The people who gathered on the dock to greet the ships were met with a terrible surprise: most of the sailors aboard the ships were dead, and those who were still alive were seriously ill . They were overcome with fever, unable to keep food down, and delirious with pain. The strangest thing was that they were covered in mysterious black blisters that oozed blood and pus and gave their disease its name: the “Black Death”. The Sicilian authorities hastily ordered the fleet of "death ships" to leave port, but it was too late: over the next five years, the mysterious Black Death would kill more than 20 million people in Europe, almost a third of the population of the continent. population.”