Many died that haply might have lived by timely aid; so that between a want of that assistance which sufferers could not procure, and the malignant nature of this disease, the multitudes of those who daily and nightly expired in Florence would be terrible to hear, even without beholding; wherefore, almost of necessity, things contrary to all former habits were engendered amongst the surviving citizens.
Lamp, Palazzo Strozzi, Florence
It was a custom, and we still see it maintained, that in cases of death every female relation and neighbour should assemble within the house and there weep for his loss; and before the mansion every male kinsman and nearest neighbour also assembled, with other citizens in great numbers, attended by divers of the clergy according to the dead man’s quality; thence on the shoulders of his peers, with funeral pomp of torch and music, the corpse was slowly borne away to that church which he had previously chosen for a sepulchre. But when the pestilence raged most fiercely these things almost entirely ceased, and new customs superseded them; for people then died not only without such assemblies of wailing women, but passed from the world in many instances without even a single witness; and few were those to whom the piteous sobs and tears of relatives were in mercy conceded; but instead thereof was heard the laugh or the jest, or the convivial feast! and this custom the women in general, casting aside their sex’s softness, did for their own especial advantage most quickly learn.
There were but few whose bodies were accompanied to the church by more than ten or twelve of their neighbours; nor were even these honourable citizens, but certain gravediggers from the lowest classes named becchini who performed this mercenary service; they roughly shouldered the bier and moved hastily and carelessly along, not to the church which the deceased had selected, but to the nearest cemetery, led by some half-dozen priests with few lights and sometimes none, who, assisted by the becchini, and not troubling about a funeral service, tossed the body into any empty pit that they happened to find.
The treatment of the lower and a great portion of the middle classes was still worse, because the greater part of these being confined either by hope or poverty to their houses, thousands daily sickened, and being destitute of assistance were allowed to die; and many there were who daily and nightly terminated their existence in the streets, and many that expired in their own houses, the stench of whose carcasses was the first notice of their dissolution. Of these and other victims all places were full, and the neighbours, not less moved by the fear of putrid bodies than by charity towards the dead, with the assistance of public porters when they were to be had, dragged the corpses into the street and left them before their several doors where especially in the morning they were to be seen in heaps by those who wandered through the tainted thoroughfares.[j]
NAPIER’S REFLECTIONS ON THE PLAGUE
In this wide and wasting pestilence all Europe was more or less immersed; she was bereft of three-fifths of her population, and excepting Milan, together with a few places at the foot of the Alps, the whole of Italy was shaken to its centre. Genoa lost 40,000, Naples 60,000; and Sicily and Apulia the incredible number of 530,000 souls! The city of Trapani was completely depopulated; all died; and her silent walls and empty dwellings were alone left to tell the tale. Throughout Tuscany the harvest of death was proportionably great: Pisa lost four-fifths or, as some say, seven-tenths; Florence three-fifths; but Siena mourned for 80,000 of her buried citizens and never recovered from the blow.