During the 1400s, Venice had created defensive structures against the recurring outbreaks of the plague, and these measures kept Venice mostly safe for much of the following centuries. Mostly.
Links
Sources
- Benedetti, Rocco. Noui auisi di Venetia, ne quali si contengono tutti i casi miserabili, che in quella, al tempo della peste sono occorsi …. In Urbino appresso Battista de Bartoli Vinitiano, 1577. 🔗
Transcript
The plague didn’t go away, but the three-pronged defences the Republic of Venice had created in the 1400s did work well.
There was a facility for isolating the sick — the Lazzaretto Vecchio — and a facility to quarantine the suspect — the Lazzaretto Nuovo — and an information gathering network to make sure the Venetians had a good idea about where and when there were outbreaks.
This was all about prevention, as there was no cure or remedies for the disease, once it struck. Prevention, however, means keeping your guards up at all times, which requires a constant effort and constant expenses.
The Magistrato in the 1500s
The Magistrato alla Sanità was the main body in charge of protecting Venice from the plague.
The on-and-off appointments of the Provveditori di Sanità — Superintendants of Health — was formalised a bit after the epidemic of 1478, as a provisional office of state.
Already in 1485, the office was made permanent, and it would exist for the next three centuries, until the fall of the Republic in 1797.
The decision to create the office was taken by the Pregadi — the Venetian senate — which had also made the decisions about creating the two Lazzaretti.
There’s a discussion of the Venetian senate in episode 12.
The senate also made the annual appointments of the three provveditori.
The importance of the Magistrato alla Sanità was soon evident, and the powers of the provveditori were extended repeatedly.
They were given authority over just about anything, which were perceived to have public health implications. This soon extended much wider than strictly plague related matters. Their remit included, besides the lazzaretti, also the cleaning of streets and cisterns, food safety, vagabonds and beggars, prostitutes, innkeepers, burials, and the colleges of doctors, physicians and barbers.
In 1504, the provveditori were given criminal jurisdiction in cases related to public health.
Later, in 1534, their sentences were declared definitive — that is, there was no possibility of appeal — but this was modified four years later by the Council of Ten, which instituted a college of the recently established Executors against Blasphemy and of the Sages for Heresy as a court of appeal for sentences handed down by the Magistrato alla Sanità.
Does this sound like an institutional mess?
Well, no written constitution. There were very few fixed rules about how the republic could operate, and most came down to tradition and customs.
There was one fundamental rule for much of the history of Venice. The Maggior Consiglio — the Greater Council — was the sovereign body of the Republic of Venice. All power emanated from that assembly, whose members were all the adult noblemen of the city.
The Maggior Consiglio appointed the senate, the Signoria, the Council of Ten and many others, usually annually, and delegated parts of its authority to them.
These, in turn, often delegated further. This is how the Pregadi created and empowered the Magistrato alla Sanità, and later the Council of Ten created the Executors against Blasphemy.
This easily led to overlap of authority between offices appointed by different bodies, and Venice had no constitution and no constitutional court to resolve such issues.
When the Council of Ten in 1537 established the office of the Executors against Blasphemy to control vice in the city — in particular gambling, drinking and prostitution — this created an overlap with the remit of the Magistrato alla Sanità, which was resolved by making the Executors against Blasphemy a court of appeal for the decisions of the former.
This is typical of how the Republic of Venice operated. They basically winged it for a thousand years.
Also, the Venetian Republic never had any concept of separation of powers between legislative, executive and judicial branches. That idea is much younger than the Republic of Venice. When power was delegated between institutions, all three powers were included. For the ancient Venetians, there were no such branches of government.
Therefore, the Provveditori alla Sanità, within their remit, made laws, enforced them, and sat as judges in cases of infringements. They were law-makers, police and judges, all at the same time.
In 1537, the Maggior Consiglio took over the annual appointments of the three provveditori.
The Greater Council basically decided that matters of public health were of such importance, that they would do the appointments and oversight directly, depriving the senate of that authority.
However, twenty years later, in 1556, the Senate decided to return into the loop by appointing, as always annually, two Sopraprovveditori alla Sanità — Over-superintendents of Health — from its own midst.
The Magistrato alla Sanità then had a leadership of five noblemen, two over-superintendents appointed by the senate, and three superintendents appointed by the Greater Council. They would later be joined by two adjuncts, bringing the leadership to seven.
That same year, 1556, the Magistrato alla Sanità was given the authority to apply the death penalty in criminal cases. Yet again, as an afterthought or as a correction, a college of sages were created to serve as court of appeal in such cases.
What all these institutional changes tell us, is that matters of public health — and in particular the plague — were a very high priority for the Republic of Venice.
In this more than half a century, the plague was there. It didn’t go away.
People got sick, and some died. Giorgione, the renowned painter, died of the plague in 1510, and he is just one of many.
However, the Venetians did not lower their guards, and major outbreaks were prevented.
Until they weren’t.
The Plague of 1575–1577
On June 25th, 1575, a man from a village in the Alps arrived in Venice, and went to find hospitality with a relative of his.
Here is an account of what happened, from less than a decades after the events, in my translation from the Venetian:
LONG QUOTE
Having come to this city in the year 1575 on the 25th of June, a man from Trentino, who said he had left the Borgo di Val Sugana which was then plague-stricken, arrived at the house of Mr Vicenzo di Franceschi in the district of S. Marciliano, in which, at that time, Franceschi was in the countryside, there was a boatman, a relative of the Trentino, left by Franceschi to guard the house, together with the boatman’s wife and children, and some of Franceschi’s household servants, in all seven persons.
Having been infected with the contagious disease because of some cloths that he had carried with him in a bag or bundle, he died on July 2 and was buried freely without arousing any suspicion.
But when, in just a few days, three women died in the same house, it was, by order of the Most Illustrious Lords of Health, quarantined, and after the dead bodies were examined by doctors, they were judged to have died of the plague, and similarly, the two living women were found to be afflicted by the same disease.
For this reason, the dead and wounded were quickly brought to the Lazaretto in the presence of the Illustrious Lords Inspectors of Health of that time and of their ministers, and also all the goods of that house, where everything which was outside the coffers was then burned, and that which was in the boxes exposed to the air for 40 days.
But because almost all the drapes of the Trentino were sold and pawned by those of the household, to provide for him during the few days he was ill, and also to have him buried, in just a few days both for this reason and because those of that household, before they were seized, had been in contact with many people, the illness was discovered in various places in the city, although by those Most Illustrious Lords Inspectors of Health, nothing was spared to do all that could be done so that the illness would not spread through the city, sparing no vigilance, effort, or anything else, even at great risk to their own lives.
Nevertheless, the evil continued to spread more and more each hour throughout the city, where it lasted for two years.
END QUOTE
The quote is from a compendium of decrees and decisions, made in 1584 by the secretary of the Magistrato alla Sanità — the highest civil servant in that office — so there can be little doubt he had access to all the documentation that existed then.
For two years the plague savaged Venice, and some thirty to forty thousand persons died.
That is something in the order of one quarter to one third of all people living in Venice at the time.
One in three or one in four. Imagine such a thing happening today.
All it took to start a major epidemic was one infected person evading the precautions of the Magistrato alla Sanità.
One person.
Nevertheless, despite the failure to contain the contagion on this occasion, the procedure followed is evident.
As soon as the magistrato got news of suspect cases, the people in question were isolated, awaiting further investigation.
This quarantining was effectuated by nailing two planks across the door of the house, so they formed a cross. There were probably some guards too, even if the text doesn’t specify it.
Then doctors were sent to verify if the cases, both dead and diseased, were the mal contagioso.
When that was established, everybody and everything were shipped to the lazzaretto for burial, isolation and treatment.
The dead were buried on the lazzaretto, and not in the normal cemeteries in the city, because the corpses were perceived not only as spreaders of the contagion, but as sources of it.
The sick were isolated on the lazzaretto awaiting their destiny.
Objects were taken away, either for cleansing, which most often was exposure to the winds and the sun, or for incineration. Destruction required the state to pay compensation to the proprietors, so it was only used for the more suspect items.
In this specific case, everything which had been packed away was quarantined, while those objects which were not in storage, were burned.
Rocco Benedetti
It so happens that we have a contemporary eyewitness, so we can get a front seat view to how the city was through the epidemic.
Rocco Benedetti was a notary between 1556 and 1582. His clients were from the upper echelons of society, both nobles and citizens like himself, many merchants, so well-educated people with an international outlook. He was also a published author before the plague struck in 1575.
His account of the plague was not, however, meant for publication. It was sent privately to a Venetian nobleman, Giacomo Foscarini, who at the time of the plague was Provveditore Generale di Candia — governor of the Venetian dominion of the island of Crete.
Parts of the text were written in 1576 — it clearly states so — but the date at the end is in August 1577, when the outbreak in Venice was finally coming to an end.
Benedetti describes the arrival of the plague in this way:
QUOTE
After having spread in other parts, it came to make a more marked presence towards us, and in the end it passed like an invisible ghost in-between the guards, who were continuously on the vigil all over to impede its arrival, it entered this city, where it slowly started to wind its way around, and hit now here, and now there, filling everybody with fright and mortal danger.
END QUOTE
The provisions taken were initially the standard fare, in a slightly more severe form:
QUOTE
Then the lord Superintendents of Health … decided for the better of sending the wounded immediately to the Lazzaretto Vecchio to recover, and the healthy, who had lived with those under the same roof, to the Lazzaretto Nuovo to isolate for forty days.
They ordered then with the Senate that all the infected household objects were to be burned, and that with money of the Commons to be compensated partially, and that the officers, as not to sadden the city, and not spread the word outside with even louder voices, should do these operations at night.
These provisions, even if they seemed good, caused nevertheless serious damage, … because as the plague made more progress every day, the fires of objects were very large, and consequently, a great quantity of public money were spent, but it was not more than a minute aid to the poor people.
END QUOTE
The burning of people’s property after dark led a lot of people to hide valuables around, outside their home, when the plague struck the household, in the hope that they wouldn’t be burned.
As these things were believed to spread the contagion, from the point of view of the authorities, such behaviour made the situation worse.
The interests of a greater “common good” clearly conflicted with the interests of the common people of non being impoverished.
QUOTE
Due to this, the lords Superintendents, changing their minds, decided that in the future the officers shouldn’t do their job if not by day, and that only the beds and those objects, which due to their purpose could be infected, were to be burned, and that the remaining things should be cleansed on the Certosa island, and in other distant places reserved for that.
END QUOTE
A slight reprieve in the epidemic led to much hope that it was over, but a second wave of the plague then swept through the city.
The Magistrato ordered an almost total lock-down of the city. Nobody was allowed to leave their contrada — city district or parish — for fifteen days.
Venice is built on over a hundred islands, and in the 1500s there were far fewer bridges than there are today. Wealthy people moved almost exclusively by boat, so the few bridges were mostly for local traffic, between neighbouring parishes.
Common people were basically ordered to stay on their home island, and not go to any of the surrounding islands.
QUOTE
In this new turn of events, the Lords forbade for fifteen days everybody going to the house of others, neither women nor children could leave their parish, and around the city one heard the crying and howling of dogs and cats, because they were all over, and as wandering animals could infect the houses, a bloodbath was made. Except, then it became necessary to pay persons for removing from the canals the said dead animals, which caused an intolerable stench.
END QUOTE
Stench meant more disease because rotting corpses were believed to generate miasma.
As the plague persisted, the city was gradually deserted. Everybody who could leave the city, did so.
Foreign nations recalled their ambassadors, merchants stopped coming to Venice, and wealthy Venetians left the city for their estates on the mainland.
Trade ground to a halt, and ever more shops remained shuttered.
All the common people, who made a living as manual labourers for the many merchants, found themselves without work and unable to put food on the table.
The city became a desolate place.
QUOTE
It was frightening to see around the city the thousands of doors with, as a sign of confiscation, the crossed planks. But much more horrible spectacle was the number of boats which continuously went back and forth, some to the Lazzaretto Vecchio loaded with the sick and the dead, all together, and others to the Lazzaretto Nuovo laden with the healthy, others with things going to the said Lazzaretto to do the isolation regime of forty days, towed by other boats. Others, then, were seen leaving for certain places, full of spoils to be sacrificed to Vulcan, and others returning to the city full of poor widows and unhappy offspring, dressed only in sad, black cloth.
END QUOTE
The Lazzaretti were overcrowded and at breaking point.
QUOTE
The Lazzaretto Vecchio resembled the Inferno where from every corner oozed stench and insupportable decay, and one heard continuously crying and sighing, and at all hours clouds of smoke spread widely in the air from the burning of the corpses. … At times, at the height of the plague, seven to eight thousand languished in the Lazzaretto Vecchio.
END QUOTE
The other lazzaretto was not much better.
QUOTE
At the Lazzaretto Nuovo between inside and outside in the ships, which resembled a navy, there were at times even ten thousand persons, a number which grew even larger that the Lazzaretti couldn’t contain them, so two hospitals were made, one at San Lazzaro and another at San Clemente, and for the healthy over five hundred wooden houses at the Vignole and others around the lagoons.
END QUOTE
In Venice, a constant presence during the plague was the pizzigamorti — those who took the dead away for burial.
As the number of the pizzigamorti fell, recruits for this most dangerous job were found in the prisons and the forced labourers in the navy docks.
Those soon perished too, and calls went out to cities on the mainland for buriers. They came in great numbers, but many were vagabonds, prisoners or outlaws.
Consequently, cases of stealing from the houses of the dead, or coercion and blackmailing of the sick, abounded, and some of the pizzigamorti were executed in public between the columns at San Marco, as a warning to the others.
At the end of 1576, the Doge pledged to build a large church to Jesus the Redeemer, and ten thousand ducats were assigned to the project.
The amount was later increased to thirteen thousand, and both the Doge and other nobles added to the fund of their personal wealth.
The site chosen was on the Giudecca island, and the church built there in is the Redentore Church. Its inauguration in July 1577, when the plague was finally loosening its grip on Venice, was a huge feast.
This feast is still held today, each year in July, to celebrate the end of the plague, with solemn processions to the church and grand fireworks over the harbour in front of the Doge’s Palace.
The estimated number of death to the plague during the 1575–1577 epidemic goes as high as 60,000, or forty percent of the entire population of Venice.
Because one person slipped through the defences.
The Plague of 1630
For the following decades, the system worked as intended.
The occasional cases of plague were intercepted, people quarantine and goods cleansed.
The methods the Venetians had developed and refined in the 1400s and 1500s, were fairly efficient in containing smaller outbreaks and thereby preventing major epidemics.
They were not, however, much good when major epidemics happened, partly because there was no cure for the disease, and partly because they had no real understanding of what the disease was.
Another weakness was, that much of the system was designed to stop infections arriving by ship from the east. That was how the early epidemics started, and thanks to geography, it was also reasonably easy to control the traffic in and out of the lagoon. The locations chosen for the two Lazzaretti were largely to intercept ships.
It was practically impossible to control to and from the mainland similarly. Instead of big ships entering through a handful of passages, there were tens of thousands of small boats going daily between the mainland and the city by hundreds of different routes.
As we shall see, it was not a coincidence that the 1575 plague started with a traveller from the mainland.
In 1630, disaster struck again, and to a large extent it was a repeat of 1575.
Some years earlier, a war of succession had broken out in the Duchy of Mantua, and all the major powers had intervened on one side or the other.
Venice backed one branch of the ducal line in Mantua, and the Holy Roman Empire another. A battle in May 1630 saw Venetian and Imperial troops pitted against each other at Villabona, not far from Verona. The Germans with superior artillery routed the Venetian troops, and the soldiers scattered all over the area, fleeing the battle.
One such soldier sought refuge in Verona.
Unfortunately, the German soldiers brought the plague to Northern Italy.
That one Venetian soldier in Verona died the day after. The mother and daughter couple, where he had found lodgings, fell ill and both died the following day.
Before the local authorities got wind of the first deaths, new cases popped up all over Verona.
Until the end of 1630, the plague burned through Verona. The remedies were the same as in Venice. Focus was on collecting and disposing of the corpses, isolating the sick in the Lazzaretto, which in Verona was a bit outside the city walls, down the river, and trying to reduce the contagion by limited the movement of people and burning large bonfires around the city.
The city of Verona had some 54,000 inhabitants in January 1630. In January 1631, one year later, that was down to 22,000 persons.
One person.
One infected person, and thirty thousand persons died in less than a year.
The government in Venice was of course aware of this, as Verona was a subject city of the republic, and they sent as much help as they could.
However, despite all the precautions, the plague made it to Venice anyway.
An ambassador from the Duchy of Mantua arrived in Venice with his entourage and baggage train, probably around a hundred persons.
Such ambassadors didn’t just row up in front of the Doge’s Palace to demand a meeting. There were protocols and procedures in diplomacy then as now.
They went to one of the entry islands in the lagoon — very often the island of Santa Maria della Grazia behind the Giudecca — and from there they sent a messenger to the palace to announce their presence, so the republic could prepare them a proper reception.
In this case, some members of the group were sick.
None of them were therefore allowed into the city.
The ambassador and his closest aides had to be quarantined, but the Signoria didn’t think it proper for such high-ranking nobles from a neighbouring state on a diplomatic mission to be isolated with common sailors and merchants on the Lazzaretto Nuovo.
Consequently, they had suitable quarters for such individuals established on the nearby island of San Clemente.
A carpenter, who lived at Sant’Agnese in Dorsoduro, went to work on the construction there. Back home with his family, he fell sick and died the day after.
Before the authorities could round up everybody suspect, the plague had spread around the city.
During the next twelve months, some forty thousand persons died of the plague, in what was basically a re-run of 1575.
The pizzigamorti circulating the streets to collect the dead. Boats full of corpses heading for the pits in the lagoon. Thousands of the plague stricken amassed in the Lazzaretto Vecchio, without staff to look after them or remove the deceased. Other thousands isolated on the Lazzaretto Nuovo, in the buildings, in tents, on ships, singing hymns and saying prayers that they’d make through the inferno of the plague.
One person.
These were the impossible odds our forefathers and -mothers were up against.
How do you create a defence against something you don’t understand, when all it takes is one individual slipping through the net, to cause hell on earth.
Yet, for most of the time, the system worked quite well.
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