Strasbourg, Alsace, in the German Empire.

February the 14th, 1349.

A Saturday, the Sabbath, on a wooden platform built overnight in the Jewish cemetery on the outskirts of the city,

somewhere between 1 and two thousand men,

women, and children were burned alive. The charges against them were simple. They had poisoned

the wells. They had conjured the black death. They had murdered Christendom. None of it was true.

The plague had not yet reached Strasbourg. Not a single person inside the city walls

had so much as coughed, but debts had reached Strasbourg, and debts unlike plague, do not kill their

creditors. They just make the creditors wish someone else would. To understand how a city burns

its neighbors on a Saints' Day, you have to go back about a year to the autumn of 1347, when 12 merchant ships limped into the Sicilian port of Messina from the Black Sea.

The dock workers who boarded those ships found most of the crew dead or dying, their bodies swollen with black oozing boils the size of eggs. The harbor master

ordered the ships out, but it was already too late. The rats had made shore. The fleas had found

new hosts, and the pestilence that would eventually kill between a third and half of every living

soul in Europe had arrived. It moved fast. By the spring of 1348,

it had swept through Italy, leapt to southern France, and begun its crawl north through the

river valleys and along the trade roads. Whole villages went silent. In Florence, a chronicler

wrote that the living could scarcely bury the dead,

and that corpses were stacked in pits down to the water table. The Pope at Avignon locked himself

in a room and ordered fires kept burning around the clock, hoping the heat would purify the air.

Physicians prescribed bouquets of flowers held to the nose. Flegelants roamed the countryside, whipping themselves bloody in public squares,

convinced that God's wrath demanded penance.

And everywhere the pestilence touched, a second epidemic followed.

...