... that Death had undone so many.

From Church of St. Vigilius of Trent (detail)

"I had not known that death had undone so many."  So said Dante, early in his journey through the Inferno, as he watched the vast numbers of damned souls move slowly toward their final abode.  He was not speaking of the horrible effects of the Black Death in Florence in 1348 - Dante died in 1321 - but the phrase certainly could be applied to that as well.

We don't know how many died in that awful summer, but modern estimates hover around the 60,000-70,000 range, reducing a population of 110,000-120,000 to around 50,000.  Marchionne di Coppo Stefani, who was twelve years old that year, wrote in his chronicle that 94,000 people died between March and October.

It is hard to get one's mind wrapped around those numbers.  More than half of the population, even by the more conservative estimates.  Some say it was three out of five people - old, young, male, female, rich, poor.  In this post I want to introduce you to a few of them, just a list of men (and one woman) whose names and histories we still know, and who ended their lives in that terrible epidemic during that terrible summer.  Not all are Florentines, but all have connections with Tuscany. 

Illustration from Boccaccio's The Decameron

Keep in mind that in the fifteen years before the plague hit, Florence had been through a devastating flood, a rebellion against a despot, a major bank failure affecting the city's major banking companies, and a failed harvest resulting in scarcity, soaring prices, and starvation.  Misfortune was no stranger to the city on the Arno, but nothing could have prepared the citizens for the Black Death.

Giovanni Boccaccio's extraordinary collection of 100 short stories, The Decameron, begins with the premise that ten young people are leaving the city together to flee the plague.  They will pass their days in the countryside amusing themselves with music, dancing, and storytelling.  In the illustration above, you can see the young men and women preparing to leave, and in the background you can see bodies prepared for a mass burial.  Boccaccio's introduction to The Decameron remains one of the most chilling eyewitness descriptions of the epidemic that has come down to us.  It is difficult to read dispassionately even now, 665 years later, as he writes of wife abandoning husband, brother forsaking sister, and parents fleeing from their children, leaving their loved ones to die alone, all for fear of contamination.   

Of the death toll, which he estimated at over 100,000, he has this to say:

Oh, how many great palaces, beautiful homes, and noble dwellings, once filled with families, gentlemen, and ladies, were now emptied, down to the last servant!  How many notable families, vast domains, and famous fortunes remained without legitimate heir!  How many valiant men, beautiful women, and charming young boys, who might have been pronounced very healthy by Galen, Hippocrates, and Aesculapius (not to mention lesser physicians), ate breakfast in the morning with their relatives, companions, and friends and then in the evening dined with their ancestors in the other world!  (Translation by Mark Musa and Peter Bondanella)

But now, to our short list of plague victims from the summer of 1348:


A quartet of artists who lost their lives in 1348 may be among the best-known of this list of 1348 decedents.  Ambrogio Lorenzetti, his older brother Pietro Lorenzetti, and two of Pietro's followers (also both students of Giotto), Bernardo Daddi, and Maso di Banco all succumbed to the Black Death in that year, impoverishing Florence's vibrant artistic scene.

Ambrogio Lorenzetti, born in Siena, was considered extremely original in his painting style.  His work was innovative in that he experimented with perspective, approached physiognomy in a style we tend to associate with the Renaissance, and studied classical antiquity.  The extraordinary fresco below, the Allegory of Good Government and Its Effects on Town and Country, may still be seen in Siena's Palazzo Pubblico.  Ambrogio was about 58 when the plague took his life.

Allegory of The Effects of Good Government, Palazzo Pubblico, Siena

Pietro Lorenzetti, Ambrogio's older brother, worked in Florence, Assisi, Cortona, and Pistoia, as well as in Siena.  His work showed Giotto's influence, and he may have worked in Duccio's workshop, possibly alongside Simone Martini.  Pietro was 68 when he died.

Pietro's masterwork was his fresco cycle in the lower church of the Basilica of San Francesco in Assisi:

Lower level, Basilica of St. Francis, Assisi

Bernardo Daddi, a follower of Pietro Lorenzetti, had been apprenticed to Giotto.  His birth year is unknown, but he may have been in his 60s when he died.  Below you will see his Madonna in the tabernacle at Orsanmichele in Florence.  It's a repainting of a celebrated image of the Madonna that Florentines believed worked miracles, an image which did not survive the terrible fire of 1304.  Daddi's is actually the second repainting of the original; the image's miracle-working properties were supposed to have transferred from the original image to its later versions.

Image of the Madonna, Orsanmichele, Florence

Maso di Banco, another follower of Pietro (and another pupil of Giotto), is known to us via Lorenzo Ghiberti's autobiography.  Maso's frescoes in the Florentine church of Santa Croce were considered to be his major works.  One is here:

Santa Croce, Florence

The poet Petrarch was not a plague victim himself, but he lost two close friends and the woman he loved that summer.  

Francesco Petrarca

Cardinal Giovanni Colonna, of the powerful and influential Colonna family of Rome, is listed here primarily as a friend and correspondent of the Tuscan poet, but he was quintessentially Roman and in fact died in Avignon, where the papacy was at that time located.  He served under Popes Benedict XII and his successor, Clement VI.  He was possessed of a fine legal education, and he is remembered for persuading Pope Clement VI to send Franciscan friars to preach the gospel in Armenia.  He was 53 when he died.

Tomb of Giovanni d'Andrea

Petrarch's other friend, Giovanni d'Andrea, had an authentic Tuscan connection, for he was born near Florence. He was a legal scholar and a professor of canon law at Padua, Pisa, and Bologna.  He was said to have been very short of stature, causing Pope Boniface VIII to believe he was kneeling, and to repeatedly ask him to rise, to the amusement of the cardinals present.  He had two daughters, both of whom predeceased him:  Novella, who was so skilled in canon law that she could teach her father's lectures in his absence (and so beautiful that she lectured from behind a curtain so she would not distract the students), and Bettina, herself a legal scholar and professor of canon law at Bologna.  He died in his mid-seventies.

Laura de Noves

But it may have been Petrarch's great love and inspiration, Laura, whose loss was most devastating to the poet.  It is thought that Laura de Noves was Petrarch's Laura, though scholars are still not certain.  That Laura was only 38 when she died in 1348, the youngest of our list of victims.  She was married to Count Hugues de Sade, an ancestor of the Marquis de Sade.  She was the daughter of a knight, Audibert de Noves, and his wife Ermessenda, born in Avignon.  Petrarch had loved her and celebrated her in his poetry since he first saw her, aged 17 (and already married for two years). 

Simon of Cascia and Rita of Cascia

The plague took a remarkable pair of religious men, the Blessed Simon of Cascia and his mentor the Blessed Silvester of Valdisieve.  Simon, who entered the Order of Augustian Hermits when young, was an ascetic who preached in Florence, as well as in other cities.  He rejected all episcopal appointments, yet he was sought after as a confessor, spiritual advisor, and preacher.  He worked to reform prostitutes, founding a house of penance for them.  In Florence he established a woman's convent and also a refuge for unmarried mothers.  His written work is said to have influenced Martin Luther.  He died at 53 years of age.

Simon frequently sought council from the Blessed Silvester of Valdiesieve, an illiterate monk in Florence, who had worked as a wool carder before entering the Benedictine Camaldolese monastery of Santa Maria degli Angeli; once a monk, he served his brothers by working as a cook.  Considered a deep thinker, Silvester was sought out by both scholars and monks for his wisdom.  He was 70 in 1348.

Wool carding

Cooking

Saint Bernardo Tolomei

Two of the victims tried to help plague sufferers, only to succumb themselves.  Bernardo Tolomei, above, was canonized in 2009.  Sienese by birth, Bernardo built up a reputation as a theologian and a student of both civil and canon law.  He was an army man for a time, serving Rudolph I of Germany.  He was once accused of heresy, but he successfully defended himself  and went on to found a religious order.  When the Black Death made its appearance in the area around Arezzo, Bernardo and his monks cared for the sick.  In 1348 he returned to Siena, where it was believed that the holy monks would be spared from the danger, but Bernardo was among the first to contract the illness and to die.  The painting below shows Bernardo caring for victims.  He was in his mid-70s when he died.

The Blessed Bernardo Tolomei ministering to plague victims

Another man who tried to help was the physician Gentile da Foligno, a professor of medicine who taught at the universities in Bologna and in Siena.  He is said to be the first European physician to perform a dissection on a human cadaver.  He was something of a specialist in diseases involving the urinary tract. 

Bust of Gentile da Foligno

Gentile da Foligno wrote a popular treatise on the Black Death, in which he recommended the drug theriac as a preventative, but the plague took him anyway.  (Theriac, a concoction first prescribed by the ancient Greeks, involved many months of preparation and no fewer than 64 ingredients, including the flesh of a poisonous snake.)

Medieval apothecary selling theriac

As I said above, Dante had been dead for 27 years when the Black Death struck Florence, but it did take the life of one of his sons.  Iacopo Alighieri may have followed his father into exile and been with him in Ravenna at the end of the great poet's life.  He is known for his commentary on his father's work The Inferno, the first of three parts of the Divine Comedy.  Iacopo did not manage to regain possession of his exiled father's property in Florence until 1343, but he was only able to enjoy it for five years until the plague carried him off.  He was probably about 59 at the time.

Dante Alighieri

Another literary figure who died in the epidemic was Ugolino Brunforte.  A member of the Franciscan order of Friars Minor and a member of a noble family of French origin, Ugolino is thought to have written the earliest version of the Fioretti, or Little Flowers of Saint Francis.  This collection of tales about Francis's life comes down to us only in later versions.  Ugolino was made a bishop under Pope Celestine V (the first pope to resign), but Celestine's successor Boniface VIII did not hold him in such high regard and annulled the appointment.  Ugolino was quite elderly, probably in his mid-80s, when he died.  Looking at my notes, I can't figure out what I thought the Tuscan connection was here, but Umbria isn't all that far away, so here he is.

St. Francis with scenes from his life

Andrea Pisano, the sculptor who created the panels on the south door of Florence's Baptistery, worked in Pisa as well as in Florence.  He succeeded Giotto as Master of the Works of Florence Cathedral.  In a typical web of relationships, Andrea's chief pupil was Andrea Orcagna, who designed the magnificent tabernacle in which Bernardo Daddi's Orsanmichele Madonna is housed (see picture above). 

Visitors to Florence tend to cluster around the magnificent doors with the panels sculpted by Lorenzo Ghiberti, the panels Michelangelo referred to as "the gates of Paradise."  Some few of us stubborn contrarians can be found around by the south doors, however, admiring Andrea's work as well.

South doors, Baptistery, Florence

Near to my heart, as a student of Florentine history, is the chronicler Giovanni Villani, who, among other acts of public service to his city, was the superintendent in charge of Andrea Pisano's work on the doors (above).  Villani served Florence as ambassador, prior, head of the mint, inspector of the building of new city walls, and magistrate in charge of provisions during a famine.  His great work of history, the Nuova Cronica, is indispensable for anyone wishing to study medieval Florence.  

Giovanni Villani, loggia of Mercato Nuovo, Florence

Villani wrote of the plague:

The priest who confessed the sick and those who nursed them so generally caught the infection that the victims were abandoned and deprived of confession, sacrament, medicine, and nursing... And many lands and cities were made desolate.  And this plague lasted until _____.

He intended to fill in the ending date later, but poignantly, his own end came first.  His brother Matteo (who eventually died of a later wave of plague) and then his nepher Filippo, Matteo's son, continued his great historical work.

These are some of the plague victims whose names and careers are still known to us today.  We even have the exact dates of death of three of them:  Ambrogio Lorenzetti on June 9, Gentile da Foligno on June 18, and Giovanni Colonna on July 3 in that brutal summer.  But let us end our list of well-known plague victims by sparing a moment's thought for the many who died alone and frightened, and whose names are now long forgotten.

Maso di Banco relief (Extreme Unction) for Giotto's campanile

Images in this post are in the public domain, with these exceptions:  Skeletons at top are a detail of a photo licensed to Mattis via the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike Unported 3.0 license, Wikimedia Commons; the picture of the Blessed Bernardo Tolomei ministering to plague victims is licensed to Noel Olivier via the same type of license, same source; and the following photos are similarly licensed to Sailko:  tomb of Giovanni d'Andrea, Maso di Banco relief of Extreme Unction; statue of Giovanni Villani in Florence's Mercato Nuovo; and the Basilica of San Francesco in Assisi.

And the Blog Hop winner is....

... Regina Jeffers!   Regina also took part in the Blog Hop.  In fact, she wrote not one but several great posts here on her blog.  A writer of historical and contemporary romance, Regina has an impressive catalogue of novels.  Her website will tell you more. 

Regina, I will try to contact you directly about your prize; should I not succeed in doing so, please get in touch with me (which can be done via my website).  And congratulations! 

Thanks to all who participated - those who commented, and those who read everyone's blog posts.  I know I enjoyed reading other writers' blogs about food in history, and I hope all of you readers did, too.

Fast Food in Medieval Italian Cities

Welcome to the Summer Banquet Blog Hop!  With 31 blogs involved, this gives readers 31 chances to read about food in different periods of history, and also to win prizes.  Enter here (details next) and then "hop" over to the others (listed below) and see what they have to offer, too. 

The prize on this blog is one of three things:

1. A copy of my book A Thing Done, as either a Kindle or Nook gift from Amazon or Barnes & Noble, winner's choice.  
2. A signed paperback copy, if that's the reader's preference and he/she is in the USA.
3. If the winner already has my book or doesn't want a copy, I will substitute  Kindle or Nook copies of all four of the short stories I've published with Callihoo Publishing.

To enter, just leave me a comment here on the blog.  I'll draw a winner on Saturday, June 8  and post the name here.  (Becoming a follower of this blog, or already being one, will give you one extra chance to win.)  The winner will then need to provide me with a way to reach him or her, if I don't already have that information.

Onward to the food blog!

Medieval Cuisine Without Cooking:  Have It Your Way

Dante at McDonald's, deciding if he wants fries with that?  Beatrice off to Starbuck's for a mocha latte?  Farinata degli Uberti lunching at Burger King?  (Actually, Farinata might have done that just to get the little paper crown, now that I think about it.)

Well, maybe it wouldn't have been quite like that.  But Italian cities have a rich tradition of food-on-the go.  In ancient Rome, vendors hawked roasted chickpeas in the theatres, people sold pastries on the streets, and you were never far from a caupona like this one in Pompeii, where you can almost see those sunken pots filled with lentil stew and bubbling away over the hot coals below:

That tradition continues into the present.  If you walk down the street in Florence, you can fortify yourself with hot, juicy sandwiches of porchetta or tripe, or hot roasted chestnuts, purchased from vendors with little food stands.  Or you can duck into a shop and come out with a slice of pizza al taglio or a cup of gelato.  The possibilities are endless.

Hot chestnuts for sale

There's even this sort of thing (in the Palermo airport), turning out slices of hot pizza to order:

This tradition of already-cooked street food was not interrupted during the middle ages.  Cookshops, bakeries, taverns, street vendors, market stalls, and shops all catered to the shopper in search of ready-to-eat meals.  If guests arrived unexpectedly (which was likely, since they couldn't exactly text ahead to tell you their arrival time), a quick trip to a cookshop would take care of dinner for all.  There, you could purchase anything from a roast hare or a meat pie or a couple of pigeons to an entire meal, with side dishes and condiments. 

But in this post I don't want to talk about the prosperous host in search of convenience food, or a casual stroller in search of a snack.  I want to give some thought to history's forgotten poor, those people who rented a single room without a kitchen, or kitchen privileges.  How - and what - did they eat?

It depended, first of all, on exactly how constrained they were.  If they had a hearth, however modest, or even a brazier for heat, that plus a single small pot would enable at least some basic cookery.  Some things (onions, some vegetables, even eggs) could be cooked directly on the fire, but a pot would make many more things possible:

But many did not have even that limited access to fire.  What then?

The first thing our hypothetical poor guy (let's call him Guido) is going to need is bread.  A meal is not a meal without bread, to Guido and his contemporaries.  (In really harsh times, grain might be cooked in water into a sort of polenta, but really, a city guy like Guido wanted bread.  The lighter in color, the better.)

Bread, in Italian cities of this period, was seldom baked at home.  Even homes with fairly complete kitchens lacked ovens, and while some things could be baked in a covered container over coals, bread really needed an oven.

The people who had ovens were the fornari and the pistori.  In some European cities, laws kept these two kinds of bread providers separate, but it appears that there was considerable overlap in Italian cities.  The fornari were the oven-keepers; they accepted bread that had been kneaded at home, and they baked it for their customers, who often paid them in kind, by leaving some of the bread with them.  They then were able to sell those loaves of bread to other customers, people like Guido who were not equipped to prepare their bread at home (which turned the oven-keepers into pistori, or the people who sold finished bread).

Then, as now, the poorest of the poor were least able to take advantage of the thriftier options.  They paid full price for bread, though it would have been cheaper to purchase grain, have it milled, and prepare the bread at home.  But let's say Guido supports himself with the odd construction job, and doesn't have a lot of extra denari for buying in bulk.  Let's also say that he lives alone, so, given the difficulties of keeping foods fresh without refrigeration, there's no sense in his buying a lot of food ahead of time.

By the way, once those ovens were finished baking bread, they could be used for baking pies and other things - again, often prepared at home, but also prepared for purchase in the bakeshops and cookshops.  Small pies could be purchased from street vendors, too, and it's likely that Guido would buy one of those for his main (early) meal of the day, if he could afford it.  Many different things could be packed into a pie - it was portable and self-contained.  Guido could choose a pie containing fruit, chopped ham, chicken or eel, soft cheese, eggs, or some combination of these ingredients.

If he went to a cookshop to purchase a larger pie, that pie might have a crust that was never designed to be eaten:  a hard container made of flour and water, to serve as a vessel for cooking the contents and then be discarded.  Edible crusts were known and available at this time, though, for those who could afford them:
 

Si tu veux que du pâté tâte
Fais mettre des oeufs en la pâte.

--Gaces de la Bugne [d. ca. 1383].  As translated in The Medieval Kitchen:  Recipes from France and Italy, by Odile Redon, Françoise Sabban and Silvano Serventi:

If you want a pie that's tasty
Have eggs put into the pastry.

 If Guido couldn't afford a pie, perhaps he could manage a chunk of cheese, a handful of olives, and some fruit, and maybe even salad greens.

His second meal (supper) would be lighter, consisting of whatever was left over from the main meal.  The notary Lapo Mazzei, a close friend of wealthy Pratese merchant Francesco Datini, wrote in the late 14th century that he often took only a handful of olives and a bit of bread at night, and even today, if you've ever bought olives in an Italian street market, you'll understand the temptation to do just that - they are quite wonderful.

Before speculating on what else Guido might have purchased, we need to give a moment's thought to what sorts of things he could keep in his rented room.  Small supplies of wine, oil, and vinegar would keep; certain condiments, of the sort that almost everyone purchased ready-made, could keep, as well.  (Sauces tended to be lean and acidic, so they would last, properly stored.  Francesco Datini used to purchase his savore sanguino from an apothecary:  it was a sauce made of raisins, cinnamon, sandal, and sumach.  He also received an apothecary's bill for such comestibles as orange and citron juice, mustard, pounded almonds, rose-water, chamomile, raisins, spices, and a tart of marzipan.)

An apothecary's shop

 Hard cheese would last for a while, if it could be kept away from mice and rats.  Nuts, olives, many sweets (though these are probably out of Guido's price range), and some vegetables would keep, though most of those vegetables would have required cooking.  Sausage, if he could afford it, could be kept for a while.  Fruit would keep for a short while.  Beyond that, there was no point in buying ahead.

Food was not prepackaged, so Guido would have to find something to carry his purchases in - a basket, cloth bags, a towel, or whatever he could find to keep his purchases safe and separated.

Another thing that would have been easy to purchase from street vendors, shops, market stalls, or even a neighbor who kept chickens, was eggs.  Of course, without a way to cook them, Guido was at a disadvantage; yet his plight was so common that I can't believe some enterprising merchants didn't come up with the idea of selling hard-cooked eggs to customers like Guido.

Vendors might be women from the country, selling the produce of their gardens or the cheeses they had made; they might be cookshop apprentices, hawking single-serving versions of the foodstuffs available back in their masters' shops; they might, in fact, be anybody with something to sell.  A partial listing of what Guido would have found in their trays and baskets includes fresh vegetables;  fruits:  melons, apples, pears, peaches, cherries, plums; nuts; smoked herring; vinegar, verjuice, honey, walnut oil, yeast-water for making bread prepared garlic sauce, green sauce, mustard; cooked peas, fried peas, cooked beans; baked goods:  flans, wafers, cakes, bean cakes, pies, and rissoles.

Vendors sold milk (best to buy it early in the day) and cheese and fresh ricotta; they offered sweets such as quince and apple pastes, nougat, pinocchiato (a sweet made with pine nuts), candied citrus peel, candied spices, and dried fruits; and even wafers - though for these last, the statutes in Paris suggested that the art of making them was "very dangerous and difficult to learn."  Guild standards for journeyman status among the waferers stated that candidates had to be able to produce at least 500 large wafers, 300 supplications (a type of wafer often left as an offering on altars), and 200 étriers (stirrup-shaped cookies) in a day.

City laws governed all types of businesses offering edibles.  In Paris in 1268, for instance (yes, I know this is supposed to be about Italian cities, but surviving records are sparse, and we take what we can find), cooked meat could be kept for only three days before selling it or throwing it away.  Laws even governed shopkeepers' etiquette:  if a customer was in front of one cookshop, the owner of another was not permitted to call to him and try to entice him away.

Guido, if he could afford it, could bypass all of this and dine at a tavern.  There he would find a range of comestibles - bread and cheese at the least, with wine, and possibly much more elaborate fare.

Quality no doubt varied.  

But what if Guido had no money?  What if the harvest had been bad, prices were soaring, food was scarce, and the wealthier shoppers bought all that was to be had?  Had he no recourse?

Well, no, actually, not much.  But the cities tried.  They did set up a way to distribute the all-important bread, once things got bad enough.  Hospitals, parish churches, and religious confraternities distributed bread and set up soup kitchens.  But sometimes the problem dwarfed the solution, and the cities saw frightening bread riots, like this one in Siena in 1329:

The price of grain by the staio (unit of measurement, rather like a bushel, but the size of it could vary from city to city) was up to 1 florin, which put grain out of many people's reach.  The government of Florence sent to Sicily for grain and made it available to the public at half a florin per staio, though it was poor quality, mixed with barley.  An armed guard protected the grain, with an executioner's block and axe prominently displayed nearby.  Siena, too, set up an elaborate distribution system.

Bread distribution - not Siena and not 1329, but similarly chaotic

By April 1329, Siena had little grain left to purchase.  It had been a dry year, and people who would normally have sold off their surplus chose instead to keep it, to make sure they could feed their families.  Laws were passed forbidding anyone to leave the city with grain or bread, because people were coming into Siena from the countryside and from neighboring provinces in search of food.  Still, people tried to smuggle bread out.  Two men who were caught with bread in their pack-saddles were arrested, chained on top of a platform, and displayed to the crowd all day (though the chronicle tells us that many felt this was unfair, as the men acted only out of desperate need). 

The Hospital of Santa Maria della Scala had been in charge of bread distribution, but on 12 May the crowds became so desperate and so obstreperous that the hospital, fearing that the hungry crowd might force its way in and raid its stores, locked the doors.  The crowd then surged toward the Campo (Siena's city center), where they ransacked the city's tubs of grain, fighting off city officials with poles and stones as the owners of nearby shops frantically locked up their businesses.   Four of the city's men were killed, but the crowd was finally persuaded to return to the Hospital, where bread distribution resumed.  Later, six of the ringleaders of the crowd were hanged. 

By 20 June the crisis was easing, because Siena too sent to Sicily for grain, and on that day it at last arrived. 

 With that, let's leave Guido to his shopping, wishing him buon appetito and a steady supply of affordable bread. 

Photographic images in this post are our own, and we hold copyright; all other images are in the public domain.

Be sure to check out all the blogs participating in the Blog Hop:

Hop Participants

1. Maria Grace
2. David Pilling
3. Anna Belfrage
4. Debra Brown
5.  Lauren Gilbert
6. Gillian Bagwell
7. Julie K. Rose
8. Donna Russo Morin
9. Regina Jeffers
10. Shauna Roberts
11. Tinney S. Heath (you're already here)
12. Grace Elliot
13. Diane Scott Lewis
14. Ginger Myrick
15. Helen Hollick
16. Heather Domin
17. Margaret Skea
18. Yves Fey
19. JL Oakley
20. Shannon Winslow
21. Evangeline Holland
22. Cora Lee
23. Laura Purcell
24. P. O. Dixon
25. E.M. Powell
26. Sharon Lathan
27. Sally Smith O’Rourke
28. Allison Bruning
29. Violet Bedford
30. Sue Millard
31. Kim Rendfeld

Building a House (Part II)

Last week's post dealt with the things a writer has to know to design a (fictional) house in Florence, mid-13th century.  It asked questions such as these:  What were houses made of?  How big were they?  How many floors?  How were they heated?  What different types of rooms were there?  Where did people sleep?  Where were things stored?  What were the windows like?

The answers to these questions are sometimes surprising, sometimes very difficult to find, and almost always vary tremendously depending on whether we're looking at the home of a wealthy noble, a comfortably-well-off artisan or businessman, or a poor person.  To see what conclusions we came to, look here.

This week I want to take a look at how homes in the city affected other people - neighbors, passersby, people conducting business.  Thus, we'll be looking at such things as the use of space, the availability of water, waste disposal, keeping animals, and the ever-present danger of fire.  

Last time, we took a look at the way homeowners expanded their limited living space by building sporti - little added rooms, or balconies, that jutted out from the house well above street level.  Because these robbed the streets of light and created a hazard (see the painting above, where part of a balcony has crumbled onto the street below), they were heavily taxed and eventually outlawed altogether, though some examples survive even today.  Even while building such structures was permitted, laws usually existed to prevent them from starting low enough on the building that a man on horseback could not pass beneath, for example.  Streets were very narrow, with the two sides quite close together, so one can imagine religious processions or ceremonial occasions, with standard-bearers having to dodge overhanging balconies so they wouldn't snag their banners on the supports. 

If goods were delivered to the house via the street door, this activity clogged the street and got in the way of passersby.  Some houses would have had access via a back door, or through an alley, but any congestion in the street could make it at least temporarily impassable.

And of course it was not only private homes accepting deliveries that clogged the street.  Many of the larger houses rented out their ground floor space to shops and businesses, like this one (shown here with a roof as if it were a single-story building, but in fact more likely to be the ground floor of a house):

Shops, too, had to receive deliveries, and they also tended to draw customers who would transact their business while standing in the street.

Houses were dark, many of them cramped for space, and much of life was lived outdoors when the weather permitted.  Generous homeowners placed benches in front of their houses so that  people could sit and rest.  Customers took up the space in front of shops, children played in the streets, goods were conveyed, people walked and rode through on their way to other destinations.  City laws made an attempt to control congestion in the streets, limiting, for example, what furnishings shop owners could place in the street and how far away from their shopfronts, but one senses that it was a losing battle.

Another form of encroachment on the streets occurred when houses were built with outside staircases.  This example, from Rome, does not take up a great deal of extra space, but such stairways could block an alley between two buildings or jut out into the street.

One of the questions that crops up, to which I find few answers, is where did people park their horses?  Certainly we know that stables existed in the cities; private palaces might well have their own, and animals and stall space could be rented from the public stables.  If someone rode to a shop or to someone's home, the horses would have to be left in the street while they conducted their business; palaces had iron rings built into their walls for tying horses.

City laws attempted to control the problems of crowding and animal waste by requiring citydwellers to contain their animals in some way rather than letting them run loose, or by limiting the hours during which merchants working the market could keep draft animals within the city's walls, or by requiring the responsible party to clean up animal waste within a certain period of time.  In practice, of course, animals were ubiquitous.  Pigs, in particular, star in many humorous stories about 13th century city life.  One famous example is the tale of the famous (and famously good-natured) painter Giotto di Bondone, who, when tripped up by a pig in the street, just grinned and picked himself up, commenting that he probably owed the pig one, having used so many pig bristles in his paintbrushes.

Another legal restriction that tended to limit the number of animals in the city was a limit on how long hay, straw, and other fodder could be kept within the city (allowing, typically, a supply adequate for one day and one night), but this was primarily because the dust and chaff from such fodder was a fire hazard.

More about fire later, but the thought of it reminds us of the citydwellers' need for water.  Locating cities on rivers facilitated laundry, milling, and many other needs of the citydwellers, but in Florence, even situated as it is on the Arno, much of the water to private homes came from wells.  The crowded space made this a danger, as it meant that waste-disposal pits were often located dangerously close to wells, and contamination frequently occurred (not that the river was exactly pristine either, what with the discarded waste materials from butchers, tanners, dyers, and other industries).

Wealthier households had private wells, perhaps located in the space behind the house, a sort of outdoor courtyard which might also house the kitchen (see last week's post) and a garden and possibly chicken coops or pigpens.  Citydwellers lacking private wells had to use the public fountains and wells, some of the former still supplied by surviving remnants of Roman technology.    Naturally, laws evolved to regulate such usage.

I don't have a Florentine example, but perhaps if I did, it would be similar to the laws drawn up to protect Perugia's magnificent Fontana Maggiore:

In Perugia, the city provided "five or seven stone basins," filled with water so that people taking water from the fountain might first wash their vessels.  Violators risked a fine of 5 soldi.  Thirteen copper vases were provided for filling vessels, or for drinking.  It was stipulated that no man could harass any woman going to collect water, either while she was on her way, while drawing water, or while returning home with it.  Taking barrels to the fountain to fill directly was strictly forbidden; not only barrels but any other "oiled, musty or dirty vessel" was prohibited.  People could not bathe or wash clothes in the fountain, and workmen were not permitted to use fountain water to mix mortar or for any other such purpose.  The city also mandated the placement of two cisterns, one inside the wall and one outside, at each of the city's gates.  Water was too vital for its availability to be left to chance, and every effort was made - at least in the statutes - to keep the water supply clean and wholesome.

Thinking about water in the medieval city naturally suggests questions about what happened to waste water, and to solid waste material, both from humans and from animals.  Cities had various types of drainage systems in place, sometimes involving underground channels, sometimes ditches running alongside streets, but there was no ideal way of disposing of such waste material, and everything depended on the compliance of the city's residents, who, after all, had limited options.  Laws prohibited dumping such materials in the streets or in the rivers, but these laws were reiterated so often that it is apparent that the problem continued.

Some homes had latrines.  These might drain directly into a cesspit behind the house, or in between two houses.  Records exist of neighboring households sharing the use of a latrine situated between the two houses, and also sharing the costs of having the cesspit cleaned when necessary.  The illustration below, from Boccaccio's Decameron, shows the unfortunate Andreuccio, who has fallen through a flimsy floorboard in such a makeshift latrine and wound up in the waste collection area down below.

 

(Presumably the brick wall shielding the waste area from the street has only been stripped away, dollhouse-style, for purposes of the illustration, and would actually have been a complete wall, to contain odors and unpleasant sights.)

Houses without latrines would be equipped with chamberpots, or possibly closestools, which might be situated in a curtained-off area for privacy.  The closestool below is 17th century, but the earlier versions can't have been very much different.

And finally, citydwellers had to remember constantly the danger of fire.  Houses were packed closely together, and many were of wood.  Even houses of brick and stone had a lot of wood involved in their construction - walls, floors, beams, stairs, furnishings.  And open fires were the only source of heat and method of cooking.  You will recall from the previous post that kitchens at this time tended to be located outside of the home, in the back, or else at the very top of the house, to try to minimize this danger.

The shops on the ground floors of many homes, however, might require a source of fire for their business (chandlers, cookshops, bakeries), or they might require the presence of flammable materials (chandlers again, apothecaries).  Stables had flammable feed on the premises; warehouses were packed with materials that would burn.  The medieval city was vulnerable.  Fire was also used as a weapon, when families or factions declared war on one another and took their battles to the streets of the city.  Arson, involving Greek fire, was the cause of a swath of destruction in 1304 that destroyed many homes and churches; the many wax votive images offered in thanks and kept in Orsanmichele helped fuel that fire.

The Great Fire of London was, of course, much later than the time period we're talking about, yet it was an example of a fire raging out of control in a pre-industrial city.  This is what citydwellers feared:

And from time to time their fears were realized.  

So many things to think about, as we try to understand the way people lived in a different time and place.  Yet the study is fascinating, and we learn unexpected things by making the effort to understand what - exactly - it would be like to have lived there, and then. 

Images in this post are either in the public domain or are our own photos, with the exception of the house in Rome with the outside staircase, which is licensed to Lalupa via the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license (Wikimedia Commons).

Building a House (Part I)

I'm building a house.  Three of them, actually - and they're just a few doors from each other, all along one street in Florence.  In the mid-13th century.

I'm working on my next historical novel, and I need to design, decorate, and furnish at least three houses:  one for the family of a well-to-do (but not noble) notary; one for a wealthy and powerful family with an ancient and honorable (and noble) surname and a knight in residence; and one humble house for the family of one of the servants of the people in the first house.  The time:  1260-ish.

And it's been much, much more difficult than I ever would have guessed.

What's the problem, you may say.  You want to know what medieval houses were like?  Just look it up.  I wish it were that easy, but alas, it is not.  Information is ambiguous as to date and place, missing altogether, or contradictory.

A city official's house in Macerata (1373)

When a historian flags a "first known mention" of something, is it brand new as of that date?  Or has it been around for years, and this is just the first mention of it that survived?  (Think inside shutters, wall fireplaces.)  We don't know.  We can't know. 

When a writer groups all of Italy together (or worse, all of Europe), you've got a problem:  Venice beat Florence to chimneys and wall fireplaces, probably by quite a bit, and it's likely that the places with a harsh climate that spurred them to cover their windows did so before the more temperate areas got around to it. 

When a writer groups the entire 13th century together, and possibly throws in the 14th for good measure, you've got another problem.  When you find a great reference in Boccaccio, who was writing a hundred years after my time period, you don't know whether he's writing about something that was innovative in his lifetime, or something that had been around forever.

As for the iconography, Villani, for example, is a chronicler who is only slightly later than our target time, but the surviving illustrations of his work are from even later - so do they reflect the reality of the times being written about, or the illustrator's contemporary reality?  

But at the end of the day (lots of days, actually) there are certain conclusions we can draw.  Unfortunately for those of us who like things definite and tidy, there are also certain things we will probably never know.

Florence is not lacking in Renaissance palaces, and they are lovely and interesting.  But medieval houses they are not - not even medieval houses for the upper crust - and they simply don't tell us much about those earlier dwellings.  In Florence one can still see streets that retain a medieval flavor, but not so many buildings that date from before the Renaissance.   (This is because of the ravages of time, of World War II, of floods and fire, of misguided modernization, and because of those very same Renaissance houses, which after all had to be built somewhere.)

Elsewhere in Tuscany

Even when medieval buildings survive, the insides have been gutted and rebuilt so many times that there is little left to go on, as we attempt to recreate how people lived in Florence in 1260.

But we do have some paintings, book illustrations, descriptions in literature, estate inventories, detailed legal documents concerning property and property division, and some archaeological evidence, so we do the best we can with what we've got.

I drew up a list of questions for myself, never dreaming that it would be such a mega-project to find the answers.  Here are the first ones, if you'd like to come along with me on this research journey:

First question:  How much living space did they have?  In the countryside, Tuscan farmhouses were considered spacious compared to those in Lombardy.  They (the Tuscan houses) ranged from 33 feet to 39 feet in length, and 16 to 20 feet in width (with a very high ceiling, which could accommodate a loft).  That's a maximum of 780 square feet.  Not a lot - and in the city, there was less space.  In the 13th century, the population was exploding - people were flocking in from the surrounding countryside, and everyone wanted to live within the walls, for safety and for convenience. 

So people built up when they could, creating the formidable defensive tower-houses that embodied the power of the nobles, or just creating more living space for more people above what had been there before:

When they couldn't build up, they built out.  That's how you get those jutting-out additions you see in the street scene above:  balconies, add-ons, sporti as the Italians called them - they blocked the light from the street below, and they had to be constructed of lightweight material and propped up, but they did give that precious little extra bit of living space.  Sometimes a balcony, or a sort of bridge, connected two nearby houses, far above street level (a way to seek safety in the home of a friend or family member if your own home was under assault, an all-too-common situation in those days).

 

How many floors?  It varied.  Typically the ground floor of any multi-storied building was devoted to storage and/or commercial space - a shop rented out (or belonging to the homeowner who lived above); storage for comestibles; perhaps a guest bedroom, or a space for invited guests to come inside - but not too far inside.  The staircase up to the family's living quarters began on the ground floor; access to it in some homes could be denied by a stout door with a bar and a lock.  (Outside staircases also existed; see next week's post for more about those.)  The main living area would be the piano nobile, or one floor up.  In a larger house, there might be additional chambers above that level.  But Florence was still full of single-story, ramshackle wooden shanties, housing those of the poor who at least had their own homes, instead of renting a room or two in a larger building. 

How many rooms, and how were they allocated?  Not very many rooms, not even in the grandest houses.  (And there were plenty of people who rented and lived in a single room.)  The one division you see, whenever division is possible at all, is that of sala and camera (living room/dining room, or the house's more public area; and the bedchamber or chambers, the house's more private area).  This illustration from Boccaccio's Decameron neatly illustrates the sala/camera distinction:

Rooms might be divided by wooden panels, or even by cloth hangings, rather than by actual walls.   At the wealthiest end, individuals (even husband and wife) might have their own bedrooms, and the man of the house might have a private study.  At the poorer end, there might have been one bedchamber for everyone to share. 

How were they heated?  In the case of the poorest houses, the question should be were they heated.  And the answer is, probably not.  While wealthier homes had at least one hearth, maybe two, and individual rooms could be heated with charcoal braziers (a sort of medieval space heater), the danger of fire in the city was substantial, and people who were renting a single room were likely going to have to make do without a source of warmth.  No heat, no kitchen, no laundry or bathing facilities.  Just that room.  Windows (see next question) were not glassed, and in fact at this early date they often would not even have been covered with cloth.

In the houses where heat was an option, it was still an imperfect system.  This date (1260) is too early for wall fireplaces with chimneys (this is a somewhat controversial point, but there really doesn't seem to be much evidence of an external chimney system in Florence at this time).  Smoke could be vented through louvred windows, though imperfectly.  A "central hearth" could be relocated to a spot next to a wall, with a fire-resistant reredos behind it, and the smoke channeled toward a window, or it could remain in the more primitive central position.  I suspect that the fireplace shown here, in an illustration nearly 200 years later than our time period, is not attached to a real chimney, but is using the cone to direct the smoke out through a vent in an external wall.  With older houses placed very close together, it must have been quite difficult to retrofit them with external chimneys; thus, there was a period of time when newer houses built by artisans were probably more comfortable and livable than the much older ancestral homes of the nobility, which were still cramped fortified towerhouses, no matter how carefully updated.

In this illustration, the woman cooking birds on a spit is cooking them near the hearth, but they are actually suspended over a portable brazier (note the handle):

What were the windows like?  Like holes in the wall, mostly.  Poor homes might have few small windows, possibly with no covering at all, though some sort of rough wooden shutter on the outside (which may or may not have fit the space well) would have been likely.  Wealthier homes might have had barred windows on the ground floor, to guard against uninvited guests; other windows would have had external shutters, but this is still a bit early for many homes to have the ingenious, intricately-designed hinged and modular inside shutters that came along a bit later and allowed people to control air flow and light much more precisely than the binary, open-shut method that was all they had before.  Certainly no glass in home windows at this time, and even the stretched- and treated-cloth coverings would not have been common.  (That doesn't mean that clever people didn't jury-rig solutions that would have made their lives easier and more pleasant.) 

The house shown below (which is in Friuli) may well be medieval, but had it been in Florence, it almost certainly would not have had such a big window at the ground level.  I suspect that the window is not original to the building, though the stonework around it suggests that it may have been.

What about the kitchen?  Those who rented a single room didn't have one, obviously.  Some families rented more than one room in a building (though they were lucky if the rooms were on the same floor and near each other), but they often didn't have kitchen access, either.  Due to the ever-present danger of fire, kitchens at this time were typically located outside the house, in an area behind the building in a little outbuilding, to contain the risk of fire.  But this is also during the time when many homes, particularly the wealthier ones, were adding a kitchen at the top of the house (again, to minimize the risk of fire).  Rudimentary cooking could be accomplished over any sort of hearth, of course, and very few private homes had an oven (bakeries provided bread, or baked the bread and pies that cooks prepared at home and brought to the bakery or cookshop to be baked). 

Where do things get stored?  Items in barrels (wine, vinegar) are usually stored on the ground floor, an area which may be divided into storage rooms.  As the contents are required elsewhere in the house, people bring containers down and take what they need.  Hauling barrels full of liquid up to a kitchen in the top of the house is not a job anyone wants to tackle.  Grain and other relatively nonperishable comestibles can be stored practically anywhere.  It's not unusual to note in inventories that such supplies are stored in bedrooms.  Wherever there's room...  Clothing, household linens, and other items of value can be found in storage chests, which typically surround the bed or line up against the wall of the camera.  The one place you won't find things stored is in those overhanging jetties, or sporti, because they might not tolerate the extra weight.

Where does everybody sleep (including servants, if applicable)?  Depends on how many rooms they have.  Bedrooms are shared; beds are shared.  Bedrooms often have pallets as well as real beds; servants and children may sleep there, or there may be a sort of dormitory for the children in another chamber.  All combinations are possible.  By the way, even the great families at this time had very few servants in residence - perhaps two or three.  That doesn't mean they didn't hire other people for specific tasks:  hauling water, delivering wood, doing the laundry.

What's the house made of?  In Florence, probably brick.  If it's a wealthy person's house, it may have a stone facade.  It may even be built entirely of stone.  It's not unusual to see the first story of a house in stone, and the upper story (or stories) in somewhat less expensive materials.  Poor homes in Florence at this time are still made of wood.

What's the flooring made of?  Again, probably brick for the ground floor.  Depending on the strength of construction, wood or another lighter material may be used for subsequent stories. A poor person's wooden house probably had a dirt floor. 

What about decor?  This only applies to the wealthier homes, of course.  Walls are usually whitewashed; painted decorations may be added, done either freehand or with stencils.  These are most typically geometric patterns and figures.  See the detail and overview below of the Sala dei Pappagalli at the Palazzo Davanzati, a late 14th century palace in Florence, now a museum.  This palace was state-of-the-art a hundred years after our time period, but this particular style of decoration may not have changed much:

Palazzo Davanzati

The wall painting is done in such a way as to suggest a fabric drapery, and indeed wall hangings were an important part of decor on special occasions, but evidence suggests that they were safely stored in chests most of the time.

Floors in these more elaborate dwellings were more likely to have reed mats than scattered rushes, which were more of a country phenomenon at this time in Tuscany (or so say my sources).  Carpets might adorn benches, hang from windowsills on feast days, or cover tables, but they weren't likely to be on the floor.

***

That's it for Part I.  Join me next week for a look at some of the features of medieval houses that affected not only those who dwelt in the house, but the whole neighborhood:  source of water, how much room does the house take up on the street, what are the fire hazards, how did the residents dispose of waste, how did they get supplies into the house, and where did they park their horses?

Images in this post are in the public domain with the exception of the Palazzo Davanzati pictures, which are licensed to Sailko via the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license, the picture of the house in Macerata, which is licensed to Abraham via the same license, and the street scene (second picture), to which my husband Tim Heath holds copyright.