The Black Death was an epidemic of bubonic plague, a disease caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis that circulates among wild rodents where they live in great numbers and density. In addition to the bald statistics, we come across profound personal tragedies: Petrarch lost to the Black Death his beloved Laura to whom he wrote his famous love poems Di Tura tells us that ‘I buried my five children with my own hands’. In the course of just a few months, 60 per cent of Florence’s population died from the plague, and probably the same proportion in Siena. in many places in Siena great pits were dug and piled deep with the multitude of dead And there were also those who were so sparsely covered with earth that the dogs dragged them forth and devoured many bodies throughout the city. The chronicler Agnolo di Tura ‘the Fat’ relates from his Tuscan home town that
In the morning when a large number of bodies were found in the pit, they took some earth and shovelled it down on top of them and later others were placed on top of them and then another layer of earth, just as one makes lasagne with layers of pasta and cheese. In Florence, the great Renaissance poet Petrarch was sure that they would not be believed: ‘O happy posterity, who will not experience such abysmal woe and will look upon our testimony as a fable.’ A Florentine chronicler relates that,Īll the citizens did little else except to carry dead bodies to be buried At every church they dug deep pits down to the water-table and thus those who were poor who died during the night were bundled up quickly and thrown into the pit. Chronicles and letters from the time describe the terror wrought by the illness. The frightening name, however, only came several centuries after its visitation (and was probably a mistranslation of the Latin word ‘atra’ meaning both ‘terrible’ and ‘black)’. The disastrous mortal disease known as the Black Death spread across Europe in the years 1346-53.
The disease is widely believed to be the plague, although the location of bumps and blisters is more consistent with smallpox. Miniature from the Toggenburg Bible (Switzerland), 1411.
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