Revisiting a Microhistory - The Raucous Tuscan Village of Monte Lupo and the Black Plague in 1630

Carlo M. Cipolla's Faith, Reason, and the Plague in Seventeenth-Century Tuscany

As is widely known by most students, readers, and scholars of late Medieval and Renaissance Europe, the plague was a constant threat. Cipolla’s opening lines of Faith, Reason, and the Plague in Seventeenth-Century Tuscany perfectly articulate that sense of foreboding. He writes, “If [someone] had to mention the dreaded word, most people would hasten to make the sign of the cross or to add the anxious invocation ‘God deliver us from it.’ When it flared up and took epidemic proportions as it did with dramatic frequency, [being endemic], the plague brought havoc and terror to cities and entire regions, killing in a very short time one quarter or one third of the population — or even more.”¹

Copper engraving of a plague doctor of 17th-century Rome, by Paulus Fürst, 1656.

As Cipolla notes, Europeans and Muslims alike saw it as “Divine punishment.” Nonetheless, they implemented health measures to try and impede the spread in villages and cities. For example, even the clergy in Renaissance Italy became involved in assisting with health officials to try and help with the dreaded disease, operating with what were called “pesthouses” (casa di parassiti) as homes for the sick. But the Church and the State, as Cipolla’s story shows, were not always in sync.

Cipolla, known for his expansive and sweeping economic histories, found a treasure trove of source material on a small Tuscan village, Monte Lupo, not far from Florence. The documents drilled down to extreme minutiae about the fallout of a serious investigation that erupted while the town was being ravaged by the plague in the late fall of 1630, and lasted through 1631. It is here, in Faith, Reason, and the Plague, that Cipolla entertains us with an incisive, needle-thin microhistory of a village, filled with vastly different characters (a priest, a cobbler, a mayor of noble origins, a surgeon, thieves, gravediggers, and more), all of whom were caught up in a time surrounded by deadly illness, and facing the dichotomies between faith and reason, Church and State.

A scence from Milan where carts carry plague victims in a piazza.

First, the reader is introduced to the small village, which is enclosed by the walls of a castello. Around this time, around 150 families lived in Monte Lupo. The villagers were extremely poor, rowdy, and impossible to manage or tax. Father Giovanni Dragoni, a Dominican monk and Vicar of San Niccolò in Monte Lupo, attempted to shepherd the village, but his efforts were not entirely successful. The new mayor of noble lineage, Francesco della Stuffa, tried to oversee the city's governance. There was a surgeon, Michelagniolo Coveri, from the Health Magistracy of Florence, who had to deal with the health of the Monte Lupans; he stayed far away from it, “fearing he would be attacked in passing through that place.”² Monte Lupans, apparently, had a rather bad reputation for being unruly throughout the region.

Eventually, Father Dragoni left around the time there were attempts to impose more taxes and health ordinances on the tiny village. At the same time, a series of break-ins was taking place. Raffaello Bonecchi, who was also called Il Macchia (the Spot), was finally caught. It turns out, as Cipolla notes, “he was a mattress-maker by day, a thief at night.” Despite his being caught for thievery, things did not improve. Meanwhile, the mayor was still attempting to assert his power, especially after Dragoni took his leave. This showing of power did not go over well with the Monte Lupans.

As Cipolla notes, “[Francesco della Stuffa’s] troubles all began with the case of Biagio Tosi, the cobbler, whose mother had died of the plague.”³ Although the mayor purportedly had power, no one in Monte Lupe believed he had any authority. In this case, when the mayor learned that Tosi’s mother had died from the plague, he ordered Tosi and his two brothers to isolate themselves in their home. Tosi was outraged and wrote to the Magistracy in Florence on 16 April, arguing that neither he nor his brothers had been in contact with his mother when she was sick.⁴ (Tosi also included a certificate from a surgeon that confirmed he had closed his shop and taken precautions.) The Magistracy took Tosi’s side, freeing him from quarantine.

Although Francesco della Stuffa made more appeals, the situation only worsened. With letters going back and forth between him and the Magistracy, they finally agreed to send him guards to help enforce his power. At the same time, the gravediggers were rebelling against him. In this case, a man had died of the plague, and the gravediggers of the village refused to bury him. While the mayor wrote his appeals and requested backup and help, the plague had spread to twenty-five houses in Monte Lupo. Then, based upon a note in the parish book, on 4 June, the Mayor himself succumbed to the plague, or, one wonders, did he succumb to the deviousness of Monte Lupans, who caused him to catch the plague and die?

The news of the Mayor’s death took time to reach Florence. So, now, the Monte Lupans had neither a priest nor a mayor in their village, and the plague was on track to swallow the tiny place that had also fallen into total political chaos. Stockades were re-erected, a pesthouse was established there, and an attempt to rein things in had begun, which meant Father Dragoni made a reappearance in the village, at the behest of the Magistracy in Florence.

Again, Coveri has been summoned to take care of the health crisis in Monte Lupo. Coveri was already well-versed in contending with the plague. Cipolla writes:

Coveri had entered the health service at the beginning of July, when the epidemic had not yet reached Tuscany, but terrifying news was pouring in from Milan, Venice, Verona, Mantua, Parma, and — even more frightening — from nearby Bologna. In the course of July, Coveri saw and visited a great number of the ‘dead and sick,’ and in August, when the Magistracy learned of suspicious cases of illness in the village of Tavola, Coveri was entrusted with the duty of visiting the sick and finding out whether they had the plague. From then on the surgeon was always in the forefront of the battle against the epidemic, moving from one village to another, from one pesthouse to another, bring orders and subsidies, and carrying out inspection and controls. He was extremely conscientious and precise, much given to the quantitative analysis of facts. His numerous report to the Health Office in Florence are generally rich in figures and data, reflecting his methodical and punctilious nature. A typical report of his from Monte Lupo on Monday, 23 1631 specified that ‘since 19 hours last Saturday until now, Monday, at 17 hours, 8 persons have died in the pesthouse and 4 in the Castello, which makes a total of 12.⁵

While he kept meticulous records, Coveri was a difficult man. He was prone to disputes, a typical “toscanaccio,”⁶ and caused issues with his colleagues. Interestingly, he and Dragoni did not have problems, despite Dragoni having a strong personality as well. The Monte Lupans, however, were not fond of him, so Coveri always carried an arquebus, a long gun, with him when he visited the small village.

Coveri was part of the plan to bring order to the village in response to the health emergency it faced due to the plague. He was also a symbol and representation of the State, and this show of force as symbol and representation would not just be him up against the people of the village, but up against the Church, too. On one Sunday, when Coveri visited Monte Lupo, a procession was being readied, and it was beginning inside the tight confines of the church. A large number of villagers had gathered to participate, and Coveri immediately saw several of them who had come from Pontorme, where mortality rates were extremely high. The Health Commissioner Benedetto Sachetti realized it was too late to put a stop to the procession. Thus, Father Dragoni and the surgeon attempted to halt the attendance of women and children in the affair. But it was too late, as the church was already packed. The event, which they thought would have disastrous results on the small village and elsewhere, played out.

The night brought no rest to the village. As the procession ended, the days after it soon turned into feasting and further celebration. No one, even with authority behind them, could stop the following events from unfolding, and that’s when things took a turn for the worse.

It was now Monday, 21 July, and the night was pleasant and temperate. Although the women and children had gone home for the evening, male revelers stayed out. Refusing to observe the quarantine, the surgeon Bernardino Zampetti and the apothecary Jacopo Casini, both of whom looked after the pesthouse, decided to try and woo a “young girl” in the village of San Miniatello. They convinced a few lute players to join them. They met near the gates of Monte Lupo, where the stockade was located.

One resident, Pandolfo di Tommoso Giorgi, lived near this gate that led to San Miniatello. With loud noises coming from the revelers and, as Cipolla notes, “his innate curiosity,” he went to his window to peer out to inspect the activity in the area that evening. With the torches the men carried, he recognized the lutist, Tommaso Brizelli, the apothecary, the cobbler, Biagio Tosi, the surgeon, and a few others, below his window. Once they left and the noise dissipated, he returned to bed.⁷

But then he was awakened a short time later by louder noises. He hastily returned to the window and looked outside. Cipolla explains:

He made a noise opening [the window], and, as his courage was in inverse to his curiosity, ‘every few minutes he had to draw back inside, because he was afraid of being hit by stones.’ Nevertheless, he managed to distinguish in the darkness ‘three or four men who were not speaking but working away in silence, and all were armed. It was plain that ‘they were removing’ the stockade.⁸

Purportedly, the revelers returned and were shocked to find that the stockade had either been destroyed or had simply disappeared. This destruction or disappearance was an affront, “an explicit insult to the powerful authority of the Magistracy of Public Health.”⁹

The next morning, Father Dragoni made an appeal to the Commissioner-General of Health, Benedetto Sachetti, explaining in a highly confidential letter that, “‘many disorders and transgressions on the same day that the display and procession of the Holy Crucifix took place . . . They made small formations with arms to prevent the health authority from operating. And the night the bars on one house and the stockade at the gate were removed and all the wood carried away.’”¹⁰

What ensued was a “formal court inquiry” with Pandolfo at the center of it all, who, after several interrogations, was eventually thrown into jail. Although Pandolfo insisted he did not know “the evildoers” of the destruction of the stockade, it remains a question as to whether or not he was telling the truth.

Others were also interrogated, but only Pandolfo found himself behind bars. The inquiry, however, was thorough and tried to determine who had been responsible for the destruction of the stockade. Nevertheless, Cipolla notes, “the mystery of who had destroyed the stockade remained a mystery.”

What is worthy of noting, Cipolla explains, is a report by the corporal of the guards, Antonio Chiatti, to the Commissioner-General of Health, Sachetti. As Cipolla quotes Chiatti writing:

By means of these processions and gatherings it is feared that some new attack of the plague has been caused, because we found that in Monte Lupo a daughter of Bastiano the carter, in Santmontana two or three persons, in Limite two, in Fibbiana two more — all became infected with the plague, since the day of the procession up until now the 23rd of July.¹¹

What’s remarkable about this quote is that Chiatti came from a humble background and probably had no education, and yet he articulated the spread of the plague from the procession and did not base it on religious reasoning.

Thus, while this procession may not have spread the plague in the area further, based on the data, it could have led to further contagion. As for the culprits of the destruction of the stockade, investigators of the time were never able to determine the wrongdoers.

1. Carlo M. Cippolla, Faith, Reason, and the Plague in Seventeenth-Century Tuscany (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1979), 1.

2. Ibid., 16.

3. Ibid., 30.

4. Ibid., 30.

5. Ibid., 43.

6. A “toscanaccio” is a Tuscan, known for their talents, but has difficulty compromising.

7. Carlo M. Cippolla, Faith, Reason, and the Plague in Seventeenth-Century Tuscany (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1979), 53.

8. Ibid., 53.

9. Ibid., 53.

10. Ibid., 55.

11. Ibid., 75.