190 DESTRUCTION OF THE GEEEK EMPIEE to the other it swept the country in repeated visitations and probably carried off nearly the same proportion of inhabitants. 1 Cantacuzenus, in a vivid description of the disease, adds that the saddest feature about it was the feeling of hopelessness and despair which it left behind. The first visitation of the disease continued during two years in the capital. In 1348 it spread throughout the empire. We have seen that in 1352 the victorious Venetian and Spanish fleets dared not venture to attack Galata for fear that their crews would be attacked by the malady. It raged in Asia Minor as fiercely as in Europe. Trebizond was ruined. The Turks themselves suffered severely. Be- tween its entrance into Europe and 1364 the Morea had three visitations, and what remained of the Greek population became panic-stricken. Further north, at Yanina its ravages were equally terrible. In 1368 so many men died that Thomas, governor of the city, forced their widows to marry Serbians whom he had induced or compelled to enter the city for that purpose. A further outbreak seven years later took place in the same city, and among its victims was Thomas's own daughter. During the same period Arta, which adjoins the ancient Cyzicus, suffered severely. It is useless for our purpose to inquire whether Black Death and Plague were identical, but one or the other continued to depopulate town and country. We have seen it at Ferrara in 1438, but in the interval since it first made its appearance it had visited the capital on seven different occasions, the latest being in 1431 when the whole country from Constantinople to Cape Matapan suffered severely. 2 1 The tradition of its destructiveness even in England, which it reached in 1348, and the panic-struck words of the Statutes which followed it, have, says J. E. Green, ' been more than justified by modern researches. Of the three or four millions who then formed the population of England more than half were swept away by its repeated visitations' (Green's Short History of the English People), p. 241. 2 According to one contemporary writer, Murad had to relinquish the siege of Constantinople in 1422 on account of the appearance of plague in his army (Historia Epirotica). Mahomet the Second, however, according to Critobulus, attributed the necessity of raising the siege to hostility within his own family, doubtless alluding to the rising already mentioned in Asia Minor. He says, in
