Gabriel de Mussis

His account in Latin, entitled Istoria de Morbo sive Mortalitate quae fuit Anno Dni MCCCXLVIII ("History of the Disease, or the Great Dying that took place in the Year of our Lord 1348"), is preserved in a manuscript in the library of the University of Wroclaw (now shelfmark R 262).

De Mussis apparently recorded an early example of biological warfare in describing how the army of the Golden Horde hurled plague-infected cadavers over the city walls during the Siege of Caffa in 1346.

Within these countries broad regions, far-spreading provinces, magnificent kingdoms, cities, towns and settlements, ground down by illness and devoured by dreadful death, were soon stripped of their inhabitants.

The Christian merchants, who had been driven out by force, were so terrified of the power of the Tartars that, to save themselves and their belongings, they fled in an armed ship to Caffa, a settlement in the same part of the world which had been founded long ago by the Genoese.

All medical advice and attention was useless; the Tartars died as soon as the signs of disease appeared on their bodies: swellings in the armpit or groin caused by coagulating humours, followed by a putrid fever.

The scale of the mortality and the form which it took persuaded those who lived, weeping and lamenting, through the bitter events of 1346 to 1348—the Chinese, Indians, Persians, Medes, Kurds, Armenians, Cilicians, Georgians, Mesopotamians, Nubians, Ethiopians, Turks, Egyptians, Arabs, Saracens and Greeks (for almost all the East has been affected)—that the last judgement had come.