ernabo's example was imitated; nor was there any century more
appropriate for recommending to governments strong regulations against
the plague that the fourteenth; for when it broke out in Italy, in the
year 1399, and still demanded new victims, it was for the sixteenth time,
without reckoning frequent visitations of measles and small-pox. In this
same year, Viscount John, in milder terms than his predecessor, ordered
that no stranger should be admitted from infected places, and that the
city gates should be strictly guarded. Infected houses were to be
ventilated for at least eight or ten days, and purified from noxious
vapours by fires, and by fumigations with balsamic and aromatic
substances. Straw, rags, and the like were to be burned; and the
bedsteads which had been used, set out for four days in the rain or the
sunshine, so that by means of the one or the other, the morbific vapour
might be destroyed. No one was to venture to make use of clothes or beds
out of infected dwellings unless they had been previously washed and
dried either at the fire or in the sun. People were, likewise, to avoid,
as long as possible, occupying houses which had been frequented by plague-
patients.

We cannot precisely perceive in these an advance towards general
regulations; and perhaps people were convinced of the insurmountable
impediments which opposed the separation of open inland countries, where
bodies of people connected together could not be brought, even by the
most obdurate severity, to renounce the habit of profitable intercourse.

Doubtless it is nature which has done the most to banish the Oriental
plague from western Europe, where the increasing cultivation of the
earth, and the advancing order in civilised society, have prevented it
from remaining domesticated, which it most probably was in the more
ancient times.

In the fifteenth century, during which it broke out seventeen times in
different places in Europe, it was of the more consequence to oppose a
barrier to its entrance from Asia, Africa, and Greece (which had become
Turkish); for it would have been difficult for it to maintain itself
indigenously any longer. Among the southern commercial states, however,
which were called on to make the greatest exertions to this end, it was
principally Venice, formerly so severely attacked by the Black Plague,
that put the necessary restraint upon perilous profits of the merchant.
Until towards the end of the fifteenth