The plague in Florence

The plague in Florence is both a public calamity and the condition that makes the Decameron’s storytelling refuge necessary. Arriving in 1348 after spreading westward from the East, the pestilence overwhelms remedies, severs bonds between neighbors and families, and drives people to flee their homes. The company’s departure from the stricken city gives the stories that follow their immediate setting and purpose: a shared attempt to preserve health and life amid fear, loss, and social disintegration.

Arrival and the course of the disease

The account dates the plague’s arrival in Florence to 1348. It had appeared in the East some years earlier, killed innumerable people there, and spread continually from place to place before reaching the West. The narrator offers more than one explanation for its origin: it may have followed the influence of the heavenly bodies, or it may have been sent by God’s just wrath in response to human wrongdoing. These are presented as contemporary interpretations, not as a settled account of cause.

Neither civic preparation nor religious supplication prevents the outbreak. Officials purge the city, forbid sick people to enter, and make provisions for preserving health; devout people also pray repeatedly, in processions and otherwise. The disease nevertheless begins to show its terrible effects around the start of spring. The contrast between organized precaution and the pestilence’s advance establishes a world in which measures that should offer protection prove powerless.

Symptoms and the failure of remedies

The account describes swellings in the groin or beneath the armpits, called plague-boils by ordinary people. Some grow as large as an apple, others as large as an egg, and they may appear elsewhere on the body. In time, black or livid blotches emerge, often first on the arms and thighs and then across the body. They vary in size and distribution, but, like the boils, are described as signs of approaching death.

Physicians’ advice and medicines seem to do no good. The narrative allows that the infection itself may have resisted treatment, or that physicians’ ignorance prevented them from recognizing its origin and responding appropriately; it also notes that many people practicing medicine had never been taught it. Few recover, and most die within three days of the signs appearing, sometimes without fever or another complication. The text thus joins a report of symptoms and rapid decline to an account of the limits of the medical knowledge available to the people in the story.

Contagion and fear

Contact makes the danger seem inescapable. Conversation and association with the sick can infect the healthy, the narrator says, and even touching clothing or other objects used by the sick appears capable of transmitting the disease. He emphasizes that this was not merely hearsay: he recounts seeing two hogs root through and toss about the rags of a poor man who had died of plague, then fall dead upon them soon afterward. The episode makes contaminated objects, not only proximity to the sick, a source of terror.

Such accounts generate fears and conjectures that converge on a brutal practical conclusion: avoid the sick and everything connected with them. The impulse to protect oneself becomes a force of abandonment. Neighbors avoid neighbors; relatives seldom visit or speak except from a distance; brothers, uncles, sisters, husbands, wives, and even parents and children are separated by fear. People who fall ill are left with the rare charity of friends or with servants attracted by extraordinary wages. Those servants are often inexperienced, their work may amount to bringing what patients request or noting when they die, and many perish in the process.

The scarcity of care also changes the circumstances of tending the sick. Women who require assistance may expose their bodies to male attendants, young or old, if illness makes it necessary, where they would ordinarily have expected a woman to care for them. The account observes that survivors may afterward have felt less modesty. It also stresses the human cost of abandonment: some who died might have lived with timely assistance, so deaths follow not only from the disease’s violence but from the collapse of care around it.

Responses to the catastrophe

Florentines adopt sharply different defenses. Some form small companies, shut themselves away in houses where no one has been sick, eat and drink temperately, avoid excess, and seek diversion through music while refusing news from outside. Others argue for the opposite course: they drink without restraint, move from tavern to tavern, sing, play, and satisfy their appetites. As many owners abandon their houses and possessions, strangers enter and use the houses as if they were their own. Yet even the revelers try to avoid the sick.

A third response is flight. Many people, caring for no one but themselves, abandon the city, their homes, relatives, and property, and seek country residences. Their escape is not a guarantee: people of different opinions fall ill in different places, often with no one to care for them, and some who had been healthy have to endure the abandonment they had modeled toward others. The account does not present withdrawal, indulgence, or flight as a sure means of safety; each is a response to uncertainty, and none reliably defeats it.

The plague and the storytelling company

The company’s retreat places the book’s frame in direct relation to the outbreak. Near the end of the gathering, the king recalls that the young people left Florence to preserve their health and lives from the misery continually visible in the city. He says that they have now spent nearly fifteen days away. Although they have eaten, drunk, danced, sung, and told stories, he has observed no blameworthy act among them, but rather decorum, concord, and familiarity. He proposes that they return the following morning, partly to avoid an overlong stay and partly because the company has become known in the neighborhood and might lose the privacy and comfort of its retreat.

The others debate the proposal but ultimately agree that it is useful and seemly. The plague therefore shapes not only the opening crisis but also the duration and limits of the company’s escape: a place of refuge can offer respite, but it is not a permanent separation from the city and its dangers. Against the disintegration of ordinary obligations, the ordered exchange of stories becomes a temporary form of companionship; the decision to return keeps that refuge within the continuing reach of the calamity from which the company first fled.