Great and terrifying signs in the heavens, and there was winter and cold and frost and great cold the likes of which had not been for one hundred years. And when the ice melted the rivers swelled and the flooding waters destroyed cities and villages and animals and people without number. After this there was a famine of destruction and many people died, and after this a great plague in all the lands of Europe and not half the people remained.

The dead from the plague would come out of their bodies in the likeness of snakes and all manner of vermin. The wise men say that in those years there was a great earthquake in Persia near India, and the mountains split and fire and sulphur and smoke emerged, and from this the air was corrupted in all the world and great plagues came [(Tzemach David, part 2)].

Rav Shmuel HaLevi the Nagid bar Rabbi Yosef, known as ibn Bikitila, from the congregation of Cordoba, was a scholar and one of the greatest intellectuals, expert in the books of the Ishmaelites. He was a peddler and sustained himself with difficulty until the days of freedom in Spain when the Philistine princes conquered it and the city of Cordoba declined. Rav Shmuel fled to Malaga and settled in a shop adjacent to the courtyard of ben al-Arif, the scribe of King Habbus ben Machis, king of the Philistines in Granada.

His wife would come to Rav Shmuel to write letters for her to send to the king's palace, and when the letters reached the scribe he recognized that this was not a woman's writing. He asked her who had written them and she showed him Rav Shmuel. The scribe appointed him as his secretary, and when the scribe died, the king appointed Rav Shmuel in his place and loved him greatly, and when King Habbus died his son Badis reigned in his place and raised him to be Nagid over all Israel.