The city in times of plague: preventive and eradication measures against epidemic outbreaks in Évora between 1579 and 1637 (original) (raw)

2006, Popolazione Popolazione e Storia 2

Death, panic, devastation, segregation, poverty, extreme scarcity, social disorder, the interruption of everyday life and isolation are some of the different definitions for the plague and plague outbreaks. Omnipresent in Europe throughout three centuries ever since the Black Death first arrived in southern Italy in 1347, the plague altered both behaviours and attitudes, ruined powerful masters and consolidated the assets of religious institutions, destroyed the financial power of many towns, facilitating the consolidation of royal power there, propitiated revolts and brought about feelings of rejection and condemnation of the poor, progressively and dangerously associated with the propagation of the disease . Phenomenon of devastating consequences that disorganized the economic and social life of the people affected for long periods of time, the plague epidemics also originated the development of new forms of organization in the cities it touched, propitiating the constitution of new powers and power groups that germinated and became stronger in an attempt to fight the disease. The Italian model – or at least the one shared by most Italian states – for the control and eradication of the plague based on the intervention of central governments, economically strong and with an already constituted bureaucratic system, would be subsequently imported to England, some time later to France and Spain, although in the last two countries the local authorities would play a main role in the battle against the disease, preceding the intervention of the central government, namely through the creation of the so-called ‘Health Boards’ . What I propose in this paper, after identifying the general guidelines of the national public assistance system, is to contemplate the Portuguese reality in the light of the findings of a case study, focused in Évora, between 1579 and 1637. From the point of view of social history, the main aim of this essay is to evaluate both the impact that different forms of political interventions achieved in the battle against the spread of the plague and the efforts to control it. Given their specificity, once the analysis goes back to the year just before the beginning of the Spanish rule in Portugal, the chronological scale allows the superposition of several crisis layouts. Which means that the interventions mentioned here were done by the Crown in a context of violent outbreaks of the plague, that occurred in moments of special difficulty for the royal power: the end of the House of Avis and the loss of the Portuguese independence (the plague of 1579-1580); the establishment of the Habsburg House and the consolidation of the Spanish authority (the plague of 1582-1583); the crisis of the last years of the kingdom of Philip II, the increase of the fiscal pressure and opposition against the ‘invaders’ (the plague of 1598-1603); civil risings and the preliminary steps for the Restoration (the plague of Malaga, in 1637). Despite the fact that the present study is circumscribed to Évora, the generalizations proposed in this text are justified by the characteristics of the system under study.