1348 plague in Florence (Black Death)

The 1348 plague in Florence is both a devastating epidemic and the crisis that makes the narrative’s later gathering possible. The account traces its arrival, visible symptoms, and apparent spread from the sick to the healthy, then turns to the fear and abandonment that overtake the city. Its force lies not only in the number of deaths but in the way the threat unsettles medicine, household life, and the obligations that ordinarily bind neighbours and kin.

Arrival and Bodily Signs

The narrative dates the catastrophe to 1348, when the pestilence reached Florence after appearing some years earlier in the East and spreading steadily westward. It offers more than one possible explanation for the affliction: the operation of the heavenly bodies, or human wrongdoing followed by divine wrath. Neither explanation is presented as a demonstrated cause. The account instead stresses that human preparations and supplications could not prevent the disease from taking hold. The city had been cleaned by appointed officers, sick people were barred from entering, measures intended to preserve health were adopted, and devout residents repeatedly prayed in processions and in other ways. As spring came, the plague nevertheless began to show its effects.

At first, the disease is described through swellings in the groin or beneath the armpits, which could grow as large as an apple or an egg. People called these swellings plague-boils. They could appear elsewhere on the body, and the account treats them as certain signs of approaching death. In a further change of symptoms, black or livid blotches appeared, first often on the arms and thighs and then across the body. Some were large and scattered; others were small and numerous. These marks, like the swellings, are presented as signs of a fatal course. By describing the visible progression from one kind of mark to another, the narrative gives the epidemic a terrible bodily legibility: its onset could be seen, but that knowledge brought no reliable means of escape.

Treatment, Transmission, and Fear

Neither physicians’ advice nor medicines seemed to help. The narrative allows two explanations for this failure: perhaps the infection’s nature resisted treatment, or perhaps physicians lacked the knowledge to identify its cause and respond properly. It emphasizes that many people practicing medicine had never received medical teaching, while reporting that few patients recovered and that nearly all died within three days of the first signs, often without fever or another complication. These are the account’s claims about the epidemic and its course, not a modern clinical diagnosis.

Contact with the sick was feared as a route of infection. The plague seemed to pass from an ill person to a healthy one as readily as fire catches dry or greasy material; even touching clothing or another object used by a sick person appeared dangerous. The narrator underscores the claim with an episode he says he witnessed: two hogs rooted through and mouthed rags belonging to a poor man who had died of the disease, then turned about and fell dead on the garments. The scene extends contagion beyond human contact and gives a concrete, horrifying shape to the fear that the illness could cling to things. Whether people approached the sick or the belongings they left behind, the danger seemed difficult to contain.

Responses and the Breakdown of Care

The living answered this uncertainty in sharply different ways. Some believed that moderation offered the best protection. They withdrew into houses where no one had been sick, chose what they regarded as the finest food and wine, avoided excess, and kept apart from news and other people, taking music and other diversions within their seclusion. Others believed that feasting, drinking, singing, and satisfying every appetite were the best defence. They went from tavern to tavern and entered other people’s houses when they found something that pleased them. Because many had abandoned care for their property, strangers could use houses as if they were their own. Yet even these revellers, for all their disregard of possessions and restraint, avoided the sick as much as they could.

A third response was flight. Many men and women left the city, their homes, relatives, and possessions for country houses, reasoning that escape offered the best protection. The narrative observes that neither this course nor the others guaranteed safety: people following different beliefs fell ill in different places, and many who had first been healthy died after being abandoned by others. Flight did not halt the disease; it also helped make abandonment seem like a model for those who remained.

That withdrawal reached into the closest relationships. Townspeople avoided one another, neighbours rarely helped, and kin visited or spoke only at a distance. Brothers left brothers, uncles nephews, sisters brothers, and wives their husbands; most shocking of all, parents refused to visit or tend their own children. The sick were left to the charity of a few friends or to servants attracted by extraordinary wages. Those servants were scarce and often inexperienced, their work reduced largely to fetching what patients asked for and noticing when they died; many perished in the process. The account also describes sick women receiving care from male attendants without regard to age or status, because abandonment had left them little choice. In some who survived, it suggests, this necessity may have diminished modesty afterward. Lack of timely care, as well as the disease’s violence, caused deaths that might otherwise have been avoided.

Death Toll and Narrative Consequence

Between March and the following July, the account says, more than one hundred thousand people were believed to have died within Florence’s walls. The figure is presented as a contemporary belief, and the narrative adds that the city may not have held so many inhabitants before the catastrophe. The loss is made visible through emptied palaces and houses, vanished households, families without heirs, and fortunes left without successors. People who had seemed healthy at breakfast could be dead by night. The suddenness collapses the distance between ordinary domestic life and death, while the empty homes register what a tally alone cannot: the destruction of whole lines of family and inheritance.

The plague therefore supplies the narrative’s immediate historical and emotional setting. After lingering over the suffering, the narrator declares an intention to leave that material behind and turns to a Tuesday morning gathering in the nearly deserted church of Santa Maria Novella. Seven young women, connected by friendship, neighbourhood, or kinship, have attended divine service in mourning clothes. The movement from the city’s isolation to their gathering does not undo the catastrophe; it establishes the conditions under which the later stories begin. The plague is at once the force that has broken ordinary social life and the circumstance against which a new company and its shared activity take shape.