Death and sickness of course attended this suffering, and to alleviate the general distress the priors as early as March had decreed that nobody should be arrested for any debt under one hundred golden florins until the following August; and also, with a premium for importation, put a maximum price on the bushel of wheat; this was useless; because hunger backed by money overcame law, and corn sold for double the government value. For further alleviation all the prisoners in the public jails were released on a compromise with their creditors and enemies, as mortality had already begun in these places to the number of two or three in a day; public debtors for less than one hundred florins were also set at liberty on paying fifteen per cent. of their fines; but very few could take advantage of this, for all were suffering from poverty, hunger, and distress. The effects now began to appear; women and children of the poorest classes sank under the woeful pressure; this lasted until November and carried off about four thousand souls; but it was worse in Prato, Pistoia, and Bologna, in Romagna, and throughout all France. In Turkey, Syria, Tatary, and India, sickness raged with unheard-of violence, giving rise and currency to a thousand marvellous tales, such as fire issuing from the earth and air, and consuming men, cattle, houses, trees, and even reducing the very earth and stones to cinders: those who escaped this, died of pestilence; and on the banks of the Tanaïs, at Trebizond, and in all the neighbouring countries, only one person in five was left among the living; in other places it is said to have rained great black maggots with eight legs, some alive, some dead, whose sting was death and whose corruption poisoned the atmosphere; but these are the least incredible of the numerous fables that this universal scourge generated in morbid imaginations, and in which all men, being terror-struck, believed implicitly. Turkey, Greece, Egypt, Syria, Crete, Rhodes, and the other eastern isles bowed before the pestilence; thence it travelled with the course of trade to Sicily, Sardinia, Elba, Corsica, and throughout the coasts of Italy; four Genoese galleys carried it to that city out of eight that had fled from the Euxine; Milan scarcely felt it, but as there were then no lazarettos it swept over the Alps, searched every vale in Savoy, ravaged Provence and Dauphiné, infected Burgundy and Catalonia; missed Brabant, but holding on its course carried death and misery through the rest of Europe until 1350, when it had penetrated even the Boreal regions and nearly depopulated Iceland, which has never yet recovered from its touch.