Philip Ziegler - The Black Death

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} 92 24 Chronicon Estense, op. cit., p. 162. 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} 93 25 Lorenzo de Monaci, Chronicon de rebus Venetorum, Brunetti, ‘Venezia durante la peste’, Ateneo Veneto, 32, 1909. 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} 94 26 d’Irsay, ‘Defence Reactions During the Black Death’, Annals of Medical History, IX, 1927, p. 171. 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} 95 27 d’Irsay, op. cit., p. 174.

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} 96 28 Hecker, op. cit., pp. 58–9. 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} 97 29 Alberto Chiappelli, ‘Gli ordinamenti sanitari del Comune de Pistoia contra la peste de 1348, Arch. stor. ital., Ser. IV, vol. XX. pp. 3–24. Anna Campbell, The Black Death and Men of Learning, p. 115. 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} 98 30 Une Ville devant la Peste. Orvieto et la Peste Noire de 1348. 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.