“In stressing the compassion of individuals involved in the administration of plague regulations, we should not undervalue the terror and fear generated by plague, whether of chroniclers of these events, such as Baldinucci and Rodinelli, or the thousands of people who were separated from their family and neighbors and taken to a Lazaretto. Life in these crowded institutions, surrounded by suffering and death - or indeed, being shut up in a house where a relative or neighbor had died or been sick with plague - must have generated fear, even if the contemporary epithet ‘more feared than death itself’ may have been a rhetorical exaggeration.”
This book explores Florence’s response to the Plague of 1630. The disease killed roughly 12% of Florence’s population over the course of this year. Remarkably, though, as deadly as this sounds, it was actually a testament to the measures the city took to mitigate the worse effects of the pandemic, as the outcome was far more brutal in other northern Italian cities. Over the same period, Milan lost approximately 46% of its population, while Parma lost a staggering 61%.
Florence’s response to the plague primarily followed two avenues. The first of these was trying to get rid of stinky air, which they believed was responsible for spreading the plague. As foul smelling air is usually associated with death/germs, this was somewhat on the right track, even though they didn’t yet know what germs or bacteria were; unfortunately, however, bubonic plague is spread through the fleas on rats, so the measures taken against stink accomplished little. This wasn’t for lack of trying, though. They attempted to empty all the outhouses, force everyone to clean out their homes, and burn all the mattresses and clothes that were gross. As an example: “This meant, because the poorest could not afford to pay, the cesspits were left to overflow. Landlords may also have employed unscrupulous and ill-trained men to fulfill this task, leading to accidents. Thus, on 17 October the guards at Porta al Prato reported that a cart belonging to the votapozzieri had overturned with its contents of two barrels of shit as it was passing through the city gate. As the Sanita officials complained, this would lead to the spread of putrefying smells and corrupt air and would mean that people would ‘die of stink.’” Just imagine this scene being repeated many times over in a city of tens of thousands of people!
The second way the city attempted to respond to the plague was through the implementation of mandatory plague hospitals and rudimentary quarantine procedures. The use of plague hospitals was a novel Italian approach that historical study has shown to have been greatly effective, even with the doctors having absolutely no idea what they were doing. Florence was especially renowned in its measures against the plague, and was greatly studied by England in particular, but sadly, the idea of plague hospitals was not really taken up in Northern Europe. As for the quarantine procedures, entire households were literally locked up when one member displayed the tell-tale buboes, but the Grand Duke personally provided their food during the mandatory 40 day (likely because Noah spent 40 days on the ark, and Jesus spent 40 days in the wilderness) sequestration. Almost always, the meals given were far better/healthier than that which the family was used to, and came at an enormous expense. Poor diet was believed to help spread plague, but such generosity also endeared the young duke to his new subjects. Eventually, when more limited quarantine efforts failed, the entire city was placed on lockdown.
There was also some limited discussion of the treatment of the Jews during this period, as pretty much uniformly throughout Europe they were blamed for the plague. Unlike in many cities, where they were believed to have spread the plague by poisoning fonts of holy water, Florence did not put its Jews to death. It did, however, literally barricade them in the ghetto, and they were not afforded the food allotment that other Florentine citizens were.
While I thought that a book like “Justinian’s Plague” dwelt on science too much, I felt this book utilized it far too little. For instance, the text spent an awful lot of time, and dug up an awful lot of historical records, to show that the plague spread along streets rather than out from an epicenter in a circular fashion. The obvious explanation for this can be summed up in a single sentence, without any historical evidence: plague is carried by rats, and rats can’t run through walls. It almost came off as if the author was taking the non-scientific efforts of these pre-modern people at face value, even though this certainly was not the case. This book was also long and DENSE, and was really more a college text than pleasure reading. Still, I learned a lot, even if the material was at times pretty dry.
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- Reviewed in the United States on May 8, 2020
Top reviews from other countries
- LallyReviewed in the United Kingdom on January 20, 2024
Lively, beautifully written and compassionate account of an important and relevant topic
- HHReviewed in the United Kingdom on November 6, 2020
Vivid human history- relevant- beautiful writing - easy for the non academic
