Let me say, then, that thirteen hundred and forty-eight years had already passed after the fruitful Incarnation of the Son of God when into the distinguished city of Florence…there came a deadly pestilence. The account has been edited for space with omissions indicated by ellipses. The following comes from The Decameron as translated by Mark Musa and Peter Bondanella, 1982 CE.
#Space funeral font messed up license#
It is possible Boccaccio made use of poetic license and reversed the order of symptoms to give the worst up front for dramatic effect, but it also could simply be that this was his personal experience of the plague. The introduction, though part of a fictional work, is still considered an accurate description of life in Florence during the plague as it matches with other accounts.Īlthough Boccaccio claims that the first symptom of the disease is the appearance of buboes, most records of the plague indicate that it began with fever, then body aches and fatigue, and then the buboes breaking out on the body. It is unclear whether Boccaccio was actually present in Florence when the plague was raging there, as his father may have sent him to Naples on business in 1348 CE, but he certainly could have been and so would serve as an eyewitness to the devastation of the city. The introduction to The Decameron, which details the outbreak in the city, is given by the narrator of the work as background before the appearance of the ten main characters, all of whom meet at an empty church in the city in the midst of the plague before deciding to leave for the country. To entertain themselves, they tell the stories which make up the bulk of the book. This work features ten young people – seven women and three men – who have fled Florence during the plague and taken shelter in a villa in the countryside. His father worked in finance and trade and held the government position of Minister of Supply before dying, probably of plague, in 1349 CE, the same year Boccaccio would begin writing The Decameron. In 1348 CE, it struck Florence, Italy, Boccaccio's native city, killing his stepmother (his mother had died earlier, possibly of plague). Merchant ships fleeing the city went first to Sicily, then Marseilles and Valencia, infecting them, and the plague then spread across Europe. When soldiers died, Djanibek ordered their corpses catapulted over the walls of Caffa, and this is thought to have infected the city's population. 1342-1357 CE) whose troops were infected by the Plague of the Near East.
The city had been under siege by the Mongol Golden Horde under the command of Khan Djanibek (r. The point-of-origin most scholars agree on are the Genoese ships from the port city of Caffa (also given as Kaffa) on the Black Sea (modern-day Feodosia in Crimea).
0 kommentar(er)
