Love, Death, and Friendship in the Time of Plague

Leviathan Press:

A few days ago, I talked with a friend about how we might be experiencing a rare, major historical event that affects the entire world. However, we who are in the middle of the event do not seem to be aware of this. Perhaps in the near future, when we look back on this period of history, people will re-examine this special period - although thanks to the development of medical standards, the death toll of this epidemic cannot be compared with the death toll during the Black Death in Europe [so far, the global death toll from the new coronavirus is about 560,000, while the latter is 75 million (controversial)], but this is still an astonishing number in peacetime.

The poet Petrarch was born during the Black Death pandemic, which undoubtedly deepened his feelings and reflections on death, love, and friendship. Even though we know more about viruses today than we did hundreds of years ago, this still cannot stop the rapid spread of new viruses: this may also be a metaphor that viruses that existed on this planet before us are reshuffling species on a massive scale in a way that we cannot see with our naked eyes, and this is just part of "nature."
Italian poet and scholar Francesco Petrarch lived through the deadliest plague pandemic in history, the Black Death of the 14th century, which swept across Eurasia and North Africa, killing as many as 200 million people. Exploring the unique record Petrarch left us in his letters and other writings, Paula Findlen discovers how he documented, commemorated, and mourned the deaths of those he loved, and what he might be able to teach us today.
What will we remember about this year’s COVID-19, and how will we recall it in the future?

In 1374, the last year of his long and interesting life, the Italian humanist and poet Francesco Petrarch observed that his society had been living with “a plague the like of which has never been seen in all the centuries” for more than 25 years. It was both fortunate and unfortunate for him to outlive many of his friends and relatives who had perished in the devastating disease.

Petrarch was one of the most articulate men of his time, and his words and writings represent an entire generation of survivors of the plague pandemic of 1346-1353 and its periodic recurrence. He skillfully used his pen to convey the collective grief of his society in the most personal and meaningful way, acknowledging the impact of such great pain and loss. In the aftermath of the devastating year of 1348, when plague swept across the Italian peninsula, his good friend Giovanni Boccaccio painted an indelible picture in his Decameron of young Florentines fleeing the plague-ridden city and weathering the storm by telling a hundred stories. For his part, Petrarch documented his experience of the plague over decades, exploring the changing effects it had on his psyche. The Black Death made him feel more deeply about the sweetness and fragility of life in the face of a pandemic that came in many different forms. He had many big questions, and he was constantly searching for answers.

“1348 has left us alone,” Petrarch declares at the beginning of his Letters on Familiar Matters, a remarkable collection of carefully selected correspondence with friends. What is the meaning of life after so much death? Has it made him—or anyone—a better person? Can love and friendship survive the plague? Petrarch asks these questions, allowing his readers to explore their own feelings about these things, too. By allowing them to express such emotions, he is, in effect, taking on the responsibility of expressing the spirit of the times, which is also his literary opportunity.

Petrarch was known as a self-proclaimed wanderer who rarely stayed in one place for long. He would sometimes isolate himself in the countryside, and sometimes immerse himself in city life, even during the worst of the plague. This mobility made him a unique observer of how the plague turned into a pandemic.

Petrarch arrived in Genoa in late November 1347, a month after Genoese ships had spread the disease to Messina. The disease spread rapidly by land and sea—the vectors were rats and fleas, though it was thought to be a product of air corruption. Petrarch was well aware of the pandemic’s course in a letter written from Verona on April 7, 1348, in which he declined an invitation from a Florentine relative to return to his native Tuscany, stating that “this year’s plague has trampled and destroyed the whole world, especially the coastal regions.”

A few days later, Petrarch returned to Parma, still plague-free, and learned that his relative, the poet Franceschino degli Albizzi, had died in the Ligurian port of Savona on his way back from France. Petrarch cursed the countless deaths that this “plague year” was claiming. He had known that the plague was spreading, but this was perhaps the first time he had truly experienced the increasing mortality rate. “I had not thought that he might die.” Now, the plague was all around him.

As time went on, Petrarch felt increasingly surrounded by fear, grief, and panic. Death struck again and again. In June, a friend came for dinner and died early the next morning. A few days later, members of his family also died. Petrarch captured this strange experience in the poem "To Himself," imagining a future in which people would not understand how terrible it was to live in "a city full of funerals" and empty homes.

Petrarch spoke of evacuating a plague-ridden city with his closest friends. On their way from France to Italy, brigands attacked two of them, murdered one, and eventually abandoned the expedition. Perhaps the survivors saw the folly of an idealistic plan that was ill-suited to their scattered circumstances. In July 1348, Petrarch’s most important patron, Cardinal Giovanni Colonna, died of plague. Many members of the Colonna family, a prominent Roman family from Avignon, also died at the same time. The poet was now jobless and more restless and disturbed than ever.

Petrarch mourned the “parting of friends”. Friendship was his joy and his sorrow. To compensate for this loss, he wrote moving letters to the living and reread his favorite letters to the dead, intending to publish the best of them. In an age of almost instant communication through email, phone calls and social media, it is easy to forget how important correspondence once was as a technology for bridging social distance. As Cicero, the ancient Roman writer whom Petrarch admired, said, letters make the absent present.

Of course, correspondence can also cause pain. If friends did not respond quickly, Petrarch worried about their survival. In September 1348, Petrarch encouraged one of his closest friends, the Flemish Benedictine monk and cantor Ludwig van Kempen, nicknamed "Socrates," to "deliver me from this fear as soon as possible by your letters." He feared that "the spread of the plague and the unhealthy air" might lead to another premature death. The reply might not have been swift, but it arrived, and its content reassured him.

At the end of this terrible year, Petrarch predicted that everyone who had escaped the first wave of the pandemic should prepare for the plague’s violent return. It was an astute assessment, and ultimately accurate. The following year, Petrarch continued to count the plague’s victims, as well as the cumulative effects of quarantine and depopulation.

After the death of Laura, a woman he had met and fallen in love with in the south of France, he wrote a poem to commemorate the tragedy and sent it to the Tuscan poet Sennuccio del Bene, only to find that he, too, had died of the plague, leading Petrarch to suspect that his words were contagious. He would have to write another sonnet. The act of writing, excruciating at first, began to lift his spirits. Life had become cruel, death was endless, but he took up his pen to make amends—his only useful weapon besides prayer, and his preferred weapon. Others suggested escape and proposed temporary public health measures like quarantine, but Petrarch seemed to think that he might be able to survive the pandemic by thinking and writing.

Wherever Petrarch traveled, he noticed the cities were deserted, the countryside was uncultivated, and there was a sense of unease in this “miserable and almost desolate world.” In March 1349, he arrived in Padua. One evening, he was dining with the bishop when two monks came to report about a French monastery ravaged by plague. The abbot had ignominiously fled, and only one of the thirty-five monks who remained had survived. Petrarch then discovered that his brother Gherardo was the only survivor of the plague. Petrarch had visited the hermitage in Méounes-lès-Montrieux in 1347 and mentioned it in his book On Religious Leisure, which still stands today. He immediately wrote to Gherardo to express his brotherly pride in having a “hero in the fight against the plague.”

In October 1350, Petrarch traveled to Florence, where he first met Boccaccio. By this time, the city was no longer at the epicenter of the plague pandemic, but its effects were still evident, like an open wound, or more accurately, a lymphocytic cyst that had not yet healed. Boccaccio was working on a draft of The Decameron. Although there is no record of the two writers ever discussing how to write about the plague, we do know that Boccaccio was an avid reader of Petrarch’s poetry and prose, and that he copied large passages from Petrarch’s work into his notebooks at various points during their lifelong friendship (until their deaths a year apart). It was Petrarch’s earlier work on the plague that inspired Boccaccio to complete The Decameron, in which he offered his own interpretation of how 1348 had become the year that turned their worlds upside down.

Around 1351, Petrarch began to memorialize those he had lost, inscribing his memories of them on a treasured object: his Virgil collection, which had a beautiful frontispiece by the Sienese painter Simone Martini. He had begun to honor his beloved Laura three years earlier, in 1348, by recording her death, the subject of many of his poems. Petrarch was determined to use all his rhetorical skills to immortalize her in his poetry and in his Virgil collection.

On its title page he inscribed these memorable words: "I have decided to write down this cruel memory of my lost love, and I think there is a bitter sweetness in my heart when I record it in the place where my eyes so often rest." He did not want to forget the burning pain of the moment, which awakened his soul and sharpened his awareness of the passage of time. Some of Petrarch's friends, such as Boccaccio, doubted whether Laura really existed or only existed in Petrarch's poetic imagination, but he never questioned Petrarch's determination to remember that year as a year of transformation.

Among other inscriptions in Petrarch’s Virgil collection (now in the Ambrosian Library in Milan), one mentions the death of his 24-year-old son Giovanni in Milan on 10 July 1361, “in the outbreak of that plague, disastrous and unusual for the public, which sought and fell upon Milan, a city hitherto untouched by such evils”. Petrarch had lived in Milan since 1353. Milan escaped the first wave of the plague but was hard hit by the second, from 1359 to 1363. Petrarch had gone to Padua in 1361, but his son stubbornly chose to stay.

Petrarch took up his pen again after his son’s death in 1361. He wrote a letter to his Florentine friend Francesco Nelli, lamenting the loss of his friend “Socrates” that year; he used it as the opening chapter of his second volume of letters, the Letters of Old Age. When Laura died, it was Socrates who informed Petrarch of the news, and when Socrates died, Petrarch added a note in his Virgil that the death had pierced his heart.

In his Letters of Old Age, he wrote: “I complained that the year 1348 of our time had deprived me of almost all the consolations of life, by the death of my friends. Now, what shall I do in the sixty-first year of this century?” Petrarch observed that the second plague pandemic was even more severe, nearly depopulating Milan and many other cities. This time, he resolved to write in a different voice, no longer lamenting but actively fighting against the adverse circumstances of his fate.

During the second plague pandemic, Petrarch launched a fierce critique of the role of astrologers in explaining the return of the disease and predicting its course. He argued that their so-called "truths" were largely correct by chance: "Why do you falsify useless prophecies after the fact, or call chance truth?" He chided friends and patrons who revived astrological predictions, arguing that they were based on pseudoscience based on misapplied astronomical data.

As the plague spread through the urban center, a physician friend encouraged the poet to flee to the country air of Lake Maggiore, but Petrarch refused to give in to fear. He remained in the city and began to spend most of his time traveling between Padua and Venice. When the plague reached the Republic of Venice, friends again pleaded with him to leave, to which Petrarch replied, "To flee from death is to flee to death, as is often the case." Boccaccio came to visit him and decided not to tell him about the death of their mutual friend Nelli, a fact that he did not discover until he received the unopened letter that had been returned the same way.

In the summer of 1363, plague returned to Florence with a vengeance. Amid renewed anxiety, Petrarch doubled down on his criticism of astrologers who were deceiving the living by predicting when the pandemic would end. Concerned citizens hung on their every word. “We do not know what is going on in the heavens,” he raged in a letter to Boccaccio in September, “but this shameless and reckless crowd claims to know.”

The pandemic was a business opportunity for astrologers who were peddling their ideas to “dry heads and thirsty ears.” Petrarch was far from alone in pointing out that astrologers’ conclusions had no basis in astronomical data or in the spread of disease. They were selling false hope and reassurance in the marketplace. Petrarch longed for a more rational response to the pandemic with better tools than the science of astrology.

What about medicine? Petrarch was famously skeptical of doctors who spoke with too much certainty and asserted their authority. He believed that doctors, like everyone else, needed to admit their ignorance as the first step to understanding anything. Ignorance itself was a “plague”—a disease to be eradicated even without a vaccine. Although he claimed to have great respect for the art of healing, he actually had little patience for it, which he slyly called “a pestilential incompetence” in his Invectives against the Physician. The plague alone did not reveal the failure of medicine, but it did highlight its limitations.

Petrarch befriended some of the most famous physicians of his time, and as he aged he stubbornly argued with them about their advice on his health. “What can you expect from others nowadays, when young and healthy physicians are everywhere seen sick and dying?” Petrarch wrote to the famous Paduan physician and inventor Giovanni Dondi in 1370, upon learning of the early death of the Florentine physician Tommaso del Garbo. Del Garbo had written one of the most important plague treatises of the fourteenth century, and he had devoted his experience of the first pandemic to protecting the health and well-being of his fellow Florentines. He died of the disease.

Doctors are, after all, human beings like everyone else; their knowledge does not grant them or their patients immortality. Petrarch went on with his life, taking some of the medical advice he received, not all of it, especially for the discomfort of scabies: a skin disease he described as the exact opposite of a “short and fatal illness” like plague—“a long and exhausting one, I fear.” Although he did not believe in any special redemptive powers of medicine, he respected the combination of knowledge, experience, care, and humility that characterized the best healers. Good, honest doctors were his heroes in the fight against the pandemic, as were his brother Gerardo (who focused on faith rather than medicine), and as distinct from astrologers who manipulated data to “fulfill” prophecies.

In a letter from Venice in December 1363, Petrarch noted that the curve had flattened in his area, but he did not think the plague was over elsewhere. “It still rages widely and terribly,” he wrote. He vividly depicted a city that could not bury its dead or mourn properly, witnessing the latest tragedy but no longer publicly mourning. He seemed to be learning how to live with the plague.

In 1366, Petrarch concluded his Remedies for Fortune Fair and Foul with a dialogue about the plague. “I am afraid of the plague,” the “fear” declares, ventriloquially expressing his growing anxiety about this “omnipresent danger.” Petrarch’s rationality states matter-of-factly that fear of the plague is “nothing more than fear of death.”

He once joked, with dark humor, that it was better to die during a pandemic surrounded by so many friends and family than to die alone. As for the survivors, Petrarch could not help but point out how many of them did not deserve such good fortune. Good people died, while “the vermin were so stubborn that neither the plague nor death itself could destroy them” survived. No one said that the plague was a just death sentence.

A year later, in 1367, Petrarch returned to Verona—the place where, in happier times, he had delighted in discovering Cicero’s lost letters in a monastery library, and where he had heard of Laura’s death. The city had suffered greatly during the second pandemic, but signs of recovery were emerging. Still, he could not say that Verona—or any city he knew—was as prosperous as it had been before 1348. The prosperity of medieval Italian towns as economic centers, whose commercial trade stretched across Europe and Asia, was now in jeopardy.

Once again, he found himself thinking about how his world had changed—and not just because of the plague. War, politics, commercial decline, the miserable state of the church, earthquakes, severe winters, and a general disregard for the law were also causes of change. He looked at the economic contraction of the late Middle Ages and observed ripple effects far beyond his own world. As he wrote in a letter reflecting on the 20 years since the outbreak of 1348, “I must own that I do not know what is happening among the Indians and Chinese, but Egypt, Syria, and all Asia Minor, have not increased in wealth more than we have, nor are they better off.”

Petrarch knew that “plague” was a very old word, but he saw “a total plague that nearly wiped out the world” as a new experience that no one had foreseen. He also realized that the plague “had never really disappeared anywhere.” It was a twenty-year ordeal. He wrote this anniversary letter to one of his few remaining childhood friends, Guido Sette, then Archbishop of Genoa. By the time the messenger reached Genoa, Sette would not be alive to read his letter. Once again, Petrarch’s pen seemed to foreshadow the end of another chapter.

In the spring and summer of 1371, plague returned to the Republic of Venice. Petrarch declined invitations to flee further. He acknowledged that the city had become dangerous again, amid “the dangers of the plague, which raged everywhere,” but he had found a “very pleasant and healthy place” that he was reluctant to leave. By then Petrarch had retreated to the house he had built in the picturesque hill town of Arquà, south of Padua. Not even the looming war could deter him from staying home, where he spent the rest of his life with his family, writing letters to friends and completing a collection of poems that was nominally dedicated to Laura’s memory but also explored the nature of time and mortality.

Against this backdrop of rural scenery, Petrarch continued to receive sad news from plague-ravaged Italy. Another childhood friend, the papal legate Philippe de Cabassoles, died shortly after exchanging letters with him reaffirming the strength of their long friendship. Petrarch again recorded this loss in his Virgil. In October 1372, he wrote a letter to his physician friend Dondi, offering his condolences on “the illness and deaths of your family.”

In 1373 Petrarch finally admitted that he had read his dear friend Boccaccio’s Decameron (written 20 years earlier), but never explained what had led him to admit it. He claimed that a copy of the Decameron had mysteriously appeared on his doorstep, but it is hardly possible to believe that he had not learned about the work until then. Petrarch claimed that he had not read the Decameron in detail, but had only skimmed through it: “I would be lying if I said I had read it, for it is long, written for the common people, and not in verse.” But we should not believe his feigned disdain for the defining work of his generation. It was a joke between two great writers.

Petrarch forgave the author’s moral lapses in most of the salacious stories because he appreciated the seriousness of their central messages, which reflected how human flaws—greed, lust, hubris, and corruption in church and state—helped breed a world infested with plague. He particularly praised the book’s opening, in which Boccaccio vividly depicts Florence under lockdown “in the time of the plague,” using language so magnificent that Petrarch admired it. Petrarch’s greatest compliment to his friend was to translate the final story (which recounts the patience and fortitude of a young peasant woman named Griselda, who marries an arrogant nobleman who tests her in every way) from Tuscan into Latin so that it would be accessible to readers unfamiliar with the author’s native tongue: “I tell your story in my own language.” Yet in a sense, Petrarch had been doing this since 1348; he had been collecting his own plague stories, finding different ways to express all the emotions that the disease provoked.

In 1374, when the plague returned to Bologna (where Petrarch had studied in his youth), he encouraged his friend Pietro da Moglio to flee to join him in Arqua. The famous professor of rhetoric declined the invitation, saying that it was Petrarch himself who encouraged him to stay where he was. Petrarch commented in his reply:

"Many are fleeing, everyone is afraid, and you are neither - glorious, magnificent! For what could be more foolish than to fear something which cannot be avoided by any means, and which may even be aggravated by fear? Wherever you flee you will meet it - what could be more useless than to run away from such a thing?"

Nevertheless, Petrarch hoped that his friend would be able to enjoy the company of Arqua's "healthy air," but he made no promises that it would remain a safe haven. Petrarch echoed the prevailing view that plague was spread by a diseased miasma caused by the corruption of the elements, calling air "an untrustworthy and unstable element."

Petrarch died in July 1374, but not of the plague, but succumbed to the various illnesses that afflicted him in his final years. In his will, he left 50 gold florins to his physician friend Dondi, to buy a "little ring to wear in memory of me," and 50 gold florins to Boccaccio, "to buy him a winter coat for his studies and his night scholarly work." Boccaccio outlived his friend by a little more than a year, dying in December 1375, probably from heart and liver failure.

Petrarch’s writings had a profound influence, both in form and content, on Italian literature, history, and philosophy in the 15th and 16th centuries, and on the Italian Renaissance as a whole. (Indeed, some have described him as the “Father of the Renaissance” for his eloquent articulation of why the ancient Greek and Roman eras were so important to his own.) His focus on the effects of plague has the strongest resonance today, during another pandemic, just as it may have had when readers rediscovered Petrarch’s plague letters, dialogues, and poems during other epidemics since the 14th century.

Rereading Petrarch these past few months, I’ve found myself wondering how we will remember 2020, a year in which disease has once again brought together many different parts of the world. Our families and friends have, to be sure, constructed a strange, private pandemic landscape, but we’ve also been witness to the larger forces that created this moment. Who will write its story?

Fourteenth-century Italy was the first society to keep detailed records of a disease that changed its world. By contrast, Thucydides’s account of the plague of Athens in 430 BC takes up just a single paragraph, but it’s also terrifying. Petrarch gives us a sense of not only how people knew about disease, but also how they thought about it. He was acutely aware of the importance of engaging in this public dialogue; by recording his own reflections, and provoking others to think about them, he left behind a rich written record that we can still benefit from today. I’m curious to see what kind of record we’ll leave behind this time. Our archive will undoubtedly be extensive and comprehensive, but it’s unlikely to capture how we interacted and communicated privately (on Zoom, for example), as Petrarch’s letters do.

Of course, there are things we do better today. In general, we are more resilient than people in Petrarch’s time—a direct result of healthier diets, more sanitary living conditions, and modern innovations in hygiene and medicine. Still, the disparity in the spread of COVID-19 across different regions has exposed vulnerabilities that we have long ignored, at our peril. The cruelty of this disease is that it strikes specific places, specific families, specific groups of friends and communities, and the health care industry has a particularly hard time caring for them.

We need to learn how to cope with this sudden loss. We need to face up to the ways it treats us all differently. We should perhaps prepare for more loss. Petrarch might have noted that the pre-modern experience of illness never completely disappeared.

Many of the people with whom Petrarch was close, who defined the foundations of his inner world, died in waves of plague. The knowledge of the finiteness of human life was embedded in his consciousness in a way that most people today do not—at least, not those who are lucky enough to enjoy relative health and prosperity and to be exposed to only minimal violence in their lifetimes; of course, not all are so lucky. Petrarch captured the essence of this experience with his brilliant literary talent. Because of the plague, his understanding of the value of love and friendship became deeper, richer, and more profound, because everything was at risk. As long as he allowed the dead to continue to live, they would not disappear. In a more personal and moving way than his friend Boccaccio, he transformed the loss that the plague brought to friends and family into works of art that still inspire readers today. If Petrarch had lived through the AIDS crisis, he would have understood why a generation responded by creating art, films, poetry, and novels to express their pain and anger and to ensure that the dead were not forgotten.

As the first wave of COVID-19 subsides, there is a moral resilience in the message Petrarch left behind that is worth remembering. He never promised that things would get better. Instead, he responded creatively and thoughtfully to unexpected challenges, assuming that they would end neither quickly nor easily. His words reverberate across more than 600 years and continue to find an audience. His voice reaches back from the past to inspire us to respond creatively to this pandemic as we ourselves worry about what the future may hold.

By Paula Findlen

Translated by Kushan

Proofreading/Rabbit's Light Footsteps

Original article/publicdomainreview.org/essay/petrarchs-plague

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