Giovanni Boccaccio's Tragic Plague: The Black Death

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The Black Death was a horrific plague that spread across all of Europe, and killed millions of people during 1347 to 1351. It is one of the biggest disasters in European history. It effected all aspects of peoples lives and the country they lived in. An Italian writer named Giovanni Boccaccio wrote about his experience first hand, which is when the plague was sweeping through Florence. I found his writing and thoughts very intriguing. Giovanni and many other authors write about the demographic disaster and how they viewed it. Any article, historian, or author will talk about how it severely impacted the economy, society, and pretty much everything and anything. These catastrophic events destroyed the country and people in it. The disaster…show more content…
Families would fall apart. Once infected with the plague you were on your own, no matter if you were just a young boy or an old woman. People did not want to help because they were scared for their own lives. There was no such thing as friends anymore, only the dead and the living. There were no more families, neighbors, or married couples. Even a mother would not want to help a daughter infected. Something else I found very striking was how people would die and how they would look. In the article written by Giovanni he states, “the emergence of certain tumors in the groin or armpits, some of which grew as large as a common apple, others as an egg, some less, some more.” This sounds horrific and just a terrible way to die. It then says that the tumors would propagate and spread in directions throughout the whole body. Later symptoms of black dots would appear on the infected and in no less then three days the sick would be…show more content…
There were major consequences that followed the plague. First thing was the only thing that people had left and that was religion. It did not matter what you believed in because once the plague struck there was no more believing, no more God, and certainly no more hope. The economy completely crumbled for the sole purpose of no one caring anymore. People did not care about money, land, and other people anymore because they just wanted to stay alive. Nothing mattered anymore, the only thing that did was survival by any cost. Everyone was on their own and it was survival of the fittest and even then people still
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