People Abandoned their Loved Ones
When plague reached a town, city or settlement, it became common practice to “avoid or run away from the sick and their belongings,” as fourteenth-century Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio put it. The house containing the infected person would be sealed up, and no one would be allowed to enter until it was apparent all within were dead- or else had somehow survived the disease. This measure meant that the healthy, as well as the sick, were effectively walled up alive.
The doors to plague afflicted dwellings were boarded up and marked with a cross to warn of its status as a place of infection. Some, very rare charitable neighbors may have tried to alleviate the suffering of those within by passing on food and water. However, most would have given infected homes a wide birth- if they had not managed to flee altogether, abandoning their livelihoods and possessions as well as their sick neighbors.
However, it was not just friends and neighbors who were abandoning each other; it was family members too. “Brothers abandoned brothers, uncles their nephews, sisters their brothers and in many cases wives deserted their husbands,” explained Boccaccio. He described how parents would even refuse to touch and comfort their infected children, abandoning even babies to die, without comfort or care in a desperate attempt to avoid infection themselves. Some accounts tell of how loved ones cruelly deceived the dying, telling them they were going to fetch a doctor, as they locked the door behind them, never intending to return.
Cases of abandonment were not isolated or localized. They occurred all across Europe in places as diverse as Scotland and Ireland, Italy and the eastern nations. Nor was this abandonment a phenomenon that developed as the plague progressed and its horrors unfolded. Cases of familial abandonment began immediately, in the first place the Black Death made landfall on European soil: Messina in Sicily. A Friar, Michele da Piazza described how no one would go near the sick ” neither priests nor sons, nor fathers nor any kinsman. “All over Europe, fear, and horror of the plague dissolved the most natural bonds of family and love and causing people to abandon their loved ones without a second glance.
Some historians have questioned the validity of abandonment tales, preferring to see them as horrific folk myths of the plague. However, such stories only arise during the time of the Great Plague, not during any other before or after. They also occur in areas so remote from each other, with details so different and divergent that they could not be simple allegorical fiction. Abandonment shows the level of horror the Black Death inspired, dissolving even the most natural instincts of care for loved ones. It was not the only way that the Great Plague warped people’s behavior. For a form of public self-harm became a warped and favorite way of trying to ward off the Plague.