The Horror of the Black Death
Merchants rummaged through the port, grabbing whatever goods they could carry.
"It's all going to rot away in the end anyway—might as well let someone get some use out of it!"
"That's right! Hyahaha!"
"Now we're talking!"
Merchants plundering goods from a village full of corpses—the dead left where they fell.
From Constantinople, through Cairo, to Messina on Sicily, and on to Genoa, they moved from city to city, selling their plunder and traveling onward, spreading the sickness in every direction.
Scritch-scritch.
The rats that crept into the cities carried fleas with them, and the rats boarded ships and sailed away again…
Among the ports the merchants frequented most heavily was one in the Messina region.
Three days after the merchants had loaded their stolen cargo and departed, Giovanni—who was still sorting freight at the harbor—felt something go wrong with his body.
"Uuurgh… Is this a fever coming on?"
He'd been shivering on and off all day, and it had made the work hard to focus on. His heart felt like it was pounding, too.
"A sickness? In weather this fine?"
Pietro had noticed his friend pushing himself hard lately, with so much work piled up, and he worried something might actually be wrong.
"I know, right. Probably nothing."
As the two of them said, the Mediterranean weather was nothing short of glorious—a place of warmth and gentle breezes, never too dry. If you were to list the most livable corners of the earth, plenty of spots along this coast would make the short list.
And today, with a few clouds conveniently veiling the sun, either of them would have been justified in calling his friend's condition strange.
"Ugh… That's it! I'm going home to rest."
Giovanni tried hauling one more crate before finally declaring defeat. His body was deteriorating far too quickly.
"Yeah… go on. I'll finish up here—don't push yourself."
It was no hardship for Pietro to take on a little more; they'd been friends since childhood, and Giovanni had covered for him more than once whenever he'd fallen ill in the past.
"Uuurgh…"
Giovanni left the port and headed home. He was shaking like an aspen leaf, and it looked terribly bad.
"Giovanni, is something the matter?"
"Yes, I'm feeling a bit ill today."
"Don't overdo it—go rest up, now. Take care."
After exchanging a brief word with old Giovanna from next door, he stepped inside his house.
"Oof…"
"Oh? Dear, you're home? Early today, isn't it?"
"Ah! Maria? You were home?"
"Yes, we finished early today."
Giovanni thought it a stroke of luck. In his current state, he'd have found it hard just to fetch water.
Maria wove wool at the village's communal weaving house, and he was grateful she'd come home ahead of schedule.
"I wasn't feeling well, so I came back early."
"Huh?"
"…"
Maria touched his forehead gently and gasped. His brow was hotter than a burning coal.
"Dear! Lie down at once—I'll fetch water. You're burning up!"
"Huh? Really? I'm in your hands, then…"
Maria hurried to the well, drew up water, and pulled a scrap of cloth from the wardrobe.
It was a fabric called cotton, brought long ago from Daehan—soft and wonderfully absorbent, perfect for soaking and wiping down a fevered body just like this.
I'm a little uncomfortable myself, but surely I'm better off than he is?
In truth, Maria had also come home early because her groin had swollen up painfully.
She'd assumed it was from being with Giovanni the night before, and too embarrassed to breathe a word to anyone, she had simply hurried home.
A day passed like that. Giovanni's condition grew worse, and Maria took to her bed alongside him.
"Mmmgh… mmmgh…"
"…"
Giovanni suffered through aching muscles on top of everything else, and Maria, who had writhed in pain through the night before finally falling asleep, ate nothing at all—the two of them lay in bed together, unable to do anything else.
Thump-thump-thump.
"Giovanni? You in there?"
"Mmmgh…"
His friend Pietro had come to check on him, but Giovanni was so drained he couldn't manage a proper reply.
"What's wrong with you?"
"…"
"Well, I'm coming in, then."
Clack.
Pietro shoved the door open and let himself in. His friend hadn't shown up for work in two days, and Maria had vanished from the village since the day after that—worried sick, he'd come to look for them.
"Mmmgh…"
"Huh? Giovanni?"
At first, finding Giovanni and Maria both lying in bed, Pietro worried he'd walked in on something private. But looking closer, something seemed very wrong.
"What's happened to you?"
"W… wa-water…"
"Got it! Hold on!"
Pietro dashed out and drew water from the village well, his worry for his friend swelling with every step. What on earth had happened to him?
He brushed off the greetings of the villagers on his way back—and found his friend's cold, lifeless corpse. He had slipped away in the span of just a few moments.
His skin had turned black in places, but Pietro's grief left him no room to examine it.
"Hic…"
As the days passed, more and more people collapsed in the port towns of the Messina region.
The symptoms varied—raging fever, chills, muscle aches, headaches, body pain, vomiting—but they shared one common feature: the horrifying necrosis that turned the skin black.
It took less than two weeks for the little port village where Giovanni and Pietro had grown up together to be reduced to a wasteland of ruin.
Small as it was, this tragedy was unfolding simultaneously in every corner of Europe.
And then there was Venice.
Rattle-rattle.
A man dragged a cart across the city, and the cart was piled high with corpses.
Thud.
He'd loaded it far beyond capacity, and a body tumbled off onto the street—but the man paid it no mind and kept moving.
There were already far too many corpses sprawled across the city for anyone to care about one more.
Another man walked behind the cart.
"What has become of the world…"
A chronicler by trade, he was recording this horrifying sight. He felt he simply had to write it down, for the sake of whatever future there might be.
"Heh heh… on the same bier, brothers and wives, parents and children, carried out together…"
Even as he murmured and set the words to paper, his own throat had swollen badly.
"Damn it all. There's no end to them…"
"When will it ever end…"
"You go to sleep, wake up, and this many more have fallen. Are we really supposed to keep clearing them?"
The city still held plenty of people, but the only ones out and about were those tasked with disposing of the dead.
Everyone else hid inside their homes, shoving their corpses out through the windows.
"Husband?"
"Papa?"
"I'm sorry…"
In one household, a man abandoned his ailing wife and children entirely and fled.
"Hoo… hoo…"
The abbot could now sense, by instinct alone, that his own end had come.
"Those damned bastards…"
When people fell ill, they had been forced inside to pray and repent—and now everyone in the monastery was dead.
"Am I the last?"
All around him, the countless blackened corpses they'd given up trying to clear away rotted where they lay.
"Damn the Papacy. They will face divine punishment for this."
Cursing the Pope, the Emperor, and the kings who had issued such an absurd order, he left behind his final words: that punishment would come.
As the plague spread across all of Europe, the Papacy too had gathered its people together, searching for an answer.
"What is the meaning of this!"
"A pestilence—here, of all places!"
"God must be wrathful!"
Even the Holy See was in an uproar.
"What do the universities say?"
This was a question for physicians and scholars of science—but at that very moment, Europe's universities were devoted almost entirely to the study of theology and philosophy.
"They say it is because Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars are aligned too closely along their orbits."
"Then what are we to do about it?"
"I imagine we must simply wait for time to pass."
With the study of science and medicine so sorely neglected, even the universities could offer nothing better than that.
And so it went. It would never have occurred to anyone that the disease was spreading by way of rats and fleas.
"Heh heh. It seems this too is God's doing. Order the sick to pray and repent."
If this was divine punishment, the Papacy concluded, then prayer would see the plague defeated—a decision so ignorant it bordered on barbaric.
The Black Death swept the world in staggered waves—yet the only lands it passed over were those connected to Daehan.
Puzzled by this, some made the arduous journey to Mudo to plead their case and ask.
"How is it that none of you fall ill?"
"Us? We just clean every day and wash up properly."
The Europeans, who considered bathing in clean water—with no one having fouled the river upstream—a nearly impossible luxury, refused to believe a word of it.
"Just that?"
"What do you mean, just? Do you have any idea how hard it is to bathe every single day?"
The people of Daehan felt rather wronged. Unaware of what the Holy Water was doing for them, they knew of no difference between themselves and the outsiders besides the washing.
From a distance, the outsiders studied the people of Daehan with narrowed eyes.
"There has to be some secret behind it!"
"Find out why they don't get sick, and we'll be rich beyond counting!"
And once again, they were Venetian merchants.
Watching Mudo intently, they stumbled upon something odd.
"Huh? Why isn't there a hospital here?"
"Right? We've wandered all over—not a single sick person, and not a single hospital either!"
Granted, a "hospital" in this age meant little more than a place to grind charcoal into medicine, but surely the difference between having one and not still counted for something?
After combing the city like rat-catchers, they finally had no choice but to ask a passerby.
"Excuse me—is there no hospital here?"
"A hospital?"
"Um… ah! A place one goes when one is ill."
"Ahh, we go to the Temple for that."
"I beg your pardon?"
According to what they were told, it sounded exactly the same as going to church when you were sick.
"Does the sickness heal if you go to church?"
"A church?"
"Um… a place where God is worshipped."
"Ahh, yes! If you tell Haneul-nim, every illness is cured."
"Oh!"
Over a slight difference in pronunciation, the merchants mistook "Haneul" for the name of these people's God.
A catastrophe born of a misunderstanding.
"As I thought! Prayer to God is the answer!"
"The Papacy was never wrong!"
"Let's hurry back and tell them!"
Had they lingered a little longer in conversation, they might have noticed something strange—for the passerby had made it clear that one did not go to the Temple to pray, but simply to tell Haneul that one was ill.
Go, say you're sick, and receive Holy Water to drink. Instead, the hapless Europeans were about to die in even greater numbers.
The merchants hurried back to the Papacy.
"Your Holiness! We have uncovered the secret of Daehan!"
"Yes? And what is it?"
The merchants hesitated. Was it a guilty conscience? Or had something begun to trouble them the moment they tried to say it aloud?
"Well, you see…"
"Out with it!"
The merchants hemmed and hawed; the Pope pressed them onward.
"This did cost us a great deal of money, you understand?"
"What?"
"We're barred from entering Daehan, are we not? There was the cost of sneaking in, and then the cost of staying hidden inside while we extracted the secret—it took a truly enormous sum."
And there it was—money. Merchants who had gone sneaking off to buy goods on the sly now packaged their findings as the fruit of a massive investment.
Had the truth come out, they'd have been hanged or burned on the spot—but no one knew but themselves. It was the perfect crime.
"How much do you require?"
"That would be… (whisper whisper)."
"Gasp!"
When the figure was quietly murmured into the Pope's ear, even he reeled in shock.
"That much?"
"Yes… it was my entire fortune…"
"Dear me…"
It was almost pitiable, watching the Pope fall hook, line, and sinker for the merchant's poor-performance act.
And this same scene was playing out across the nations of Europe, as the merchants who'd uncovered the secret divided the countries between them, one apiece, to sell their information.
"Very well. I'll pay…"
"Yes… they say the sickness is cured by going to the church and praying!"
"Hm? Is that true?"
The Pope rather liked the answer. Was this not confirmation that his own decision had been right all along?
And so an unexpected wave of prayer fervor swept across Europe. Believe in God, and you shall be saved—believe, and the sickness shall be cast out!