Petrarch's War Florence and the Black Death in Context

This revisionist account of the economic, literary and social history of Florence in the immediate aftermath of the Black Death connects warfare with the plague narrative. Organised around Petrarch's 'war' against the Ubaldini clan of 1349–1350, which formed the prelude to his meeting and friendship with Boccaccio, William Caferro's work examines the institutional and economic effects of the war, alongside literary and historical patterns. Caferro pays close attention to the meaning of wages in context, including those of soldiers, thereby revising our understanding of wage data in the distant past and highlighting the consequences of a constricted workforce that resulted in the use of cooks and servants on important embassies. Drawing on rigorous archival research, this book will stimulate discussion among academics and offers a new contribution to our understanding of Renaissance Florence. It stresses the importance of short-termism and contradiction as subjects of historical inquiry.

Introduction: plague in context: Florence 1349–50; 1. Petrarch's war; 2. The practice of war and the Florentine army; 3. Economy of war at a time of plague; 4. Plague, soldiers' wages, and the Florentine public workforce; 5. The bell ringer travels to Avignon, the cook goes to Hungary: towards an understanding of the Florentine labor force, 1349–50; Epilogue: why two years matter (and the short-term is not inconsistent with the long-term).

William Caferro is Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of History and Professor of Classics and Mediterranean Studies at Vanderbilt University, Tennessee. He has held fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, Villa I Tatti in Florence and the Italian Academy at Columbia University and, in 2010, he received a Simon R. Guggenheim fellowship. He has written widely on medieval and Renaissance Italy, including Mercenary Companies and the Decline of Siena (1998), The Spinelli of Florence: Fortunes of a Renaissance Merchant Family (2001), John Hawkwood: An English Mercenary in Fourteenth-Century Italy (2006), which won the Otto Gründler Award from the International Medieval Congress, and Contesting the Renaissance (2010).