The van diemen decameron
Boccaccio’s Florence and the Black Death

What we now call the Black Death – the first great outbreak of the bubonic plague – killed at least one third and perhaps as much as a half of Europe’s population in the mid-14th century. It hit Florence in 1348 and killed about two-fifths of the city’s people within a year. Florence was a city rich in worldly goods and artistic expression, a vibrant and exciting place in which to be young and well off. Perhaps even the birth-place of the Renaissance, but of course, the plague changed all that. 

In his introduction to The Decameron – in what is considered the best exposition of psychological reactions to the plague – Giovanni Boccaccio talks about the varying responses to the onslaught of the horror: extreme piety and penitence; reticence and isolation – or the opposite. “Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die” may  perhaps be better put as, “Drink, shag and be desperate, because we don’t know what to do”. 

Boccaccio was 35 at the time of the plague and he was unhappy in love and not doing particularly well in worldly affairs either, but he was also a man who was at the centre of the creation of a vernacular literature in Italy. He was a friend and a great admirer of the most pre-eminent Mediaeval/Renaissance poet of all, Dante Alighieri, and actually suggested the title of The Divine Comedy. (I say Mediaeval/ Renaissance because we really are on a cusp here.) Boccaccio so loved Dante’s work that he copied the 14,233 lines of The Divine Comedy for another great writer, his friend, Francesco Petrarco, known to us as Petrarch and as the progenitor of the sonnet. This strict, 14-line poetical form, usually used for love poems, was famously utilised and perhaps perfected by Shakespeare 150 years later, though never published by him. Notwithstanding, The Bard and Petrarch’s domination of the sonnet form, I reckon I wrote a pretty good one as a love-sick teenager in 1966 – the sonnet form lends itself to poetically inspired pimply adolescents.

A theatrical aside: when the London theatres were closed because of a new outbreak of the plague in 1592, Will Shakespeare switched from the blank verse of the stage and turned his hand to rhyming poetry. He wrote and published Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece while in lock-down, and by all accounts made a pretty good quid out of them – Will was very good with money. And in yet another connection between Boccaccio and Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s source for his Troilus and Cressida was, most probably, Boccaccio’s version of the same tale. The serious point is that Giovanni Boccaccio was there at the centre of cultural life in mid-14th century Florence and was one of the drivers of Renaissance Italian literature – he wasn’t just a satirist and certainly not a dilettante. 

. . .

To modern eyes, Boccaccio’s Decameron has a somewhat strange premise. Seven fashionable young women decide – almost on a whim – to leave the city and find shelter from the plague in the country-side. They, quite casually, pick up three young men to accompany and protect them, and, with attendant servants, set out. Very quickly they find an abandoned – and conveniently well-stocked – country estate, and take up residence. They then tell tales to pass the time, and those tales are The Decameron. Boccaccio published his collection of stories – many recycled from older sources – in 1353, just five years after the plague in Florence. So his seemingly outlandish premise – 10 gilded youths impulsively heading for the hills and occupying an abandoned villa – must have seemed realistic to his audience, who would, of course, be very familiar with how things were just five years before. The idea of seven young women of “good families” behaving in such a way would, I suggest, be pretty outlandish even in 21st century western liberal society: in 14th century Florence, where women of high status were almost cloistered, it would have been outrageous. But Boccaccio’s audience accepted the idea – the world had been turned upside-down. 

But did it last in post-plague Florence? Were there lasting societal changes in the city? Of course there were. A city can’t lose half or more of its population and not change, but these changes took time. In the short term, there was certainly nothing as startling as the liberation of women, despite the sexual high jinks related in Boccaccio’s text. Florence was a republic with political office-holders elected by trade guilds. Wealthy burghers held the most power, and the grandi – the aristocratic families – were specifically excluded from executive office. There was constant political tension and frequent turmoil, and the plague seems to have changed this not one bit. 

Soon after the plague, political life was back to its usual turbulence, both vibrant and violent. Perhaps this was so because the Black Death, whilst being catastrophic in terms of lives lost, was very short-lived:though it returned many times, this first round of the plague was done and dusted within two years, and it killed disproportionally more poor people than rich. Far from the plague destroying the culture of Florence, the artistic heights and luxurious excesses of the High Renaissance were still to come, and the early flaunting of these excesses led to the most famous of Florence’s revolutions, the setting up of Savonarola’s democratic republic and his famous Bonfire of the Vanities

In the first half of the 15th century, the republic increasingly came under the control of one or two wealthy families who pushed the system toward dictatorship, which was eventually achieved by the Medici in the middle of the century. Florence flourished commercially for two centuries after the Great plague, and reached the ultimate peak of its artistic endeavours, symbolised perhaps, by Michelangelo’s David, in the early years of the 16th century. 

But at the same time another Florentine, Nicolo Machiavelli, wrote The Prince, describing how he thought politics and public policy should be handled. This book is considered by many to be so cynical as to be immoral, but his ideas basically became standard practice in Florence under the rule of the Medici in the mid-16th century – and in Rome under the Borgias. It would seem that the High Renaissance was not a high point of political science – certainly not to a modern, liberal sensibility – though Putin and Trump might well approve. 

So, 50 years after the plague, the wealthy burghers and a corrupt church were firmly in control of Florence and Florentine minds – and women were still “in their place”. But art and commerce were flourishing, and did so for centuries under increasingly corrupt and dictatorial regimes. Whether this is comforting or disheartening – or even a mixture of both – depends on your point of view, but it is certainly a cautionary tale for us today, living through a huge disruption to society, as Boccaccio did almost 700 years ago.


Read more of the Van Diemen Decameron here, or submit a story to editor@fortysouth.com.au.

James Parker is a Tasmanian historian (but with deep connections to Sydney), who writes and talks on mainly colonial subjects – especially convicts, women and the Tasmanian Aboriginal people.