During the Black Death, Florentine chronicler Giovanni Villani wrote, “The priest who confessed the sick and those who nursed them so generally caught the infection that the victims were abandoned and deprived confession, sacrament, medicine, and nursing … And many lands and cities were made desolate. And this plague lasted till ________.”

He left the blank so that he could record the date of the plague’s end, but then he himself succumbed, dying in 1348.