Boccaccio used this description as the preamble to his Decameron; a stark background against which he was to create a miracle of light and vivid fantasy. It is only reasonable to consider whether, in the interests of dramatic contrast, he did not portray the Black Death in Florence in even gloomier colours than it deserved. Certainly he was not anxious to stress the happier side: the selfless devotion of certain nuns or doctors, the efforts of the city government to keep going some sort of order and administration. Certainly, too, few cities suffered as much as Florence. But so much of Boccaccio’s detail is to be found in the records of contemporary chroniclers in France, Germany and England as well as Italy, that no one can doubt its essential truth.
The headlong flight from the cities, abandoning possessions and leaving houses open to all the world; the ruthless desertion of the sick, to meet their end as best they might, with no company but their own; the hurried, sordid burials in great communal pits; crops wasting in the fields and cattle wandering untended over the countryside – such details are the common currency of the chroniclers. On some points, even, it seems that Boccaccio does not do full justice to the horror: other reports, for instance, give more attention to the sinister role of the becchini,{82} brutalized monsters, their life not worth twenty-four hours’ purchase, who would force their way into the houses of the living and tear them away to join the dead unless the men paid for their safety with a handsome bribe or the women with their virtue.
In its picturesque detail, therefore, one must accept Boccaccio’s account as accurate and authentic. But the same cannot be said for his statistics. His estimate of a hundred thousand dead within the city is patently exaggerated. By 1345 the population of Florence was already declining from its zenith of some fifty years before. The evidence of the number of bread tickets issued in April 1347 suggests a population of well over ninety thousand{83} and the most authoritative modern estimate similarly puts it at between eighty-five and ninety-five thousand, with a slight preference for the higher figure.{84} Unless Florence was virtually unique it seems impossible that more than two thirds and unlikely that much more than half of these can have died during the six months of the plague. In the much smaller but in many ways comparable cities of San Gimignano, Siena and Orvieto, analysis of the available data suggests a death rate of about 58 per cent in the first{85} and 50 per cent (or a little more) in the others.{86} One could not be far wrong if one guessed that between forty-five and sixty-five thousand Florentines died of the Black Death.
Boccaccio’s estimate, though extravagant, was not wholly fantastical. It is noteworthy, too, that he qualified it with some surprise that the population of the city should have turned out to be so much greater than had been generally believed. In this he was more cautious than many of his contemporaries who manipulated or invented statistics with almost inconceivable levity. Dr Coulton has referred to the ‘chronic and intentional vagueness’ of the medieval mind when confronted by a set of figures and quotes as an example the action of the English parliament which, in 1371, fixed the level of a tax on the basis that there were some forty thousand parishes in the kingdom, while, in fact, the most cursory study of readily available records would have shown that there were less than nine thousand.{87}
Partly this may have been due to the intractability of Roman numerals for complicated multiplication or division but there seems too to have been genuine indifference to the need for, indeed the very possibility of, precision. A large figure was a picturesque adornment to an argument but not part of the basic data from which a conclusion was drawn. It might be expressed as though exactly calculated but this was merely so as to heighten the dramatic effect. When the Pope was assured by his advisers that the Black Death had cost the lives of 42,836,486 thoughout the world, or the losses in Germany were estimated at 1,244,434,{88} what was meant was that an awful lot of people had died.
The estimates of chroniclers are not always so nonsensical. When the Chronicler of Este{89} said that, in and around Naples, sixty-three thousand people were killed by the plague in two months, the figure was high but not impossible. It is again unlikely that the Chronicler of Bolgona was right in saying that three out of every five people died{90} but there are contemporary historians who maintain that in certain Italian cities the mortality rate was in the region of 60 per cent.{91} But, right or wrong, neither of these writers was convinced of or even particularly concerned about the literal accuracy of his figures; the estimate was an expression in vivid and easily remembered form of the enormity of his experience. The material for an even slightly accurate census did not exist and the contemporary scholar, extrapolating from a few verified facts, is more likely to arrive at a sensible answer than the medieval chronicler dependent on his own eyes and a vivid imagination and convinced, anyway, that the matter was one of trivial importance.
Though the Florentines were subjected to almost intolerable pressure it does not seem that the machinery of government ever broke down altogether. The same is true of the other Italian cities. Venice was one of the first to be afflicted; not surprisingly, since its position as chief European port of entry for goods from the East was bought at the cost of seventy major epidemics in seven hundred years.
At the worst of the Black Death six hundred Venetians a day were said to be dying; this rate can hardly have been sustained for long but is by no means incredible.{92} On 20 March, 1348, the Doge, Andrea Dandolo, and the Great Council appointed a panel of three noblemen to consider measures to check the spread of the plague.{93} A few days later the panel reported its recommendations. Remote burial places were designated; one at S. Erasmo at what is now the Lido, another on an island called S. Marco Boccacalme which seems since to have vanished into the lagoon.{94} A special service of barges was provided to carry corpses to the new graveyards. All the dead, it was ruled, were to be buried at least five feet underground. Within the city itself beggars were forbidden to exhibit corpses in the streets, as was their macabre custom, and various measures of relief were adopted, including the release of all debtors from gaol. Surgeons were exceptionally allowed to practise medicine. Strict control of immigration was introduced and any ship which tried to evade it was threatened with burning. Either in this epidemic or possibly the next a quarantine station was set up at the Nazarethum where voyagers returning from the Orient were isolated for forty days – the period, apparently, being fixed by analogy to Christ’s suffering in the wilderness.
But such precautions, even though the Great Council did what it could to enforce them, came too late to save the city. The dead, as in Florence, were numbered at a hundred thousand; the estimate seems to have had even less in the way of a factual basis. Doctors, in particular, suffered and within a few weeks almost all were dead or had fled the city. A certain Francesco of Rome was a Health Officer in Venice for seventeen years. When he retired he received an annuity of twenty-five gold ducats as a reward for staying in Venice during the Black Death ‘when nearly all physicians withdrew on account of fear and terror’. When asked why he did not flee with the rest he answered proudly: ‘I would rather die here than live elsewhere.’{95}