“It was supposed that, through the failure of the people, there would for a long time be abundance of every thing which the earth produces; and, on the contrary, through the ingratitude of men, every thing came to unusual scarcity, and so continued a long time. In some countries there were several unusual famines. So also it was expected that there would be abundance of clothing, and of all other things which are of service to the human body beyond subsistence: and, in fact, the contrary came to pass for a long time; for most things were worth twice as much as they used to be before the aforesaid mortality, and more. And labour, and manufactures of all sorts, rose regularly to more than twice the ordinary rate. Lawsuits, disputes, controversies and riots arose on every side among the citizens of every country, on account of their inheritances and successions. And our city of Florence long filled her courts with them, with great expenditure and unusual charges. Wars were stirred up, and various scandals throughout all the universe, contrary to the common expectation of men.” These Italian accounts might be suspected of exaggeration, but they are fully supported by ultramontane authority; and though the pestilence of 1348 is usually known as the plague of Florence (a distinction which it owes probably to Boccaccio), it raged even more destructively beyond the Florentine territory, and beyond the Italian peninsula. The French and English historians in particular bear testimony to the extent of misery produced by it. “Never in old times was it heard or seen that such a multitude of people lay dead: the evil seemed to grow by imagination and contagion, for if a whole man visited a sick man, it was very seldom that he escaped. Thus in many towns and villages the priests fled to avoid attending upon the dying: in many places, out of twenty persons, not two remained alive. At Paris, in the hospital of the Hôtel Dieu, the mortality was such, that for a long time five hundred corpses were carried in carts daily to the burial–ground of the Innocents.”[118] “In Provence and Languedoc two–thirds of the people were estimated to have perished; in the rest of France one–third. Allowing for the inclination which all men have to magnify those calamities, the naked facts of which are terrible enough, there is here evidence of a mortality hardly to be equalled.”[119]