A Misguided Warning That Triggered a Panic
Seventeenth century Europeans greatly feared that nefarious people planned to spread a plague throughout Christendom via sorcery, witchcraft, or mysterious “poisonous gasses”. Such fears were exacerbated in the city of Milan, Italy, after its governor received an alarming message in 1629 from King Philip IV of Spain. It warned him to beware of four French escapees from a Spanish prison, who might be headed to Milan to spread the plague via “poisonous and pestilential ointments“. For months afterwards, tensions mounted in Milan as the alarmed citizens kept a wary lookout for suspicious characters, and people grew steadily more stressed out and frazzled as fears mounted of an imminent poisoning. The city sat thus on a powder keg for months, before it finally erupted in what came to be known as “The Great Poisoning Scare of Milan“.
It started on the night of May 17th, when some citizens reported that they saw mysterious people place what appeared to be poison in a cathedral partition. Health officials went to the cathedral, but found no signs of poisoning. The next day, the Milanese woke to find that all doors on the main streets had been marked with a mysterious daub. Health officials inspected the daubs, but there was nothing harmful in them. They concluded it was a prank by mischievous actors with a sick sense of humor, who got their kicks out of the citizens’ fears. Official reassurances did not calm the public, however. The Milanese took the mysterious daubs as a sign that the expected poison attack had finally arrived, descended into a citywide mass hysteria, and began to accuse random people of acts of poisoning.