It was somewhere about the middle of the fourteenth century, or, to fix dates more precisely, in the autumn of the year 1343, that the great plague, described by various Italian writers, and especially by Boccaccio in his Decameron, for the sins or admonition of the Tuscans, fell upon the rich and beauteous city of Florence. The means by which this calamity, after spreading desolation through the Levant, and also through many of the maritime cities of Italy, was first introduced into Florence, have been matter of dispute. Some historians declare, that it first came in by the dealing of certain Jews; who introduced into the town, and bartered with the inhabitants, large quantities of condemned apparel--clothes belonging to the dead--which they had bought privately, getting them at a low market, in the infected city of Ancona. And of this suspicion, whether it was well or ill founded, the accused in the end bore the consequences; for, with only twelve hours allowed for preparation, in the fourth week of the disease, they were driven beyond the walls of the city; the streets in which they had dwelt being levelled with the ground, and themselves adjudged to death in case they attempted to return. Other writers, however, assert, on the contrary, that the malady itself was never "infectious;" but merely "endemic;" and that it was not imported at all, but arose from some malaria, or general predisposition to disease in the atmosphere. And certain it is, which so far goes to set up the theory of these last speculators, that the weather, during the whole of the spring and summer preceding the visitation, had been unusually close and sultry. Foul and offensive exhalations had proceeded, in a remarkable degree, from all pools, and fens, and marshes, in the neighbourhood of the city. The bed of the Arno, though afterwards replenished by sudden and heavy rains, had, at one period, sunk lower than the oldest citizen ever remembered to have seen it. Insects, moreover, in all fields and gardens, had appeared in numbers quite unprecedented; so as even, in many places, combined with the effect of the drought, entirely to destroy vegetation. And--a circumstance which still more attracted notice--the rats, both in the houses of Florence, and in the farms in the neighbouring villages, multiplied with such rapidity, and to such an excess, that all temporal remedies being found unavailing, it was thought necessary to have recourse to the aid of the church, and formally to _excommunicate them_. The success of this extraordinary measure, or how far it operated at all, does not appear; but the fact of its being applied, is distinctly stated in all the chronicles of the time. Notice was formally read in open church against the rats; that, unless they withdrew from all houses, wheat-stacks, barns, or granaries, in Florence and the vicinity, within four days from the date of those presents, process of "deprivation" would be issued against them.