1348

The year 1348 gives the Decameron its catastrophe and its point of departure: plague reaches Florence, devastates its population, and makes the flight from the city that frames the storytelling possible. The account moves from bodily symptoms to contagion, from competing efforts at self-preservation to the abandonment of the sick, and finally to a city so emptied by death that seven young women gather in a nearly deserted church.## The Outbreak in FlorenceThe narrative dates the arrival of the pestilence to 1348, when it spread westward from the East and reached Florence. It describes the disease as having appeared earlier in eastern regions, where it had already taken an immense number of lives. The account offers the heavenly bodies and human wrongdoing under divine wrath as possible explanations; it does not settle the cause. Preparations within the city and repeated prayers prove powerless to halt the calamity, whose effects become evident around the beginning of spring.The first signs are swellings in the groin or beneath the armpits, some as large as an apple and others like an egg. The narrator says they spread to other parts of the body and were followed by black or livid blotches, appearing on the arms and thighs before extending elsewhere. Both the swellings and the blotches signal approaching death. The account emphasizes how rapidly illness could become fatal: most sufferers died within three days of the signs appearing, often without fever or another complication.## Contagion, Remedies, and FearPhysicians’ advice and medicines appear to do little or no good. The narrator attributes this either to the nature of the infection or to the ignorance of many practitioners, including people who lacked medical training but had become numerous among those treating the sick. The description makes uncertainty part of the crisis: neither the disease’s origin nor an effective response is known.The pestilence is represented as passing readily from the sick to the healthy, not only through close association but through contact with clothing or other things the ill had touched. The narrator supports this claim with an episode he says he witnessed: two hogs root through and mouth rags belonging to a poor man who had died of plague, then soon stagger, fall, and die on them. This scene extends the threat beyond human contact and gives the fear of contaminated objects a vivid, consequential form.Florentines respond with sharply different strategies. Some withdraw into houses where nobody has been sick, restrict their company, eat and drink moderately, and seek diversion while refusing news from outside. Others treat feasting, drinking, singing, and roaming from house to house as a remedy, taking advantage of homes whose owners have abandoned concern for their property. A further group leaves the city for country houses, reasoning that flight offers the surest protection. None of these ways of thinking guarantees escape: people following different courses fall ill in different places, often left without help.## The Collapse of Care and Civic LifeFear does more than separate the sick from the healthy; it breaks ordinary obligations among the living. Neighbours avoid one another, relatives rarely visit, and siblings, spouses, and even parents abandon close family members. Those who fall ill are left to the charity of a few friends or to servants attracted by exceptionally high wages. The servants are scarce, often inexperienced, and exposed to the same danger; many die while tending the sick.The shortage of care has further consequences. Women who become ill accept help from male attendants, regardless of age or status, and expose their bodies when their sickness requires it. The account presents this as a practical consequence of abandonment and scarcity, while suggesting that the experience may lessen the modesty of those who survive. More gravely, some people die for want of timely assistance who might otherwise have lived. Disease and social collapse together shape the scale of the disaster.## Mortality and Narrative ConsequenceBetween March and the following July, the plague and the neglect of the sick are believed to have killed more than one hundred thousand people within Florence’s walls. The narrator evokes the loss through emptied palaces and houses, families and inheritances left without heirs, and people who share a morning meal with their companions only to die before night. The figure is presented as an estimate, made more staggering by the narrator’s observation that the city may not have contained so many people before the outbreak.The devastation also explains the circumstances in which the Decameron’s frame begins. With Florence nearly emptied of inhabitants, seven young women, linked by friendship, neighbourhood, or kinship, meet on a Tuesday morning in Santa Maria Novella after hearing divine service. They wear mourning clothes appropriate to the season, and the church is almost deserted. The narrative first dwells on the calamity because, as its narrator explains, that recollection makes clear why the events that follow come about. The year 1348 is therefore not merely a date: it is the historical and narrative rupture that turns collective grief, fear, and flight into the conditions for the company’s gathering and storytelling.