Black Death in the Florentine Plague Setting

The Black Death in the Florentine Plague Setting is the catastrophe that supplies the Decameron with its date, its opening crisis, and the reason a storytelling company leaves ordinary life behind. In the account, the plague reaches Florence in 1348 after spreading west from the East; its visible signs and terrifying contagion unsettle medicine and communal bonds alike. The epidemic is more than background: it creates the conditions in which flight, isolation, and storytelling become urgent responses to danger and grief.

Arrival and symptoms

The narrative dates the plague’s arrival in Florence to 1348 and says its effects began to appear in the spring. It presents two possible explanations for its coming: the operation of the heavenly bodies or human wrongdoing, with the plague understood by some as punishment sent by divine wrath. These are the account’s period explanations, not a settled explanation of the disease. Measures taken in the city included cleansing it of impurities, barring sick people from entering, and offering repeated prayers and processions, but none prevented the outbreak.

The first signs described are swellings in the groin or beneath the armpits. Some grow as large as an ordinary apple, others as an egg; the populace calls them plague-boils. They spread to other parts of the body, and in some sufferers the disease changes into black or livid blotches, either scattered and large or small and densely sown. The account treats both the swellings and the blotches as signs of approaching death. It distinguishes this presentation from what it says occurred in the East, where a nosebleed was regarded as a sure sign of death.

Transmission and failed remedies

The account emphasizes the apparent speed and reach of contagion. It says physicians and medicines seemed ineffective, while also raising uncertainty about whether the infection itself resisted treatment or whether a shortage of medical knowledge prevented effective measures. Alongside trained practitioners, many people with no medical instruction had taken up the practice. Few patients recovered, and most died within three days of the first signs, often without fever or another complication.

Contact with the sick is described as dangerous, but so is contact with their belongings: clothing and other objects used by an infected person seem capable of transmitting the disease. The narrator reinforces this claim with an episode presented as personal observation. Two hogs root among the rags of a poor man who has died of the plague, take the material in their mouths, and soon fall dead upon it. The scene extends the perceived threat beyond human contact and gives the narrative’s account of contagion a stark, memorable image; it remains a report within the text rather than a modern medical finding.

Fear and the breakdown of care

People respond to danger in sharply different ways. Some withdraw into houses where no one has been sick, keep to temperate food and drink, avoid news from outside, and seek diversion in music. Others treat feasting, drinking, singing, and roaming as their best defense, entering other people’s houses with little regard for possessions. Both groups still try to avoid the sick. A further response is flight: many abandon the city, their homes, relatives, and property for country estates, yet neither those who leave nor those who stay are spared in every case. Some sicken and die far from the people who might have cared for them.

The epidemic’s most intimate damage is abandonment. Neighbours avoid neighbours; relatives seldom visit or speak except from a distance; siblings and spouses separate, and parents refuse to tend their own children. The sick are left to the charity of a few friends or to servants attracted by unusually high wages, many of whom are inexperienced and themselves die while serving. In this scarcity, the account notes that sick women may accept care from male attendants, whatever their age, and expose their bodies when necessity requires. It also says that inadequate care contributes to deaths that might otherwise have been avoided. The plague’s toll is thus represented not only through symptoms and mortality but through the collapse of ordinary obligations.

The epidemic as narrative frame

The book presents storytelling as a response to this crisis. Its framing account proposes one hundred stories, told over ten days by seven ladies and three young men during the pestilence, with songs for diversion. The stories include both joyful and grievous turns of love and other accidents of fortune; reading them is offered as solace, particularly for women described as confined to their chambers and with fewer ways than men to distract themselves from melancholy. The gathering’s entertainment does not erase the epidemic: it answers the isolation and distress the opening account has established.

Later references keep the plague present across stories set in different circumstances. A story of a family in exile mentions the pestilence as having taken a young woman; another begins against the background of the epidemic’s suspension of ordinary legal authority, which the company invokes when discussing permissible subjects. In a story set near Fiesole, the plague remains visible in the landscape of the storytelling present. These recurrences make the disease a continuing temporal frame rather than a crisis confined to the opening pages: private histories unfold under the shadow of a catastrophe that has already disrupted the city and its bonds of care.