As stalls in the marketplaces thinned and fewer products were allowed to enter, the dwindling inhabitants of towns and cities – at least the healthy ones – might have to leave their homes every day to see which meager foodstuffs had found their way through the gates. Except for them and the ever-present pregonero shouting aloud the city council’s most recent edicts, the streets were mostly empty. People must have been desolate and afraid as news, true and false, drifted in along with travelers lucky or able enough to squeeze past the guards. “A healthy, upright woman arrived here yesterday at eight in the morning, apparently from Valladolid,” wrote a correspondent from Salamanca, “and by eleven o’clock she had been buried.”1 Better to stay inside than to deal with that. Most artisans, whose workshops were usually in the interior of their homes or in the back but who sold out in front, adding noise and color to streets, were gone. There were no bills of mortality, but no lists were needed for people to know that neighbors had left, died, or had been moved to the hospital. As Defoe’s fictional protagonist remarked of London, “It was a most surprising thing, to see those Streets, which were usually so thronged, now grown desolate, and so few People to be seen in them.”2