[In 1348] into the distinguished city of Florence . . . there came a deadly pestilence. . . . And against this pestilence no human wisdom or foresight was of any avail; quantities of filth were removed from the city by officials. . . . [T]he entry of any sick person into the city was prohibited; and many directives were issued concerning the maintenance of good health. Nor were the humble supplications, rendered not once but many times by the pious to God, through public processions or by other means, in any way efficacious.

Neither a doctor’s advice nor the strength of medicine could do anything to cure this illness; . . . in fact, the number of doctors, other than the well-trained, was increased by a large number of men and women who had never had any medical training; at any rate, few of the sick were ever cured, and almost all died after the third day of the appearance of the previously described symptoms. . . .

There came about such a fear and such fantastic notions among those who remained alive that almost all of them took a very cruel attitude in the matter; that is, they completely avoided the sick and their possessions, and in so doing, each one believed that he was protecting his own good health.

There were some people who thought that living moderately and avoiding any excess might help a great deal in resisting this disease, and so they gathered in small groups and lived entirely apart from everyone else. . . . Allowing no one to speak about or listen to anything said about the sick and the dead outside, these people lived, entertaining themselves with music and other pleasures that they could arrange.

Others thought the opposite: they believed that drinking excessively, enjoying life, going about singing and celebrating, satisfying in every way the appetites as best one could, laughing and making light of everything that happened was the best medicine for such a disease; so they practiced to the fullest what they believed by going from one tavern to another all day and night, drinking to excess; and they would often make merry in private homes, doing everything that pleased or amused them the most. This they were able to do easily for everyone felt he was doomed to die and as a result abandoned his property, so that most of the houses had become common property, and any stranger who came upon them used them as if he were their rightful owner. . . .

And in this great affliction and misery of our city the revered authority of the laws, both divine and human, had fallen and almost completely disappeared, for, like other men, the ministers and executors of the laws were either dead or sick. . . . As a result, everybody was free to do as he pleased.

Others . . . maintained that there was no better medicine against the plague than to flee from it. . . . [M]en and women in great numbers abandoned their city, their houses, their farms, their relatives, and their possessions and sought other places, going at least as far away as the Florentine countryside. . . . [B]rother abandoned brother, uncle abandoned nephew, sister left brother, and very often wife abandoned husband, and—even worse, almost unbelievable—fathers and mothers neglected to tend and care for their children as if they were not their own. . . .

When a woman fell sick, no matter how attractive or beautiful or noble she might be, she did not mind having a manservant (whoever he might be, no matter how young or old he was), and she had no shame whatsoever in revealing any part of her body to him . . . when necessity of her sickness required her to do so. This practice was, perhaps, in the days that followed the pestilence, the cause of looser morals in the women who survived the plague. . . .

With the fury of the pestilence increasing, [traditional burial customs] for the most part died out and other practices took [their] place . . . so not only did people die without having a number of women around them, but there were many who passed away without having even a single witness present. . . . And these dead bodies were not even carried on the shoulders of honored and reputable citizens but rather by gravediggers from the lower classes that were called becchini. Working for pay, they would pick up the bier and hurry it off. . . .

Many ended their lives in public streets, during the day or at night. . . . The city was full of corpses. . . . So many corpses would arrive in front of the church every day and at every hour that the amount of holy ground for burials was certainly insufficient for the ancient customs of giving each body its individual place; when all the graves were full, huge trenches were dug in all of the cemeteries of the churches and into them the new arrivals were dumped by the hundreds; and they were packed in there with dirt, one on top of another, like ship’s cargo. . . .

But . . . the hostile winds blowing there did not . . . spare the surrounding countryside. . . . In the scattered villages and in the fields the poor, miserable peasants and their families without any medical assistance or aid of servants, died on the roads and in their fields and homes, as many by day as by night, and they died not like men but more like animals. . . . When they saw that death was upon them, completely neglecting the future fruits of their past labors, their livestock, their property, they did their best to consume what they already had to hand. So it came about that oxen, donkeys, sheep, pigs, chickens, and even dogs, man’s most faithful companion, were driven from their homes into the fields where the wheat was left not only unharvested but also unreaped, and they were allowed to roam where they wished. . . .

So great was the cruelty of Heaven, and, perhaps, also that of man, that from March to July of the same year, between the fury of the pestiferous sickness and the fact that many of the sick were badly treated or abandoned in need because of the fear that the healthy had, more than one hundred thousand human beings are believed to have lost their lives for certain inside the walls of the city of Florence.

Source: Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans. Mark Musa and Peter Bondanella (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), Copyright © 1982 by Mark Musa and Peter Bondanella, pp. 6–12. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. This selection may not be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.