3 stories from this place.
Gabriele de' Mussis's *Historia de Morbo* (c. 1348) is the source of the famous story that the Mongol khan Jani Beg ended the 1346 siege of Caffa by catapulting plague-infected corpses over the walls. De' Mussis was not at Caffa. The corpse-catapult story may be a literary invention. The Black Death still arrived in Italy from Caffa.
Read the story →The Eratosthenian Earth circumference (about 250,000 stadia, accurate to 2%) was the standard ancient figure but had been substantially undermined by a competing late-antique calculation by Posidonius. Columbus took the smaller Posidonian figure as his planning baseline. If he had used Eratosthenes's number, he would never have sailed.
Read the story →Between 1347 and 1351 a pandemic killed somewhere between a third and half of everyone in Europe. Contemporaries called it the Great Mortality. It was the largest single demographic event in recorded human history.
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