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Setting the World on Fire
The Brief, Astonishing Life of St. Catherine of Siena
By Shelley Emling St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2016 Shelley Emling
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-7919-5
CHAPTER 1
A Bright Little Girl
For the residents of Tuscany, the year 1348 must have felt like the end of the world. Even from nearly 5,000 miles away, by way of merchants traveling along the ancient international passageway known as the Silk Road, the Italians heard rumblings of something sinister percolating in central Asia that would soon test the faith of even the most faithful like nothing ever had before. The fourteenth-century plague — or the Black Death, as it would later be called — wiped out nearly one-third of the people of China before the rest of the world knew what was coming. Tracking very precisely the medieval trade routes across the Black Sea and into the Mediterranean that brought European customers silk, porcelain and other goods, the plague first descended on Europe in 1345–1346 with the Mongol attack on the city of Kaffa, a bustling seaport on the Crimean Peninsula. During the siege, some members of the Mongol army became infected with the plague. When comrades died, the Mongols lobbed the bodies over the city's walls, an early version of biological warfare. Some infected sailors — covered in mysterious black boils — managed to flee in Genoese trading ships bound for Italy. When the ships docked at the port of Messina on the island of Sicily in October 1347, citizens were aghast at all the dying sailors who were aboard. Acting fast, the Italians banished the ships back out to sea — but it was too late. At least some of the very ill, as one chronicler put it, had already tumbled out of the galleys "with sickness clinging to their very bones." One of the greatest scourges of all time had arrived.
Europe was a perfect breeding ground for the disease. Densely populated cities — the number of European inhabitants shot up from 38 million to 74 million in the three centuries leading up to 1300 — only accelerated its circulation. Unsanitary conditions pervaded the medieval continent with many streets nothing more than meandering cesspools of fetid water. Butchers slaughtered animals outdoors, leaving the unusable scraps for dogs and cats to fight over. Bathrooms were a curious luxury. Most people used chamber pots that were emptied into open sewers, which usually fed into nearby rivers and creeks. Lice and bugs played no favorites, swarming in the homes of both the rich and the poor. The stench of cities was so bad that some people held scented handkerchiefs to their noses to keep from vomiting.
After striking Sicily in 1347, the plague followed a circular path through Europe. Droves of people across Italy, France, England, Germany, eastern Europe and even Russia collapsed like dominoes before the disease finally exhausted itself in 1351. In London alone, nearly half the population — perhaps 40,000 people — perished during the 18 months between the fall of 1348 and the spring of 1350. Medical knowledge was sorely lacking, and people knew nothing about contagious diseases. The only thing people knew with 100 percent certainty was that a harrowing sequence of symptoms came on swiftly, followed by certain death 24 to 48 hours later. The first sign was sneezing (hence the origin of the phrase "God bless you," a protective charm designed to save the sneezer from evil). And they knew there was no cure.
The epidemic was so rampant and spread so fast that dazed family members had no choice but to walk out on each other as soon as any one of them exhibited even a hint of fever, chills, headache or weakness. Lawyers refused to draw up wills for the infected. Doctors refused to see patients. Parents shunned their own children; children shunned their parents. Shop owners closed stores. Existing societal and economic structures came unraveled faster than you could say "Pope Clement." As a result, multitudes of the sick were abandoned without any care. With towns reporting hundreds of deaths every day, people perished without the benefit of last rites or the confession of sins, a prospect that must have horrified medieval Christians who didn't want to risk missing out on heaven. So scarce were priests, themselves wiped out in great numbers, that people were allowed to make confessions to laymen or, in a worst-case scenario, to women. With bloated bodies piling up in the streets, Pope Clement VI had no choice but to consecrate the entire Rhône River, which instantly transformed it into a holy place to lay the dead. Soon a perpetual stream of corpses drifted slowly into the Mediterranean Sea. Those bodies lucky enough to be buried in the ground — often by desperate members of the lowest class who were paid sky-high wages — were stacked on top of each other, separated by thin layers of clay, "just as one makes lasagna with layers of pasta and cheese," in the words of one chronicler.
In a century in which nothing traveled faster than the speediest horse, the extent of the plague's contagious power couldn't have been more jarring. Whole families were wiped out in one fell swoop. In enclosed communities such as prisons, convents and monasteries, the infection of one generally spelled the demise of the entire institution. One observer wrote about plague victims eating lunch with their friends and "dinner with their ancestors in paradise." It's no wonder then that, at least for a few somber years, millions of people began to seriously contemplate the end of civilization and, with it, the extinction of the human race.
The chaos gave rise to various bizarre movements, including a group of Christian men known as the Brotherhood of the Flagellants, which flourished despite the church's considerable efforts to tamp it down. These zealots believed the disease was God's retribution against a sinful world that had long ago lost its moral footing. In their desire to appease him, the Flagellants marched barefoot throughout Europe's biggest cities, beating their backs and shoulders with weighted scourges until blood soaked through their white robes and dripped down their legs. Anyone unfortunate enough to witness this public manifestation of self-sacrifice was horrified. The Flagellants were extremely anti-Semitic — but they were far from the only ones. Outbursts of hateful anti-Semitism were common even before the disease, and the apocryphal nature of the plague sparked even more virulent attacks against Jews — already isolated outsiders. To some, the only plausible explanation for death on so massive a scale was human wickedness. Surely, they contended, someone must be behind the spread of the plague, perhaps by poisoning the wells, and who better to blame than vindictive Jews dead-set on killing Christians and dominating the world? Everyone seemed to overlook the fact that the death toll held steady for all segments of the population — Jews included. Panic reigned supreme, and everybody was looking for a scapegoat.
The Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio lived through the epidemic and gave a chilling description of the toll the disease took:
The symptoms were not the same as in the East, where a gush of blood from the nose was the plain sign of inevitable death; but it began both in men and women with certain swellings in the groin or under the armpit. They grew to the size of a small apple or an egg, more or less, and were vulgarly called tumors. In a short space of time, these tumors spread from the two parts named all over the body. Soon after this the symptoms changed and black or purple spots appeared on the arms or thighs or any other part of the body, sometimes a few large ones, sometimes many little ones. These spots were a certain sign of death, just as the original tumor had been and still remained.
No doctor's advice, no medicine could overcome or alleviate this disease. An enormous number of ignorant men and women set up as doctors in addition to those who were trained. Either the disease was such that no treatment was possible or the doctors were so ignorant that they did not know what caused it, and consequently could not administer the proper remedy. In any case very few recovered; most people died within about three days of the appearance of the tumors described above.
The plague's greatest blow to the medieval Christian way of thinking, he noted, was the idea of being buried far away from one's own church and family.
"Such was the multitude of corpses brought to the churches every day and almost every hour that there was not enough consecrated ground to give them burial, especially since they wanted to bury each person in the family grave, according to old custom. Although the cemeteries were full they were forced to dig huge trenches, where they buried the bodies by hundreds. Here they stowed them away like bales in the hold of a ship and covered them with a little earth, until the whole trench was full."
By 1353, the pandemic had carried off anywhere from 25 percent to 60 percent of Europe's population. The Black Death was originally thought to be an epidemic of the bubonic plague, caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis and contracted from infected fleas living on rats. However, scientists from Public Health England in 2014 drew a stunning new conclusion: the disease that decimated Europe in 1348 moved so quickly that it must also have been airborne, spread from person to person through coughing, sneezing or breathing. In other words, the plague actually may have been pneumonic — not bubonic.
Airborne or not, the plague turned life into a grim, grisly battle for the people of Tuscany. As one might expect, the elderly and the very young were especially likely to succumb to infection, with newborn children the most vulnerable. Some 50 to 60 percent of all Tuscans perished. In Siena alone, the population plummeted from 42,000 before the plague to around 14,000 by 1350. But as indiscriminate as the Black Death was, the disease somehow managed to skip over at least a few very fortunate households — including one in Siena headed by a kindhearted wool dyer and his spirited wife — almost as if by divine providence.
Somehow the God-fearing dyer Giacomo di Benincasa and his outspoken bride, Lapa di Puccio di Piagente, the daughter of a businessman and a poet of some renown, survived the catastrophe mostly unscathed. They lived and worked in a fairly spacious three-story house — one that still stands today — in which Giacomo's workshop was also located on the bottom floor. Built against the side of a hill on Via dei Tintori, or the Street of Dyers, the home was close to the Fontebranda, the oldest and most impressive of the fountains supplying fresh water to the town. Sitting in the shadow of the Basilica of San Domenico, the fountain had been rebuilt, entirely in brick, in 1246. The couple needed a house with lots of space — even the family name means "well-housed" — as they were raising a large brood of active boys and girls. By the time Catherine and her twin sister, Giovanna, came along, born in a second-floor bedroom on March 25, 1347, Lapa, then age 40, already had given birth to 22 other children, a massive number by today's standards and considered unusually large even in the 1300s. The date of Catherine's birth was an auspicious one as it not only marked the beginning of the new year but was also the day the Catholic Church celebrated the Feast of the Annunciation. Indeed, before the advent of the Gregorian calendar in 1582, March 25 was celebrated as the day of Christ's conception, nine months before his birth on December 25. Catherine's birth also came 120 years after the death of St. Francis of Assisi — often described as Catherine's brother in spirit — in the arms of Lady Poverty, which is how he described his life of extreme austerity.
Lapa could nurse only one of her new twins, so sickly little Giovanna was placed in the care of a wet nurse, while the charmed Catherine was weaned on her mother's milk. Since so many pregnancies had forced Lapa to hand her babies off to other women, Catherine became the first infant Lapa had been able to successfully breastfeed. Years later, Lapa would concede that Catherine had been her favorite child. Giovanna died in infancy, and Lapa went on to have one more baby, a girl named Giovanna in memory of Catherine's twin. But she died when Catherine was 16, in 1363. In general, though, Giocomo and Lapa were fortunate to have the chance to bring up even one-third of their children at a time when the infant mortality rate was exceptionally high.
In Siena, Giacomo was known for being kind, smart, honest and markedly mild-mannered — so much so that he sometimes annoyed his vociferous wife. Once, when he refused to make extortion payments demanded of him by a conniving competitor, Giacomo opted to suffer slander rather than utter even one bad word against the man. When Lapa denounced the person to her husband, Giacomo replied, "Leave him be in peace. You will see that God will show him his fault and protect us." And, as Lapa later revealed, that's exactly what happened. The man apologized and cleared the family's good name. This kind of generous, soft-hearted demeanor helped Giacomo become a well-liked and somewhat prominent businessman and a full member of the cliquish wool guild, an affinity that was no trivial matter. As a member, he was allowed to vote in state elections and hold public office. During these years, the export trade was inextricably linked with wool, and dyeing was an important cog in the wheel of a prosperous local economy. Indeed, wool was the most popular material for clothing, mostly because it could hold dye so well. No doubt the importance of wool was one of the reasons friends and family held Giacomo in such high esteem. Lapa, too, was revered, coming from an established merchant family. From what we know, Giacomo and Lapa made a good team. Whereas she was impulsive and loud — and lived to be nearly 100 — he was practical and calm and died when he was middle-aged.
Of Catherine's siblings, her brother Bartolomeo made the most fortuitous union by marrying Lisa Colombini, the pious niece of Giovanni Colombini, one of the most fascinating characters ever to come out of Siena. In midlife, this wealthy merchant suddenly found God, becoming so deeply religious that he handed all his belongings over to charity so that he might live a life of abject poverty. Wearing little more than rags, he crisscrossed Tuscany, preaching against the evils of money. He tended the sick, donated to charity and turned his home into a refuge for the poor — all of which won him a loyal fan base. Catherine would go on to become very close to her sister-in-law Lisa as well as being one of Giovanni's biggest supporters.
The prosperous decades enjoyed by the Benincasa family leading up to Catherine's birth mirrored those of Siena, which boasted a pre-plague population of well over 40,000 in 1347. Northern and central Italy as a whole was flourishing, being on the trade route between the eastern Mediterranean and northern Europe. Siena — a heavily fortified hub in the heart of the Tuscan countryside 30 miles south of Florence — and the other cities of the region grew in wealth as they acquired more and more of the land surrounding them. Eventually these so-called city-states became in effect independent — and competitive. Indeed, these centers of population expended a substantial amount of energy trying to one-up each other, in both military and economic terms. Culturally, too, the Tuscan region played a decisive role in the birth of the Italian Renaissance some five decades later. Home to artists, writers and philosophers, including Dante Alighieri, Francesco Petrarch and Giovanni Boccaccio, the region helped revolutionize art and literature. When it came to language, the Tuscan dialect was the one that emerged dominant in Italy's political and cultural circles by the fourteenth century. Although Italian first showed up in written documents during the tenth century — usually in notes inserted into Latin documents — there was for a long time no standard written or spoken language in Italy. Therefore, writers had two options: they could write in Latin or in their own regional dialect. It was the dialect of the culturally important Florence that would become the basis of the modern Italian language. Incidentally, Catherine was the first woman to write in that powerful Florence vernacular, or the popular spoken language of the region.
To Siena's south was Rome, the first city in the world to exceed a population of one million. But by the fourteenth century, even it paled in comparison to the brightness of its northern neighbors. Although the city reigned supreme in Europe for more than 1,000 years, it was by the 1300s nothing but a shadow of its former self, with a crumbling infrastructure and its famed Colosseum and other once-beautiful monuments in various states of disrepair. In comparison with Rome, Siena and the other cities of northern and central Italy were on an upward trajectory toward unrivaled social, political and economic success. This entire region with its formidable wool industry and bankers who were known to be masters of international commerce was thriving. A new commercial class was flush with material goods — and optimism about the future. Accelerated immigration from the countryside infused the economy with much-needed laborers. So many residents of surrounding villages poured into Siena that the city was soon bursting at the seams. To at least some financial experts, this time — in this place — gave impetus to capitalist market ideology. Historians, too, often describe the Renaissance that began in the late 1300s as the start of modern history, for it was during this period that many of the traits of contemporary modern Western society took shape.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Setting the World on Fire by Shelley Emling. Copyright © 2016 Shelley Emling. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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