Expelling the Plague

Along with Florence, Mantua, Milan, and Venice, historians credit Dubrovnik (also called Ragusa) with implementing the earliest recorded plague control measures. These fourteenth- and fifteenth-century legislative actions—including quarantines, Health Offices, plague hospitals, and sanitary cordons—were adopted much later in northern Europe and, according to some historians, may have contributed to the eventual disappearance of large-scale plague epidemics on the continent. The historiography of early plague legislation focuses on the aristocratic Italian city-states and, since Dubrovnik was for a time under Venetian rule, it has been easy to assume that what transpired in one also transpired in the other. Dubrovnik's history and political culture, however, differed significantly from that of the Italian city-states. So too did the impetuses behind its plague control efforts. In Expelling the Plague, Zlata Blažina Tomić and Vesna Blažina have dug deep into the archival records to generate a wealth of evidence that exposes these differences. Their study utilizes the rich State Archives of Dubrovnik—including the deliberation records of the city's governing councils, its legislative books, and a unique manuscript of detailed health records covering the 1500–1530 period—as well as contemporary chronicles and scholarly Croatian works. Taken together, the archives, many of which were transcribed and translated for this book, provide detailed, day-by-day accounts of Ragusan authorities' understanding, deliberation, and management of the plague between 1377 and 1533. They reveal not only the names and motivations of the patricians responsible for developing and enacting plague control regulations but also the identities, occupations, and stories of commoners unfortunate enough to have run afoul of them. Tomić and Blažina successfully weave the individual and communal narratives and, in doing so, reframe our understanding of how ordinary people lived their lives in a city that faced centuries of recurrent epidemics.

Ancient history · Archaeology · Deliberation · Fifteenth · Genealogy · Geography · Historiography · Legislature · Plague (disease) · Political science · Politics · Quarantine · State (computer science) · History · History of Medicine Studies · Law · Medicine · Yersinia bacterium, plague, ectoparasites research