by John Kelly
It is thought that a third of the city’s eighty thousand to ninety thousand citizens died of plague but, as with Sicily, no one knows for sure.
Venice, January 1348
The Genoese cleric who likened his fellow citizens to donkeys also had some thoughts about the character of Genoa’s great rival, Venice. “The Venetians are like pigs,” the cleric declared, “and truly they have a pig’s nature, for when a multitude of pigs . . . is hit or beaten, all draw close and run unto him who hits it.”
The cleric could have added vanity to his list of Venetian traits. The “ruler of half and a quarter of the Roman empire” liked to boast that it had the sleekest ships, the wealthiest bankers, the most beautiful women, and the most intrepid merchant adventurers. “Wheresoever water runs,” declared a local chronicler, Venetians can be found buying and selling. The most famous—and, in the view of most non-Venetians, the most shameless—display of Venetian narcissism was the all-day parade the city gave itself upon the installation of Lorenzo Tiepolo as doge, or city ruler.
The parade began with a glorious morning sail-by. The entire Venetian fleet, fifty magnificent vessels—the decks and masts of each crowded with cheering sailors; sails billowing out like puffed cheeks—glided across the mouth of the harbor, looking as stately as a procession of cardinals. Then, in the sparkling light of an Adriatic afternoon, the city’s guilds marched out of St. Mark’s Square behind two lines of gaudily attired trumpeters. Behind the musicians came the master smiths, with garlands in their hair, and above their heads, brightly colored banners flapping in the wind. Next came the furriers, in samanite and scarlet silk with mantles of ermine and vair; then the master tailors, in white robes with crimson stars; the gold workers, dressed in a shiny gold fabric; and finally the wicked barbers, ogling and gawking at the scandalously dressed slave girls marching in front of them.
But the Genoese cleric was right: narcissistic the Venetians might be, but in moments of crisis, they did band together—and that trait served them well when the plague slipped out of a silvery January dawn in 1348. Unlike the fatalistic Sicilians, who accepted the pestilence as an act of God, the competent, vigorous Venetians displayed what psychologists call agency. In the context of the times, the city’s response to the Black Death was well organized, intelligent, and ruthless in its insistence on the maintenance of public order. On March 20, in an atmosphere of grave crisis, Venice’s ruling body, the Great Council, and the doge, Andrea Dandolo, appointed an action committee of leading nobles; the committee’s recommendations would form the basis for a reasonably coherent municipal response to the pestilence. Public health would be born in the tortured cities of northern and central Italy in the winter and spring of 1348, and Venice would be in the forefront of the new field.
Under instruction from municipal authorities, all ships entering Venice were boarded and searched; vessels found harboring foreigners and corpses (citizens of Venice being transferred home for burial) were set ablaze. To maintain public order, drinking houses (inns) were shut down, and the gaily colored wine boats that sailed the canals were ordered out of the water. Anyone caught selling unauthorized wine was fined, his goods confiscated and emptied into the canals. On April 3, with the warm weather approaching, the Grand Council issued a new directive. A few days later, a fleet of stiletto-shaped municipal gondolas appeared in the canals, their boatmen shouting,
“Corpi morti, corpi morti,” as they navigated between the shuttered buildings. “Whoever had such dead in his house had to throw them down into barges under heavy penalty,” says a contemporary.
As May settled over the Venetian lagoons, corpse-laden convoys shuttled back and forth through the choppy gray seas to the windswept islands of San Giorgio d’Alega (St. George of the Sea Weed) and San Marco Boccacalame. The convoys carried the poor, collected from streets, canals, hospitals, and charitable institutions. As a reward for being a citizen of a state that ruled “half and a quarter of the Roman Empire,” each cadaver got a grave dug exactly five feet deep, a last view of Venice, and a final prayer from a priest. The same rules governed internment at San Erasmo, a mainland burial site under one of the modern city’s most famous districts, the Lido.
By summer, with black-draped mourners everywhere, public morale became a grave concern. Venice was becoming the Republic of the Dead. On August 7, so as to avoid a further deepening of feelings of “affliction” in the city, the Grand Council banned
gramaglia, or mourning clothes. The tradition of laying the dead in front of the family home to solicit contributions was also ended. The practice, popular in poorer neighborhoods, was deemed inappropriate in a time of plague. A new municipal clemency program was also instituted. To fill the empty canals and streets, the prisons were opened and municipal authorities softened their stance on the readmission of debt exiles; a right of return was granted to those who agreed to pay a fifth of what they owed.
Mass flight did occur in Venice, but the city clamped down vigorously on refugees. On June 10, with the death rate approaching six hundred a day, the authorities issued an ultimatum to absent municipal workers: return to your post within eight days or lose your position.
Caffa is often mentioned as the source of Venice’s infection. But, leaving aside the problem of how a crew could have survived such a long journey, if Caffa—or even Constantinople—were the source of infection, Venice, on the east coast of Italy, should have been infected around the same time or even a little sooner than Messina, instead of months later. Ragusa (present-day Dubrovnik), a Venetian colony on the Balkan side of the Adriatic, which was visited by a Crimean fleet late in 1347, is a more likely source of infection. Contemporaries put the municipal death toll at a hundred thousand, but, with a population of roughly l20,000, that would give Venice a preposterously high mortality rate of almost a hundred percent. A historian of the city, Frederic C. Lane, thinks the plague killed about 60 percent of Venice, roughly 72,000 people, extraordinary enough.
One thing even the Black Death could not damage was Venetian self-esteem. On being awarded an annuity for his valorous services to the city during the pestilence, the municipal physician Francesco of Rome declared, “I would rather die here than live anywhere else.”
The forceful Venetian response to the Black Death proves the point of
Disaster and Recovery, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission study on thermonuclear war. In the worst years of the mortality, Europeans witnessed horrors comparable to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but even when death was everywhere and only a fool would dare to hope, the thin fabric of civilization held—sometimes by the skin of its teeth, but it held. Enough notaries, municipal and church authorities, physicians, and merchants stepped forward to keep governments and courts and churches and financial houses running—albeit at a much reduced level. The report is right about human resiliency: even in the most extreme and horrific of circumstances, people carry on.
Central Italy, Late Winter–Early Spring 1348
“At the beginning of January [1348], two Genoese galleys arrived from Romania, and when [the crews] reached the fish market someone began to talk with them and immediately . . . fell ill and died.”
The incident in the fish market in Pisa marks a new stage in the spread of the Black Death. Behind the coastal city lay a dense network of rivers, roads, and trade routes, and at the other end of the network lay the urban centers of Tuscany. As if scenting fresh blood, the previously seaborne plague suddenly changed direction and thrust inland with the ferocity of a feral animal. In Florence, eighty-one kilometers to the east, alarmed municipal authorities frantically made preparations for the coming onslaught. Citizens were exhorted to keep their homes and streets clean and butchers to observe municipal restrictions on the slaughter of animals. Prostitutes and sodomites—medieval Florence had a reputation as a hotbed of sodomy—were expelled, and a 500-lire fine was imposed on visitors from already afflicted Pisa and Genoa. In early April, with the city not appreciably cleaner, local officials established a spe
cial municipal health commission with quasi-military powers. Commission agents were authorized to forcibly remove “all putrid matter and infected persons from which might arise . . . a corruption or infection of the air.”
To the north, Florence’s neighbor Pistoia issued a series of extraordinary public health directives. As a warm late spring breeze wafted across the town square, a municipal official announced that, henceforth, “bodies . . . shall not be removed from the place of death until they have been enclosed in a wooden box and the lid of the planks nailed down”; that “each grave shall be dug two and a half arms length deep”; that “any person attending a funeral shall not accompany the corpse or kinsmen further than the door of the church”; and that “no one shall dare or presume to wear new clothes during the mourning period.” And “so that the sound of bells does not trouble or frighten the sick, the keepers of the campanile shall not allow any bells to be rung during funerals.”
However, at least one new measure would have had a familiar ring to listeners. The official decreed that “it shall be understood that none of this applies to the burial of knights, doctors of law, judges, and doctors of physic, whose bodies can be honored by their heirs . . . in any way they please.”
In Perugia, to the south of Florence, anxious local authorities turned to Gentile da Foligno for help. A leading physician of the day, Gentile was already famous for his paper on human gestation. After studying the vexing question of why human gestation tends to be more variable than that of the elephant (two years), the horse (twelve months), and the camel (ten months), Gentile concluded that one factor in the variability was the tendency of humans to become excited while having sex. In another renowned paper, Gentile examined a second vexing contemporary question: Is it better to suck poison from a wound on an empty stomach, as the great authority Serpion held, or on a full stomach, as the equally famous Maimonides and George the German had concluded? Gentile sided with Maimonides and George the German.
Questioned about the pestilence, Gentile, a professor at the medical school in Perugia, was initially reassuring. His plague tract, prepared at the request of municipal authorities, is so measured in tone—it describes the pestilence as less dangerous than some previous epidemics—that a modern German scholar would accuse him of writing most of it before 1348. However, the calm tone of the tract more than likely reflects geographical distance. Since the plague was still far away when Gentile began writing, he had set pen to paper lacking a firsthand knowledge of the disease. The passages that were added to the tract later, when the pestilence was approaching Perugia and more information was available, show that the “prince of physicians” was quick to appreciate
Y. pestis’s unique destructive power. These new additions describe the plague as “unheard of” and “unprecedented.”
While Florence exhorted its citizens to clean the streets, and Venice burned suspect ships, Siena, as ever, remained preoccupied with
la glorie de Sienne. Municipal records show that in February 1348, as the pestilence thrust eastward across the wintry Tuscan countryside, Siena’s governing body, the Council of Nine, was preoccupied with getting the municipal university upgraded to a more prestigious
studium generale. The Nine adopted a typically Sienese solution to the problem: bribery. The council instructed its representatives at the papal court—the arbiter of such things—to spend whatever sums necessary to obtain the prestigious
studium generale designation. If Siena took any precautions to protect itself from the plague, they have been lost.
In Orvieto, eighty miles to the south of Florence, town officials had an even more novel reaction to the approaching danger. They simply ignored it. Examining municipal records for the late winter and spring of 1348, French historian Elizabeth Carpentier found not a single reference to the pestilence. Perhaps Orvieto’s Council of Seven, the town’s governing body, was concerned about further depressing public morale, already badly shaken by the famines of 1346 and 1347 and a series of bloody and incessant local wars. In such a fraught atmosphere, plague talk could easily produce panic. However, the Seven also seem to have been engaging in a bit of magical thinking. It almost seems as if the council had convinced itself that if the pestilence did not hear its name spoken in Orvieto, it would pass over the town as the Angel of Death passed over the children of Israel who marked their doors with lambs’ blood.
When the last of the winter snow had melted and the morning sky was flooded with golden light again, the plague came. The dying started slowly in March and early April, then quickly gathered momentum. On April 11, with local mortality levels approaching Sicilian levels, Florence suspended municipal deliberations; Siena followed suit in early June; and on July fifth, Orvieto. By August 21, six of Orvieto’s seven town councilors were dead, and the survivor was recovering from plague. All through the desperate spring and summer of 1348, only once had the word “plague” been spoken in a council meeting, and then not until June, when the pestilence seemed about to swallow the town whole. Contemporaries put Orvieto’s death rate at 90 percent, though Professor Carpentier thinks 50 percent a more reasonable estimate. In June, with the summer heat settling over the hills of Umbria, renowned physician Gentile da Foligno died a simple country doctor’s death, tending patients in Perugia. A devoted student would later claim the great man died of overwork, but the brief course of Gentile’s illness suggests a pestial death. In Pistoia, which gave its name to the pistol, draconian public health measures proved as ineffective as had St. Agatha’s relics in Messina. “Hardly a person was left alive,” wrote a local chronicler, and while surely that was an exaggeration, a half century later Pistoia’s population would be only 29 percent of its mid-thirteenth-century level. In neighboring Bologna, where will making reached record levels on June 8, 1348, the Black Death claimed 35 to 40 percent of the city.
In Florence and Siena, the death rates would be even worse.
Chapter Five
Villani’s Last Sentence
March 1348
ON A GRAY MARCH AFTERNOON IN 1348, PAST AND PRESENT intersected in the writing room of Florentine Giovanni Villani. As Villani sat at his desk composing a history of the plague, the disease was already in the villages to the west of the city and expected in Florence within days. Walking home from church that morning, the old man had seen dozens of carriages and carts rushing eastward toward the hills behind the city. Many of the shops and homes he passed had already been shuttered. Everyone who could seemed to be fleeing the city, and everyone who could not was deep in prayer. Seventy-two-year-old Villani, former banker and lifelong chronicler of Florence, would seek solace in his writing. He picked up his pen; on the walk home, he had composed a first sentence for his brief history of the pestilence. “Having grown to vigor in Turkey and Greece . . . ,” he wrote, “the said pestilence leaped to Sicily, and Sardinia and Corsica.” Pausing, Villani examined the sentence. What should come next? Ever since the previous November, Florence had been full of rumors about the plague, but which to believe? Ah yes, the old chronicler recalled, one story had struck him as both true and haunting—full of great courage and great foolishness. It was a report about eight Genoese galleys that had dared the pestilential Crimea. Four ships had returned “full of infected sailors . . . smitten one after the other on the return journey”; the other four vessels were said to be still wandering the Mediterranean, crewed by dead men. As the old man began to recount the fleet’s odyssey, the room fell silent. There was just the crackle of embers in the dying fire and the sound of carriages rushing by in the empty street outside. As Villani wrote, the gray afternoon light in the window behind him faded into the lifeless black of a March night.
In his prime, Giovanni Villani had been a revered figure in Florence. A dazzling polymath, the young Villani had seemed capable of anything: computing the city’s population from its grain consumption, counting the number of workers in the municipal cloth industry, writing a multivolume history of Florence in the manner of Virgil and C
icero. A wealthy banker at thirty, a civic leader at forty, the elegant Villani had climbed to the very pinnacle of Florentine society with silky ease, serving once as chief of the municipal mint and twice as prior, the city’s most important civic office. Florence, more celebrated than any “republic or city state, save the Roman Republic . . .”; Florence, the city that invented eyeglasses and modern banking; Florence, the city Pope Boniface VIII called the earth’s fifth element along with earth, wind, fire, and water—Florence had reached its glorious apotheosis in the feline, multitalented Signor Villani. For a time, the chronicler’s only fault seemed to be marrying unwisely. When his second wife, the haughty Monna dei Pazzi, ran afoul of the sumptuary laws (dress codes), the rueful Villani grumbled that the “disordinate appetite of women . . . overcomes the reason and good sense of men.”
However, by March 1348 the former Florentine wunderkind was an impoverished and disgraced old man—his fortune lost, his good name blackened beyond repair. Ten years earlier, at the age of sixty-two, Villani had endured the double humiliation of bankruptcy and debtors’ prison. After his release, the former banker returned to chronicling, a passion that survived all the storms and seasons of life, but postimprisonment Villani showed a new appetite for disastrous and apocalyptic events, as if drawn to situations that mirrored his own embittered old age. And during the 1340s, Florence was happy to provide him with many such episodes.