ry seriously. To spread widely and quickly, and to take on the proportions of a true large pandemic, the plague must cross water. Contact with water ignites its latent powers, like a canister of oil thrown upon a fire. The Black Plague first strikes water at the Black Sea port of Kaffa (modern Theodosia) in the Crimea. A khan of the Golden Horde besieges the town in 1343 and again in 1345-46. In an effort to take the town he catapults the bodies of plague victims over its walls. "The people hurriedly dump the bodies into the sea." (Mussis 45) The coastline of the entire Mediterranean Sea now lays open to the attack of the plague.
             Why were the medieval populations of Europe so vulnerable to the plague? One can site various social factors to explain the catastrophic losses. A proposed explanation is based on the Malthusian principles. Malthus concludes that human populations tend to expand up to and beyond the limits of their food supplies. When these populations pass those limits, a reckoning is inevitable. This reckoning takes the form of famines, epidemics, wars, and the mortality resulting from them. These "positive checks" violently reduce the community's numbers to a size that its resources can handle. The plague is itself a classical Malthusian crisis, triggered by excessive numbers of people.
             The conclusion that Europe is overpopulated on the eve of the plague rests on two types of evidence, direct and indirect. The direct evidence comes from the sheer size that many European communities have attained by 1300. To cite only one out of the many possible examples, "the Italian reg
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