It’s the spring of 1348 in Florence. The bubonic plague has been raging in the city since the beginning of the year. In just a few months, the hustle and bustle that once filled the streets has slowed to a trickle: everyone is dead, or shut inside their homes, or has fled to the countryside in an attempt to escape. Instead, the bodies filling the streets are lifeless.
Each morning, people perform the task of hauling the corpses that were once their neighbors out of their homes. Funeral biers roll down the streets, carrying entire families piled on top of each other. In churchyards, corpses are stacked in communal trenches, because there is no longer enough space for individual plots.
“At every church they dug deep pits down to the water-table,” writes a Florentine chronicler. “And thus those who were poor who died during the night were bundled up quickly and thrown into the pit. In the morning when a large number of bodies were found in the pit, they took some earth and shoveled it down on top of them; and later others were placed on top of them and then another layer of earth, just as one makes lasagne with layers of pasta and cheese.”
Priests robotically recite rushed prayers for a deceased person being placed in the ground, before moving on to the next, and the next, and the next. No one is there to mourn these departed souls. In a square, a group of young men are whipping themselves, their blood spraying as they scream at Florentines to “REPENT!” in a desperate attempt to appease God and end his wrathful plague.
Every now and then, a burst of cheer can be heard from a group of townspeople on their way to the next tavern, celebrating what they believe to be their last moments with wine—but the cheer feels foreign now, and profoundly hollow.
What is now Italy was the Black Death’s point of entry into Europe, and it was in an extremely vulnerable state when the plague arrived. Unlike much of Europe, which operated according to the feudal system, pre-unification Italy was composed of separate city-states with their own governing bodies. Major cities like Venice, Florence, and Milan emerged; their populations rose; and people moved to these urban areas. Northern Italy established itself as the economic capital of Europe, and invented the modern banking system. The region was also Europe’s intellectual hub, and, at the time, home to the most literate society in the world. The political freedom the city-state system allowed fostered achievements in science and the arts.
However, outside of these new and vibrant cities, a series of bad harvests began with the onset of the 1300s. “We have it pretty well documented to be the result of climate change, as the annual temperature declined,” says Edward Muir, a professor of history at Northwestern University. “The population suffered malnutrition as a result, and there was a beginning of epidemics originating then for this abused population.” Muir cites records from the city of Pistoia, not far from Florence, that reveal a major mortality event every five-to-10 years leading up to the Black Death.
Back in the cities, a financial crisis was afoot. Muir explains that Italy’s liquid capital and credit were wrapped up in its banks, which funded the country’s wool and cloth industries; these employed a majority of northern Italian towns’ populations. Between disruptions in the European and Asian trade routes, the rise of the wool industry in England, and King Edward III of England reneging on a three-million-florin loan from Florentine banks, Italy found itself going broke.
By the early 1340s, the bubonic plague was spreading along trade routes in China, India, Persia, Syria, and Egypt. It made its way to Europe via what visiting research scholar at the University of Richmond Dr. David Routt refers to as “the Kaffa story”: an example of the globalization taking place in the 14th century, which set the stage for such a wide-ranging and fast-spreading pandemic.
The Mongols had been laying siege to the Genoese trading post in the Crimean region known as Kaffa (Feodosiya, Ukraine today) off and on since 1307. The plague, carried by rats, began making its way through the Mongol troops in 1345 and 1346. In what is believed to be an early act of biological warfare, the troops would catapult diseased cadavers into Kaffa. (Meanwhile, infected rats were roaming across siege lines.) The Genoese traders fled to Italy, bringing the plague with them. The first plague-ridden ships docked in Sicily in October of 1347, and by January of 1348, the disease had reached Venice, Genoa, Pisa, and Rome. In dire financial straits and in the midst of a food crisis, Italy was in no shape to try to ward off this novel disease.
Unlike COVID-19, the bubonic plague was instantly and visually alarming. There was a first, pneumonic, wave, which brought with it high fever, blood-spitting, and a perhaps mercifully fast death. The bubonic wave was characterized by its blood-filled buboes, which were called gavòccioli. Every breath and drop of sweat emitted by a sufferer packed the stench of the disease. The sight and smell of the bubonic plague compounded the urgency people felt to get away from anyone sick with it, and fast. Roughly five days was all it took for the infected to die. And die so many did: in its initial 1346–53 run, the plague is believed to have killed about 50 million people, or 60% of the European population, according to Norwegian historian Ole Benedictow. Florence’s population was sliced from 110,000–120,000 in 1338 to 50,000 by 1351.
In 1978’s A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, American historian Barbara Tuchman explores the idea that the 14th century and the 20th century reflect each other in terms of suffering and death. At its heart, though, A Distant Mirror captures the driving force behind our relationship with history: we want to use it to better understand our present. We’re looking for reasons, explanations, context—in a period like our present pandemic state, some of us magical thinkers may even be looking for hope. (If Italy was still standing in 1350, maybe it’s safe to assume humanity will survive COVID-19.)
Since the novel coronavirus made its presence widely known at the start of this year, epidemiologists have been studying the trajectories of past pandemics in order to model out possible paths that this virus could take. The rest of us have been poring over those stories in order to understand how this virus might change our own lives. By parsing how the influenza epidemic of 1918 and 1919 impacted culture and commerce and individuals, perhaps we can form expectations of this pandemic’s effects. The search for this kind of meaning is taking many people back even further than 1918, back to the century that Tuchman used as a mirror to her present.
While scientists and doctors study cell mutations and immune-system responses based on data from the viruses humanity has previously experienced, for an understanding of human responses, we have stories. It’s the reason that Rebecca Messbarger, PhD, Professor of Italian and Inaugural Director of Medical Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis, has been busy giving interviews on Boccaccio since COVID-19 landed on American soil.
Giovanni Boccaccio wrote The Decameron between 1349 and 1352. It’s set in his contemporary world: Italy as it shifted from the Middle Ages into the Renaissance. So many themes resonate strongly 670 years later, however. As the plague spread throughout Boccaccio’s country, people desperately tried to understand it. Some turned to fanatical paths in their quest for meaning, whether religious or conspiratorial. In 14th-century Italy, the chances of surviving the Black Death depended mainly on your means and your privilege: could you afford to not work, could you afford to escape to your private estate? Italians in 1348 also reacted to this wildly contagious disease with varying levels of social distancing, from complete shut-ins to defiant, drunken parties. Also recognizable is the human need for hope and escapism in stories, a need that The Decameron is entirely constructed upon.
“We’re more and more focused on data, but I really think a book like Boccaccio’s transcends its own historical moment and has a lot to say to us about the human experience of a catastrophic pandemic,” Messbarger says. “These voices of the past can help us make sense of what we’re experiencing and reflect on that.”
When we reach further back in time past the dawn of film and radio, our concept of who the average person was and how they acted becomes foggier. We only have diarists and writers to paint as vivid a picture as possible, and just how much we can relate to people in the 17th or 15th or 13th century is left open to interpretation. Perhaps what is making The Decameron—for many, previously just another book on a college syllabus—so popular right now is that it is surprisingly easy to see our 21st-century selves in its 14th-century characters.
Giovanni Boccaccio likely did not witness the Black Death in Florence, as his introduction in The Decameron would have readers believe. By 1346, he is thought to have moved to the city of Ravenna. However, he would have likely received updates and descriptions of the plague in Florence via letters from his father. The writer would ultimately lose his father, his step-mother, and many of his friends and acquaintances to the disease.
Giovanni Boccaccio was born in 1313 in Tuscany. His father, Boccaccino di Chellino, was building a prominent career in banking, which would eventually take him and his son to Naples, and provide Boccaccio with the opportunities to mingle with both the working class and Italian nobility. Boccaccio later returned to Florence, and though he eventually moved on, his relationship with the city is what sets an authentic tone in the introduction of The Decameron. This lead-in to the work’s 100 fictional stories is rooted in the facts of the plague and the Florentine people Boccaccio knew well, creating a depiction we can relate to so easily now.
“Some say that it descended upon the human race through the influence of the heavenly bodies, others that it was a punishment signifying God’s righteous anger at our iniquitous way of life,” Boccaccio writes in this introduction. The instant the bubonic plague made itself known, people began to grasp for an explanation. That human response is at work today in the face of COVID-19, too; it’s one that all too often leads to othering and racial bias. Trump’s insistence on calling our pandemic “the China virus” and the racist abuse the Asian population has faced this year are reflected in the 14th-century Europeans who targeted Jews, friars, foreigners, and the very poor as scapegoats. Lepers and others with visible skin conditions were murdered.
One of the most popular beliefs was that the plague was God’s punishment. Young, typically higher-born men formed leagues of flagellants that traveled from town to town whipping themselves in public squares and violently urging citizens to repent, believing this would appease God and end the disease. According to Muir, these groups were often misogynistic, placing extra blame on young women and their vanity.
Another theory of the plague’s origins emerged from academia. Professors at the University of Paris combined medicine and astrology in their search for answers, concluding that Earth’s air was overheated and corrupted by a conjunction of Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter in 1345, which created unnaturally hot, moist air that blew from Asia to Europe. Doctors referred to this poisoned air as a pestilence, and the plague was often called “The Great Pestilence.” Based on this idea, doctors urged people to wear or hold sweet or bitter substances like violets, wormwood, or vinegar, and to purify the air around them with incense.
Especially in the United States, current mistrust of medicine abounds: before we even have a proven COVID-19 vaccine, we’re already facing the hurdle of encouraging people to actually get it. One in three Americans say they won’t. 14th-century Italians were, perhaps a bit more understandably, wary of doctors. As we saw medical students rushed into the workplace this spring, Boccaccio writes about the pool of practitioners swelling in response to the plague, and in 1348, these new “doctors” were not people who had studied in a formal setting. These practitioners didn’t understand the disease nor its origins, and so could not offer any effective treatments. Their potential patients, then, saw no reason for faith.
While flagellants tried to eradicate the plague with whipping, doctors tried to end it with their air-purifying, and citizens tried to drive out the people they believed caused it, Italian city-state governments grasped at control with measures that bear a resemblance to this year’s shelter-in-place restrictions. “Large quantities of refuse were cleared out of the city by officials specially appointed for the purpose, all sick persons were forbidden entry, and numerous instructions were issued for safeguarding the people’s health, but all to no avail,” Boccaccio writes of Florence.
Officials in Venice and Milan comprehended that goods being traded needed to be treated, and ordered frequent cleaning of surfaces as well as social distancing rules. In Milan, the afflicted were sealed up in their homes, cruelly left to perish. In Pistoia, citizens who visited another plague-ridden town were forbidden to return home. The town of Orvieto took a red state, 2020 approach and ignored the pandemic altogether.
By March, Venice enacted a policy that ships coming to port from afflicted cities would have to remain docked in the Venetian lagoon for 30 days, which was later extended to 40 days. The Italian word for a 40-day period, quarantino, is the origin of the term “quarantine” that we’re all so used to now.
As for how individual citizens reacted to the Black Death and made efforts to avoid its wildfire spread, Boccaccio categorized people into four levels of social distancing.
Like those who have not left their homes since March and get their groceries delivered, 14th-century Italy had its strict shut-ins. “Having withdrawn to a comfortable abode where there were no sick persons,” Boccaccio writes, “they locked themselves in and settled down to a peaceable existence, consuming modest quantities of delicate foods and precious wines and avoiding all excesses. They refrained from speaking to outsiders, refused to receive news of the dead or the sick, and entertained themselves with music and whatever other amusements they were able to devise.” This would be today’s “drink your cellar” crowd, thoughtfully making their way through their precious bottle collections and distracting themselves with Netflix.
Then, like those who pack bars in Florida, there were those who defied social distancing recommendations and took no precautions. They “maintained that an infallible way of warding off this appalling evil was to drink heavily,” Boccaccio writes, “enjoy life to the full, go round singing and merrymaking, gratify all one’s cravings whenever the opportunity offered, and shrug the whole thing off as one enormous joke.” This group hopped from one tavern to the next, drinking to “immoderate excess.” While the tendency to drink a little more to soften the edges of a terrifying crisis is understandable today, there was another, more salient motivation at hand in 1348.
“Eat, drink, and be merry, because you’re doomed,” says Dr. Joanna Drell, Professor of History at the University of Richmond. These revelers figured they could be dead within a week, so they wanted to enjoy every moment they had left. It’s the logic behind the “Danse Macabre” that would come about 75 years later: embrace life now, because it may vanish in a snap.
Even for those who did not respond with bar crawls, the plague inspired a more candid relationship with mortality for most 14th-century Europeans. This coming to terms with the inconvenient truth of our inevitable end is happening now as nurses and teachers in the prime of their lives publicly discuss preparing a will before returning to work.
The third group was moderate, balancing the caution of the first group and the carrying on with life of the second. This is the group Messbarger muses Boccaccio would have belonged to. “There were many other people who steered a middle course,” Boccaccio writes. “...Neither restricting their diet to the same degree as the first group, nor indulging so freely as the second in drinking and other forms of wantonness, but simply doing no more than satisfying their appetite. Instead of incarcerating themselves, these people moved about freely, holding in their hands a posy of flowers, or fragrant herbs, or one of a wide range of spices, which they applied at frequent intervals to their nostrils, thinking it an excellent idea to fortify the brain with smells of that particular sort; for the stench of dead bodies, sickness, and medicines seemed to fill and pollute the whole of the atmosphere.” These people were following the advice of doctors ascribing to the miasma theory. Drell brings up an article by Stanford University professor Paula Findlen, comparing these people covering their faces with flowers to today’s mask wearers.
The fourth group was the one Boccaccio seems to judge most harshly: the abandoners. “Some people, pursuing what was possibly the safer alternative, callously maintained that there was no better or more efficacious remedy against a plague than to run away from it. Swayed by this argument, and sparing no thought for anyone but themselves, large numbers of men and women abandoned their city, their homes, their relatives, their estates and their belongings, and headed for the countryside…” Boccaccio adds that the plague rendered some so fearful that, “brothers abandoned brothers, uncles their nephews, sisters their brothers, and in many cases wives deserted their husbands.” The worst of all, though, according to Boccaccio? The fathers and mothers who left their own children. Thankfully, this does not seem to be a widespread response to COVID-19, though the end result is familiar: isolation. Whether through the choice of a frightened father or the protective mandate of a hospital, these two pandemics see their victims dying alone.
Boccaccio’s account of plague-ridden Florence lays bare, too, the socioeconomic impact on spread and mortality that has shaped pandemics from the Middle Ages (and before) to now. While Boccaccio unjustly frames this as “greed” and not need, he writes about the servants who had no choice but to keep working, at great risk to themselves—the dilemma all of the service industry faces today. “And in performing this kind of service,” Boccaccio concludes of the serving class, “they frequently lost their lives as well as their earnings.”
The second socioeconomic line of advantage and disadvantage is the very premise of The Decameron, though the inequity of this is not something Boccaccio closely examines. It is the fact that wealthier classes had the option to escape: They didn’t have to work, they had homes outside the crowded cities, they had the aforementioned servants beholden to them for survival, they had the means to stock their pantries with fine foods and wines. While the plague raged on in the countryside, and while fleeing cities certainly didn’t guarantee safety, death disproportionately came for the poorer classes who had but their city homes and the necessity of work.
It is a group of these very privileged individuals through whom Boccaccio unfurls The Decameron’s 100 tales. Pampinea, Fiammetta, Filomena, Emilia, Lauretta, Neifile, and Elissa are Boccaccio’s seven high-born ladies, ranging in age from 18 to 27, who met at church and had the idea to quaranteam together in the countryside. Boccaccio clears up any temptation to judge these characters for the very abandonment he decried pages earlier with some exposition that tidily declares all the women’s family members dead or fled. Because Boccaccio’s ideal of a young woman realizes she’s not rational enough to survive something like a quarantine without “the supervision of some man,” the septet recruit three young men named Panfilo, Filostrato, and Dioneo. With a few of the quarantine bubble’s servants, they decamp to an Eden-like estate two miles outside of Florence, lush, spacious, elegant, and idyllic, with cellars “stocked with precious wines, more suited to the palates of connoisseurs than to the sedate and respectable ladies.”
The 10 noble characters proceed to organize and schedule the life out of their supposedly relaxed escape, structured with lavish meals and wine drinking and a general ignorance of the plague, all orchestrated by their servants. During their holiday-esque quarantine, they entertain each other with the 100 stories that are The Decameron, tales that mostly entertain but manage to deliver sentiments that were bubbling up at this time: namely suspicion of the church and appreciation for the ingenuity of man, says Drell. “These secular stories about man’s ingenuity, which is so often woman’s ingenuity—[Boccaccio’s] take on it is what he felt society needed at the time.”
The themes at hand in these 100 stories have been analyzed at length in various essays and the forewords of different translations—G.H. McWilliam’s 1972 introduction is the reference used primarily for this article. The overarching motif, especially in this moment, is a dual purpose of escapism and provocation. The Decameron’s stories are invented to entertain, to allow those fleeing the nightmare of the Black Death some mental and emotional respite. They’re not fluff, however. Whether humorous or sad, these stories are constructed with premises that resonate with the change from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance that was taking place in Italy.
It would make for a neat ending to this initial plague wave to declare that the social reckoning it caused catalyzed the Renaissance—it’s the kind of evolution many of us are working toward now, with the hope that our society does not return to normal but grows to a new, better normal that addresses the gross inequity laid bare by this pandemic. It’s not that clear, however, for 14th-century Italy. Historians disagree over the origins of the Renaissance and trace its beginning back to different points. It can be said, though, that themes like Boccaccio’s embrace of man’s ingenuity, individualism, and a close relationship with life’s fragility contributed to the beliefs of the Renaissance.
The plague fed the Renaissance in a more pragmatic, less esoteric way, too. According to Muir, it was a simple matter of that class divide and how it affected who died. Richer people had been able to escape the plague, and so after it faded, this smaller group now had more of the country’s wealth, and they used it to patronize the arts (as well as churches, and fancy new palaces for themselves).
Right now, we’re watching how upwardly mobile and financially comfortable people could be shaping our own future, as they are the ones with stable jobs they can perform remotely, fleeing cities and decentralizing our long-standing hubs of finance, business, and culture. The “New York is dead” debate captures collective American anxiety over whether we’ll recognize our cities on the other side of this pandemic. For better or worse, Florentines, Neapolitans, Venetians, and other Italians wouldn’t have recognized their homes by 1350 or so.
Because the plague ravaged Italy’s labor force, wages for those who could still work rose. The last vestiges of feudalism that had clung on in the north disintegrated as serfs could buy their own freedom, and as there was more land for fewer people. Not only did more wealthy people survive the plague, but wealth at least somewhat made its way into the hands of the once-poor who were still alive.
While religious fervor had thrived during the plague because of the belief that the disease was God’s punishment, this gave way to growing individualism as well as an increasing distrust in the church. So many priests died and had to be quickly replaced that the church’s standards began to slip and corruption blossomed, Muir says. Suddenly in tune with how fleeting human life is, people turned to art and music for meaning and to enjoy their years on earth. A staid, religion-fueled rigidity in Italian society gave way to the concept that life was actually to be celebrated.
The realization of the ideas that Boccaccio broached in his 100 stories isn’t documented in The Decameron: the book was complete by 1352, and Boccaccio later renounced it. It’s believed that he had a religious reawakening and was convinced the scandalous content of the book’s stories had secured him a spot in hell.
Boccaccio’s opinion of The Decameron wasn’t shared by many. In fact, other contemporary writers, intellectuals, and doctors were inspired by its content to write their own advice manuals. Physician Tommasso del Garbo prescribed that, in times of plague, people avoid contemplating death and instead engage in stories, songs, and games. Pace University professor Martin Marafioti calls The Decameron “narrative prophylaxis,” or protecting oneself with stories.
With so many recognizable human responses to a global health disaster, the foremost being the basic need for stories—or whatever will keep us from being swallowed whole by our despairs and worries—The Decameron is certainly a narrative prophylaxis of the moment.
There’s the escapism our fellow humans found 670 years ago that we need today, and there’s a strange comfort in the fact that, despite the horrors of the Black Death, people reacted in ways that feel keenly familiar—and that, after the unspeakable tragedy of such loss, the world kept turning. The plague returned in waves, but it didn’t last forever. Perhaps the most urgent aspect of this plague mirror is the future: these moments bring reckonings. We know what 14th-century Italy’s looked like. What will ours look like?
Words by Courtney IsemanIllustrations by Colette Holston
