The harbour where the Black Death got into Europe

Messina's harbour is a natural basin closed off by a low curving spit of sand, the peninsula of San Raineri, whose shape gave the original Greek town its name: Zancle, the sickle. Ships could lie inside it in almost any weather. The town had counted at least thirty thousand people as far back as 1277, and since 1321 it had been the working capital of the island kingdom. It was one of the busiest harbours in the Mediterranean, and a Genoese merchant galley tying up there was the least remarkable thing that could happen on a working day.

What was aboard one of them in the autumn of 1347 was not. The only narrative account of it comes from a Franciscan called Michele da Piazza, writing in Sicily about ten years later, who put the arrival at the beginning of October and said the men on the ships carried a disease in their bones so virulent that anyone who merely spoke to them was dead within days. Messina began to die almost at once. Within weeks the city had driven the Genoese and their vessels back out of the harbour, and its own people were fleeing inland. From that quay the Black Death spread into western Europe.

Almost everything else about the landing is contested: how many ships there were, which month it was, whether the crews had ever been within a thousand miles of the Crimea, and whether the story everyone knows about how the plague got aboard happened at all. The year is not contested. Every account gives 1347.

Where the Black Death first arrived in Europe

Messina was not a backwater that happened to be in the way. It sits on the Sicilian side of the strait that separates the island from the toe of Italy — a little over five kilometres of water at the city itself, and three at the narrows further north. Everything sailing between the Tyrrhenian and the Ionian either came through that gap or went the whole way round Sicily, past the racing tidal current and the whirlpool the Greeks had turned into Charybdis, with Scylla on the rock across the water.

From the quay you could see the far side, and the far side belonged to somebody else. Sicily had thrown out its French rulers in the rising of 1282 and fought twenty years to keep them out, and the Peace of Caltabellotta in 1302 split the two halves between Aragon and the House of Anjou. The mountains opposite were Angevin, ruled from Naples by Joanna I, who in August 1347 struck a pact with Sicily to stop it invading while she settled her own affairs. Two enemy kingdoms in plain sight of one another, with the busiest shipping lane in the Mediterranean running between them.

Into that lane came the Genoese. Genoa in the fourteenth century ran a trading network reaching from Southampton to the Sea of Azov, and its ships flew a red cross on a white field — the cross of St George, its ensign since at least 1113 and lent to English shipping in 1190. At the eastern end of that network stood Caffa, in the Crimea, and Tana at the mouth of the Don. What came back was slaves, wax, hides, salt fish, and above all grain.

What the one chronicle of the Messina landing says

Michele da Piazza's account is the reason his chronicle is quoted in every history of the pandemic. He describes a pain through the whole body, then a hard swelling on the thigh or the upper arm, then three days of coughing blood, then death. The sick were shunned by everyone including their own families; priests would not come to hear confession; men had to be paid heavily to carry corpses out of the houses.

In their bones they bore so virulent a disease that anyone who only spoke to them was seized by a mortal illness and in no manner could evade death.

Michele da Piazza, writing in Sicily about ten years later

He also reports what the city did about it, which was to expel the ships. That spread the infection along the coast instead of containing it, and did nothing whatever for Messina. By November the town was emptying, and most of those leaving went south to Catania, hoping for the protection of St Agatha, whose relics lay there. Messina asked for the relics; Catania's own people refused to let the bones leave the city, and sent a statue of the Virgin from Santa Maria della Scala instead. Catania then forbade, on pain of excommunication, the burial of Messina's dead inside its walls, so the refugees went into trenches outside. It bought Catania nothing. The island's regent, John of Randazzo, fled to the woods of Mascali and died there in April 1348, reportedly the last Sicilian victim of the first wave.

He is a chronicler with a moral case to make rather than a reporter: his galleys are fleeing divine vengeance in his opening sentence, and a few pages later demons walk through Messina transfigured into the shape of dogs. That register is evidence of what people believed and how they explained it, which is a real historical fact in its own right, and it is not evidence of what a bystander would have seen.

Did the Mongols catapult plague corpses into Caffa?

Everyone has heard the other half of this story. In 1346 a Mongol army of the Golden Horde besieging the Genoese port of Caffa fell sick, and in desperation catapulted its own plague dead over the walls; the survivors inside fled home by sea and carried the disease to Europe. It is one of the most repeated anecdotes in medieval history, it is regularly described as the first use of biological warfare, and it is almost certainly wrong.

The whole account rests on one man, a notary called Gabriele de' Mussi, who spent the 1340s in Piacenza and never went near the Black Sea. Hannah Barker's 2021 study of the Black Sea grain trade found that he had run two separate sieges of Caffa together, one in 1344 and one in 1346–47, and that there is no evidence siege engines were used in the second at all. Mark Wheelis, whose 2002 paper in the CDC journal Emerging Infectious Diseases is the article that made the catapult story scientifically respectable, said in that same paper that Caffa was not how plague entered Europe: it spread, in his words, in a stepwise fashion, on many ships rather than a few.

In 2023 Jean Pascal Zanders and Seth Carus took apart the mechanics. The Mongols used man-powered mangonels rather than counterweight trebuchets, the ground around Caffa runs uphill to the walls, there was no timber to build with, and no medieval trebuchet has ever been excavated anywhere. The story reached modern scholarship through a chain of citations running back to a book on medieval artillery published in 1907, each author trusting the last.

Barker's own answer is quieter and more convincing. Italian shipping took enormous quantities of grain out of the Black Sea, and in 1346 a series of trade embargoes stopped the cargoes moving even though people were still crossing. When the embargoes lifted in 1347, fleets sailed for Tana with orders to buy grain and nothing else. Grain ships carry rats. The plague did not arrive as an act of war; it arrived, in her phrase, as an unintended consequence of peace.

The correction matters beyond the pleasure of spoiling a good anecdote. The Caffa story was a blame story from the beginning — foreigners, at a distance, deliberately poisoning Christendom — and Europe spent the next two years acting on that logic much closer to home. From the spring of 1348 pogroms spread from Toulon through Savoy into the German-speaking lands on the accusation that Jews had poisoned the wells. Strasbourg burned about two thousand people on 14 February 1349, four months before the plague reached the city at all. Clement VI issued bulls against the accusation and was ignored.

Why historians disagree about when the plague reached Messina

Michele says October, and twelve ships. Modern scholarship is not sure about either. Twelve is a suspicious number in a chronicle written by a Franciscan a decade after the fact, and many historians read it as the apostolic twelve rather than a count.

The month is a harder problem, and the disagreement is between two serious reconstructions that cannot both be right. Ole Benedictow, whose route reconstruction with Marcella Cesana and Raffaella Bianucci appeared in Anthropological Science in 2017, puts two Genoese galleys at Messina in the second half of June 1347. He reasons backwards from the outbreaks that follow: Genoa itself was infected by the middle of August, and an October landfall in Sicily cannot produce an August outbreak in Liguria. Barker, working from the documents rather than from epidemiology, keeps October and has Genoa infected in November.

What the two agree on is the year, the port and the ships' nationality, which is why 1347 and Messina are solid ground while the rest of it is still moving.

How fast the Black Death spread across Europe

From Sicily the plague went everywhere a ship could go. Marseille was infected around the first of November 1347, Pisa that autumn, Venice by late November, Genoa in the same season. It reached the English coast at Melcombe Regis in June 1348, Norway in 1349, and northern Russia by the early 1350s, having gone the long way round the continent to arrive at last from the far side.

The death toll is commonly put at between 30 and 60 per cent of Europe, and at somewhere between 75 and 200 million people across Eurasia. The bacterium is Yersinia pestis, identified in 1894 and since recovered from the teeth of fourteenth-century plague dead. How it moved so quickly is still open: the classical model has it carried by rat fleas, while more recent work argues that human fleas and body lice did most of the work once the disease was ashore, which fits the speed of its spread inland better than rats do.

How the Black Death changed Europe

The survivors inherited a labour market that had been turned upside down. There was suddenly far more land than there were people to work it, and those people knew it. England's response was the Statute of Labourers of 1351, which tried to freeze wages at their pre-plague levels and to compel the able-bodied to work for whoever asked; resentment at that settlement, and at the poll taxes that followed, ran directly into the Peasants' Revolt of 1381.

The other inheritance was public health. Nothing Messina did in 1347 worked, and everyone knew it. Holding arrivals outside the town until they were plainly well was tried at Ragusa in 1377 — thirty days, a trentino — and Venice built its plague hospital on an island in 1423 and stretched the period to forty days, a quarantena, which is the word we still use.

Messina's harbour is still there, still closed by its sickle. The old city that stood around it is not: an earthquake and tsunami levelled Messina in 1908 and killed something like half its people, and that is the disaster the city marks. The quay where the galleys came in has no memorial at all.