In her essay ‘Universal and Particular: The Language of Plague, 1348–1350’, Ann Carmichael looked at a large collection of chronicles and physicians’ texts to see how writers described plague as an epidemic illness. This chapter adapts Carmichael’s approach to explore ideas of epidemic illness before the Black Death arrived. This approach helps modern scholars to consider how contemporaries revised previous ideas of the causes of epidemics when faced with the first wave of the Second Plague Pandemic.

Rather than study an array of texts as Carmichael did, this chapter focuses instead on one influential chronicle – the last book of Giovanni Villani’s New Chronicle – to unpack this author’s complex understanding of the interconnectedness of warfare, sin and the movement of planets as causes or indicators of epidemic disease. My intention here is neither to investigate what actually transpired on the ground nor to take a broad approach to how the mechanics of warfare generated and spread disease. Rather, my interest is in teasing apart the perceptions of one influential writer in fourteenth-century Italy to see how disease was linked to warfare through the lens of sin, astrology and natural disaster in the years and months leading up to the Black Death. In other words, Villani did not make the kind of direct association between warfare and epidemic disease that we might immediately recognise; rather, to him the two were the linked results of an unfortunate entanglement of aristocratic sin in the shadow of a malevolent planetary conjunction.

Villani’s New Chronicle and epidemic disease: setting the stage

Giovanni Villani came from a banking family in Florence. Born in 1280, he died in 1348 during the Black Death. For more than twenty years, he worked on the New Chronicle, a universal history whose final book covers the early to mid-fourteenth century. Scholars consider Villani’s text to be an important example of Florentine historical writing in the vernacular. As it was for many writers of his time, for Villani the political and natural worlds were not separate. Famines, floods and earthquakes were equally devastating as military defeat, and each reflected God’s judgment on the affected parties. A strong thread of morality, linked to Fortune’s wheel and God’s punishment, runs through Villani’s book as it explores the activities of political leaders in the city of Florence and far beyond.