Gabriele de Mussis

(c. 1280–c. 1356 AD), notary from Piacenza, and professed onsite witness to the Mongol siege of Kaffa, and the ensuing spread of the Black Death through Europe (1347–1352). Author of the acclaimed report on the plague titled Istoria de Morbo sive Mortalitate quae fuit Anno Dni MCCCXLVIII. The original manuscript can be traced to the University of Wroclaw, Poland, and comes to us via the German translation by Augustus Henschel (1842) and finally Rosemary Horrox’s English translation, parts of which form chapter mottos in Masks of God.

Further reading:

Derbes, Vincent J. “De Mussis and the Great Plague of 1348.” Journal of the American Medical Association 196 (1966): 59–62.

Gottfried, Robert S. The Black Death: Natural and Human Disaster in Medieval Europe. Free Press, 1983.

Henschel, August Wilhelm. “Documente zur Geschichte des schwarzen Todes.” Archiv für die gesammte Medizin 2 (1842): 26–59.

Horrox, Rosemary, ed. The Black Death. Manchester University Press, 1994.

Wheelis, Mark. “Biological Warfare at the 1346 Siege of Caffa.” Emerging Infectious Diseases 8, no. 9 (2002).

https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/8/9/01-0536_article.

“The Siege of Caffa.” The Trench.

https://www.thetrench.org/de-mussis-and-the-siege-of-caffa/.