Black Death: The Reshaper of Europe

The Black Death: The Reshaper of Europe The worst catastrophe in European history. The most consequential. A reckoning with what a bacterium destroyed, and what, from the ruins, it made possible. In the autumn of 1347, a fleet of Genoese trading ships docked in the harbour of Messina, Sicily. Most of the sailors aboard were dead. Those still alive were covered in black, pus-weeping swellings the s...