The plague years
MEDIEVAL EUROPEANS DIDN’T GRASP HOW DISEASE SPREAD. THEIR RESPONSE WASN’T SO DIFFERENT FROM OURS NOW
… OTHERS WERE CAVALIER ABOUT THE DISEASE AND WENT ABOUT THEIR LIVES SOCIALIZING, DRINKING HEAVILY, ‘SATISFYING THEIR APPETITES BY ANY MEANS AVAILABLE.’ — ACCOUNT FROM 14TH- CENTURY WRITER AND POET GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO
When the new disease arrived, little was clear beyond the fact that it killed with terrifying speed. Near- certain death trailed the first symptoms by four days or less. The doctors were helpless. This city was soon overwhelmed with corpses. Workers in church yards dug pits down to the water table, layering bodies and dirt, more bodies and dirt.
One writer of the time compared the mass graves to “lasagna.”
Seven centuries later, the plague in Europe stands as an example of a pandemic at its worst — what happens when so many people die so quickly that some foresee the end of the human race. Few places were hit harder than Florence, whose population in 1348 was cut by at least one- third and possibly far more.
We had figured a trip to Florence might provide some comforting perspective on modern times — a chance to dwell on a period patently deadlier and more fear- inducing than the coronavirus pandemic. But instead, as we spoke with historians and searched for the plague’s lasting marks, what stood out most were the similarities, 672 years apart.
Theirs was a mysterious bacteria spreading at a time when people didn’t yet understand disease transmission, ours a novel virus infiltrating a world that prides itself on its medical knowledge. But in both cases, the first instinct was to close borders to try to keep the disease at bay.
When that didn’t work, officials called for strict rules — but only some people paid attention. All the while, there was a proliferation of conspiracy theories. Many tried to blame the disease on outsiders or minorities — in medieval Europe, often on Jews.
“Much has changed since the 1340s,” author John Kelly wrote in his book on the plague, “but not human nature.”
Then, like now, people were divided over how to face the threat. Some in Florence shut themselves inside their homes and lived in isolation, says a detailed account from 14th- century writer and poet Giovanni Boccaccio. Others ventured out in public, armed with herbs and spices intended to purify the air — a medieval version of HVAC filters and masks. Still others were
cavalier about the disease and went about their lives socializing, drinking heavily, “satisfying their appetites by any means available,” Boccaccio wrote.
Nobody was safe, and isolation scarcely worked as a safeguard in a dense city. But the people who gathered in groups courted greater risk. Marchionne di Coppo Stefani, a wealthy Florentine, wrote of daring dinner parties in which a host would gather 10 friends, with plans to reconvene again the next night.
At the next dinner, Stefani said, sometimes “two or three were missing.”
Worst of all, in an obvious parallel to the present, many faced their last moments cut off from everybody else, accounts from the time suggest. During the plague, these lonely deaths were borne not out of pub
lic health protocols but out of sheer terror. People, after the onset of symptoms, were a mortal danger to those around them. So, in some cases, family members abandoned sick loved ones, even children. Their deaths were noticed only when neighbours smelled the rotting corpses.
“Many departed this life,” Boccaccio wrote, “without anyone at all as a witness.”
The plague lashed Europe again and again over centuries — devastating London in the 1660s, and Marseille, France, in 1720 — but nothing was worse than what struck in the late 1340s and early 1350s, when the disease touched almost the entire continent and killed tens of millions of people. This was Europe’s first wave. Florence
was one of the hot spots.
We enlisted Donatella Lippi, a professor of medical history at the University of Florence, as a tour guide. She took us through the city, which in the tourist- free quiet of the coronavirus pandemic looked like a pristine medieval theatre set.
In 1348, she said, the city was in its own state of near- lockdown. The inns and workshops were closed.
People were panicked. It was unclear how the disease spread — but there was no doubt proximity to others was a risk. Animals — oxen, dogs, pigs — were dying, as well. People wondered whether it was retribution from God. They prayed and disavowed sin. They obsessed about the air and used scents and fires to ward off perceived deadly vapours. They were mostly guessing. Scientists wouldn’t know what actually caused the plague — how the bacteria were spread by rats and fleas — until 500 years later.
Among Florence’s hospitals at the time, at least one was accepting the sick, just a small building with a few beds. Lippi guided us around a street corner and there it was. It’s now a facility spanning much of a city block, with a white tent outside, a screening area for potential coronavirus patients.
Lippi led us through the frescoed entranceway, down several corridors, to a quiet courtyard covered in scruffy grass. She explained that in the 18th century, excavators discovered layer upon layer of human bones — hospital dead who went unclaimed by family members. Some bones dated back to the 1300s, meaning they may have died of the plague.
“Probably,” Lippi said. “We don’t know for sure.”
What she does know for sure is that plague pits were dug all over the city and that all the usual customs for grieving together and mourning collapsed. In the absence of family processions, gravediggers desperate for money took over the task of transporting the dead bodies, dropping them in mass graves.
Lippi said that, before the coronavirus pandemic, she’d studied the plague with the “distance of a historian.” But she thought about the pits of plague victims in March, when hundreds were dying of the virus in Italy every day, when crematoriums couldn’t keep up and military trucks in the city of Bergamo hauled away the dead.
“It’s a very close connection,” she said.