Until towards the end of the fifteenth century, the very
considerable intercourse with the East was free and unimpeded.
Ships of commercial cities had often brought over the plague:
nay, the former irruption of the "Great Mortality" itself had been
occasioned by navigators. For, as in the latter end of autumn,
1347, four ships full of plague-patients returned from the Levant
to Genoa, the disease spread itself there with astonishing
rapidity. On this account, in the following year, the Genoese
forbade the entrance of suspected ships into their port. These
sailed to Pisa and other cities on the coast, where already nature
had made such mighty preparations for the reception of the Black
Plague, and what we have already described took place in
consequence.
In the year 1485, when, among the cities of northern Italy, Milan
especially felt the scourge of the plague, a special Council of
Health, consisting of three nobles, was established at Venice, who
probably tried everything in their power to prevent the entrance
of this disease, and gradually called into activity all those
regulations which have served in later times as a pattern for the
other southern states of Europe.
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