One of my good Russian friends has just written the following short column, which just shows us that there is indeed nothing new under the sun… and that ordinary Russians are also at a loss about what to do next!
Self-isolation and reading gave me some dark historical analogies. It’s time to move on to physical training and then to lunch with pasta and buckwheat.
In 1346, the army of the Crimean Tatars besieged the Genoese fortress of Kaffa (present-day Feodosia), and a plague broke out in the ranks of the besiegers. The Tatars switched to the use of bacteriological weapons and began to throw the corpses of soldiers who died from the plague through the wall with catapults.
An epidemic broke out in Kaffa, the surviving Genoese embarked on ships and fled to their homeland, bringing with them to Europe the largest catastrophe in its history, the plague epidemic known as the Black Death.
In October 1347, the plague invaded Sicily, from there it quickly spread to Africa, Sardinia, Corsica and the European continent. In January 1348, Venice, Genoa itself, Marseille were defeated, in which 56 thousand people died.
By June, the plague had crossed the Alps and the Pyrenees, ended up in England in December, and broke out in Scandinavia and Scotland in 1349. Several cities miraculously escaped the plague – Milan, Nuremberg, Liege, the sparsely populated areas of East Germany and Poland, where the inhabitants were distributed in small settlements over a large area.
The largest commercial and trading centres in Europe, such as Venice, Florence, Genoa, Paris, London were the worst hit.
