The ships from Caffa most likely did so, thereby delivering bubonic plague to port after port along the Black Sea. In those days, it was the practice of trading vessels to stick close to the coast, and to dock every three or four days. Belowdecks, Kelly writes darkly, “hundreds of plague-bearing rats were scratching themselves and sniffing at the cool sea air.” The people of Caffa began to fall ill, at which point a number of the Genoese decided, “Let’s get out of here,” and ran for their ships. Their general, Khan Janibeg, ordered his men’s corpses to be flung over the walls of Caffa, in the hope that they would infect the city. In the early thirteen-forties, Caffa was attacked by Mongols, and the conflict dragged on until, in 1347, it took an unexpected turn: the Mongol soldiers started sickening and dying. On the eastern coast of Crimea, there was a city, Caffa (today, Feodosiya), that was an important trading hub, with a large community of Genoese merchants dispatching silks, sturgeon, timber, fur, and slaves from east to west. In any case, a mysterious illness swept through Asia in those years, and eventually it reached Crimea. In the early decades of the fourteenth century, Asia reportedly suffered a series of ecological upheavals-storms, floods, earthquakes-and these disturbances may have forced the rodents out of their holes and into contact with human beings. The Black Death seems to have originated in Asia, probably on or near the Central Asian steppe, home to large rodent populations carrying the plague bacillus. A new title has now been added to the list, “The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time” (HarperCollins $25.95), by the science writer John Kelly. Therefore, like disaster movies, the Black Death is very popular. The Black Death, the pandemic of bubonic plague that hit Europe in the mid-fourteenth century, is like a disaster movie: a menace stalks the land cries go up in the streets millions of people die, not including you and me. In four years, the Black Death killed at least a third of the population of Europe.

Norman cantor in the wake of the plague