A terrifying disease arrived in the ports of southern Italy and Sicily in the fall of 1347. Within two years, one-third of Europe's population had died of the bubonic and pneumonic plagues. As the sickness spread rapidly from one town to the next, the people of medieval Europe struggled in vain to find its cause and its cure. Letters, reports, medical treatises, and literary accounts collected in this book vividly describe the plague, the terror it brought to those who witnessed it, and its larger effects on medieval society.