Lessons from History: Pandemics and The Decameron

Cities around the world thrive because of innumerable Acts and Statutes, pieces of primary and secondary legislation, supported by a small army of dedicated regulators and compliance professionals. Everyone from revenue agents (IRS, HMRC et al.) through to traffic police, individuals working in consumer protection (such as Trading Standards Officers) as well as the countless thousands managing compliance activities for firms. So, what happens when a pandemic strikes and the administration fails?

Shortly after a pandemic ravaged the world, Boccaccio wrote The Decameron. The opening of the narrative acknowledges the profound impact that the disease, now known familiarly as the Black Death, had on his home city of Florence. The harsh reality of 100,000 deaths is displayed in a few short pages, which form the basis for cultural manifestations directly linked to the casualisation of death: the immediacy of death becomes a source of sexual liberality and proclivity, along with general hedonism and its contrary, puritanical restraint. 

What is most apparent in The Decameron, however, is that it is the breakdown in social order in Florence that allows the plague to spread. Community support breaks down as brother is abandoned by brother and the sick are left to their own devices or to be exploited by those who seek advantage. The city’s administration flounders in the rapidity of the plague’s incursions. 

The result is that some wealthier families self-isolate, living quietly and abstemiously, while others party in a hedonistic frenzy excluding the sick from their doors and some of the wealthiest, and most influential, fly to country estates deserting the city, leaving behind an unregulated mass of humanity without clear leadership or direction to fall sick as they please. 

Undoubtedly, the destructiveness of the plague had a colossal impact on the development of economic, religious and political affairs in its immediate aftermath, which may have prepared the way for much that we find only too commonplace and familiar in relationships to our busy social, political and commercial environment in this current era.

Boccaccio writes of the origins of the Black Death; the route of infection for the plague that afflicted Florence followed a similar vector to Covid19:

In the year then of our Lord 1348, there happened at Florence, the finest city in all Italy, a most terrible plague; which, whether owing to the influence of the planets, or that it was sent from God as a just punishment for our sins, had broken out some years before in the Levant,and after passing from place to place, and making incredible havoc all the way, had now reached the west. 

The plague first appears in the Levant, or Eastern Mediterranean, ‘passing from place to place’ causing ‘incredible havoc’, which suggested a celestial influence (the planets or God) to the author. Boccaccio signals a disaster of biblical proportions beyond the ken of humanity, worthy only of the most futile speculation. 

What is key, here, is the subtle recognition that the infection spreads along a trade route. Levantine trade had long been the passage for luxuries, such as silks and spices, the indulgencies of the wealthy, from seemingly impossibly remote locations. Spatially, these lands are at the edge of the world, fables beyond the furthest extent of Alexander the Great’s ancient empire; places populated by myth, legend and fearsome chimera. 

This heightened sense of a foreign, alien, monstrous invasion becomes a template for representations of plague and, conversely, for representations of peoples that have a distinctly non-European physiognomy. The legacy of this calamitous pandemic is found in the way in which it has contributed to suspicions inflicted on all kinds of individuals deemed outsiders, undesirables or, more simply, foreigners. Frequently, we find concerns expressed in the media and elsewhere that conflates human waste with individuals characterised as the undeserving poor and the association with helpless or incapable religious and administrative institutions.

According to Boccaccio, the ordinary mechanisms available in the Middle Ages, such as the power of prayer, or the clear instructions and rules of the city’s officers, do not have the capability to halt something that has its origins in the fabulous, miraculous, or metaphysical: 

There, spite of all the means that art and human foresight could suggest, such as keeping the city clear from filth, the exclusion of all suspected persons, and the publication of copious instructions for the preservation of health; and notwithstanding manifold humble supplications offered to God in processions and otherwise; it began to show itself in the spring of the aforesaid year, in a sad and wonderful manner. 

The very reasonable approach of the city to its inhabitant’s health, clearance of ‘filth’, exclusions of individuals suspected of having signs of infection, specific instructions to protect health and prayers of supplication, have no effect in stabilising a rapidly deteriorating situation. Nonetheless, the proximity of these terms, ‘filth’ and ‘suspected persons’ continues to echo down the ages through vicious racial stereotyping or polemics against ‘street people’. 

The general infirmity of degraded or degenerate individuals, their exclusion from society, does not offer a solution in Florence and the futile actions taken by medical practitioners or the pharmacological arts of wise women, also offer no relief:

To the cure of this malady,neither medical knowledge nor the power of drugs was of any effect; whether because the disease was in its own nature mortal, or that the physicians (the number of whom, taking quacks and women pretenders into the account, was grown very great) could form no just idea of the cause, nor consequently devise a true method of cure; whichever was the reason, few escaped; but nearly all died the third day from the first appearance of the symptoms, some sooner, some later, without any fever or accessory symptoms. 

The rapidity with which victims of the plague went from presentation of symptoms to death and the high level of fatalities, indicates reasons for the terror that the Black Death inspired. What is noteworthy is the presentation did not include high temperatures or associated symptoms (shivering etc.) and that these symptoms had dramatically transformed as the disease made its progress westward:

Unlike what had been seen in the east, where bleeding from the nose is the fatal prognostic, here there appeared certain tumours in the groin or under the arm-pits, some as big as a small apple, others as an egg; and afterwards purple spots in most parts of the body; in some cases large and but few in number, in others smaller and more numerous— both sorts the usual messengers of death.

By the time this plague reached European cities the ‘fatal prognostic’ had transformed; instead of nose bleeds the victims were covered in tumours in the groin and arm-pits, followed by a few large purple spots that then became small and numerous. This pathology has been represented as variously caused by Anthrax, Syphilis, Bubonic Plague and others; although it now seems likely to have been a variant of Bubonic Plague. The transformation, however, stands as a clear warning that any immunity gained from an earlier form of the infection may not have been able to resist the new mutagen, although one can only speculate on the fate of those individuals who were carriers of the infection along the trade routes. 

We should be grateful that we have the ability for many people to work from home. We should be extremely grateful that we have an administrative and health system that works together to organise the response of civil society. We should also acknowledge the progress that has been made in the last 100 years that has contributed to the underlying health and well-being of peoples around the world. We, in the West, are most fortunate. We have a legal and regulatory environment that has built a system, which shields us from the worst effects of the current pandemic. In 1348, the population of Florence saw its administrative and civil capabilities overwhelmed by a pandemic. In contrast, we continue to operate relatively effectively and may even have a newly enhanced sense of community acting as a socially cohesive collective.

Perhaps the most profound observation made by Boccaccio is that “What gave the more virulence to this plague, was that, by being communicated from the sick to the hale, it spread daily, like fire when it comes in contact with large masses of combustibles.” The practice of self-isolation, and the use of lockdown, therefore, has practical, real-world, experience as its basis and should not be ignored unless, like some pyromaniac’s dream, we wish to be consumed in a conflagration. So, it is not the creation and exclusion of monsters, fabulous or otherwise, which can ensure our mutual protection, but the simple mechanisms of enforcing the 2m separation between individuals outside of the direct family.