More than thirteen million people are said to have perished in China, India was almost depopulated, and at last in 1347 Europe also was smitten. Very swift was the blow, for many victims of the plague died in a few hours, the majority within five days; and contemporary writers tell us of ships, that left an eastern harbour with their full complement of crew, found drifting in the Mediterranean a few weeks later without a living soul on board to take the helm; of towns where the dead were so many that there was none to bury them; of villages where the peasants fell like cattle in the fields and by the wayside unnoticed. In Italy, in France, in England, there is the same record of misery and terror. Boccaccio, the Italian writer, describes in his book, the _Decameron_, how the wealthy nobles and maidens of Florence fled from the plague-stricken town to a villa without the walls, there to pass their days in telling one another tales. These tales have made Boccaccio famous as the first great European novelist; but in reality not many even of the wealthy could keep beyond the range of infection, and Boccaccio himself says elsewhere ‘these who first set the example of forsaking others languished where there was no one to take pity on them’. Neither courage, nor devotion, nor selfishness could avail against the dread scourge; though like all diseases its ravages were most virulent where small dwellings were crowded together or where dirt and insanitary conditions prevailed. ‘They fell sick by thousands,’ says Boccaccio of the poorer classes, ‘and having no one whatever to attend them, most of them died.’ According to a doctor in the south of France, ‘the number of those swept away was greater than those left alive.’ In the once thriving port of Marseilles ‘so many died that it remained like an uninhabited place’. Another French writer, speaking of Paris, says, ‘there was so great a mortality of people of both sexes ... that they could hardly be buried.’ ‘There was no city, nor town, nor hamlet,’ writes an Englishman of his own country, ‘nor even, save in rare instances, any house, in which this plague did not carry off the whole or the greater portion of the inhabitants.’ One immediate result of the Black Death was to put a temporary stop to the war between England and France; for armies were reduced to a fraction of their former strength and rival kings forgot words like ‘glory’ or ‘conquest’ in terrified contemplation of an enemy against whom all their weapons were powerless.