The globalisation of germs

The Year of the Plague #7

Part One: The Worst Year Ever
Part Two: Rats
Part Three: Rome’s Miserable Fate
Part Four: Crop rotation in the 14th century
Part Five: ‘We live in an age where illness and deformity are commonplace’
Part Six: The Scum of England

At the time of the plague, Florence was the continent’s banking centre and already home to a substantial middle class. Although it is hard to calculate historical GDP, the elites of northern Italy were certainly rich by contemporary standards, and the Florentines had already developed a more mercantile culture, one in which honour came from wealth, a cultural shift that would spread north as Europe’s nobility began to see the benefits of becoming rich rather than engaging in endless war.

While Florence was the continent’s banker, and would over the following century become the beating heart of its artistic renaissance, the richest city in Europe was probably Venice; it was certainly the most glamorous. The lagoon city was home to as many as 150,000 people, a trading empire that boasted – with the rather un-catchy slogan - that it ruled ‘one quarter and one-eighth of the Roman Empire’. In fact, it wasn’t quite that big, but Venetian merchants were everywhere in the eastern Mediterranean and traded pretty much every good available.

Venice originated in the chaos of the western empire’s collapse, where it proved a natural sanctuary from raiders, being surrounded by protective lagoons and swamps, and so unlike other cities, it had no walls or gates.

The city was ruled by an oligarchy of 150 families, at the head of which was the Doge, ‘a mystical figure, rarely glimpsed by the public, who presided over Venice’s longstanding, mystical relationship with the sea, often portrayed as a marriage,’ in Laurence Bergreen’s words. In a symbolic gesture of this maritime identity, every spring the doge tossed a gold ring into the Adriatic to renew these vows.

Venice had a certain mystique. It was famed for its canals, where wine boats used to sail down draped in bright colours. Once a year it held a carnival in which all sorts of orgies were supposed to take place, although the reality was probably less exciting (it usually is). It was also known for having plenty of rats, which ‘were everywhere - emerging from the canals, scurrying along the wharves and streets, gnawing at the city’s fragile infrastructure.’