Chapter 5. Florence: a witness asking to be believed

This section argues, as a historical claim, that Boccaccio's description of Florence in 1348 records a disease's signs, speed and routes of spread with care, but is written to make a reader believe a horror, not to let a reader recognise a disease; and that its figures are marked, in its own words, as belief and estimate. That bears on the Black Death dispute by showing which features of the description Cohn's kind of comparison can use, and how the text's framing limits what any count drawn from it can carry.

5.1Why the account was written

Boccaccio states the purpose of the introduction first, and it is not recognition. The narrator addresses the book's readers, gracious ladies, and apologises for opening with grief:

"But, because without this review of the past, it would not be in my power to shew how the matters, of which you will hereafter read, came to pass, I am almost bound of necessity to enter upon it, if I would write of them at all."

The account is a necessary preface to the stories. It looks back to explain how the company of the Decameron came to meet. It does not look forward to a recurrence; in Koselleck's terms it belongs wholly to the space of experience (Koselleck 1985). Boccaccio's care is spent on making the account believable, not usable.

5.2The date, the origin and two causes

The date is given in the form of the Christian era, and the cause in a disjunction:

"I say, then, that the years of the beatific incarnation of the Son of God had reached the tale of one thousand three hundred and forty-eight when in the illustrious city of Florence, the fairest of all the cities of Italy, there made its appearance that deadly pestilence, which, whether disseminated by the influence of the celestial bodies, or sent upon us mortals by God in His just wrath by way of retribution for our iniquities, had had its origin some years before in the East, whence, after destroying an innumerable multitude of living beings, it had propagated itself without respite from place to place, and so, calamitously, had spread into the West."

The Italian keeps the disjunction: "la quale o per operazion de’ corpi superiori o per le nostre inique opere da giusta ira di Dio a nostra correzione mandata sopra i mortali", in this article's English: which, either by the working of the higher bodies or, for our wicked deeds, sent by the just anger of God upon mortals for our correction. The narrator does not choose between the heavens and God. Thucydides gave the question of cause to others; Boccaccio sets the two causes of the time side by side. The origin in the East and the westward spread are given as fact, without a marker of hearsay, though the narrator could not have seen them.

5.3Measures that did not avail

The next sentence is the one Skeptron's record is built on:

"In Florence, despite all that human wisdom and forethought could devise to avert it, as the cleansing of the city from many impurities by officials appointed for the purpose, the refusal of entrance to all sick folk, and the adoption of many precautions for the preservation of health; despite also humble supplications addressed to God, and often repeated both in public procession and otherwise, by the devout; towards the beginning of the spring of the said year the doleful effects of the pestilence began to be horribly apparent by symptoms that shewed as if miraculous."

The Italian is: "per lo quale fu da molte immondizie purgata la cittá da uficiali sopra ciò ordinati e vietato l’entrarvi dentro a ciascuno infermo e molti consigli dati a conservazione della sanitá". In this article's English: by which the city was purged of much filth by officials appointed over it, and entry was forbidden to every sick person, and many counsels were given for the preservation of health. Rigg's "precautions" stands where the Italian has consigli, counsels or advice. The difference matters for any reading of the passage as a list of public measures. Cleansing by appointed officials and a ban on the entry of the sick are acts. Counsels given are advice, and the sentence does not say who gave them or whether anyone followed them.

The order of the sentence is also worth noticing. The measures come first, the failure second, and the timing last: "quasi nel principio della primavera dell’anno predetto orribilmente cominciò i suoi dolorosi effetti, ed in miracolosa maniera, a dimostrare", in this article's English: almost at the beginning of the spring of the said year it began, horribly and in a marvellous manner, to show its grievous effects. The measures are placed before the horrible showing of effects, but the sentence gives no date for any measure, and its time word, the beginning of spring, is approximate. The sentence says the measures did not avert the disease. It does not say what they did. In Rosenberg's sequence the sentence holds the public response and its ritual side, the processions, in one clause, ranked together as things that did not work (Rosenberg 1992).

5.4The signs, measured against the East

The description of the signs opens with a comparison:

"Not such were they as in the East, where an issue of blood from the nose was a manifest sign of inevitable death; but in men and women alike it first betrayed itself by the emergence of certain tumours in the groin or the armpits, some of which grew as large as a common apple, others as an egg, some more, some less, which the common folk called gavoccioli."

This is the closest Boccaccio comes to Thucydides's purpose, and it runs the other way. Where Thucydides gives signs so that the disease may be recognised elsewhere, Boccaccio contrasts the disease in Florence with the disease reported elsewhere. The Eastern sign, blood from the nose, is reported without a source; the Florentine sign is the swelling, named in the common speech of the city. Massèra's text reads "le quali li volgari nominavan «gavoccioli»", which the common people called gavoccioli. The name is local and popular. Neustadt and May advise testing an analogy by listing likenesses and differences (Neustadt and May 1986); the narrator does something like it, and finds a difference.

The course follows:

"after which the form of the malady began to change, black spots or livid making their appearance in many cases on the arm or the thigh or elsewhere, now few and large, now minute and numerous. And as the gavocciolo had been and still was an infallible token of approaching death, such also were these spots on whomsoever they shewed themselves."

And the speed: "not merely were those that recovered few, but almost all within three days from the appearance of the said symptoms, sooner or later, died, and in most cases without any fever or other attendant malady." The Italian ends "ed i piú senza alcuna febbre o altro accidente morivano", and most died without any fever or other complication.

These are the features that a comparison of the kind Cohn made sets against the modern disease: a season, signs, a speed of death, the presence or absence of fever. The reading note does not say which contemporary records Cohn read, and this article does not claim that the argument rests on this passage; it notes only that the text supplies such features, presented as observed in Florence.

The swelling is called an infallible token of death, and the narrator says almost all died within three days. Here Lipsitch and colleagues' point about case definitions applies (Lipsitch et al. 2015). If the sign by which a case is recognised is the sign the narrator has already called a token of death, the statement that few recovered is partly a statement about the definition. The narrator does allow that some recovered, "those that recovered few", and later that of every opinion "not all died, neither did all escape". The account thus holds a near-total mortality and an admission of survivors, without any count to reconcile them.

5.5Physicians and their failure

The failure of medicine is again given with two possible reasons, and the narrator again declines to choose: either the disorder defied treatment, or the physicians, ignorant of its source, could not apply a remedy. An aside notes that "besides the qualified there was now a multitude both of men and of women who practised without having received the slightest tincture of medical science". In Italian the aside runs "cosí di femine come d’uomini senza avere alcuna dottrina di medicina avuta mai", women as well as men without ever having had any teaching in medicine. The physicians' ignorance echoes Thucydides, but Boccaccio does not offer the account as a remedy for it.

5.6Contagion, objects and the hogs

The account of transmission is the passage where the narrator's own witness is most insistent. It begins with a simile:

"Moreover, the virulence of the pest was the greater by reason that intercourse was apt to convey it from the sick to the whole, just as fire devours things dry or greasy when they are brought close to it."

It extends to objects: "but any that touched the cloth of the sick or aught else that had been touched or used by them, seemed thereby to contract the disease." The verb is "seemed", and the Italian has "pareva", it seemed. The narrator reports the transmission by objects as an appearance, not a certainty.

Then the witness, set up before the story is told:

"So marvellous sounds that which I have now to relate, that, had not many, and I among them, observed it with their own eyes, I had hardly dared to credit it, much less to set it down in writing, though I had had it from the lips of a credible witness."

The Italian has "il che se dagli occhi di molti e da’ miei non fosse stato veduto, appena che io ardissi di crederlo, non che di scriverlo", which had it not been seen by the eyes of many and by mine, I would hardly dare to believe it, let alone write it. The narrator sets a standard: hearsay from a credible witness would not have been enough to write this down; sight was needed. That standard is stricter than the one applied to the East, and it is applied to the most surprising claim in the account. The story follows:

"The rags of a poor man who had died of the disease being strewn about the open street, two hogs came thither, and after, as is their wont, no little trifling with their snouts, took the rags between their teeth and tossed them to and fro about their chaps; whereupon, almost immediately, they gave a few turns, and fell down dead, as if by poison, upon the rags which in an evil hour they had disturbed."

The parallel with Thucydides is close. Both accounts offer animals as evidence that the disease was of an extraordinary kind: at Athens, birds that vanished and dogs that died; at Florence, hogs that died on a dead man's rags. Thucydides called the animals a proof, τεκμήριον. Boccaccio calls the hogs an experience of the narrator's own eyes. In both, the animal sign stands where the author most needs the reader's trust, and each is offered as a mark of difference from ordinary disease, not as a clue to cause.

In Rosenberg's terms this passage reads the disease as contamination (Rosenberg 1992): it passes by contact, speech, cloth and objects, from people to people and to animals. A few paragraphs later the account reads it as configuration. Those who walked abroad with flowers and spices did so "because the air seemed to be everywhere laden and reeking with the stench emitted by the dead and the dying and the odours of drugs." The narrator reports both styles as the citizens held them, and commits to neither; the opening disjunction between the heavens and God adds a third.

5.7Responses, the collapse of order, and who bore the cost

The narrator sorts the citizens' responses into kinds: those who shut themselves away and lived temperately, those who drank and revelled, those who took a middle course with perfumes, and those who fled. Of the last, the narrator says they "affirmed that there was no medicine for the disease superior or equal in efficacy to flight". Boccaccio's own words are "dicendo niuna altra medicina essere contro alle pestilenze migliore né cosí buona come il fuggir loro davanti", saying that no other medicine against pestilences was better or as good as fleeing before them. Each response is presented as a theory of prevention, and the narrator's verdict on all of them is the same: "Of the adherents of these divers opinions not all died, neither did all escape;".

The collapse of law is given with a reason that parallels Thucydides's:

"In this extremity of our city's suffering and tribulation the venerable authority of laws, human and divine, was abased and all but totally dissolved, for lack of those who should have administered and enforced them, most of whom, like the rest of the citizens, were either dead or sick, or so hard bested for servants that they were unable to execute any office; whereby every man was free to do what was right in his own eyes."

At Athens the law lost its force because no one expected to live to be tried; at Florence, because those who should have enforced it were dead or sick. One explanation concerns the governed, the other the governors.

The abandonment of the sick follows, kin by kin, and then the cost to those left:

"Wherefore the sick of both sexes, whose number could not be estimated, were left without resource but in the charity of friends (and few such there were), or the interest of servants, who were hardly to be had at high rates and on unseemly terms,"

Where Rigg writes that their number could not be estimated, the Italian speaks of "la moltitudine inestimabile", the inestimable multitude. The narrator says that the sick could not be counted, before giving a count of the dead.

The account then names who bore the worst. It is explicit about rank:

"The condition of lower, and, perhaps, in great measure of the middle ranks, of the people shewed even worse and more deplorable; for, deluded by hope or constrained by poverty, they stayed in their quarters, in their houses, where they sickened by thousands a day, and, being without service or help of any kind, were, so to speak, irredeemably devoted to the death which overtook them."

The original has "a migliaia per giorno infermavano": by thousands a day they fell sick. The figure is a manner of speaking in a passage whose point is the poor's lack of help, not a tally. The reason given for their greater suffering is that they could not leave and could not pay. Ann Carmichael argues that in the century after the Black Death plague came to be seen as a disease of the poor, and that Florence's plague controls under health officials increasingly targeted the poor as the source of danger (Carmichael 1986). Boccaccio's passage comes before the period her argument covers, so it cannot test it. What it shows is an earlier position: the poor as those who bore the disease, because poverty kept them in place, not as its source. The reading note frames Carmichael's argument around the poor as the source of danger; Boccaccio's text presents them as those who bore it.

5.8The dead: rites, trenches and an estimate

The rites changed, and the narrator records the change with care. The old custom of mourning women within and kinsmen and clergy without gave way to the becchini, hired carriers from the lower ranks, who took the bier "not to the church of the dead man's choice, but to that which was nearest at hand". Neighbours laid the dead outside their doors, "where any one who made the round might have seen, especially in the morning, more of them than he could count;". The Italian has "n’avrebbe potuti veder senza numero", could have seen them without number. A second time, the narrator says that the thing could not be counted.

The burials followed:

"they dug, for each graveyard, as soon as it was full, a huge trench, in which they laid the corpses as they arrived by hundreds at a time, piling them up as merchandise is stowed in the hold of a ship, tier upon tier, each covered with a little earth, until the trench would hold no more."

This sentence describes the plague dead buried together in trenches, and it is the closest point between Boccaccio's text and Bos and colleagues' method, which took teeth from a cemetery used for the dead of those years. But the trenches described are Florentine, in the churchyards of the city, and the genome came from London. The text tells a reader where such material would lie in Florence. It does not tell the reader that any of it has been examined.

Then the estimate:

"it is believed without any manner of doubt, that between March and the ensuing July upwards of a hundred thousand human beings lost their lives within the walls of the city of Florence, which before the deadly visitation would not have been supposed to contain so many people!"

The Italian is "oltre a centomilia creature umane si crede per certo dentro alle mura della cittá di Firenze essere stati di vita tolti", more than a hundred thousand human creatures, it is believed for certain, were taken from life within the walls of the city of Florence. The verb is si crede, it is believed. Rigg renders per certo as "without any manner of doubt"; the certainty is firm in both languages, but the subject of the belief is impersonal. The narrator does not say who counted, or that anyone did, and the last clause carries its own doubt: before the plague no one would have supposed the city to hold so many. The study's reading note treats the figures as the narrator's estimates, not counts, and the text supports that reading in its own grammar.

The season is the one firm time in the estimate: between March and July. Taken with the beginning of spring in the opening, the account gives a season of mortality. Seasonality is one of the features Cohn's argument names (Cohn 2002). The text gives it as the span of the narrator's estimate, not as a dated series.

5.9The record beside the text

Skeptron's record of Florence takes a narrower view of the text than its title suggests. Its scenario opens:

The record keeps the three measures in the text's order. Its "various measures taken to preserve health" stands nearer to Rigg's "precautions" than to the Italian consigli, counsels; the record checked a different English translation, which this article has not read. It places the symptoms "around the spring", which matches the text's approximate time. It drops the processions, the failure, the symptoms themselves, the contagion, the responses, the abandonment, the burials and the estimate.

The record then answers a question about the causes of the time:

The first two sentences treat the narrator's disjunction correctly: the heavens and God are kept as the period's explanations, not as causes. The third sentence makes a point the text supports: the sentence that lists the measures says they did not avert the disease, and gives no evidence about what each did. The record's answer is more cautious than the text's verdict, which is that the measures failed.

The record carries a seam. Its scenario contains the sentence "Not permissible." on its own, after the sentence about spring. There it answers nothing; it repeats the first words of the answer quoted above.

The largest difference between the text and the record is the count. The text gives an estimate of the dead and twice says that the sick and the dead could not be counted. The record gives no count and does not mention the estimate. A reader of the record alone would not know that the text holds a figure, or that the text marks the figure as belief.

5.10What this case adds

The Florentine account adds to the Black Death dispute a statement of what a contemporary description of this kind commits to. It gives a season, signs located on the body, a change from swellings to spots, a speed of death, an absence of fever in most cases, a contrast with the East, routes of spread through contact and objects, several explanations held at once, a differential burden on the poor, and burial in trenches. It marks its strongest claims by sight, its routes of spread by what seemed, and its count by belief. For Cohn's argument the text supplies the kind of features that his comparison used. For Bos and colleagues' finding it supplies a description of where Florentine material would lie, and nothing that the London genome tested. Read closely, the text is evidence about description, the object of Cohn's comparison, and not about the organism.