Teofilo F. Ruiz - The Terror of History: On the Uncertainties of Life in Western Civilization

ON THE UNCERTAINTIES OF LIFE IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION

TEOFILO F. RUIZ

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ruiz, Teofilo F., 1943

The terror of history : on the uncertainties of life in Western civilization /

Teofilo F. Ruiz.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-691-12413-1 (hardcover : acid-free paper) 1. Civilization, Western.

2. UncertaintySocial aspectsHistory. 3. TerrorSocial aspectsHistory.

4. DisastersSocial aspectsHistory. 5. Adjustment (Psychology)History.

I. Title.

CB251.R85 2011

909'.09821dc22 2011011127

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Minion

Printed on acid-free paper.

Printed in the United States of America

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

To My Students

In early fall 2005 with throngs of tourists still in oppressive display and warmed by a shimmering Tuscan sun, I meandered through the streets of Florence, seeking, in the Oltrarno piazza di Santo Spirito, some relief from the crowds. Thinking already of this book, I tried to imagine what it would have been like to walk through the city in 1348. Though reliving the past is not always advisable or even desirable, to a present-day visitor 1348 Florence would have been both uncannily familiar and unfamiliar. For one, the smells, noise, and activity of a medieval city, especially one as large as Florence which had around 100,000 inhabitants early that year, would have shaken the modern sensibilities of most Westerners. Yet, the significant landmarks that twentieth-first-century tourists seek so devoutly and in such appalling numbersthe Duomo, the Palazzo Vecchio, the piazza de la Signoria, the Ponte Vecchio, or the Franciscan church of Santa Crocealready dominated the citys landscape in the mid-fourteenth century. Nothing however would have prepared the modern traveler for the horror that beset Florence and other parts of Europe later that year.

Although we may knowthanks to the works of many historians that provide comprehensive accounts of the Black Death and its impactfar better than Florentines did in 1348 all the social, economic, cultural, and demographic consequences of the plague, we have unwittingly reduced the historicizing of these events to mere scholarship. In doing so, we have robbed the plague of its cruel immediacy and reality as a felt experience in time. So allow me to retell to you one of the grimmest stories in the long and troubled history of the West and the world. Late in 1348 few would have walked the city in admiration of its new and beautiful civic and religious landmarks. That year, as was the case in most parts of Europe, a violent and often deadly form of pestilence struck the city. It delivered an almost fatal blow to Florentine and European societies, to their morale, to their sensibilities. Perhaps as much as half the population of the city died within a short period of time. The poor, as was the case in the tragedy unleashed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, died in greater proportion than other segments of the population. So did the Jews, in spite of much repeated and mistaken assertions to the contrary. Parents abandoned their children and vice versa, husbands their wives. Selfless behavior and piety were often rewarded by horrible death. Selfishness, often articulated by fleeing the ill or ceasing all contact with the sick, gave a fleeting hope of survival. All around Europe, the experiences were more or less the same. For a period of almost six monthsusually the time it took the sickness to vanquish those most vulnerablelife came to a stop. Governments, ecclesiastical institutions, and individuals proved incapable of dealing with the onslaught of the Black Death.

Pestilence, originating in the East, had made its way slowly along trade routes until it reached the shores of the Aegean Sea, and, then, carried by ship, Sicily. Shortly afterwards it entered the Italian peninsula and spread to other parts of Europe. Transmitted by fleabites or through airborne contamination (delivered through sneezing or coughing), death from bubonic pestilence was particularly painful and graphic. Boils in the armpits, groin, or neck, and livid marks on the body (from which the description of the sickness as the Black Death derives) were followed by internal hemorrhage, uncontrolled diarrhea, the spitting of blood, and other such horrific symptoms. Fortunately for the suffering victims and relatives, the end was swift. In modern Western society, where we hide our sick and dying in hospitals or similar institutions, we cannot even begin to comprehend the impact of such illness even to a society, such as that of the Middle Ages, where squalor, poverty, and disease were part of the quotidian patterns of life. Florences experiences were replicated in other towns and villages throughout the West, eliciting reflections from witnesses who experienced the Black Death close at hand. Agnolo di Tura, known as the Fat and a citizen of Siena, tells us that he buried his children with his own hands, one of those cases in which a father did not flee the illness of his children but remained behind to care for and bury them. Monasteries, providing the ideal setting for transmission, were decimated. In some places, as for example northern Castile, documentary evidence seems to stop for almost a decade after the plague, as if life and the memorializing of death, transfers of property, and other activities that form the pattern of peoples lives had all come to an unwanted stop. Among those recording the tragedy, no one did so with more chilling accuracy than Giovanni Boccaccio, noted writer, member of the Church, citizen of Florence, and witness to the plague in his beloved city. In the preface to his enchanting Decameron, Boccaccio provides us with a road map to the debilitating sickness and, more importantly, to the manner in which the citizens of Florence reacted to its onslaught.

In seeking to explain the causes of the Black Death and its trajectory through Florence, Boccaccio presents his readers with a host of possible explanations. It came, he tells us, As Boccaccio describes it, in the face of the plagues assault, people responded in a variety of ways. Pious supplications and religious processions were of no avail. Some withdrew from the sick and lived a life of moderation, eating and drinking only the finest foods and drinks, speaking not of death. Others embraced life by engaging in constant revelry, debauchery, and drunkenness. A few chose the middle course, going out into the world with flowers close to their nostrils to avoid the miasma, with posies in their pockets, as the nursery rhyme tells us, before we all fall down. Others fled into the countryside in search of safety. And yet others, as Boccaccio did, sought to escape or to make meaning of the catastrophe by writing. Nothing helped. For death pursued those who stayed and those who fled equally, slaying them randomly.