The Black Death (7 page)

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.
19

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,
20
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
21
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
22
but there are contemporary historians who maintain that in certain Italian cities the
mortality
rate was in the region of 60 per cent.
23
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.
24
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.
25
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.
26
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.’
27

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.
28
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.
29
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,
30
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.