Philip Ziegler - The Black Death

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} 99 31 Cronica Senese di Agnolo di Tura del Grosso, Muratori, 15, VI, p. 555. 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.

Siena is an example of a city which, superficially, recovered quickly from the Black Death but, in reality, suffered economic and political dislocation so profound that things were never to be the same again. An intensive campaign to attract immigrants by tax concessions and other devices filled many of the gaps left by the plague. The exceptionally high death rate among clergy was to some extent overcome by throwing open to laymen posts usually reserved for monks or priests. Many estates, left without heirs, were taken over by the City Council. By 1353, a balanced budget had almost been achieved. What was left of the old oligarchy gained enormously through inheritances from their dead relations and the accumulation of power in fewer hands. It seemed that the status quo ante had been restored, indeed that the old order was even more firmly established than before the plague.