Black Death

A date that has to be converted

The near-contemporary Split chronicle A Cutheis Tabula puts the start of the plague epidemic in the Dalmatian port at Christmas Day, 25 December 1347 by modern reckoning. Its surviving formula reads as 25 December 1348.

Because the chronicle uses a Nativity-style year that begins on Christmas Day, historians interpret that as 25 December 1347 in the modern January-to-December system. Silently rewriting the manuscript's 1348 as 1347 makes the date look more certain than it is.

What Marino a Cutheis actually recorded

'First cases' is modern shorthand. The chronicle records the beginning of an epidemic, not named or medically diagnosed patients.

It describes the deaths of nobles and other residents, flight from the city, and bodies left without customary burial. It calls the dead innumerable and supplies no death total at all.

Cutheis depicts families facing an immediate choice: flee to save themselves, or stay and bury their relatives.

What the chronicle does not say

It identifies no ship, traveller or route as the source. Cutheis does not mention Caffa and names no Genoese plague ships; maritime introduction through the stricken Adriatic is plausible context rather than something the source preserves.

The Tabula survives only in fragments, and its wolves, demonic imagery and unnatural animal behaviour work as literary and moral motifs as much as observation.

The record of Split's outbreak is a fragmentary medieval chronicle, not a public-health register of the first diagnosed patient in Croatia.