Boccaccio used this description as the preamble to his Decameron; a stark background against which he was to create a miracle of light and vivid fantasy. It is only reasonable to consider whether, in the interests of dramatic contrast, he did not portray the Black Death in Florence in even gloomier colours than it deserved. Certainly he was not anxious to stress the happier side: the selfless devotion of certain nuns or doctors, the efforts of the city government to keep going some sort of order and administration. Certainly, too, few cities suffered as much as Florence. But so much of Boccaccio’s detail is to be found in the records of contemporary chroniclers in France, Germany and England as well as Italy, that no one can doubt its essential truth.
The headlong flight from the cities, abandoning possessions and leaving houses open to all the world; the ruthless desertion of the sick, to meet their end as best they might, with no company but their own; the hurried, sordid burials in great communal pits; crops wasting in the fields and cattle wandering untended over the countryside – such details are the common currency of the chroniclers. On some points, even, it seems that Boccaccio does not do full justice to the horror: other reports, for instance, give more attention to the sinister role of the becchini,{82} brutalized monsters, their life not worth twenty-four hours’ purchase, who would force their way into the houses of the living and tear them away to join the dead unless the men paid for their safety with a handsome bribe or the women with their virtue.
In its picturesque detail, therefore, one must accept Boccaccio’s account as accurate and authentic. But the same cannot be said for his statistics. His estimate of a hundred thousand dead within the city is patently exaggerated. By 1345 the population of Florence was already declining from its zenith of some fifty years before. The evidence of the number of bread tickets issued in April 1347 suggests a population of well over ninety thousand{83} and the most authoritative modern estimate similarly puts it at between eighty-five and ninety-five thousand, with a slight preference for the higher figure.{84} Unless Florence was virtually unique it seems impossible that more than two thirds and unlikely that much more than half of these can have died during the six months of the plague. In the much smaller but in many ways comparable cities of San Gimignano, Siena and Orvieto, analysis of the available data suggests a death rate of about 58 per cent in the first{85} and 50 per cent (or a little more) in the others.{86} One could not be far wrong if one guessed that between forty-five and sixty-five thousand Florentines died of the Black Death.
Boccaccio’s estimate, though extravagant, was not wholly fantastical. It is noteworthy, too, that he qualified it with some surprise that the population of the city should have turned out to be so much greater than had been generally believed. In this he was more cautious than many of his contemporaries who manipulated or invented statistics with almost inconceivable levity. Dr Coulton has referred to the ‘chronic and intentional vagueness’ of the medieval mind when confronted by a set of figures and quotes as an example the action of the English parliament which, in 1371, fixed the level of a tax on the basis that there were some forty thousand parishes in the kingdom, while, in fact, the most cursory study of readily available records would have shown that there were less than nine thousand.{87}
Partly this may have been due to the intractability of Roman numerals for complicated multiplication or division but there seems too to have been genuine indifference to the need for, indeed the very possibility of, precision. A large figure was a picturesque adornment to an argument but not part of the basic data from which a conclusion was drawn. It might be expressed as though exactly calculated but this was merely so as to heighten the dramatic effect. When the Pope was assured by his advisers that the Black Death had cost the lives of 42,836,486 thoughout the world, or the losses in Germany were estimated at 1,244,434,{88} what was meant was that an awful lot of people had died.
The estimates of chroniclers are not always so nonsensical. When the Chronicler of Este{89} said that, in and around Naples, sixty-three thousand people were killed by the plague in two months, the figure was high but not impossible. It is again unlikely that the Chronicler of Bolgona was right in saying that three out of every five people died{90} but there are contemporary historians who maintain that in certain Italian cities the mortality rate was in the region of 60 per cent.{91} But, right or wrong, neither of these writers was convinced of or even particularly concerned about the literal accuracy of his figures; the estimate was an expression in vivid and easily remembered form of the enormity of his experience. The material for an even slightly accurate census did not exist and the contemporary scholar, extrapolating from a few verified facts, is more likely to arrive at a sensible answer than the medieval chronicler dependent on his own eyes and a vivid imagination and convinced, anyway, that the matter was one of trivial importance.
* * *
Though the Florentines were subjected to almost intolerable pressure it does not seem that the machinery of government ever broke down altogether. The same is true of the other Italian cities. Venice was one of the first to be afflicted; not surprisingly, since its position as chief European port of entry for goods from the East was bought at the cost of seventy major epidemics in seven hundred years.
At the worst of the Black Death six hundred Venetians a day were said to be dying; this rate can hardly have been sustained for long but is by no means incredible.{92} On 20 March, 1348, the Doge, Andrea Dandolo, and the Great Council appointed a panel of three noblemen to consider measures to check the spread of the plague.{93} A few days later the panel reported its recommendations. Remote burial places were designated; one at S. Erasmo at what is now the Lido, another on an island called S. Marco Boccacalme which seems since to have vanished into the lagoon.{94} A special service of barges was provided to carry corpses to the new graveyards. All the dead, it was ruled, were to be buried at least five feet underground. Within the city itself beggars were forbidden to exhibit corpses in the streets, as was their macabre custom, and various measures of relief were adopted, including the release of all debtors from gaol. Surgeons were exceptionally allowed to practise medicine. Strict control of immigration was introduced and any ship which tried to evade it was threatened with burning. Either in this epidemic or possibly the next a quarantine station was set up at the Nazarethum where voyagers returning from the Orient were isolated for forty days – the period, apparently, being fixed by analogy to Christ’s suffering in the wilderness.
But such precautions, even though the Great Council did what it could to enforce them, came too late to save the city. The dead, as in Florence, were numbered at a hundred thousand; the estimate seems to have had even less in the way of a factual basis. Doctors, in particular, suffered and within a few weeks almost all were dead or had fled the city. A certain Francesco of Rome was a Health Officer in Venice for seventeen years. When he retired he received an annuity of twenty-five gold ducats as a reward for staying in Venice during the Black Death ‘when nearly all physicians withdrew on account of fear and terror’. When asked why he did not flee with the rest he answered proudly: ‘I would rather die here than live elsewhere.’{95}
Even harsher measures of control were tried in other cities. In Milan, when cases of the plague were first discovered, all the occupants of the three houses concerned, dead or alive, sick or well, were walled up inside and left to perish.{96} It is hard to believe that this drastic device in fact served any useful purpose but for this or some other reason the outbreak seems to have been postponed by several weeks and Milan was the least afflicted of the large Italian cities. The technique of entombment was sometimes employed by the householder as well as by the authorities. In Salé, Ibn al Khatīb records, Ibn Abu Madyan walled up himself, his household and a plentiful supply of food and drink and refused to leave the house until the plague had passed. His measures were entirely successful: a fact disturbing to those who believed that the atmosphere had been corrupted and that bricks and mortar could consequently be no impediment
to the disease.
Boccaccio, in fact, did less than justice to the efforts of the city fathers to control the plague in Florence. A committee of eight was set up from among the wisest and most respected citizens and was given something close to dictatorial powers. But when it came to the point there was not much which even the wisest of committees could achieve. Their regulations were largely concerned with the removal of decaying matter from the markets and the dead and dying from the streets – sensible enough objects but, by themselves, not likely to save the city. Nor, when the plague was at its worst, did the personnel exist to ensure that even so modest a policy was carried out.
Pistoia, where the civil ordinances published during the Black Death have been preserved, provides an unusually clear picture both of the efforts which the authorities made to preserve the citizens and the limitations imposed by their ignorance and the weakness of the machinery of government.{97} On 2 May 1348, when the first cases of the Black Death were beginning to appear in the vicinity, the Council enacted nine pages of regulations intended to guard the town against infection. No one was to visit the Pisan or Luccan states where the plague was already rampant. If such a visit were made then, even though the citizen had started his journey before the date of the ordinances, his return to Pistoia was forbidden. No linen, woollen goods, or, not surprisingly, corpses, whatever their source, were to be imported into the town. Food markets were put under strict supervision. Attendance at funerals was to be limited to members of family and standards were laid down for the place and depth of burials. To avoid disturbing the sick and also, no doubt, so as not to undermine the morale of the healthy, there was to be no tolling of bells at funerals and no announcements by criers or trumpeters. The second set of ordinances, of 23 May, relaxed the ban on travel; no doubt because the plague had now taken so firm a grip that any such precautions would have been futile. Rules for the supervision of markets, however, were further tightened up. On 4 June changes were made to the rules for funerals. Sixteen men from each part of the town were to be selected as grave diggers and nobody else was to be allowed to do such work. Because of the shortage of wax, candles were no longer to be burned for the dead. Finally, on 13 June, the regulations governing the defence of the city were re-cast. So as to spare the cavalry, who were traditionally drawn from the richer section of society, ‘the fatigue of mind and body which had been proved to induce pestilence’, it was decreed that each cavalry man could provide a substitute to perform his duties.
This last proviso is of interest as being one of the very few instances of legislation or any other kind of official pronouncement which discriminated in favour of the rich and noble. Obviously the rich were better equipped than the poor to protect themselves against the plague but the temptation to Church and State to load the dice still further in their favour was generally resisted. Indeed, on the whole, civic authorities and national governments alike seem to have accepted their responsibilities towards the poorer sections of their populations and to have done their inadequate best to shield them from disaster.
A contrast to the responsible attitude of the Pistoians is to be found in the apparent apathy of the government of Orvieto. In her profound and brilliant study of Orvieto at the time of the Black Death,{98} Dr Elizabeth Carpentier has analysed the impact of the disease and the reactions of its victims in terms which, mutatis mutandis, must be valid for every medium-sized town of Italy.
Orvieto in the mid-fourteenth century was a small but prosperous town of about 12,000 inhabitants. It had lost even more than its neighbours in the perpetual warfare between Guelph and Ghibelline and its rich vineyards and wheat fields had repeatedly been ravaged by marauding visitors or discontented citizens. The insecurity from which the whole region suffered had done serious harm to its role as a commercial centre and had reduced to almost nothing the profit which it gained from transit trade. The famine of 1346 and 1347 hit Orvieto badly though the hardships endured by its citizens were small compared with those in other, less well provided regions. By the autumn of 1347 the worst seemed to be over. There had been a good harvest and what promised to be a reasonably stable peace had been patched up. But the situation was still precarious and the powers of resistance of the average Orvietan had been gravely sapped.
Then, in the spring of 1348, came the Black Death. For months previously the members of the Council must have known that disaster was on the way but no official discussion took place and no preventive measures were adopted. When the Council met on 12 March 1348, the plague had reached Florence, some eighty miles away. But still the official silence was maintained. Perhaps the Councillors believed, not without reason, that it did not lie in their power to avert disaster and that, therefore, the less said the better. But there was also something of the spirit of the child who sees moving up on him the thundercloud that will ruin his play but says nothing in the hope that, if he pretends not to notice it, it will miraculously move away.
The Council, in fact, had good reason to think that there was little or nothing for them to do. Orvieto had one doctor and one surgeon paid by the city to tend the poor and teach students. There were seven private doctors listed as owning land and perhaps two or three more besides. This was not a bad tally for a town of medium size. But the hospitals were less impressive. Only one was reasonably well financed; the others had little space and less facilities. And the state of public hygiene was deplorable. Constantly reiterated laws against rearing pigs and goats in the street, tanning skins in mid-city and throwing refuse out of windows show that the Council was concerned about the situation but also that it was powerless to improve it. Dirt and malnutrition were the two great allies of the plague, in Orvieto as in so many other cities.
The Black Death was probably brought to Orvieto in the train of the Ambassador who arrived from Perugia towards the end of April 1348. It raged for four months at something near to full strength and reached its peak in July. It seems that the septicaemic form of the disease was common since there are many references to people dying within twenty-four hours of the first symptoms appearing. According to a contemporary chronicler more than five hundred victims died a day at the worst of the mortality and the final death roll included more than ninety per cent of the population. Both figures are unacceptably high; the first particularly so since even a week of such intensity would have eliminated more than a quarter of the total population. Dr Carpentier, working from admittedly scanty material, is inclined to put the mortality rate at about fifty per cent.
Compared with ninety per cent such a figure may seem tolerable, but it is still difficult to conceive the impact of a catastrophe which, within four or five months, removed every second person from a small and closely knit community. In every family of four in Orvieto, one of the parents and one of the children could statistically expect to die. The surprise is not that there was panic and despair but that the fabric of the city’s social life survived more or less unimpaired. Until the end of June the official records made no mention of the plague. Business as usual was the order of the day. Then the strain became too great. Of the Council of Seven elected at the end of June, two were dead by 23 July, three more by 7 August. Another member was ill by 10 August and, though he seems eventually to have recovered, a further death was recorded by 21 August. From the beginning of July all regular Council meetings were abandoned and there were blank pages in the city register. In mid-August Orvieto’s most important religious ceremony, the procession of the Assumption, was abandoned on orders of the authorities. Yet by the end of the month the Council was meeting regularly once more, the shops were open, three new public notaries and two new gate-keepers had been appointed, the many problems arising out of wills and intestacies were being sorted out. For the doctors, at least, there was a silver lining to the cloud. Before the Black Death the physician retained by the city, if he was lucky enough even to receive his salary, was paid £25 a year. After the plague Matteo fù Angelo was offered £200 a year and exemption from all the civic taxes.
Orvieto survived; to the outward eye at least substantially unscathed. Siena was left with a visible memento of the plague for posterity to wonder at. In 1347 work was in progress on what was to be the greatest church of Christendom. The transept of the Cathedral was built, the foundations of the choir and nave laid out. Then came the Black Death. The workmen perished, the money was diverted to other more urgent purposes. When the epidemic passed the shattered city could not find the funds or energy to complete the project. The truncated body of the Cathedral remained, was patched up and gradually became so much an accepted part of the landscape that today it is hard to believe it was ever intended to take a different form.
‘Father abandoned child’, wrote Agnolo di Tura{99} of the plague at Siena, ‘wife, husband; one brother, another, for this illness seemed to strike through the breath and the sight. And so they died. And no one could be found to bury the dead for money or for friendship…. And in many places in Siena great pits were dug and piled deep with huge heaps of the dead…. And I, Agnolo di Tura, called the Fat, buried my five children with my own hands, and so did many others likewise. And there were also many dead throughout the city who were so sparsely covered with earth that the dogs dragged them forth and devoured their bodies.’
According to Agnolo di Tura, if his somewhat convoluted calculations have been interpreted correctly, fifty thousand died within the city including thirty-six thousand old people. Many more fled to the country and, when the Black Death passed on, only ten thousand inhabitants remained. Since the total population of Siena could not, at the most, have exceeded fifty thousand in 1348 one finds, once again, a contemporary estimate which is not only improbable but actually impossible. But there is plenty of evidence that the city was unusually hard hit. The wool industry was closed down and the import of oil suspended. On 2 June, 1348, all civil courts were recessed by the City Council, not to reopen till three months later. In an emergency session of the Council, legalized gambling was prohibited ‘for ever’, the loss of revenue was considerable and, as it turned out, eternity was deemed to have run its course before the end of the year. The size of the City Council was reduced by a third and the obligatory quorum of members cut to a half. The church waxed fat from inheritances and gifts from frightened citizens; so much so that, in October, all annual appropriations to religious persons and institutions were suspended for two years.
The Black Death Page 6
