by John Kelly
gavoccioli, or plague boil.
What remains a source of contention, however, is why the plague was so severe in the city.
This question goes to the heart of an even larger and far more contentious and puzzling question: Why was the plague in late medieval Europe so much more catastrophic than the plague of the Third Pandemic? Victorian scientists arrived in late-nineteenth-century India and China expecting to encounter a ravaging, galloping, all-consuming monster. Journalist William Seveni warned readers of the British
Fortnightly Review to brace themselves. “We must not deceive ourselves [for once] the dreadful scourge . . . obtains a foothold [it] will be a far greater danger than when the terror-stricken Romans cried, ‘Hannibal ante portas!’”
However, while millions died, the plague of the Third Pandemic proved to be a far more manageable disease than the plague of the Black Death. In early-twentieth-century India,
Y. pestis traveled at an average of eight miles
per year; in South Africa, a little faster: eight to twenty miles annually. By contrast, in Black Death Europe,
Y. pestis covered the eighty-one kilometers between Pisa and Florence in two months—January to March 1348. In France and England the disease also moved with alacrity. Between Marseille and Paris, it traveled at a rate of two and a half miles
per day; between Bristol and London, at two miles per day.
Contagion rates were also strikingly different. When the plague season arrived in Third Pandemic India, people would simply move two hundred yards from the family home, encamp, and wait for the disease to burn itself out. Indeed,
Y. pestis proved so lethargic, British doctors in the colonial medical service joked that the safest place to be during the pandemic was the plague ward of a hospital. The pestilence of the Black Death, in contrast, was the pathogenic equivalent of a piranha. Boccaccio’s description of the two pigs who fell dead after shaking an infected blanket was not literary hyperbole. The medieval plague spread so quickly, several medieval medical authorities were convinced the disease was spread via glance. “Instantaneous death occurs,” wrote a Montpelier physician, “when the aerial spirit escaping from the eyes of the sick man strikes the healthy person standing near and looking at the sick.” The medieval plague also produced symptoms uncommon in the modern disease, including a gangrenous inflammation of the throat and lungs; violent chest pains; a hacking, bloody cough; uncontrollable vomiting; a foul body odor; and a rapid course. Like Friar Michele da Piazza, chronicler Villani noted that most victims were dead within three days.
Most striking of all is the difference in mortality rates. In the Black Death, mortalities of 30 and 40 percent were common, and in the urban centers of eastern England and central Italy, death rates reached an almost unimaginable 50 to 60 percent. Historian Samuel K. Cohn claims that in the worst years of the Third Pandemic, death tolls never exceeded
3 percent. While that estimate is open to question, no one challenges Cohn’s contention that, overall, the mortality rates of the Third Pandemic were dramatically lower than those of the Black Death.
In the 1980s these discrepancies gave rise to a new theory of the medieval plague. A group of scholars began to argue that the Black Death was not a plague at all, but an outbreak of another disease—possibly anthrax, possibly an Ebola-like illness called hemorrhagic fever. The arguments of the Plague Deniers, as the group might be called, will be examined in the afterword. Suffice it to say here that recently DNA from
Y. pestis has been found in several medieval plague sites. Moreover, it is not necessary to reinvent the Black Death to explain the discrepancies between the Second and Third Pandemics.
Microbiologist Robert Brubaker thinks that many of the differences between the two outbreaks dissolve if the vast differences between medieval and Victorian medicine are factored into the equation. Another possible explanation for the differences may lie in the unique impact of a disease like plague on a premodern society with no access to a relatively sophisticated colonial medical service. Unlike viral infections, which often left behind a large core of immune survivors to care for the ill and harvest the food the next time an epidemic struck, plague spared no one. Despite the findings about CCR5-D32, the best available current evidence is that
Y. pestis does not produce permanent immunity in victims. During the Black Death, this biological quirk may have produced an enormous
secondary mortality. As both Boccaccio and Stefani suggest, many people seem to have died not because they had particularly virulent cases of plague, but because the individuals who normally cared for them were either dead or ill themselves. In addition, the medieval streets may have become even dirtier and more rat infested because the street sweepers were all dying, and the malnourished even more malnourished because the farmers who grew the food and the stevedores who carted it to the city were also being decimated by plague.
A third possible explanation for the supermortality of the Black Death is that the medieval pandemic was caused by an unusually virulent strain of
Y. pestis, marmot plague, which spread to rats as it moved toward Europe, while the Third Pandemic was an outbreak of less lethal rat plague that, for the most part, stayed in rats.
In the view of many Russian scientists, what makes marmot plague more virulent than, say, rat or gerbil plague, is a long-shared evolutionary history. Having cohabitated together, perhaps since the plague bacillus first evolved on the steppe, marmots have had more time than other rodents to develop resistance to the bacillus. Thus, to survive in marmots, biologically speaking,
Y. pestis has been forced to go nuclear by adopting a strategy of hypervirulence, which it has done by, for example, evolving a tropism for the lungs.
Many Western microbiologists question whether the virulence of the plague bacillus varies from one rodent species to another. However, unlike most existing explanations of the Great Mortality, the Russian marmot theory has the virtue of simplicity. It provides a single, coherent explanation for several aspects of the medieval plague that continue to puzzle historians and scientists, including the high mortality rates and the apparently very high incidence of pneumonic plague even during the warm Italian springs and summers.
One or several of these factors may well have been responsible for the fearful death tolls in Florence, and a few months later, in Siena, a few dozen kilometers to the south. Except in Siena the mortality was even greater and the song of death that arose from its stilled summer streets, even more haunting than Boccaccio’s mournful dirge.
Siena, April–May 1348
“La mortalità cominciò in Siena di maggio”—the mortality commenced in Siena in May, wrote Agnolo di Tura. Other sources place the plague’s arrival in mid-April. All that is known for certain is that in Siena, as in Florence, men and women grew fearful as spring gathered in the countryside. The rustics, the rough countrymen who brought oil into Siena, stayed home; shops and stores were shuttered; the municipal courts fell silent; and the wool industry, a sinkhole for so much Sienese wealth and pride, shut down. However, one aspect of Sienese life went on as usual as death arrived with spring in the fateful year of 1348.
As they had every day for a decade, the Sienese continued to awake each morning to the shouts of laborers mounting the scaffolding around the city cathedral, and to walk home each evening in the aura of the loveliest vista in Tuscany, the cathedral’s white marble pinnacles and statues flushing rose red under a twilight blue Tuscan sky. The decision to pour thousands of lire into transforming the main town church into a majestic Tuscan St. Peter’s was typically Sienese. “That vain people,” Dante mocked in the
Inferno, but a more accurate description of the medieval Sienese might be “deluded.” Feeling overshadowed by larger, wealthier Florence, little Siena spent the better part of the thirteenth century huffing and puffing to make itself look bigger than it was, usually with disastrous results. Deciding the road to municipal glory lay in naval power, in the manner of Genoa and Ven
ice, landlocked Siena frittered away a fortune trying to turn a malarial coastal village called Talamone into a major seaport. A few decades earlier, deciding cloth-making was the key to municipal glory and wealth, waterless Siena (water was essential to the manufacture of cloth) had frittered away another fortune digging up the rocky hill under the town in search of a mythic underground river called Diana.
In Agnolo di Tura, the city of dreams found its perfect spokesman. Reality has its place in Agnolo’s journals, but not so prominent a place that it interfered with Siena’s march toward the “broad sunlit uplands” of civic glory. Thus, in 1324, when the town wall is expanded, Agnolo boasts that Siena “has . . . grown in population such that the . . . walls [have to be] extended at Val di Montone.” And in 1338, when the City Council decides to expand the town church, Agnolo is so enthusiastic you can already see the new cathedral floating above the Arno plain like a great gothic ship asail on a pumpkin-colored sea. “Siena,” he writes, “is in a great and happy condition. Accordingly a great and noble enlargement of the city cathedral has begun.” Even in 1346, a year of torrential rain and widespread famine, Agnolo remains, as ever, upbeat. After visiting the Campo, the town’s main square, he declares that it is “more beautiful than any other piazza in Italy.”
Like Giovanni Villani, Agnolo di Tura was a town chronicler, but there the resemblance between the two men ends. The older Villani was a scion of a wealthy mercantile family: well educated, urbane, and, before his financial embarrassment, an important civic figure. Agnolo was an everyman, albeit an ambitious everyman. He seems to have begun life as a humble shoemaker. There is still a bill of sale for some molds and other tools he bought in January 1324. The rest of Agnolo’s early life remains unknown, except for his mother’s name, Donna Geppo, and where he grew up, the Orvile section of Siena. However, Agnolo’s literary career suggests some early education, and his habit of signing himself Agnolo di Tura del Grasso, or Agnolo the Fat, suggests that he liked to eat.
Agnolo seems to have thought big as well. Everything else we know about him points to a young man eager to rise in the world. The dowry of his wife, Nicoluccia, for example, indicates that the humble shoemaker managed to marry a bit above himself. Three hundred and fifty lire was a tidy sum for a craftsman’s wife to bring into a marriage. Other surviving evidence also points to dreams too big for a cobbler’s bench. One is a set of receipts for some gifts Agnolo bought the wife of a high official in the Biccherna, Siena’s treasury department, where he worked part-time as a tax collector. It is unclear whether the gifts were purchased at the man’s behest or on Agnolo’s initiative; either way, the purchases were clearly meant to curry favor.
The fact that Agnolo convinced the tax office to reimburse him for the presents a few months later suggests that he was also shrewd about money, an impression reinforced by Nicoluccia’s dowry and Agnolo’s real estate dealings, which include the sale of a piazza near a place called Fontebradda for the handsome price of twelve gold florins in 1342. Real estate, tax collecting, shoemaking—would even an ambitious young man wear so many professional hats? It may be that Agnolo was not the only di Tura eager to rise in the world. In the medieval version of the “Take my wife” joke, the wife never tires of reminding her husband that her family is higher born than his. Some of this dynamic may have been at work in the di Tura marriage. During the 1330s and 1340s so many houses are listed under the name Agnolo di Tura, historians have speculated that Siena had several men of that name. But there may be another explanation. The residences all belonged to the same Agnolo di Tura, who kept moving his family into ever bigger houses in hopes that one day his higher-born wife would stop reminding him of how much she had sacrificed to marry a lowborn shoemaker.
The other salient fact about Agnolo is that he and Nicoluccia had five sons.
Agnolo mentions the children only once in his chronicle, but he compresses so much emotion into the single reference, the door flies open to the di Tura family’s life—to the Christmas visits of Donna Geppo’s, the Sunday outings at the Campo, the evening walks through the little squares that blink out from Siena’s converging streets like an eye to a keyhole: the five di Tura boys running across the square, scattering a flock of birds into a vermillion-colored sky, an out-of-breath Agnolo chasing after them, and Nicoluccia shouting for everyone to stop, especially Agnolo, who is too
grasso to run.
In the early summer of 1348, this happy life ended in a field near the cathedral.
The first official Sienese reaction to the pestilence came in early June. On the second, the City Council shut down the civil courts until September. A week and a half later, with plague pits already beginning to appear in the city, council officials resorted to a favorite municipal strategy—bribery. To appease a wrathful God, on June 13 a thousand gold florins were appropriated for the poor and gambling was banned “forever” in the city. On June 30 money was appropriated for the purchase of
“torchi e candele” for a great religious procession.
The Palazzo pubblico, the building where the City Council met, was familiar to Agnolo. In his chronicle, he mentions a 1337 renovation there: “Rooms were constructed for Signori [Lords] and their staff [above the council chamber] and scenes from Roman history . . . were painted outside them.” In the terrible May and June of 1348, one sees Agnolo, a big, heavyset, sad-faced man, walking the halls of the palace offering condolences to bereaved colleagues, listening to debates on how to dispose of the corpses accumulating in the sweltering, malodorous streets, comforting the dying on the new second floor. However, if Agnolo did any of these things, he never wrote about them. The impression one gets from the chronicle is that summer—the summer of the plague—Agnolo became a walker in the city.
“In many parts of Siena, very wide trenches were made and in these, they placed the bodies, throwing them in and covering them with but a little dirt.”
One sees Agnolo walking to the cathedral, the workmen gone from its roof and walls now; its nave lit by the glow of a thousand candles—
“After that they put in the same trench many other bodies and covered them also with earth and so they laid them layer upon layer, until the trench was full.”
—and through the Plaza de Campo, where he and Nicoluccia would take the children on Sundays—
“Members of a household brought their dead to a ditch as best they could without a priest, without divine offices.”
—and the little squares, where the di Tura children would scatter birds into the evening sky with their shouts and charges.
“Some of the dead were . . . so ill covered that the dogs dragged them forth and devoured many bodies throughout the city.”
Here a final image suggests itself: Agnolo standing at the a burial site near the unfinished cathedral on a soft April Sunday in 1356 or 1357. The field is featureless—in the pestilential summer of 1348 there were too many dead for individual graves and headstones. There is just a marker noting that during the Great Mortality many people of Siena were buried here. Agnolo places a bouquet of flowers under the marker and says a prayer. Later, walking home, he begins to relive the day he first visited the plague pit: the smells and the sights of that day—the hungry dogs snarling at one another while they pawed at the loose earth, the burly rustic gravediggers stripped to the waist in the summer heat, the wails of the grieving mothers and fathers, the piles of greasy white corpses in the shallow plague pits, and himself—full of fury, grabbing a shovel from a rustic and digging a separate, deeper grave.
One imagines that this was the day Agnolo added the concluding sentence to his chronicle for 1348:
“And I, Agnolo di Tura, called the fat, buried my wife and five children with my own hands.”
The mortality in Siena was grave. According to Agnolo, “52,000 persone” died in the city, including 36,000 “vecchi”—old people; for the countryside, he gives a figure of 28,000. In a region with a preplague population as potentially high as 97,000, that works out to a de
ath rate of 84 percent, a figure most modern historians consider improbable. Current estimates put the mortality in Siena at between 50 and 60 percent. The plague produced one additional casualty. While the eternal ban on gambling was revoked within six months (Siena was broke again), seven hundred years on, the cathedral renovation awaits completion.
Rome, Summer 1348
In August the pestilence traveled southward from Orvieto to Rome, where one of the most extraordinary of all of medieval Italy’s little municipal dramas was playing itself out.
Imagine Mussolini three times as handsome and four times as preposterous, and you have the drama’s hero, Cola di Rienzo, self-proclaimed tribune of Rome, fantasist extraordinaire, and local hero. For smashing the Mafia-style rule of Rome’s old noble families, the
populus romanus were willing to forgive their handsome Cola almost anything, including the fantasy that he was the bastard son of a German emperor instead of the peasant son of a barkeep. But when Cola knighted his own son in the blood of another man, even the Roman crowds recoiled in horror.
The second major character in the drama was Cola’s nemesis, eighty-year-old Stefano Colonna, Rome’s most powerful aristocrat and an authentic natural wonder. “Great God, what majesty is in this old man,” wrote a contemporary. “What a voice, what a brow and countenance, . . . what energy of mind and strength of body at such an age!” When Cola’s supporters killed Stefano’s son, grandson, and nephew, the old man refused to mourn, saying, “It is better to die than [to] live in servitude to a clown.”
