1348
Black Death sweeps Florence
By June the streets of Florence stank of corpses no one would bury. Boccaccio watched neighbors throw their own children out of windows. Three of every five Florentines died within months, the city's population plummeting from around ninety thousand to thirty-five thousand. Out of this catastrophe he conceived the Decameron, ten storytellers fleeing to a hilltop villa in Fiesole.
Plague reaches Mecca and the hajj caravans
Ibn Battuta, back in Damascus and observing the pestilence, reported that two thousand people a day were dying in the city. The plague then followed pilgrim routes into the Hijaz, where it struck Mecca and Medina with devastating force. The Islamic world suffered as much as Christendom, perhaps more than Chinese contemporaries who had encountered the disease earlier.
Clement VI defends Jews against pogroms
As panicked Christians blamed Jews for poisoning wells and lit pyres from Strasbourg to Barcelona, the Avignon pope issued bulls forbidding their persecution. He reminded the faithful that Jews were dying of the plague too. The pyres burned anyway. Tens of thousands of European Jews were massacred during the pandemic.
Charles IV founds Charles University in Prague
Modeled on Paris, the new studium generale was the first university in Central Europe, attracting scholars from across the German-speaking lands. Charles wanted Prague to rival any imperial city in learning and prestige. Within a generation it would attract masters from across the German lands and become the cradle, in another fifty years, of Hussite reformation.
Earthquake destroys Friuli
On a winter morning a massive quake leveled towns from Villach to Cividale, toppling church towers and burying entire neighborhoods. Aftershocks continued for weeks. Already the plague was creeping up the Adriatic. To survivors it seemed God had set the four horsemen loose at once on the eastern Alps. Tens of thousands died.