"What shall I say more?" adds the historian. "So wicked and timid were the Catanians that they refused even to speak to any from Messina, or to have anything to do with them, but quickly fled at their approach. Had it not been for secret shelter afforded by some of their fellow citizens, resident in the town, the unfortunate refugees would have been left destitute of all human aid." The contagion, however, was already spread, and the plague soon became rife. The same scenes were enacted at Catania as before in Messina. The Patriarch, desiring to provide for the souls of the people, gave to the priests, even the youngest, all the faculties he himself possessed, both episcopal and patriarchal, for absolving sins. "The pestilence raged in the city from October, 1347, to April, 1348, and the Patriarch himself, Gerard Otho, of the Order of St. Francis, fell a victim to his duty, and was one of the last to be carried off by the disease. Duke John, who had sought security by avoiding every infected house and person, died of the disease at the same time. The plague was spread in the same way from Messina throughout Sicily; Syracuse, Girgenti, Sciacca, and Trapani were successively attacked; in particular it raged in the district of Trapani, in the extreme west of the island, [p015] which," says the writer, "has remained almost without population."[22] Having briefly noticed the origin of the great pestilence which ravaged Europe in the fourteenth century, and its progress towards Italy, the story of Gabriel de' Mussi may again be taken up at the point where he describes the flight of the Genoese traders from the Crimea. The narrative has so far anticipated his account only by giving the history of the epidemic in Constantinople and Sicily. FOOTNOTES: [2] Muratori, _Rerum Italicarum Scriptores_, xiv, col. 14. [3] _The Epidemics of the Middle Ages_, translated by B. G. Babington (Sydenham Society), p. 21. [4] Marinus Sanutus, _Liber secretorum Fidelium crucis super Terræ Sanctæ recuperatione et conversatione_, in Bongars, _Gesta Dei per Francos_, vol. ii. [5] The most southern part of Asiatic Turkey. [6] Probably Mahe, on the Malabar coast. [7] Now Cambay, in the Baroda Dominion to the north of Bombay. [8] Otherwise Kus, now Koos, in Upper Egypt, not far from Thebes. [9] Sometimes known as S. Feodosia. This port was by the beginning of the 14th century a most important trading settlement of Genoese merchants. In 1316 Pope John XXII issued a Bull making it the cathedral city of an extensive diocese. By the time of the outbreak of the great plague it had become the centre of almost all commerce between Asia and Europe (_Cf._ M. G. Canale, _Della Crimea, del suo commercio et dei suoi dominatori_, i, p. 208 _et seq._)