In the spring of 1348, the Black Death reaches Florence, devastating its population but also clearing new avenues for the non-rich. In the aftermath, a moderately affluent landowner, Salvestro de’ Medici, embarks on a political career. Just how far can Salvestro make it, between siding with the conservative establishment against his own family’s populist sympathies and the antics of his violently unstable brothers?
Transcript
Let’s start the story of one of the most catastrophic and decisive events in the history of Florence and the Medici family about 4,000 miles away from Florence, at a small cottage on the shores of Lake Issyk-Kul [Izek-Kul] in modern-day Kyrgyzstan [Kergizstan]. There lived a woman named Magnu-Kelka and her husband Kutluk. We know very little about them except for two things, thanks to their grave inscriptions. They were Nestorian Christians, a sect of Christianity that developed in Syria and spread as far eastward as China. The other thing we know is that they died in 1339, very early victims of what we know as the Black Death.
The traditional consensus is that the Black Death was bubonic plague, caused by a particularly nasty strain of a bacteria with the fancy scientific moniker of yersinia pestis. Some modern scientists and historians have questioned this diagnosis, instead arguing the Black Death was some illness that no longer exists, was another disease like typhus or anthrax, or was the bubonic plague, just with help from another biological agent like a widespread toxic microfungi that weakened the immune system. But there’s less debate over how the Black Death travelled. It may have started in the steppes of Central Asia or the Gobi Desert and travelled along the Silk Road to the port city of Caffa on the Black Sea, which was then controlled by Genoa. And from there, the plague hitched rides on ships to Constantinople, Sicily, the French Riviera, and of course northern Italy through Genoa. Estimates vary, but many settle on the average death rate being 20 percent with local death tolls as high as 40 and 50 percent.
When the Black Death reached Florence in March of 1348, the city was still suffering under an economic depression and political unrest. Based on tax records, the historian Gene Brucker estimates that on the eve of the Black Death Florence had a population somewhere between 90,000 and 120,000. By 1352, the population had fallen down to 50,000. But numbers alone don’t tell the whole story. I think nothing hits home the impact of the plague than the fact that the chronicle being written by one of our main observers of medieval Florence, Giovanni Villani, ends mid-sentence with “And the plague lasted until – .” There’s also this poignant remark from famous poet and scholar Petrarch: “Oh, happy posterity who will not experience such abysmal woe and will look upon our testimony as a fable.”
Florence’s nightmare was historians’ gain. The writer Giovanni Boccachio gave the most detailed first-hand account of the Black Death in the introduction to his famous story collection, the Decameron. For starters, here is his description of the symptoms:
“It did not take the form it had assumed in the East, where if anyone bled from the nose it was an obvious portent of certain death. On the contrary, its earliest symptom, in men and women alike, was the appearance of certain swellings in the groin or the armpit, some of which were egg-shaped whilst others were roughly the size of the common apple…Later on, the symptoms of the disease changed, and many people began to find dark blotches and bruises on their arms, thighs, and other parts of the body, sometimes large and few in number, at other times tiny and closely spaced…Against these maladies, it seemed that all the advice of the physicians and all the power of medicine were profitless and unavailing…At all events, few of those who caught it ever recovered, and in most cases death occurred within three days from the appearance of the symptoms we have described, some people dying more rapidly than others, the majority without any fever or other complications.”
“The plague I have been describing was of so contagious a nature that very often it visibly did more than simply pass from one person to another. In other words, whenever an animal other than a human being touched anything belonging to a person who had been stricken or exterminated by the disease, it not only caught the sickness, but died from it almost at once. To all of this, as I have just said, my own eyes bore witness on more than one occasion.”
Boccachio also describes the way his fellow Florentines reacted to the plague, in ways that might sound familiar to those of us who lived through COVID.
“Some people were of the opinion that a sober and abstemious mode of living considerably reduced the risk of infection. They therefore formed themselves into groups and lived in isolation from everyone else. Having withdrawn to a comfortable abode where there were no sick persons, they locked themselves in and settled down to a peaceable existence, consuming modest quantities of delicate foods and precious wines and avoiding all excesses. They refrained from speaking to outsiders, refused to receive news of the dead or the sick, and entertained themselves with music and whatever other amusements they were able to devise. Others took the opposite view, and maintained that an infallible way of warding off this appalling evil was to drink heavily, enjoy life to the full, go round singing and merrymaking, gratify all of one’s cravings whenever the opportunity offered, and shrug the whole thing off as one enormous joke. Moreover, they practiced what they preached to the best of their ability, for they would visit one tavern after another, drinking all day and night to immoderate excess; or alternatively (and this was their more frequent custom), they would do their drinking in various private houses, but only in the ones where the conversation was restricted to subjects that were pleasant or entertaining. Such places were easy to find, for people behaved as though their days were numbered, and treated their belongings and their own persons with equal abandon.”
“There were many other people who steered a middle course between the two already mentioned, neither restricting their diet to the same degree as the first group, nor indulging so freely as the second in drinking and other forms of wantonness, but simply doing no more than satisfy their appetite. Instead of incarcerating themselves, these people moved about freely, holding in their hands a posy of flowers, or fragrant herbs, or one of a wide range of spices, which they applied at frequent intervals to their nostrils…Some people, pursuing what was possibly the safer alternative, callously maintained there were no better or more efficacious remedy against a plague than to run away from it. Swayed by this argument, and sparing no thought for anyone but themselves, large numbers of men and women abandoned their city, their homes, their relatives, their estates and their belongings, and headed for the countryside…”
Florence tried to address the catastrophe by appointing a committee of eight that would devise and oversee the enforcement of new regulations. Here the government showed something of an awareness of the importance of hygiene when it came to dealing with disease. Of course, they knew nothing about modern germ theory. Yet, the medical theories of the day did hypothesize that disease could be caused by foul air and even that there were invisible seeds of disease that could be spread. So they outlawed the slaughtering of animals in public places, mandated that streets be regularly cleaned, cesspits had to be emptied at night, and all water channels had to be cleared. There was also new laws for poor relief, like selling bread at reduced rates and more regular cleaning of poor neighborhoods.
The grimmest part of the plague commission’s work by far was having to oversee the digging of mass graves for victims of the plague. Sadly, as people who live on the other side of the twentieth century, mass graves are a still macabre but not entirely unexpected sight. However, for a society that still took the consecration of graves and last rites very seriously, the placement of anonymous bodies that perished without being witnessed by a priest in a vast, unmarked grave was downright traumatic. Another eyewitness of the plague in Florence, Marchionne di Coppo Stefani, writes:
“All the citizens did little else except to carry dead bodies to be buried; many died who did not confess or receive the other sacraments, and many died by themselves and many died of hunger. At every church they dug deep pits down to the water level; and thus those who were poor who died during the night were bundled up quickly and thrown into the pit. In the morning when a large number of bodies were found in the pit, they took some earth and shovelled it down on top of them; and later others were placed on top of them and then another layer of earth, just as one makes lasagna with layers of pasta and cheese.”
As you might expect from a disease that might have been killing up to half the people that lived there, the Black Death changed life in Florence. In fact, it changed life in Florence as much as and in many of the same ways it changed life in all of Europe. For one thing, the Black Death and the recurrence of bubonic plague in the following decades apparently inspired a less devout generation, more concerned about their life and legacy in this world than the afterlife. The historian Samuel Cohn found in the years immediately following the Black Death there was a greater demand for paintings showing their rich patrons alongside sacred figures like John the Baptist and the Virgin Mary. Also, Cohn found that, by the sunset of the fourteenth century, commissions for religious art fell drastically, at about the same time the careers of pioneering Florentine Renaissance artists like Donatello and Brunelleschi were taking off.
Under the weight of the plague, the old philosophical consensus also crumbled. Under the hugely influential philosopher Thomas Aquinas, the intellectual mainstream just before the Black Death was that the universe operated in an orderly manner, according to consistent laws set by God. Further, the universe and its laws could be understood through classical logic and reason. After the plague, though, a new philosophical movement, the nominalists, instead argued that the human mind is actually unable to comprehend the workings of the universe and at best could only interpret events as they unfold. Not only that, but God’s omnipotence actually meant that there was no stable order to the universe, since God, by definition, could change anything at any time. How much nominalism influenced the Renaissance philosophy of humanism and in what ways is a huge topic that could probably spawn its own podcast, but we can at least say that nominalism tearing down the very idea of tidy universal rules and categories might have helped pave the way for the humanist view of people as individuals, rather than things that fit in a category. But we’ll come back to the subject of humanism later on.
Back to the Black Death, commentators also decried how, during and after the plague, moral standards plummeted. It’s not something we can just look at some old record to prove. But it’s not hard to imagine that the sight of your loved ones dying and God’s chosen representatives being powerless to not only turn back the plague with their prayers but perishing in droves themselves would have an impact. At least, this is what Matteo Villani, Giovanni Villani’s brother who took over writing his chronicle after his death, claimed:
“It was thought that the people, whom God by his grace had preserved in life, having seen the extermination of their neighbors and of all the nations of the world would become better, humble, virtuous and catholic, avoiding iniquities and sins and overflowing with love and charity for one another. But the opposite happened. Men, finding themselves few and rich by inheritances and successions of earthly things, forgetting the past as it never was, gave themselves to the most disordered and sordid behavior as ever before.”
It certainly didn’t help the moral and religious climate that the Church had to drastically lower their standards, including in Florence. Many priests, friars, and monks took their religious duties seriously during the plague, braving the plague-ridden air to provide medical aid and spiritual comfort to the dying. It’s an inspiring example of the lengths of selflessness faith at its best can inspire. It was also the reason why clergy dropped like drunks at a frat party. In Florence, more than half of the members of the Dominican were claimed by the plague. Across Europe, the Church was forced to take in men and women who were illiterate and had no interest in the Church except getting a steady paycheck or a roof over their heads. Speaking of frat houses, we know of one Dominican friar, Giovanni di Carlo, in Florence was devastated by the state of his monastery after they had to take in young men who didn’t have any education or faith just to keep the lights on.
Just as people even within the Church became more skeptical and hedonistic, people’s relationships with death changed too. The Danse Macabre, that famous image of young people dancing with death, actually predated the Black Death. But during and after the plague, images of the Danse Macabre became more elaborate. Instead of just showing the young dancing with Death, they began to show people of different classes, even popes and kings, participating in the dance and driving home the message that everyone is equal before Death. Grave markings commissioned by the wealthy also began to display realistic depictions of corpses in decay, rather than showing the deceased in repose or at prayer. These became known as transi tombs or momento mori monuments. It also looks like the living became more willing to intrude upon the realms of the dead. A notorious example of this was the cemetery of Champfleur in the city of Avignon, which in the years after the Black Death apparently became a place where adulterers met their lovers, prostitutes hung out, and people gambled.
But, as we’ll see in the story of the Medici, the influence of the Black Death wasn’t all rotting corpses set in stone, illiterate priests, and graveyard parties. The plummeting educational standards for clergy might have at least sped along the process of people using the languages they actually spoke in their daily life for administration and literature, instead of Latin. Also, while fewer people were paying for religious art, the number of commissions for art work actually increased overall in the decades after the Black Death, arguably helping set the stage for what we call the Renaissance. Then there was how the Black Death made life better for a lot of the survivors. For example, like the Church, the guilds of Florence had to lower their membership criteria. David Herlihy found that the silk merchant guild admitted only 16 new members in 1346 and 18 in 1347, the years on the eve of the Black Death. After the plague, it admitted 69 new members in 1349 and kept admitting large numbers even after the city’s population practically collapsed. Whatever the qualifications of these new members, it did mean that there was in the wake of the plague more social mobility in Florence than there had been in generations, if not centuries.
Florence also reaped other Europe-wide benefits brought about by the recent catastrophe. With the high death rates, employers found themselves without workers and landlords without tenants and farmers. Thanks to the new demand, even lowly tenant farmers and laborers could actually threaten to leave their current landlord or employer and look for a better deal elsewhere. Governments tried to rein in these trends by restricting the rights of workers and tenant farmers to break their contracts and setting wages at pre-Plague levels. These efforts were generally unsuccessful – well, except in sparking historic peasant revolts like the Jacquerie in France and the Peasants’ Revolt in England. It also set the stage for a revolt in Florence itself, but we’ll get there too. As for Florence, the wages of skilled workers rose nearly 200 percent. Likewise across Europe the prices of essential foods and rents fell. The quality of living actually increased for the lower classes with people being able to afford luxuries they wouldn’t have otherwise had access to in the pre-plague years. All of this was another cause of complaint for Matteo Villani:
“The common people, by reason of the abundance and superfluity that they found, would no longer work at their accustomed trades; they wanted the dearest and most delicate foods while children and common women clad themselves in all the fair and costly garments of the illustrious who had died.”
Some Florentine families were nearly or practically wiped out. An affluent lawyer, Donato Velluti, wrote in his memoirs that nearly all the men in his family were wiped out. The Medici, however, were much luckier. Many branches of the family were still thriving, or at least surviving. Tax records preserve the existence of 20 Medici households, two whose yearly income was at the level of urban laborers. Others were doing much better. Although not rich enough to join Florence’s jet set, the family of Foligno di Conte de’ Medici had saved its fortune before the great recession that slammed Florence by shifting its investments from banking and business to land. He and his father Conte had managed to piece together a wealthy estate in the Mugello, the Medici’s home of origin. Foligno’s memoirs are mostly concerned with the details of his estate, which he described as “a palace with a courtyard, an orchard, and a well.” Some of the Medici managed to stay in business despite the turmoil of the fourteenth century, though. Vieri di Cambio de’ Medici founded a business firm specializing in exports, Vieri di Camboi de’ Medici & Company.
But undoubtedly the Medici of this generation who left the biggest fingerprint on history was Foligno and Vieri’s cousin, Salvestro di Alammano de’ Medici. Like Foligno, Salvestro and his brothers owned homes, farms, and vineyards across the region. More so than Foligno, however, Salvestro threw himself into a career in politics. Unfortunately, he was plagued by more than his fair share of Billy Carters and Tony Rodhams. (If you’re not American, I’m sorry if you don’t get that reference, but I do suggest looking it up.) Salvestro’s brothers, Michele and Andrea, were both arrested for breaking into houses and shops during the plague. They were just joining many other looters acting out of desperation, except given their wealth and status they were clearly acting out of just boredom. Under the harsher laws passed to combat lawlessness during the plague years, the two barely dodged the death penalty and were probably only saved by Salvestro’s political connections.
However, another of Salvestro’s brothers, Bartolomeo, would make Andrea and Michele look like juvenile pranksters. In 1360, he was involved in a conspiracy to violently overthrow the existing conservative administration. At the eleventh hour, Bartolomeo betrayed his co-conspirators to Salvestro, who was forced into the embarrassing position of begging the Signoria to spare his brother from punishment in exchange for the incriminating testimony. Four years later, Bartolomeo got into some kind of quarrel with his own nephew, Salvestro’s son Niccolo, and murdered him. The paper trail goes cold here, but apparently Salvestro stepped in to save Bartolomeo from being executed over the death of his own son.
All through this, Salvestro had aligned himself with Florence’s conservatives and the pro-magnate faction. Bartolomeo’s failed conspiracy was on behalf of the reformer and populist factions, which the Medici had otherwise identified with since Walter of Brienne was overthrown. None of this seems to have shaken Salvestro’s convictions, at least not right away. However, whether he would do it because of his family’s own loyalties or just out of sheer opportunism or somewhere in-between, Salvestro would eventually switch sides. By doing so, he would make his mark, for better or for worse.
The Medici Podcast 