A Day When the Black Plague Arrived, 1347
A New Chapter in The Time Travel Series
The Time Travel Series: including free and premium posts.
In early October 1347, twelve Genoese trading galleys limped into the harbor of Messina, Sicily, having fled the besieged Crimean port of Caffa where Mongol forces had catapulted plague-ridden corpses over the city walls. The sailors aboard were dying or already dead, their bodies marked by black swellings—buboes—in the groin and armpits, oozing blood and pus. The Sicilians who first approached these ships could not have known they were witnessing the opening act of the greatest catastrophe in European history.
Our subject is Marco di Ferrante, age nineteen, a facchino (dockworker) and the son of a deceased fisherman, who lives with his widowed mother and younger sister in the cramped, foul-smelling lanes behind the Messina waterfront. He wears a coarse brown wool tunic, much-mended, rope-belted, with rough linen braies beneath, and goes barefoot as leather is beyond his means. He has not bathed in weeks; none of his class do. Today, he will unload cargo from the East—and witness the end of his world.
October 4, 1347 — 5:47 AM — Di Ferrante dwelling, backstreets of Messina waterfront
The young man wakes on a straw pallet crawling with lice, in a single-room stone hovel he shares with his mother and twelve-year-old sister. The air is thick with the smell of old fish, woodsmoke, and human bodies unwashed for weeks. A rat scurries along the wall. Through the single unglazed window, the pre-dawn light is gray. His mother is already up, stirring yesterday’s bean pottage over a small hearth. She coughs—she always coughs. Marco scratches at fleabites on his ribs, pulls his rough wool tunic over his head, and prepares to walk to the harbor for the day’s labor.
October 4, 1347 — 6:23 AM — Streets of Messina, approaching the harbor
Marco walks barefoot through the narrow, muddy lanes toward the waterfront. The streets are already stirring—women emptying chamber pots from upper windows, pigs and chickens rooting through refuse heaps, a dead dog bloating in the gutter. The stench is overpowering: human waste, rotting vegetables, animal dung, the omnipresent salt-fish reek. A Franciscan friar in brown robes hurries past, muttering prayers. Marco passes a baker’s stall where he cannot afford to stop. Ahead, through gaps between timber-framed buildings, he sees the masts of ships in the harbor—more than usual. Strange ships. The other dock workers are gathering, murmuring.
October 4, 1347 — 7:15 AM — Messina harbor quayside
