The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time

by John Kelly

  Even without the plague, the 1340s would have been a desperate decade for the city. In 1340 there was a terrible epidemic; in 1341, a war with Pisa; and in 1343, political upheaval and civil strife, the latter culminating in a monstrous act of public barbarism that had left the old chronicler deeply shaken. “In the presence of the father and for his greater sorrow,” Villani wrote of the execution of the city’s chief of police and his son, the crowd “first dismembered the son, cutting him into small bits. This done, they did the same with the father. And some were so cruel . . . they ate of the raw flesh.” In the mid-1340s ecological upheaval and financial ruin added to the sum of Florentine misery. There were the torrential rains of 1345 and the terrible famine of 1347, and in between there was the financial catastrophe of 1346, when Edward III of England, who was using Florentine money to fight the Hundred Years’ War, defaulted on his loans to local banks to the tune of 1,365,000 florins—a sum the horrified Villani described as the “value of an entire kingdom.”

  However, no catastrophe captured the old chronicler’s imagination quite like the plague. In the autumn of 1347, as Catania and Messina fought over St. Agatha’s bones, Villani, in an I-told-you-so mood, was writing, “This plague was . . . foretold by the masters in astrology last March. . . . The sign of Virgo and its master . . . Mercury . . . signif[y] death.” A series of sinister ecological portents in late 1347 and early 1348 reaffirmed Villani’s belief that death would soon be astride the Arno plain. The winter before the plague arrived, the earth ripped open again, and large parts of northern Italy and Germany were rocked by earthquakes; shortly after Christmas 1347 a mysterious “column of fire” appeared over Avignon. Eyewitnesses claimed that the glowing shaft of golden light was a natural phenomenon produced by “the sun’s rays like a rainbow,” but Villani was having none of that. Even if the column was a natural phenomenon, he insisted that its appearance “nevertheless [is] a sign of future and great events.” Whenever Villani wrote “great,” he meant “terrible.”

  The pestilence, when it arrived, was everything that a Lear-like old man could have hoped for. Slipping under Florence’s three sets of walls on a grim March day,

  Y. pestis toured the city like a conquering King Death. Stopping here and there to admire “views that resemble paintings,” it infected Florence’s “beautiful streets, beautiful hospitals, beautiful palaces and beautiful churches.” Demonstrating a new ferocity, it burst into homes and churches and leaped upon the inhabitants “with the speed of fire racing through a dry or oily substance.” The plague killed eighty Dominicans at the monastery of Santa Maria Novella and sixty Franciscans at Santa Croce del Corvo; it killed vast numbers of Florence’s eight thousand to ten thousand schoolchildren, thirty thousand wool workers, six hundred notaries and lawyers, and sixty physicians and surgeons. And, as if emboldened by its success, with each passing day the pestilence killed with ever-mounting ferocity. It killed through a gray, wet April and a sunny May; and when the summer came and the July sun baked a thousand tangerine rooftops, it killed with an even greater ferocity, as if killing was the only happiness it knew.

  In early spring, as the pestilence was taking hold in Florence, Villani completed his history. After following

  Y. pestis from its origins to the present moment, the chronicler wrote, “And the plague lasted until . . .”—then put down his pen, apparently expecting to pick it up again after the disease had burned itself out. It was an uncharacteristic act of optimism on the old pessimist’s part, and, as it turned out, an unwarranted one.

  Seven hundred years later, Villani’s last sentence still awaits completion.

  In the opening scene of

  The Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio’s allegory set in hills above Black Death Florence, several young women, “fair to look upon” and highborn, are attending a funeral in the city. Afterward, sitting in the oppressive darkness of the church nave, the little group falls into a fit of communal gloom. Outside, on the hot, pestilential streets, a world of pain and death awaits them. Suddenly a member of the group—a pretty young woman named Pampinea—brightens. Turning to her companions, she says, “Dear ladies, Here we linger for no purpose . . . [other] than to count the number of corpses being taken to burial . . . If this be so (and we plainly perceive that it is), what are we doing here? . . . We could go and stay together in one of our various country estates. . . . There we shall hear birds singing . . . see fresh green hills and plains, fields of corn undulating like the sea.”

  While the sparkling twenty-somethings in

  The Decameron are fictional, the account of the plague that precedes their conversation in the church is not. Giovanni Boccaccio lived though the Black Death in Florence,* and his account of the epidemic captures the texture and feel of life in a pestilential city as no other document of the period does.

  “It is a remarkable story I have to relate,” Boccaccio begins, then offers the reader a small sample of how “remarkable” life in Florence was. “One day,” he says, “the rags of a pauper who had died from the disease were thrown into the street where they attracted the attention of two pigs. In their wonted fashion, the pigs first of all gave the rags a thorough mauling with their snouts, after which they took them between their teeth and shook them against their cheeks. And within a short time, they began to writhe as though they had been poisoned, then they both dropped dead to the ground, spread-eagled upon the rags that had brought about their undoing.”

  A visiting Venetian once described Florence as a “clean, beautiful, happy place,” but the city Boccaccio describes had become a vast, open-air death pit. “Many dropped dead in the open streets by day and night, . . . whilst a great many others, though dying in their own houses, drew their neighbors’ attention to the fact more by the smell of their rotting corpses than by any other means. And what with these, and the others who were dying all over the city, bodies were here, there and everywhere.”

  Of the plague’s divisive effects, Boccaccio writes, “It was not merely a question of one citizen avoiding another; . . . this scourge had implanted such a great terror in the hearts of men and women that brothers abandon brothers, uncles their nephews, sisters their brothers, and in many cases, wives deserted husbands. But even worse, and almost incredible was the fact that fathers and mothers refused to nurse and assist their own children, as though they did not belong to them.”

  The dying could find no succor outside the family, either. “Countless numbers of people who fell ill, both male and female, were entirely dependent upon . . . the charity of friends (who were few and far between) or the greed of servants, who remained in short supply despite the attraction of high wages out of all proportion to the services they performed.” As shocking to Boccaccio as the desertion of the sick was “a practice almost never previously heard of, whereby when a woman fell ill, no matter how gracious or well born or beautiful she might be, she raised no objection to being attended by a male servant, whether young or not. Nor did she have any objections to showing him every part of her body as freely as she would have displayed it to a woman. . . . This explains why those women who recovered were possibly less chaste in the period that followed.”

  According to Boccaccio, “A great many people died who would perhaps have survived had they received some assistance. . . . And, hence, what with the lack of appropriate means for attending the sick and the virulence of the plague, the number of deaths reported in the city whether by day or night was so enormous that it astonished all who heard tell of it, to say nothing of the people who actually witnessed the carnage. And it was perhaps inevitable that among the citizens who survived, there arose certain customs that were quite contrary to the established tradition.”

  Boccaccio is referring here to the way the plague changed the grand opera that was the Florentine Way of Death. “It had once been the custom . . . ,” he writes, “for the women relatives and neighbors of the dead man to assemble in his house in order to mourn in the company of the women who had been closest to
him; moreover, his kinsfolk would foregather in the front of his house along with his neighbors and various other citizens, and there would be a contingent of priests, whose numbers varied according to the quality [that is, status] of the deceased; his body would be taken thence to the church in which he had wanted to be buried being borne on the shoulders of his peers amidst the funeral pomp of candles and dirges. But as the ferocity of the plague began to mount, this practice all but disappeared. . . . Not only did people die without having many women about them, but a great number departed this life without anyone at all to witness their going. Few indeed were those to whom the lamentations and bitter tears of their relatives were accorded; on the contrary, more often than not, bereavement was the signal for laughter, and witticism and general jollification—the art of which the women, having for the most part suppressed their feminine concerns for the salvations of the souls . . . , had learned to perfection.”

  Even sadder to see, according to Boccaccio, were the pathetic little trains of mourners who followed the dead through the summer streets. It became “rare for bodies . . . to be accompanied by more than ten or twelve neighbors to church, nor were they borne on the shoulders of worthy or honest citizens but by a kind of grave digging fraternity newly come into being and drawn from the lowest orders of society. These people assumed the title of sexton and demanded a fat fee for their services, which consisted of taking up the coffin and hauling it away swiftly not to the church specified by the dead man in his will, but usually to the nearest at hand.”

  Boccaccio’s grave diggers are the sinister

  becchini, who circled Florence like vultures during the plague. Adopting the death’s-head motto, “Those who live in fear die,” these rough country men from the hills above the city earned an unsavory reputation not only for their cavalier attitude toward death, the way they seemed almost to condescend to it, but also for their swashbuckling behavior. In a city swollen with grief and loss, the

  becchini drank and wenched and caroused and stole like happy buccaneers. As spring became summer, the terrors of life in Florence grew to include a front door bursting open in the dead of night and a group of drunken, shovel-wielding grave diggers rushing into the house, threatening rape and murder unless the inhabitants paid a ransom.

  The greatest blow to the Florentine Way of Death, however, was not the

  becchini or the cynicism of the female mourners, but the plague pits. “Such was the multitude of corpses . . . ,” wrote Boccaccio, that “huge trenches were excavated in the churchyards, into which new arrivals were placed in their hundreds, stored tier upon tier like ships’ cargo, each layer of corpses being covered with a thin layer of soil till the trench was filled to the top.”

  Professor Giulia Calvi was describing the psychological effects of the pits during a recurrence of the plague in the city, but her words apply equally well to Black Death Florence. “Nothing,” she writes, “was more senseless, uncommon and cruel [to Florentines] than to be buried . . . far from the family vault, one’s own church . . . from the texture of family life and neighborhood life . . . naked, mutilated by animals, a victim of the elements.” For many, the pits held another, even greater terror. The modern idea of a personal death, of “my death,” is a product of the European Middle Ages. In Antiquity and the early medieval period “death, at least as described in epic and chronicle, was a public and heroic event,” says historian Caroline Walker Bynum. “But in the later Middle Ages death became increasingly personal. In painting and in story, [it] was seen as the moment at which the individual, alone before his personal past, took stock of the meaning of his life.” The plague pit was the antithesis of this idea; it made death anonymous, casual, animal-like, and left the individual unrecognizable “even for future resurrection.”

  However, one thing even the Black Death could not change was human nature. Florentines responded to the pestilence in ways that still sound familiar. “Some people,” says Boccaccio, “were of the opinion that a sober and abstemious mode of living considerably reduced the risk of infection. They, therefore, formed themselves into groups and lived in isolation from everyone. Having withdrawn to a comfortable abode, . . . they locked themselves in and settled down to a peaceable existence, consuming modest quantities of delicate food and precious wines and avoiding all excesses.

  “Others took the opposite view and maintained that an infallible way to ward off this appalling evil was to drink heavily, enjoy life to the full . . . gratifying all one’s cravings . . . and shrug the whole thing off as one enormous joke.” Members of this group visited “one tavern after another drinking all day and night to immoderate excess or . . . they would do their drinking in various private houses, but only in ones where the conversation was restricted to subjects that were entertaining or pleasant. . . . People behaved as though their days were numbered and treated their belongings and own persons with abandon.”

  A third group of citizens “steered a middle course . . . living with a degree of freedom sufficient to satisfy their appetites, and not as recluses. They therefore walked about, carrying in their hands flowers or fragrant herbs or divers sorts of spices, which they frequently raised to their noses, deeming it an excellent thing thus to comfort the brain with such perfumes because the air seemed to be everywhere laden and reeking with the stench emitted by the dead and dying, and the odors of the drugs.”

  A fourth group reacted like Pampinea and her friends. “Some again,” says Boccaccio, “the most sound perhaps . . . affirmed that there was no medicine for the disease superior or equal in efficiency to flight; following which prescription, a multitude of men and women, negligent of all but themselves, deserted their city, their houses, their estates, . . . and went into voluntary exile, or migrated to the country, as if God . . . would not pursue them.”

  The chronicle of another Florentine, Marchione di Coppo Stefani, helps to flesh out the picture of life in the pestilential city. Though he wrote several decades after the plague, Stefani employed a perhaps more resonant metaphor to convey the horror of pits. He says the dead were laid out, “layer upon layer just like one puts layers of cheese on lasagna.” The chronicler also offers a fuller explanation of how friends and relations would desert the dying. As night fell, plague victims “would plead with . . . relatives not to abandon them,” and to avoid an ugly scene, often the relatives would agree to stay. “‘So you don’t have to wake me during the night,’ they would tell the victim at bedtime, ‘take some sweetmeats, wine or water, they are on the bedstead by your head.’” According to Stefani, this supposed act of kindness was usually a ruse. “When the sick person fell asleep [the relative] left and did not return.” Frequently these little dramas of abandonment and betrayal had an even darker second act. The next morning, awakening to find herself deceived and abandoned, the plague victim would crawl to a window and cry out for help, but since “no one . . . wished to enter a house where someone was sick,” the call would go unheeded, leaving the victim to die alone in the warm morning light in a pool of her own blood and vomit.

  Stefani’s account also contains a description of the mordant dinner parties that became popular in Florence during the mortality. These often had the aspect of the game Ten Little Indians. “The [pestilence] was a matter of such great discouragement and fear,” says the chronicler, “that men gathered . . . to take some comfort in dining together. And each evening one of them provided dinner to ten companions and the next evening they planned to eat with one of the others.” But often when the next night arrived, the guests would find that the host “had no meal planned because he was sick. Or if [he] made dinner for ten, two or three were missing.”

  For many Florentines, one of the strangest aspects of the Black Death was the eerie stillness that fell over the streets and squares. Normally church bells echoed through the city morning, noon, and night, but during the plague the heavy thud of the gloomy bells became too much for people to bear and municipal authorities ordered them silenced. “They could not s
ound bells . . . nor cry out announcements, because the sick hated to hear this, and it discouraged the healthy as well.” Human nature being what it is, greed flourished. “Servants, or those who took care of the ill, charged from one to three florins a day, and the cost of things grew as well,” says Stefani. “The things that the sick ate, sweetmeats and sugar, seemed priceless. Sugar cost from three to eight florins a pound, . . . capons and other poultry were very expensive, and eggs cost between twelve and twenty-four pence each. . . . Finding wax was miraculous. A pound of wax would have gone up more than a florin if there had not been a stop put [by the municipal government] to the vain ostentation that the Florentines always make over funerals. . . . The mortality enriched apothecaries, doctors, poultry vendors,

  beccamorti [literally, vultures, and another name for the

  becchini], and greengrocers, who sold poultices of mallow, nettles, mercury, and other herbs necessary to draw off the mortality.”

  The Black Death’s visit to Florence is unusually well documented. We know that the mortality claimed roughly fifty thousand lives, a death rate of 50 percent in a city of about a hundred thousand. We also know that while public order held, anarchy and disorder were common. Major riots were avoided, but flight was general and greed ubiquitous. During 1348, municipal officials stole 375,000 gold florins from the inheritances and estates of the dead. We know, too, that in Florence victims often developed two buboes instead of the one characteristic of modern plague. We know as well that many animals died; along with Boccaccio’s pigs, there are reports of dogs and cats and apparently even chickens being stricken by the