It was George Santayana[1] who gave us this immediately appropriate aphorism:
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”
In the 14th Century, Feodosia (then known as Kaffa or Caffa) was a city of the Black Sea. It had grown rich as a trading centre sitting astride one of the main overland trading routes to China (known as the ‘Silk Road’). The Genoese and Venetian merchants exchanged European wine, pottery, jewellery and woollen cloth for a range of Asiatic spices, silk, porcelain, and slaves! In 1347 one of those slaves (or their handlers) unwittingly smuggled in something else from China. It later became known as “The Black Death” and finally reduced the population of Europe by one-third or more. We would probably know it today as Covid-1!
The Crimean City of Feodosia, (Theodosia)
NM February 2021
[1] Santayana, G. (1905), Reason in Common Sense, p. 284, volume 1 of The Life of Reason