Plague and pestilence in literature and art

by Sir Raymond Henry Payne Crawfurd

‘Here, where this plot of ground extends, formerly stood the shop of the barber, Giangiacomo Mora, who had conspired with Guglielmo Piazza, Commissary of the Public Health, and with others, while a frightful plague exercised its ravages, by means of deadly ointments spread on all sides, to hurl many citizens to a cruel death. For this, the Senate, having declared them both to be enemies of their country, decreed that, placed on an elevated car, their flesh should be torn with red-hot pincers, their right hands be cut off, and their bones be broken: that they should be extended on the wheel, and at the end of six hours be put to death and burnt. Then, and that there might remain no trace of these guilty men, their possessions should be sold at public sale, and their ashes be thrown into the river; and to perpetuate the memory of their deed the Senate wills, that the house in which the crime was projected shall be razed to the ground, shall never be rebuilt, and that in its place a column shall be erected, which shall be called Infamous. Keep afar off, then, afar off, good citizens, lest this accursed ground should pollute you with its infamy. August 1630.’

This cursing of the site recalls the curse of Joshua[177] on the site of Jericho after its capture: ‘Cursed be the man before the Lord, that riseth up and buildeth this city Jericho: he shall lay the foundation thereof in his first-born, and in his youngest son shall he set up the gates of it.’ And the Constitutions of Moses[178] pronounced a similar curse on cities that turned aside from the true religion.

In 1777 Count Pietro Verri, Counsellor of State in the service of Maria Theresa, published a treatise on Torture, in which special reference was made to this case at Milan in 1630. His work, however, did not see the light till 1804. Then in 1839 the Processo originate degli Untori nella peste del 1630 was issued in Milan, giving a full official account of the trial of these Anointers. Fletcher, in 1895, drew up a summary of evidence from all the sources in his Tragedy of the Great Plague of Milan.

Early in the morning of June 21, 1630, one Catarina Rosa, a woman of the lower classes, saw from the balcony of her house a man going down the street writing on a sheet of paper. He stopped to wipe his fingers on the wall of a house, probably to get rid of ink-stains, but the woman’s fear at once conjured up the superstitious image of a deadly ointment smeared on the walls to spread the plague. A crowd of excited women flocked to the Council Chamber to inform the Senate, who at once ordered the man’s arrest. Henceforth no one dared touch a wall. Ripamonti tells how three young French travellers fared, who in admiring the marble of a temple unsuspectingly ventured to touch it. Someone saw them do it, and raised the alarm. Forthwith they were savagely set upon and hurled into gaol, and only released when it was found that there was no vestige of evidence to suggest anything but innocent curiosity.

Again, an old man of eighty was seen to dust a bench in the church of St. Anthony with his cloak before sitting down. Immediately the women cried out that he was anointing the benches, and the worshippers set on him there and then in the church, and after beating him brutally dragged him before the magistrates. Ripamonti believes that he died of his injuries.

The search for the suspected Anointer resulted in the arrest of one Guglielmo Piazza, a scrivener who carried an ink-horn at his belt. He was also a commissioner of health, that is to say, a petty official employed to report cases of plague. Throughout two applications of torture he stoutly denied the offence, but in his cell, broken with suffering and fearing a renewal of torture, he yielded to the suggestions of those around him. He confessed his guilt, and declared that he obtained the deadly ointment from the barber Giangiacomo Mora. This man was straightway arrested and carried to the court, but there vehemently asserted his innocence and vowed that he had never seen Piazza. Under torture, however, he gave way, and vied with the unhappy Mora in concocting falsehoods. Among others, they implicated Count Padilla, son of the Commandant of the Castle, but in the end he was acquitted, and it is from the notes of his trial that Verri obtained the material for the narrative of Piazza and Mora.

Mora, like most barbers of his day, dabbled in medicine, so that medicinal jars and vessels were found in his shop. These, he asserted, contained preservatives against the plague, and probably with truth, for during epidemics of plague they were in great demand. Ambroise Paré gives an elaborate formula for a preservative water, with which to wash the body frequently and rinse the mouth, and a few drops of it were to be placed as well in the nostrils and ears. Similar nostrums were in great demand during the Great Plague of London and that of Marseilles in 1720.

Piazza had occasionally visited Mora’s shop as a customer of the barber, and both stated that Mora had undertaken to prepare a pot of his preservative for Piazza. On this innocent transaction was to be built up a charge of wholesale murder. Mora was induced by torture to admit that Piazza had supplied him with foam from the mouths of plague victims to mix with his ointment.

In the intervals of torture Mora and Piazza more than once recanted and declared that their confessions were false, but a renewal of torture soon induced them to retract. The ignorant ferocity of the populace called aloud for satisfaction. At the conclusion of their examination the unhappy victims were carried off for the execution of a terrible sentence, in spite of the pledge of impunity. With the merciful prospect of death before them, they openly asserted that all their admissions incriminating others were false and had been extracted from them by their terror of further torture.