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By Root 1370 0

the bowels of hell inflicted on the living. What could be more appalling than this death by spontaneous internal putrefaction, this sudden consuming of the body from within? Bubonic plague was carried by rats and transmitted to human beings by fleas that jumped from those rats, but no one in Caravaggio’s world was aware of that fact. The concept of infection was understood and so was the importance of quarantine, so that houses known to be plague-ridden were locked from the outside, their inhabitants forbidden to leave until the contagion had passed (when all those trapped within were usually found dead). But, although the precise cause of the disease was unknown, human intuition had groped towards an understanding that the illness might in some way be linked to hygiene. Public proclamations issued at regular intervals by Milan’s health office in the late 1570s give no fewer than seven accounts of the true cause of the plague, and although they differ widely it is striking how many of them involve rumours about unclean bedding or clothes – which no doubt did, indeed, harbour the fleas that carried the disease. The plague was said to have begun in Venice, originating with Jews trading in used household goods; to have been brought from Mantua by a Jew who had come from that city to Milan selling – again – used household goods; to have been caused by a citizen of Mantua, a man carrying the disease who had spent the night in a Milanese inn and thereby infected the bedding on which he had slept; to have been transmitted by a dirty shirt, worn by a traveller and unwisely confiscated by an innkeeper in part settlement of his bill; and so on.38

As well as carrying inklings of the truth about the actual mechanisms of infectious transmission, these stories vividly demonstrate the extent to which plague was liable to stir up a hornets’ nest of prejudice. There was a long, ignoble history of such accusations. During the fourteenth century, when all of Europe suffered unprecedented mortality rates from outbreaks of the Black Death, as plague became known, the rumour was put about that Jews were deliberately spreading the disease. The idea of a pestis manufacta, a plague-inducing substance secretly manufactured by the enemies of Christianity, took hold of the popular imagination. In the lower Rhineland and parts of Provence, many Jews suspected of such terrorist acts had been interrogated and tortured, and when confessions had been extorted from them entire Jewish communities had been systematically liquidated.39 There was no such response to the Milanese plague of the 1570s, but there was a recurrence of rumours about the role of untori – unguent-spreaders – in creating the epidemic. According to a Jesuit eyewitness, Paolo Bisciola, ‘it is said that there were certain men who went about touching the walls, gates, and streets with artificial unguents, which opinion many affirmed through the discovery one morning that almost all of the gates and cadenazzi of the Corsa di Porta Nuova, had been smeared, and the walls in various places had been soiled by unguents.’40 The presumed culprits, this time, were not the Jews but the Spanish. For a while, the people of Milan convinced themselves that their hated rulers were to blame for the evil that afflicted them. The Spanish governor of Milan felt compelled to pass legislation that forbade anyone from repeating the accusation – which only made the Milanese population even more jittery.

In truth, the Spanish government was partly to blame, although not in the way so luridly imagined. The plague had actually been brought from Sicily to Milan by the entourage of Don Juan of Austria, illegitimate brother of Philip II of Spain and hero of Lepanto: the group had arrived in the city in August 1576, with several of its members already close to death. The inner circle of the Milanese Senate knew this, and so did members of the city’s Health Tribunal. The plethora of alternative official explanations was a smokescreen created partly to protect the reputation of the Spanish royal family and preserve the