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October 1347 - July 1348Reputable source · 2 sourcesWell documented

The Black Death Kills More Than a Third of Florence

Plague-carrying ships from the Crimea land in Sicily and spread ruin across Italy within a year

On the timeline · around October 1347 - July 1348 · Medieval Italy and the City-StatesMedieval Italy and the City-StatesRenaissance and Foreign RuleThe Black Death Kills More Than a Third of Florence105011501250135014501500

Quick facts

First Italian landfall
Messina, Sicily, October 1347
Reaches Florence
March 1348
Florence deaths (1348 outbreak)
More than 100,000
Florence population, 1338 to 1351
c. 120,000 down to c. 50,000

What happened

Sicily and the Italian peninsula were the first parts of Catholic Western Europe reached by the bubonic plague pandemic known as the Black Death, which arrived on merchant ships fleeing the Crimea and landed at Messina in October 1347. From Sicily the disease spread north through the peninsula, reaching Pisa, then Florence by March 1348, where it raged until July of that year. More than 100,000 people are believed to have died inside Florence's walls in that single outbreak, and the city's population fell from around 120,000 to about 50,000 between 1338 and 1351. The Florentine writer Giovanni Boccaccio, whose stepmother died in the outbreak and whose father, a finance official, likely died of it the following year, used the plague in Florence as the frame for his story collection the Decameron, a portrait of the disease's social effects that historians still treat as broadly accurate even though the surrounding stories are fiction.

Why it matters

The Black Death killed a larger share of Italy's urban population than almost any event before or since, and the resulting labor shortages reshaped wages, land tenure, and social structure across the peninsula's city-states for a generation. Italy's early and severe exposure to the plague, arriving first because of the same Mediterranean trade networks that had made cities such as Genoa and Venice wealthy, makes its outbreak one of the best-documented anywhere in Europe.

How we know

The plague's arrival at Messina in 1347 and its spread to Florence by 1348 are corroborated by multiple contemporary eyewitness chroniclers, including Boccaccio, Marchionne di Coppo Stefani, and Agnolo di Tura, each independently describing the outbreak in their own cities.

Sources

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Part of a timelineHistory of Italy27 events · A peninsula that fractured into rival kingdoms and city-states after Rome fell, then spent thirteen centuries putting itself back together as one countryView all →