The Black Death Outbreak

Gottfried (1983) estimated that nearly 75 percentage of the Florentine population was lost to the plague or died as a consequence of it (46). In his fictionalized account of the Black conclusion in The Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio (1965) wrote that "It crack without stop from one place to another...N all familiarity nor human foresight prevailed against it, although the urban center was cleansed of much filth by chosen officer in charge and sick persons were veto to enter it" (xxiii-xxiv).

Boccaccio also described the impact of the plague on Florence and its people. The wealthy fled the city for the "cleaner" air and surroundings of their rural properties; shops and factories closed, prices for scarce foods and basic commodities soared as the market system which brought goods into the city from the countryside began to experience difficulties. As Boccaccio (1965) described it, "It was common practice of near of the neighbors, moved no less by fear of taint by the putrefying bodies than by charity towards the deceased, to drag corpses out of houses with their manpower" (xxvii). Physicians routinely charged enormous sums for treatments that were pathetically useless, while priests wandered the streets ministering to the at rest(predicate) and dying until they, themselves, were stricken.

Gottfried (1983) writes that like others in Italian cities affected by the plague, the Florentines adopted an Epicurean attitude, "drinking, reve

stinting restructuring also took place in the years after the plague, which do possible the creation of a new class of entrepreneurial merchants. This new class or merchants included a unassailable number of nobles and changed aristocracy. Given that the wealth of the landed classes depended upon their capacity to withdraw the peasantry in productive work, the lack of adequate workers impoverished galore(postnominal) of the hereditary nobility, leaving them land-rich but cash poor. Spiritually, the Black hassle also had devastating consequences. Boccaccio (1965) wrote that as the plague continued, some Florentines morose to prayer, fasting, and mortification of the flesh in the hopes that an appeal to God would throw their safety.

Others became superstitious and turned to the black arts, numerology and astrology for signs of help. As Boccaccio (1965) wrote, "In the midst of the affliction and misery that had befallen the city, even the reverend agency of divine and human law had almost crumbled and fallen into decay, for its ministers and executors...had either sickened and died, or had been left so entirely without assistants that they were unable to see to it their duties" (xxv-xxvi). Doubts as to the truth of the Christian faith that may consecrate originated in part during the years of the plague could well be associated with the rise of secular humanism in the Renaissance and, by and by on, the Protestant Reformation.

Medical science was totally unprepared to picture relief to the sick and dying or to halt the spread of infection. Most victims died within three days of the appearance of terminal signs such as swelling in the groin or armpit. Animals, running wild in the streets, rooted in the throw away clothing and among the corpses of the dead; it is probably, says Marks (1971), that these animals assisted in feast the disease among the Florentine population (57). A distinct reduction in learning, due in part to the deaths of intellectuals and scholars, continued for a subs
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