Black Death

Some people left town altogether and studiously avoided helping the sick. When the Black Death found them, their neighbors showed them similar consideration. Boccaccio’s Introduction continues:

And not all those who adopted these diverse opinions died, nor did they all escape with their lives; on the contrary, many of those who thought this way were falling sick everywhere, and since they had given, when they were healthy, the bad example of avoiding the sick, they, in turn, were abandoned and left to languish away without care.

Society had fallen apart. Even some parents abandoned their children. Boccaccio is emotional as he describes the breakdown of families:

The fact was that one citizen avoided another, that almost no one cared for his neighbor, and that relatives rarely or hardly ever visited each other - they stayed far apart. This disaster had struck such fear into the hearts of men and women that brother abandoned brother, uncle abandoned nephew, sister left brother; and very often wife abandoned husband, and - even worse, almost unbelievable - fathers and mothers neglected to tend and care for their children, as if they were not their own.

No one was safe. Not in one’s home. Not in one’s bed. Not in the country. The scourge of the plague (like it would be three hundred years later in London) was everywhere. There weren’t enough clerics alive to have proper funerals.

The atmosphere was ripe for someone to blame.