a monastery in Drogheda another 23 in Dublin.
He feared it would eventually come for him too. Clyn, like many others, believed he was living through the end days and set out to chronicle the plague as best he could for posterity.
“Lest the writing should perish with the writer and the work fail with the worker, I leave parchment to carry on the work, if perchance any man survives or any of the race of Adam escape this pestilence and continues the work I have begun”.
Sometime in early 1349 the chronicle stops suddenly. Somebody else writes the final entry: "Videtur quod author hie obit" (it would appear that the author has died).