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In Aleppo, ruled by the Mamluk sultans, al-Wardi, a world historian and author of the geographical treatise The Uniqueness of Strange Things, was one of the first to understand the strangeness of a global pandemic. ‘The Plague began,’ he declared, ‘in the land of darkness.’ Even in the face of horror, al-Wardi wrote with dark wit:

Ah, woe to him on whom it calls!

It found the chink in China’s walls –

they had no chance against its advance.

It sashayed into Cathay, made hay in Hind

and sundered souls in Sind.

It put the Golden Horde to the sword, transfixed Transoxiana and pierced Persia.

Crimea cringed and crumpled.

But now it was getting closer: ‘It destroyed mankind in Cairo … stilled all movement in Alexandria, attacked Gaza, trapped Sidon, and Beirut; fired its arrows into Damascus. There, the plague sat like a lion on a throne and swayed with power, killing daily one thousand or more.’ Finally it arrived in Aleppo.

At the same moment, down the African coast in Tunis, the capital of a Maghreb kingdom, a seventeen-year-old named Ibn Khaldun and his brother Yaha were studying philosophy, mathematics and history with famous scholars. Their family were Andalusian aristocrats who had escaped Spain. But now the plague hit Tunis.

Across the Mediterranean in Italy, a Florentine poet, Francesco Petracco – which he latinized to Petrarca – was at the height of his fame. Petrarch’s poetry-loving Italy was beset with wars, the arena for conflict between German emperors and French kings, who established their own papacy in Avignon. Florentine politics was typically vicious: Petrarch’s father, a politician, was exiled from Florence, as was another Florentine, Dante Alighieri, who in the 1320s finished the epic poem Commedia, which deeply influenced Petrarch. The boy trained as a cleric and notary, serving as secretary to a cardinal in Avignon, but sought illumination in the classical world, studying Cicero’s letters, and he wished only to be a poet. He also did a peculiar thing that would become part of European civilization: communing with nature and walking up a mountain just for the fun of it.

His epic Africa – about Scipio – made his name as a young man. In 1327, when he was twenty-three, his life changed when he saw a married woman in church. ‘I struggled constantly with an overwhelming but pure love affair,’ he wrote, ‘my only one.’ But it inspired his Songbook of love sonnets that made him famous.

As a priest he was not allowed to marry or have lovers, but he had a son and a daughter with a paramour. In 1341, his poetry won him the honour of being crowned poet laureate in Rome. Now, he was in Verona, his career was at its height, when he witnessed the arrival of the ‘death-dealing scythe’. His brother, a Carthusian monk, saw thirty-four of his fellow monks perish. ‘Oh my brother!’ lamented Petrarch. But worse was to come. He lost two of his dearest – his son and his mysterious muse:

Laura, illustrious by her virtues, and long celebrated in my songs, first greeted my eyes in the days of my youth … but in the year 1348 withdrew from life, while I was at Verona, unconscious of my loss … Her chaste and lovely body was interred the same day: her soul, as I believe, returned to heaven, whence it came. To write these lines in bitter memory of this event, and in the place where they will most often meet my eyes, has in it something of a cruel sweetness …

In Aleppo, al-Wardi observed the desperate measures being taken against the Mortality: ‘Oh, if you could see the nobles of Aleppo studying their books of medicine. They follow its remedies by eating dried and sour foods. The buboes which disturb men’s lives are smeared with Armenian clay.’ But still it came. In Verona, Petrarch watched his loved ones die – ‘Where are now our sweet friends, where their beloved faces, their soothing words, their mild and pleasing company?’ – while he corresponded with a new, younger fan, Giovanni Boccaccio. His fellow Florentine, whose father worked for the banking Bardis, disliked banking. Dispatched by his father to the louche Neapolitan court, young Boccaccio fell in love with a muse, whom he called Fiammetta, and it was she who inspired his own early poetry.^* When Boccaccio tried the law, he loathed that too. Dreaming of literature, he longed to meet Petrarch.