The Black Death Period

The Black Death Period gives the Decameron’s opening its stark historical and moral setting: in 1348, plague strikes Florence in Tedaldo's family story, overturning ordinary care, trust, and communal life. The account moves from bodily signs and the fear of contagion to a city emptied by death, making the catastrophe both a subject in its own right and the circumstance from which the storytelling company emerges.

Arrival and setting

The narrative dates the plague’s arrival to 1348 and says that, some years earlier, it had appeared in the East, where it killed an innumerable number of people before spreading westward. Despite measures taken in Florence in Tedaldo's family story—including purifying the city, barring sick people from entering, and offering counsels for preserving health—the disease began to show its effects in the spring. The account also records repeated public processions and other devout supplications, none of which halted its progress.

The narrator presents more than one explanation for the calamity: it might have resulted from the influence of the heavenly bodies, or have been sent by God’s just anger to correct human wrongdoing. These are explanations available within the narrative, not a settled account of the disease’s cause. The plague is described as an affliction that defeats both human foresight and appeals for divine aid.

Symptoms, course, and contagion

The first signs were swellings in the groin or beneath the armpits. Some grew as large as an apple and others as an egg; people commonly called them plague-boils. They could appear elsewhere on the body, and the illness might then produce black or livid blotches, often first visible on the arms and thighs before spreading. The narrative treats both the swellings and the blotches as certain signs of approaching death.

Physicians and medicines seemed unable to help. The account allows that the infection itself might resist treatment, while also suggesting that physicians’ ignorance—including that of people practicing without medical instruction—prevented them from recognizing its source and taking effective measures. Few recovered: most of the sick died within three days of the first signs, often without fever or another complication.

The danger extended beyond face-to-face contact. The account says that conversation and association with the sick could infect the healthy, and that touching their clothes or other objects they had used appeared to do so as well. To make this fear tangible, the narrator recounts seeing two hogs root through and mouth the rags of a poor man who had died of plague; after turning around, both animals fell dead on the cloth. The episode gives a witnessed animal death the force of a warning about how far contagion might reach.

Responses and social rupture

Fear produced sharply opposed strategies. Some people gathered in houses where no one had been sick, withdrew from everyone else, and tried to preserve themselves through moderation. They ate choice food, drank fine wines temperately, avoided excess, and kept themselves occupied with music and other diversions while refusing news of death and illness outside. Others held that feasting, drinking, roaming, singing, and scoffing at events offered the surest remedy, and acted accordingly. With people abandoning concern for their property, many houses stood open to strangers, who used them much as their owners might have done. Even those who pursued revelry continued, as best they could, to avoid the sick.

A third response was flight. Many men and women left their city, homes, relatives, and possessions for country houses, reasoning that escape offered the best defense. Yet neither flight nor either style of self-protection guaranteed safety: people with different approaches fell ill in different places, and some who had been healthy abandoned the sick when their turn came.

The breakdown of care is described in intimate as well as civic terms. Neighbours rarely considered one another, relatives seldom visited, and even parents refused to tend their children. The sick depended on the few charitable friends who remained or on scarce servants, many of whom accepted extravagant wages and often died while caring for them. With no appropriate help, some people who might otherwise have survived were lost. The shortage of attendants also meant that women who fell ill might be cared for by men and expose their bodies when sickness required it; the narrator observes that this experience could lessen the modesty of those who recovered.

Mortality and narrative consequence

The narrator places the catastrophe’s toll between March and the following July. He reports the belief that more than one hundred thousand people died within the walls of Florence in Tedaldo's family story, a number greater than the city had perhaps been thought to contain before the plague. Once crowded palaces and houses were left empty, and families, inheritances, and fortunes were left without lawful heirs. People who had seemed healthy at breakfast could be dead by night.

After dwelling on these losses, the narrative turns toward a city nearly void of inhabitants. On a Tuesday morning, seven young women, connected by friendship, neighbourhood, or kinship, meet in the nearly empty church of Santa Maria Novella after hearing divine service. They wear mourning clothes, fitting the season; each is between eighteen and twenty-eight years old. Their gathering marks the transition from the account of public catastrophe to the company whose stories will follow. The plague therefore does not merely supply a date: its severing of ordinary social bonds creates the conditions under which a new, deliberate community of conversation takes shape.