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By Root 1769 0

the fall of Rome, leaving the continent in dangerous disorder. The disease brought down urban dwellers more readily and thereby destroyed the educated class and the skilled craftsmen. Inside and outside the cities, the closed and polluted environments of monasteries and convents provided an ideal opportunity for the disease to kill everyone, a tragedy from which European monasticism in particular, and the Roman Catholic church in general, never recovered. Dense villages faced a similar danger, as did the residents cooped up inside castles and manorial estates.

The social impact of the plague was best recorded in Florence, where it erupted in 1348, in the writings of Giovanni Boccaccio, one of many to lose numerous family members and close friends. In his Decameron, ten young noble ladies and ten men flee the plague and find refuge in a country estate, passing the time by telling tales. In the world described by Boccaccio, husband deserted wife, mother abandoned child just to escape the plague. So many died that priests had no time to offer services and diggers could not accommodate the bodies, which were then tossed into group graves or left for dogs and pigs to eat. The “venerable authority of laws, human and divine, was abased and all but totally dissolved.” Officials were “unable to execute any office; whereby every man was free to do what was right in his own eyes.”

Without understanding the disease’s true cause or methods of transmission, people still quickly recognized its close association with commerce and the movement of people in and out of cities. The writings of Boccaccio, Petrarch, and others of the time show the two primary reactions to the disease were to abandon the city, if possible, or at least to close the city to outsiders. Either response immediately halted trade, communication, and transportation. Local authorities throughout Europe enacted plague laws to limit its spread and control popular reaction. In 1348, the small city of Pistoia in Tuscany barred entry of people from infected areas, banned the importation of any type of used textiles, and forbade the sale of fruit or the slaughtering of animals that might cause the smell of death, which they suspected as contributing to the spread of the disease. Similarly, they forbade the tanning trade, and without it the commerce in leather goods ceased. Citizens returning from other places could only bring a small amount of baggage equivalent to about thirty pounds. No one could send a gift to the home of a person who had died of the plague or go there to visit, and no one was allowed to buy new clothing.

Diplomatic delegations and letters ceased to flow. Without the Mongol transportation system, the Catholic church lost touch with its missions in China. Frightened people everywhere blamed foreigners for bringing the disease, further threatening international commerce. In Europe, the Christians once again turned on the Jews, who had a close association with commerce and with the east, from whence the plague came. Some Jews were shut up in their homes and burned; others were taken out and tortured on the rack until they confessed their crimes. Despite a papal bull from Pope Clement VI in July 1348 protecting the Jews and ordering the Christians to stop their persecutions, the campaign against them escalated. On Valentine’s Day in 1349, the authorities of Strasbourg herded two thousand Jews to the Jewish cemetery outside of the city to begin a mass burning. Some Jews were allowed to save themselves by confessing their crimes and converting to Christianity, and some children were forcefully converted. More than a thousand perished over the six days that it took to burn them all, and the city outlawed the presence of any Jew in the city. City after city picked up the practice of publicly burning Jews to thwart the epidemic. According to the boasts of one chronicler, between November 1348 and September 1349, all the Jews between Cologne and Austria had been burned. In the Christian parts of Spain, the people initiated similar persecutions against the resident