Black Death in Italy

• 1. Introduction

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  Twelve Genoese ships arrived at the port of Messina in Sicily in October 1347, and the Black Death in Italy had begun. Sicily and the Italian Peninsula were the first region of Catholic Western Europe to be reached by the bubonic plague. Nothing about the civilization that received those ships had prepared it for what followed.

  Italy at the time was not a single state. The south was divided between the Kingdom of Sicily and the Kingdom of Naples. The Papal States controlled the center. The north, technically subject to the Holy Roman Empire, had broken into a collection of autonomous city-states and principalities. Many of those northern cities ran the most sophisticated administrative systems in medieval Europe.

  The traditional story of how the plague first reached Europe centered on Kaffa, a Genoese slave-trade port in the Crimea. A Mongol army under Jani Beg, whose soldiers were dying of the disease, supposedly catapulted infected corpses over the city walls. The surviving Genoese then fled by ship, carrying the illness west toward Italy. Historians now largely view that story as a xenophobic blame narrative, not a reliable account of events.

  Whatever its origins, the pandemic struck a uniquely literate Italy. Giovanni Boccaccio in Florence, Agnolo di Tura in Siena, and Gabriele de' Mussi in Piacenza witnessed the catastrophe firsthand. Their accounts, combined with the administrative records of Italy's city-states, made the Italian outbreak the most thoroughly documented in European history.

  What did a medieval city actually do when medicine, religion, and law all failed at once? What did the survivors make of what they had lived through? And what came from the catastrophe that struck the most organized cities in medieval Europe? Those answers begin in Sicily, with the first written accounts of the plague's arrival.

• 2. Sicily's First Hours

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  The chronicler Michele da Piazza described what he witnessed in Messina after those ships arrived. Abscesses formed on the skin of people who came into contact with those who had disembarked. They began coughing and then dying. The sailors were expelled from Messina as soon as the illness became apparent. The disease was already spreading faster than any decree could stop it. Physicians fell ill and refused to answer calls from the sick. Priests declined to hear confessions. Notaries would not draw up wills. Guards died at their posts or fled. Criminals moved freely through the homes of the dying while no one interfered. The sick wanted to be treated, to arrange their affairs, and to confess before they died. None of those things were available to most of them.

  Messina came to be regarded, by its surviving inhabitants, as a city God had condemned for its sins. Refugees fled toward Catania, hoping to bring the statue of Saint Agatha from that city to Messina as a holy appeal. The citizens of Catania locked their gates against them. The refugees were permitted instead to carry the Virgin Mary statue from the church of Santa Maria della Scala to Messina.

  During November 1347, people fled from Messina in all directions across Sicily. They died on the roads as they went and carried the disease to every part of the island. Catania became the second plague center of Sicily. Even members of the royal family were not spared. John, Duke of Randazzo, fled Catania for the forest of Mascalia. He was recorded as the last plague victim in Sicily, dying there in April 1348. By then, the illness had already been moving through the Italian Peninsula for months, having first reached Pisa in January.

• 3. Florence's Failed Defenses

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  The city of Florence began taking precautions as early as autumn 1347, when rumors of a great epidemic arrived from elsewhere in Europe. City streets were cleaned. Sick travellers were refused entry at the gates. Residents were told to keep their homes, streets, and squares free of animals. Butchers were held to strict hygienic rules. Authorities went further: prostitutes and homosexuals were banned from the city in an effort to reduce what many residents believed was divine punishment. Public processions of prayer were organized. Florence tried almost everything available to it.

  In March 1348, the plague arrived anyway, and lasted until July. Those who caught the illness died within 3 days. People were infected by the smallest contact, even by handling the clothes of someone who had been ill. Giovanni Boccaccio described witnessing dead bodies thrown out onto the streets, followed by animals that came near them and fell dead in turn. Priests, judges, and other officials died so swiftly that law and administration collapsed.

  A group emerged from the chaos to handle the bodies: the becchini, grave diggers recruited from the city's poorest beggars. They charged enormous sums to throw the dead into mass graves. Those who could not pay left the bodies in the streets. Corpses soon lined the roads of Florence. In the countryside outside the city, peasants died in their fields. The living let loose their animals and consumed their own supplies, having lost any hope of surviving.

  The chronicler Matteo Villani described what the survivors did. The poor abandoned the class system entirely. They ate luxury food and dressed themselves in the clothes of dead aristocrats. People married without any regard to class, status, or suitability. The mass death had, for a time, erased the social lines that organized Florentine life.

  Giovanni Boccaccio later claimed that 100,000 people died in Florence during the outbreak. That number exceeds the city's entire population, so it cannot be taken literally. The actual death toll was nonetheless severe. One of the most recognizable victims was the painter Bernardo Daddi. By August 1348, the plague had reached Rome. The city had already shrunk: the Pope's relocation to Avignon had taken with it the pilgrims and clerical visitors who once crowded Rome's streets. That same decline also delayed the plague's arrival there.

• 4. No One Wept

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  Agnolo di Tura recorded how bodies were thrown into holes all over Siena, and how no one wept over them. Everyone believed, he wrote, that they would soon die as well. The survivors around them pleasured themselves with food, wine, pleasure hunting, and games. When the plague finally left, Siena's rulers had died. So had the painters Ambrogio Lorenzetti and Pietro Lorenzetti. Agnolo di Tura claimed that only 8 people remained alive in the city when the illness departed.

  In Piacenza, Gabriele de' Mussi set down what happened when a Genoese man named Fulco della Croce arrived in the city carrying the disease. Fulco della Croce died shortly after arrival. His host family died next, then their neighbors. Convents proved especially vulnerable: priests who heard confessions from the sick carried the plague back to their communities when they left. Physicians, notaries, and priests eventually refused to answer calls from the ill. In the houses from which everyone had fled, the lonely screams of the dying could be heard from the street outside. Corpses were sealed inside those abandoned houses, which bystanders avoided out of fear. Eventually, the sick in Piacenza began digging their own graves in the middle of the town squares.

  Venice in April 1348 was already under severe strain before the plague arrived. A famine the previous year had pushed refugees from the countryside into the city. An earthquake in January had added to the disruption. Once the disease entered the crowded streets, bodies accumulated rapidly. The smell from houses where the dead had been abandoned spread through the city. Between 25 and 30 people were buried each day in the cemetery near the Rialto. Corpses were transported by boat to islands in the lagoon for burial, but those doing the transporting gradually caught the disease and died. So many Venetians fled the city that the remaining council members banned departure in July 1348. Anyone who left risked losing their position and standing.

  Between March and September 1348 in Bologna, many of the most prominent academics at the University of Bologna died, among them Giovanni d'Andrea. The chronicle of Giovanni of Parma recorded the plague's arrival in Trento in June 1348. Two successive rulers of Padua died in July 1348. The deaths of so many scholars, leaders, and officials across Italy posed a question the survivors could not avoid: what could a city actually do to protect itself from the next outbreak?

• 5. The Quarantine Inheritance

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  In the Italian countryside, unemployed mercenaries known as the Condottiero moved into the disorder the plague had left behind. They took control of rural populations who had no authorities left to protect them. The breakdown of law and order that the outbreak had produced did not disappear when the disease did. Workers who survived found themselves in a position their predecessors had never held. The labor pool had shrunk, and those who could work demanded better wages and better conditions. The elite responded with repression and violence.

  Northern Italian cities began developing systematic rules against future outbreaks. Travellers from infected areas were banned from entering. Some cities ordered the destruction of textiles and other objects that had been in contact with the sick. From the second half of the 14th century, quarantine regulations spread through many Northern Italian cities. Port cities developed ship quarantine, holding arriving vessels and their passengers for assessment before allowing them to land. Inland cities established hospital quarantine facilities for travellers arriving from affected regions. The practice of isolating the sick gained recognition as an effective way to contain epidemic disease.

  These regulations were eventually recognized as the foundation of modern quarantine law. Ship quarantine in port cities and hospital quarantine for inland cities became standard practice first across Italy and then across Europe. The city-states that had documented the Black Death with such precision had also, in trying to survive it, built something that outlasted them. Their approach to isolating the sick became one of the most enduring contributions of the 14th century to European public health.