“Father abandoned child, wife husband, one brother another, for the plague seemed to strike through breath and sight. And so they died. And no one could be found to bury the dead, for money or friendship.” This was how Agnolo di Tura described the plague in 1350. Citizens of European towns felt they could not even trust their own family, afraid that the plague would catch simply through being near each other. This horrible sickness broke family ties and friendships through its destruction of entire cities and even countries. The black plague changed how people thought of each other, warped social constructs, and even forced some to commit horrible acts, such as the becchini. The becchini were a group of lower class men, usually sick with the plague themselves, that would cart bodies out of homes and bury them. But some of these men turned to despicable acts such as rape and murder, simply because those who were sick did not have the strength not fight them off. This group instilled fear in Europeans as the story traveled of savage men, assisting in keeping people off the streets and holed up in their homes or churches. This left them isolated from the rest of the town, which is what they thought would stop the spread of disease, but little did they know the disease was transported through their own homes, in the form of rats and fleas. With an estimated 75 to 200 million people dying of the black plague in just the years 1346-53, the disease affected every family in the regions it struck, including the lives of artists and writers. Most of them became preoccupied by death, personifying it as a dancing skeleton luring people to their grave or a thick black smoke, suffocating victims. Before 1346, the arts were conveniently focused on the happy lives of kings, popes and other rich aristocrats. The plague started a resurgence of social awareness, where people started writing and painting about the common man and his personal struggles. These works often had a pessimistic and fearful tone, with an underlying anger for the disease. They showed how “the dance of death” was inevitable, no matter how much money or power one had. Even though the times shaped and pushed art into a darker era, it also slowed it down considerably. Immediately after the outbreak started, all major art projects in
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In Florence, Italy, on of the biggest marketplaces in the country, many of the shops and factories were forced to shut down, which meant prices skyrocketed from shortages, leaving nearby cities and villages starving. To try and keep factories running, businessmen would offer larger wages and hire more of the lower class. This inevitably caused more inflation because suddenly the lower class had more spending money and sellers raised their prices accordingly. Hyperinflation was one of the biggest problems during the years the plague swept Europe, because it left some families to die from starvation, not disease. While the plague was an awful pandemic that took many lives, it did improve the lives and futures of the lower class, as their wages were permanently raised and the standard of living went up for all classes in the years after the
In Florence, Italy, on of the biggest marketplaces in the country, many of the shops and factories were forced to shut down, which meant prices skyrocketed from shortages, leaving nearby cities and villages starving. To try and keep factories running, businessmen would offer larger wages and hire more of the lower class. This inevitably caused more inflation because suddenly the lower class had more spending money and sellers raised their prices accordingly. Hyperinflation was one of the biggest problems during the years the plague swept Europe, because it left some families to die from starvation, not disease. While the plague was an awful pandemic that took many lives, it did improve the lives and futures of the lower class, as their wages were permanently raised and the standard of living went up for all classes in the years after the