Petrarch's Plague: Love, Death, and Friendship in a Time of Pandemic

Petrarch spoke on behalf of an entire generation of plague survivors, following the pandemic of 1346–53 and its periodic return. He skillfully wielded his pen to express his society’s collective grief in the most personal and meaningful ways, acknowledging the effect of so much pain and loss. In the immediate aftermath of the particularly devastating year of 1348, when plague engulfed the Italian peninsula, his good friend Giovanni Boccaccio in his Decameron sketched an indelible portrait of young Florentines fleeing their plague-ridden city to wait out the storm by telling one hundred tales.

 For his part, Petrarch documented the experience of plague over several decades, probing its changing effects on his psyche. The Black Death sharpened his sense of the sweetness and fragility of life in the face of the endemic reality of disease that came in so many different forms. He had big questions and was in search of answers.

“The year of 1348 left us alone and helpless", Petrarch declared at the very beginning of his Familiar Letters, his great project to share carefully selected versions of correspondence with friends. What was the meaning of life after so much death? Had it transformed him, or for that matter anyone, for the better? Could love and friendship survive plague? Petrarch’s questions allowed his readers to explore how they, too, felt about these things. He gave them permission to express such sentiments, indeed took up the burden, which was also his literary opportunity, to articulate the zeitgeist.

Petrarch was famously a self-professed wanderer who rarely stayed in one place very long. He alternated between periods of self-imposed isolation in the countryside and full immersion in the life of cities, even during the worst outbreaks of disease. This mobility made him an especially unique observer of how plague became a pandemic. At the end of November 1347, one month after Genoese ships brought plague to Messina, Petrarch was in Genoa.

Disease spread rapidly by land and sea — through rats and fleas, though at the time it was believed to be a product of the corruption of the air. Petrarch’s awareness of the course of this pandemic comes through clearly in a letter written from Verona on April 7, 1348, when he refused the invitation of a Florentine relative to return to his native Tuscany, citing “the plague of this year which has trampled and destroyed the entire world, especially along the coast”.

Returning several days later to Parma, still a plague-free zone, Petrarch learned that his relative the poet Franceschino degli Albizzi, on his way back from France, had died in the Ligurian port of Savona. Petrarch cursed the toll that “this pestilential year” was now exacting.4 He understood that the plague was spreading, yet perhaps this was the first time that the escalating mortality struck close to home. “I had not considered the possibility of his being about to die". Plague now touched him personally.

As the year progressed, Petrarch felt increasingly surrounded by fear, sorrow, and terror. Death came suddenly and repeatedly. In June, a friend who came to dinner was dead by morning, followed by the rest of the family in a matter of days. In the poem “To Himself”, an effort to capture the strangeness of this experience, Petrarch imagined a future that would not understand how awful it had been to be alive in “a city full of funerals” and empty homes.

Petrarch talked of retreating from the plague-infested cities with his closest friends. After bandits attacked two of them as they traveled from France into Italy, murdering one, nothing came of it. Perhaps the survivors recognized the folly of an idealistic plan that simply did not fit their dispersed circumstances. In July 1348, Petrarch’s most important patron, Cardinal Giovanni Colonna, died of plague, along with many members of this distinguished Roman family whom he served in Avignon. The poet was now out of a job, more restless and unmoored than ever.

Petrarch deeply mourned the “absence of friends".7 Friendship was his joy and his sorrow. He compensated for this loss by writing eloquent letters to the living as well as rereading his favorite missives to the deceased, preparing the best ones for publication. In an era of almost instantaneous communication via email, phone, and social media, it is easy to forget how important correspondence was as a technology to bridge social distance. Letters, as Petrarch’s ancient Roman hero Cicero famously declared, made the absent present.

The act of correspondence could also bring anguish. Petrarch worried about whether friends were still alive if they did not respond quickly. “Free me from these fears as soon as possible by a letter from you", Petrarch encouraged one of his closest friends, nicknamed Socrates (the Flemish Benedictine monk and cantor Ludwig van Kempen), in September 1348.9 He fretted that “the contagiousness of the recurring plague as well as the unhealthy air” might precipitate another untimely death. Communication may not have been swift but it was nonetheless effective and, ultimately, reassuring.

At the end of this awful year, Petrarch predicted that anyone who escaped the first assault should prepare for the viciousness of plague’s return. This was an astute and ultimately accurate observation. During the following year, Petrarch continued to enumerate plague victims as well as the cumulative effects of quarantine and depopulation. He wrote a poem commemorating the tragic death of Laura, a woman he had known and loved in southern France, only to discover that the person to which he’d sent the poem, the Tuscan poet Sennuccio del Bene, later died of plague as well.

This made Petrarch wonder if his words bore the contagion. Another sonnet was required. The act of writing, which had initially been impossibly painful, began to elevate his spirits. Life had become cruel and death unrelenting but he compensated by taking pen in hand — the only useful weapon he had besides prayer and the one he preferred. Others advised flight and proposed temporary public health measures such as quarantine, but Petrarch seems to have felt that he might think and write his way through this pandemic.

Everywhere he traveled, Petrarch observed the absence of people in the cities, the fields that lay fallow in the countryside, the disquiet of this “afflicted and nearly deserted world". By March 1349, he found himself in Padua. He was dining with the bishop one evening when two monks arrived with reports of a plague-ridden French monastery. The prior had shamefully fled and all but one of the thirty-five remaining monks were dead. This was how Petrarch discovered that his younger brother Gherardo, now celebrated for his courage and caring, was the sole survivor of this pestilential holocaust. 

The hermitage in Méounes-lès-Montrieux, which Petrarch visited in 1347 and wrote about in his work On Religious Leisure still exists today. He immediately wrote Gherardo to express fraternal pride in having a plague hero in the family. In October 1350, Petrarch moved on to Florence and it was here that he first met Boccaccio. By this time the city was no longer the epicenter of the pandemic, but its effects were still tangible, like a raw wound, or more accurately a lanced yet still pustulating bubo, that had not yet healed. Boccaccio was in the midst of drafting the Decameron. 

Although there is no record of the two writers discussing how to write about plague, we do know that Boccaccio avidly consumed Petrarch’s poetry and prose, copying lengthy passages in his notebooks at many different moments throughout a long friendship that lasted until their deaths one year apart. It was Petrarch’s early plague writing that spurred Boccaccio to complete his own take on how 1348 became the year their world changed.

Around 1351, Petrarch began to memorialize those whom he loved and lost by inscribing his recollections of them on the pages of a much-treasured possession — his copy of Virgil’s works adorned with a beautiful frontispiece by the Sienese painter Simone Martini. He began this practice of commemoration by recording the death — from three years earlier, in 1348 — of his beloved Laura, the subject of so many of his poems. Petrarch resolved to use every ounce of his eloquence to make her eternally present in his poetry but also in his Virgil. 

On its flyleaf, he inscribed these unforgettable words: “I decided to write down the harsh memory of this painful loss, and I did so, I suppose, with a certain bitter sweetness, in the very place that so often passes before my eyes". He did not want to forget the searing pain of this moment that awakened his soul and sharpened his consciousness of the passage of time. Boccaccio was among Petrarch’s friends who wondered if Laura ever existed outside of his poetic imagination, but he never questioned Petrarch’s determination to remember that year as transformative.

Among the other inscriptions in Petrarch’s Virgil — now held by the Ambrosian Library in Milan — is notice of the death of his twenty-four-year-old son Giovanni on July 10, 1361 in Milan, “in that publicly ruinous though unusual outbreak of plague, one that found and fell upon that city, which up to that point had been immune to such evils". Spared the devastation of the first wave of plague, Milan — where Petrarch had been living since 1353 — became the focal point of a second pandemic in 1359–63. By 1361, Petrarch had left for Padua, but his son stubbornly chose to remain behind.

In 1361, after his son’s death, Petrarch once again took up his pen. He began his Letters of Old Age, his second collection of correspondence, with a letter to a Florentine friend Francesco Nelli bemoaning the loss of his beloved friend Socrates. Socrates had been the person who informed Petrarch of Laura’s passing, and Petrarch added a note in his copy of Virgil about this latest plague death to pierce his heart. In his Letters of Old Age, he wrote: “I had complained that the year 1348 of our era had deprived me of nearly every consolation in life because of my friends’ deaths.

Now what shall I do in the sixty-first year of this century?”12 Petrarch observed that the second pandemic was worse, nearly emptying out Milan and many other cities. He was now determined to write in a different voice, no longer lamenting but actively combatting fortune’s adversity. During this second pandemic, Petrarch launched a fierce critique of the role that astrologers played in explaining plague’s return and predicting its course. He considered their self-proclaimed truths to be largely accidental: “Why do you feign futile prophecies after the fact or call chance truths?”

He chastised friends and patrons who revisited their horoscopes, considering them a false science predicated on the misuse of astronomical data. As plague spread through the urban centres, a physician friend encouraged the poet to flee to the country air of Lake Maggiore, but Petrarch refused to succumb to terror. Remaining in cities, he began to spend the bulk of his time between Padua and Venice. When plague reached the Venetian Republic, friends renewed their entreaties, leading Petrarch to comment: “it has very often happened that a flight from death is a flight to death".

Boccaccio came to visit and decided not to tell him of their mutual friend Nelli’s demise, leaving Petrarch to discover his most recent loss when letters returned, unopened. Plague returned to Florence in the summer of 1363. In this heightened atmosphere of renewed anxiety, Petrarch redoubled his criticisms of astrologers who deluded the living with predictions of when the latest pandemic would end. An anxious populace hung on their every word. “We do not know what is happening in the heavens", he fumed in a letter to Boccaccio in September, “but impudently and rashly they profess to know".

A pandemic was a business opportunity for astrologers who peddled their words to “parched minds and thirsty ears". Petrarch was hardly alone in pointing out that the astrologers' conclusions had no basis in astronomical data or the spread of disease. They sold false hope and certainty in the marketplace. Petrarch longed for a more reasoned response to pandemic with better tools than the science of the stars.

What then of medicine? Petrarch was famously skeptical about physicians who claimed too much certainty and authority. He believed that physicians needed to acknowledge their own ignorance as a first step towards knowing anything. Ignorance itself was “pestiferous”, a disease to be rooted out and eradicated even if there was no vaccine. While professing great respect for the art of healing, he had no patience with what he slyly dubbed “pestilential incompetence” in his Invectives against the Physician. Plague alone did not reveal medicine’s failure but it brought its limits into stark relief.

Petrarch befriended some of the most famous physicians of his age and stubbornly debated their advice regarding his own health as he aged. “When today I see young and healthy doctors falling ill and dying everywhere, what do you tell others to hope for?”Petrarch expressed this sentiment in a letter to the famous Paduan physician and inventor Giovanni Dondi upon hearing of the premature death of the Florentine physician Tommaso del Garbo in 1370.

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