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The following excerpt is taken from Boccaccio's The Decameron. It is a detailed description of life in the middle ages, specifically the effects of the Black Death or Bubonic Plague.
I say, then, that the years of the beatific incarnation of the Son of God
had reached the tale of one thousand three hundred and forty-eight when in
the illustrious city of Florence, the fairest of all the cities of Italy,
there made its appearance that deadly pestilence, which, whether
disseminated by the influence of the celestial bodies, or sent upon us
mortals by God in His just wrath by way of retribution for our iniquities,
had had its origin some years before in the East, whence, after destroying
an innumerable multitude of living beings, it had propagated itself without
respite from place to place, and so, calamitously, had spread into the West.
In Florence, despite all that human wisdom and forethought could devise to
avert it, as the cleansing of the city from many impurities by officials
appointed for the purpose, the refusal of entrance to all sick folk, and the
adoption of many precautions for the preservation of health; despite also
humble supplications addressed to God, and often repeated both in public
procession and otherwise, by the devout; towards the beginning of the spring
of the said year the doleful effects of the pestilence began to be horribly
apparent by symptoms that shewed as if miraculous.
Not such were they as in the East, where an issue of blood from the nose was
a manifest sign of inevitable death; but in men and women alike it first
betrayed itself by the emergence of certain tumours in the groin or the
armpits, some of which grew as large as a common apple, others as an egg,
some more, some less, which the common folk called gavoccioli. From the two
said parts of the body this deadly gavocciolo soon began to propagate and
spread itself in all directions indifferently; after which the form of the
malady began to change, black spots or livid making their appearance in many
cases on the arm or the thigh or elsewhere, now few and large, now minute
and numerous. And as the gavocciolo had been and still was an infallible
token of approaching death, such also were these spots on whomsoever they
shewed themselves. Which maladies seemed to set entirely at naught both the
art of the physician and the virtues of physic; indeed, whether it was that
the disorder was of a nature to defy such treatment, or that the physicians
were at fault--besides the qualified there was now a multitude both of men
and of women who practised without having received the slightest tincture of
medical science--and, being in ignorance of its source, failed to apply the
proper remedies; in either case, not merely were those that recovered few,
but almost all within three days from the appearance of the said symptoms,
sooner or later, died, and in most cases without any fever or other
attendant malady.
Moreover, the virulence of the pest was the greater by reason that
intercourse was apt to convey it from the sick to the whole, just as fire
devours things dry or greasy when they are brought close to it. Nay, the
evil went yet further, for not merely by speech or association with the sick
was the malady communicated to the healthy with consequent peril of common
death; but any that touched the cloth of the sick or aught else that had
been touched or used by them, seemed thereby to contract the disease.
So marvellous sounds that which I have now to relate, that, had not many,
and I among them, observed it with their own eyes, I had hardly dared to
credit it, much less to set it down in writing, though I had had it from the
lips of a credible witness.
I say, then, that such was the energy of the contagion of the said
pestilence, that it was not merely propagated from man to man but, what is
much more startling, it was frequently observed, that things which had
belonged to one sick or dead of the disease, if touched by some other living
creature, not of the human species, were the occasion, not merely of
sickening, but of an almost instantaneous death. Whereof my own eyes (as I
said a little before) had cognisance, one day among others, by the following
experience. The rags of a poor man who had died of the disease being strewn
about the open street, two hogs came thither, and after, as is their wont,
no little trifling with their snouts, took the rags between their teeth and
tossed them to and fro about their chaps; whereupon, almost immediately,
they gave a few turns, and fell down dead, as if by poison, upon the rags
which in an evil hour they had disturbed.
In which circumstances, not to speak of many others of a similar or even
graver complexion, divers apprehensions and imaginations were engendered in
the minds of such as were left alive, inclining almost all of them to the
same harsh resolution, to wit, to shun and abhor all contact with the sick
and all that belonged to them, thinking thereby to make each his own health
secure. Among whom there were those who thought that to live temperately and
avoid all excess would count for much as a preservative against seizures of
this kind. Wherefore they banded together, and, dissociating themselves from
all others, formed communities in houses where there were no sick, and lived
a separate and secluded life, which they regulated with the utmost care,
avoiding every kind of luxury, but eating and drinking very moderately of
the most delicate viands and the finest wines, holding converse with none
but one another, lest tidings of sickness or death should reach them, and
diverting their minds with music and such other delights as they could
devise. Others, the bias of whose minds was in the opposite direction,
maintained, that to drink freely, frequent places of public resort, and take
their pleasure with song and revel, sparing to satisfy no appetite, and to
laugh and mock at no event, was the sovereign remedy for so great an evil:
and that which they affirmed they also put in practice, so far as they were
able, resorting day and night, now to this tavern, now to that, drinking
with an entire disregard of rule or measure, and by preference making the
houses of others, as it were, their inns, if they but saw in them aught that
was particularly to their taste or liking; which they were readily able to
do, because the owners, seeing death imminent, had become as reckless of
their property as of their lives; so that most of the houses were open to
all comers, and no distinction was observed between the stranger who
presented himself and the rightful lord. Thus, adhering ever to their
inhuman determination to shun the sick, as far as possible, they ordered
their life. In this extremity of our city's suffering and tribulation the
venerable authority of laws, human and divine, was abased and all but
totally dissolved, for lack of those who should have administered and
enforced them, most of whom, like the rest of the citizens, were either dead
or sick, or so hard bested for servants that they were unable to execute any
office; whereby every man was free to do what was right in his own eyes.
Not a few there were who belonged to neither of the two said parties, but
kept a middle course between them, neither laying the same restraint upon
their diet as the former, nor allowing themselves the same license in
drinking and other dissipations as the latter, but living with a degree of
freedom sufficient to satisfy their appetites, and not as recluses. They
therefore walked abroad, carrying in their hands flowers or fragrant herbs
or divers sorts of spices, which they frequently raised to their noses,
deeming it an excellent thing thus to comfort the brain with such perfumes,
because the air seemed to be everywhere laden and reeking with the stench
emitted by the dead and the dying and the odours of drugs.
Some again, the most sound, perhaps, in judgment, as they we also the most
harsh in temper, of all, affirmed that there was no medicine for the disease
superior or equal in efficacy to flight; following which prescription a
multitude of men and women, negligent of all but themselves, deserted their
city, their houses, their estate, their kinsfolk, their goods, and went into
voluntary exile, or migrated to the country parts, as if God in visiting men
with this pestilence in requital of their iniquities would not pursue them
with His wrath, wherever they might be, but intended the destruction of such
alone as remained within the circuit of the walls of the city; or deeming,
perchance, that it was now time for all to flee from it, and that its last
hour was come.
Of the adherents of these divers opinions not all died, neither did all
escape; but rather there were, of each sort and in every place, many that
sickened, and by those who retained their health were treated after the
example which they themselves, while whole, had set, being everywhere left
to languish in almost total neglect. Tedious were it to recount, how citizen
avoided citizen, how among neighbours was scarce found any that shewed
fellow-feeling for another, how kinsfolk held aloof, and never met, or but
rarely; enough that this sore affliction entered so deep into the minds of
men and women, that in the horror thereof brother was forsaken by brother,
nephew by uncle, brother by sister, and oftentimes husband by wife; nay,
what is more, and scarcely to be believed, fathers and mothers were found to
abandon their own children, untended, unvisited, to their fate, as if they
had been strangers. Wherefore the sick of both sexes, whose number could not
be estimated, were left without resource but in the charity of friends (and
few such there were), or the interest of servants, who were hardly to be had
at high rates and on unseemly terms, and being, moreover, one and all men
and women of gross understanding, and for the most part unused to such
offices, concerned themselves no farther than to supply the immediate and
expressed wants of the sick, and to watch them die; in which service they
themselves not seldom perished with their gains. In consequence of which
dearth of servants and dereliction of the sick by neighbours, kinsfolk and
friends, it came to pass--a thing, perhaps, never before heard of that no
woman, however dainty, fair or well-born she might be, shrank, when stricken
with the disease, from the ministrations of a man, no matter whether he were
young or no, or scrupled to expose to him every part of her body, with no
more shame than if he had been a woman, submitting of necessity to that
which her malady required; wherefrom, perchance, there resulted in after
time some loss of modesty in such as recovered. Besides which many
succumbed, who with proper attendance, would, perhaps, have escaped death;
so that, what with the virulence of the plague and the lack of due tendance
of the sick, the multitude of the deaths, that daily and nightly took place
in the city, was such that those who heard the tale--not to say witnessed
the fact--were struck dumb with amazement. Whereby, practices contrary to
the former habits of the citizens could hardly fail to grow up among the
survivors.
It had been, as to-day it still is, the custom for the women that were
neighbours and of kin to the deceased to gather in his house with the women
that were most closely connected with him, to wail with them in common,
while on the other hand his male kinsfolk and neighbours, with not a few of
the other citizens, and a due proportion of the clergy according to his
quality, assembled without, in front of the house, to receive the corpse;
and so the dead man was borne on the shoulders of his peers, with funeral
pomp of taper and dirge, to the church selected by him before his death.
Which rites, as the pestilence waxed in fury, were either in whole or in
great part disused, and gave way to others of a novel order. For not only
did no crowd of women surround the bed of the dying, but many passed from
this life unregarded, and few indeed were they to whom were accorded the
lamentations and bitter tears of sorrowing relations; nay, for the most
part, their place was taken by the laugh, the jest, the festal gathering;
observances which the women, domestic piety in large measure set aside, had
adopted with very great advantage to their health. Few also there were whose
bodies were attended to the church by more than ten or twelve of their
neighbours, and those not the honourable and respected citizens; but a sort
of corpse-carriers drawn from the baser ranks who called themselves becchini
(1) and performed such offices for hire, would shoulder the bier, and with
hurried steps carry it, not to the church of the dead man's choice, but to
that which was nearest at hand, with four or six priests in front and a
candle or two, or, perhaps, none; nor did the priests distress themselves
with too long and solemn an office, but with the aid of the becchini hastily
consigned the corpse to the first tomb which they found untenanted. The
condition of lower, and, perhaps, in great measure of the middle ranks, of
the people shewed even worse and more deplorable; for, deluded by hope or
constrained by poverty, they stayed in their quarters, in their houses,
where they sickened by thousands a day, and, being without service or help
of any kind, were, so to speak, irredeemably devoted to the death which
overtook them. Many died daily or nightly in the public streets; of many
others, who died at home, the departure was hardly observed by their
neighbours, until the stench of their putrefying bodies carried the tidings;
and what with their corpses and the corpses of others who died on every hand
the whole place was a sepulchre.
It was the common practice of most of the neighbours, moved no less by fear
of contamination by the putrefying bodies than by charity towards the
deceased, to drag the corpses out of the houses with their own hands, aided,
perhaps, by a porter, if a porter was to be had, and to lay them in front of
the doors, where any one who made the round might have seen, especially in
the morning, more of them than he could count; afterwards they would have
biers brought up, or, in default, planks, whereon they laid them. Nor was it
once or twice only that one and the same bier carried two or three corpses
at once; but quite a considerable number of such cases occurred, one bier
sufficing for husband and wife, two or three brothers, father and son, and
so forth. And times without number it happened, that, as two priests,
bearing the cross, were on their way to perform the last office for some
one, three or four biers were brought up by the porters in rear of them, so
that, whereas the priests supposed that they had but one corpse to bury,
they discovered that there were six or eight, or sometimes more. Nor, for
all their number, were their obsequies honoured by either tears or lights or
crowds of mourners; rather, it was come to this, that a dead man was then of
no more account than a dead goat would be to-day. From all which it is
abundantly manifest, that that lesson of patient resignation, which the
sages were never able to learn from the slight and infrequent mishaps which
occur in the natural course of events, was now brought home even to the
minds of the simple by the magnitude of their disasters, so that they became
indifferent to them.
As consecrated ground there was not in extent sufficient to provide tombs
for the vast multitude of corpses which day and night, and almost every
hour, were brought in eager haste to the churches for interment, least of
all, if ancient custom were to be observed and a separate resting-place
assigned to each, they dug, for each graveyard, as soon as it was full, a
huge trench, in which they laid the corpses as they arrived by hundreds at a
time, piling them up as merchandise is stowed in the hold of a ship, tier
upon tier, each covered with a little earth, until the trench would hold no
more. But I spare to rehearse with minute particularity each of the woes
that came upon our city, and say in brief, that, harsh as was the tenor of
her fortunes, the surrounding country knew no mitigation, for there--not to
speak of the castles, each, as it were, a little city in itself--in
sequestered village, or on the open champaign, by the wayside, on the farm,
in the homestead, the poor hapless husbandmen and their families, forlorn of
physicians' care or servants' tendance, perished day and night alike, not as
men, but rather as beasts. Wherefore, they too, like the citizens, abandoned
all rule of life, all habit of industry, all counsel of prudence; nay, one
and all, as if expecting each day to be their last, not merely ceased to aid
Nature to yield her fruit in due season of their beasts and their lands and
their past labours, but left no means unused, which ingenuity could devise,
to waste their accumulated store; denying shelter to their oxen, asses,
sheep, goats, pigs, fowls, nay, even to their dogs, man's most faithful
companions, and driving them out into the fields to roam at large amid the
unsheaved, nay, unreaped corn. Many of which, as if endowed with reason,
took their fill during the day, and returned home at night without any
guidance of herdsman. But enough of the country! What need we add, but
(reverting to the city) that such and so grievous was the harshness of
heaven, and perhaps in some degree of man, that, what with the fury of the
pestilence, the panic of those whom it spared, and their consequent neglect
or desertion of not a few of the stricken in their need, it is believed
without any manner of doubt, that between March and the ensuing July upwards
of a hundred thousand human beings lost their lives within the walls of the
city of Florence, which before the deadly visitation would not have been
supposed to contain so many people! How many grand palaces, how many stately
homes, how many splendid residences, once full of retainers, of lords, of
ladies, were now left desolate of all, even to the meanest servant! How many
families of historic fame, of vast ancestral domains, and wealth proverbial,
found now no scion to continue the succession! How many brave men, how many
fair ladies, how many gallant youths, whom any physician, were he Galen,
Hippocrates, or Aesculapius himself, would have pronounced in the soundest
of health, broke fast with their kinsfolk, comrades and friends in the
morning, and when evening came, supped with their forefathers in the other
world.
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