Unit 2 Networks of Exchange. The other eight units are not on this desk. Unit 2 pilot. Not nine units. Not a mock engine.

Review2027 format

Delayed check — exchange and its costs

Second public sitting. A retained judgment on an objective requires a fresh independent check at least seven days after earlier success. This screen can wait for the real due date, or you can simulate the delay to demonstrate the rule. Simulation is labeled. It is not time travel. Unit 2 pilot. Not nine units. Not a mock engine. Struggle after a week is expected; that is why the check exists. Public-domain translation (Rigg). Teaching paraphrases stay labelled.

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Today: 2026-09-11

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Content notice

The stimulus describes epidemic disease and death in 1348 Florence. The academic content is required; you may pause and return. Fresh stimulus family BOCC-1348 — not an exact repeat of Pegolotti or Ibn Battuta.

Primary extract2027 format

Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron — the plague in Florence, 1348

Creator: Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375), Florentine writer
Date / range: Events of 1348; Decameron framed shortly afterward (mid-14th c.)
Original context: A literary frame-story introducing tales told by people who have left plague-stricken Florence. It is both a historical witness and a crafted narrative with moral and literary aims. Boccaccio offers competing explanations (celestial influence, divine wrath) rather than a single medical theory.
Source type: Literary narrative with contemporary eyewitness claims (text extract)
Rights: Public domain (Rigg 1921 translation).
Repository / translation: English: The Decameron, trans. J. M. Rigg (London: David Campbell, 1921), Vol. 1, pp. 5–11.. Abridged from Rigg’s 1921 translation. Graphic clinical and burial detail is shortened for classroom length; the omitted passages describe tumors, high mortality, and breakdown of funeral custom. Ellipses mark cuts.
Academic note: Valuable for how a Western Mediterranean city experienced a pathogen that moved along long-distance routes. It does not by itself prove a single origin point or a unique transmission path. Historians still debate plague phylogeny and the relative role of particular sieges or caravans.

Zoom text without altering the wording. Accessibility rendering matches the extract.

I say, then, that the years of the beatific incarnation of the Son of God had reached the tale of one thousand three hundred and forty eight, when in the illustrious city of Florence … there made its appearance that deadly pestilence, which, whether disseminated by the influence of the celestial bodies, or sent upon us mortals by God in His just wrath … had had its origin some years before in the East, whence, after destroying an innumerable multitude of living beings, it had propagated itself without respite from place to place, and so calamitously, had spread into the West. In Florence, despite all that human wisdom and forethought could devise to avert it, as the cleansing of the city from many impurities … the refusal of entrance to all sick folk, and the adoption of many precautions for the preservation of health … towards the beginning of the spring of the said year the doleful effects of the pestilence began to be horribly apparent … Moreover, the virulence of the pest was the greater by reason the intercourse was apt to convey it from the sick to the whole … not merely by speech or association with the sick was the malady communicated to the healthy … but any that touched the clothes the sick or aught else that had been touched, or used by these seemed thereby to contract the disease. … In this extremity of our city’s suffering and tribulation the venerable authority of laws, human and divine, was abased and all but totally dissolved for lack of those who should have administered and enforced them … Whereby every man was free to do what was right in his own eyes. … this sore affliction entered so deep into the minds of men and women, that in the horror thereof brother was forsaken by brother … and oftentimes husband by wife: nay, what is more, and scarcely to be believed, fathers and mothers were found to abandon their own children … to their fate, as if they had been strangers.

Boccaccio, writing about Florence in 1348, says a deadly pestilence began in the East years earlier, spread from place to place into the West, overcame city precautions, seemed to pass through contact with the sick and their belongings, and left laws and families unable to hold together.

Annotate — keep layers separate

Observation: what the text states. Inference: what you reasonably conclude. Keep them in separate boxes — mixing them is the habit that later shows up as a sourcing miss on the SAQ.

Passage (copy a short phrase)Your note

No annotations yet on this source. Start with one observation: a short phrase the text actually states, not the argument you want to make.

Boccaccio reports that Florence’s precautions (cleansing, keeping the sick out) failed, and that contact with the sick and their belongings seemed to spread the malady. Combined with his claim that the pestilence had come from the East “from place to place,” the best Unit 2 use of this source is that 2027 format

A.long-distance networks that moved people and goods could also move a pathogen, and a dense city then experienced local, person-to-person disaster.B.the plague proves that medieval people never tried to explain disease naturally.C.Florence must have been the origin point because the Decameron is set there.D.literary sources cannot be used for environmental history.

A student argues: “Because Boccaccio is emotional about family members abandoning the sick, we should ignore him and only use Pegolotti.” The strongest reply is that 2027 format

A.emotional testimony can still document social breakdown; Pegolotti cannot replace a Florentine urban witness, and neither source is a full map of Eurasia.B.Pegolotti is unbiased because he lists prices.C.only official College Board documents may be used as sources.D.the student is right: one biased word ruins a source.

Fresh task (not the lesson’s Kilwa/Pegolotti comparison). In 5–7 sentences, explain one mechanism by which increased exchange c. 1200–1450 could produce both commercial intensification and demographic disaster, and why a caravan city, a Mediterranean commune, and a countryside might not experience those effects in the same way. You may use Boccaccio and your Unit 2 knowledge. Do not copy your earlier short response. 2027 format

Independent short explanation

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Delayed check — exchange and its costs

Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron — the plague in Florence, 1348

Creator

Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375), Florentine writer

Date / range

Events of 1348; Decameron framed shortly afterward (mid-14th c.)

Original context

A literary frame-story introducing tales told by people who have left plague-stricken Florence. It is both a historical witness and a crafted narrative with moral and literary aims. Boccaccio offers competing explanations (celestial influence, divine wrath) rather than a single medical theory.

Source type

Literary narrative with contemporary eyewitness claims (text extract)

Rights

Public domain (Rigg 1921 translation).

Repository / translation

English: The Decameron, trans. J. M. Rigg (London: David Campbell, 1921), Vol. 1, pp. 5–11.. Abridged from Rigg’s 1921 translation. Graphic clinical and burial detail is shortened for classroom length; the omitted passages describe tumors, high mortality, and breakdown of funeral custom. Ellipses mark cuts.

Academic note

Valuable for how a Western Mediterranean city experienced a pathogen that moved along long-distance routes. It does not by itself prove a single origin point or a unique transmission path. Historians still debate plague phylogeny and the relative role of particular sieges or caravans.

Zoom text without altering the wording. Accessibility rendering matches the extract.

I say, then, that the years of the beatific incarnation of the Son of God had reached the tale of one thousand three hundred and forty eight, when in the illustrious city of Florence … there made its appearance that deadly pestilence, which, whether disseminated by the influence of the celestial bodies, or sent upon us mortals by God in His just wrath … had had its origin some years before in the East, whence, after destroying an innumerable multitude of living beings, it had propagated itself without respite from place to place, and so calamitously, had spread into the West. In Florence, despite all that human wisdom and forethought could devise to avert it, as the cleansing of the city from many impurities … the refusal of entrance to all sick folk, and the adoption of many precautions for the preservation of health … towards the beginning of the spring of the said year the doleful effects of the pestilence began to be horribly apparent … Moreover, the virulence of the pest was the greater by reason the intercourse was apt to convey it from the sick to the whole … not merely by speech or association with the sick was the malady communicated to the healthy … but any that touched the clothes the sick or aught else that had been touched, or used by these seemed thereby to contract the disease. … In this extremity of our city’s suffering and tribulation the venerable authority of laws, human and divine, was abased and all but totally dissolved for lack of those who should have administered and enforced them … Whereby every man was free to do what was right in his own eyes. … this sore affliction entered so deep into the minds of men and women, that in the horror thereof brother was forsaken by brother … and oftentimes husband by wife: nay, what is more, and scarcely to be believed, fathers and mothers were found to abandon their own children … to their fate, as if they had been strangers.

Annotate — keep layers separate

Observation: what the text states. Inference: what you reasonably conclude. Keep them in separate boxes — mixing them is the habit that later shows up as a sourcing miss on the SAQ.

Passage (copy a short phrase)Your note

No annotations yet on this source. Start with one observation: a short phrase the text actually states, not the argument you want to make.