As 100,000 Florentines died in three months, Boccaccio fled to the countryside. He was able to witness how ‘At the start, certain swellings, either on the groin or under the armpits, grew to the size of a common apple, others to the size of an egg, some more, some less, and these the vulgar named plague-boils.’* No one understood how it spread, but they sensed it was through a ‘miasma’. Their suspicions were not completely wrong for the pneumonic mutation passed in breath, in furs, in food. ‘Some said: the air’s corruption kills. I said: the love of corruption kills,’ wrote al-Wardi, laughing at the way ‘they perfumed their homes with camphor, flowers and sandalwood, wore ruby-rings, ate onions, vinegar and sardines’. Boccaccio noted that ‘The mere touching of the clothes appeared by itself to communicate the malady to the toucher.’ Many believed it had a divine origin: ‘Oh God, it is acting by Your command,’ as Al-Wardi put it. ‘Deliver us from this … We ask God’s forgiveness for our bad souls …’
Then the plague killed its witty chronicler al-Wardi. In Tunis, Ibn Khaldun watched his mother and father die of the Mortality along with many of his teachers; he and his brother survived and watched as ‘Cities and buildings were laid waste, roads obliterated, mansions emptied, dynasties and tribes weakened. The entire inhabited world changed.’
Feelings of impotence, fear, loathing and suspicion ran wild. In Germany and Austria, Jews, the outsiders within, were accused of poisoning wells and burned alive. Flagellants travelled from town to town whipping themselves in displays of repentance. ‘Fear and fanciful notions’ spread while ‘ignorant men and women set themselves up as doctors’, wrote Boccaccio. No treatments worked; lancing the buboes just spread the pathogen; burning spices covered the stench of putrefaction; bleeding, cupping and placing half-dead pigeons on the buboes saved no one.
At dawn bodies were dumped outside the houses, before being tossed on to corpse-heaped carts: ‘A dead man was of no more account than a dead goat.’ Gravediggers got rich and arrogant, supervising mass graves where ‘Bodies were stowed like bales in the hold of a ship.’ Most of the population fled to the countryside, hoping the cleaner air and greater space would alleviate the Mortality, but stories of villages filled with dead and bodies lying beside the roads proved that rusticity was no refuge. Recent research shows it was not the density of people but the density of rats that decided the death rate. Besides, chicken, cows and pigs were also carriers. ‘Some lived in small communities’; others ‘ate and drank immoderately, going from tavern to tavern, satisfying every appetite’. Noblewomen showed their bodies to the servants and slept with them. Then inexplicably the first wave of the Death ebbed.
In October 1350, Florence commissioned Boccaccio to welcome a famous returning son, Petrarch, who stayed in his house. Petrarch was nine years older but the two became friends. Boccaccio called him ‘Master’ and together they watched the Mortality return: ‘We have mourned the year 1348. But now we realize it was only the beginning of mourning and this strange force of evil, unheard of through the ages, has not ceased since then, ready to strike on all sides, to the right and left like a most skilled fighter. So after sweeping across the whole world several times, now that no part is left unharmed, it has struck some regions twice, thrice and four times …’
The death rates were astonishing – 50 per cent of England’s six million people; 75 per cent of Venice’s population; 98 per cent of parts of Egypt – ultimately killing a third to a half of Eurasia and north Africa. Out of seventy-five million Europeans, twenty-five million died. The virus also reached west and central Africa, where villages have been found abandoned. Worldwide, the total number of deaths was somewhere between 75 and 200 million. And nor was this the end: pandemics always return, and the plague struck repeatedly over the next centuries.
Finally in Ragusa (Dubrovnik), the Venetian authorities ordered sailors to stay on their ships for thirty days (
* This was a
