Messina, Sicily. Autumn, 1347.
The plague came in on Genoese galleys. Messina expelled the ships, but it was already too late. As the mortality deepened, the Franciscan friar Michele da Piazza watched the city divide into two — “the city of the infected, a municipality of pain and despair, and the city of the uninfected, where fear and hate ruled.”
Churches and shops fell silent. Beaches emptied. Fishing boats lay idle. The streets went quiet.
And then the bonds went.
“The disease bred such loathing,” Friar Michele wrote, “that if a son fell ill … his father flatly refused to stay with him.”
Many in Messina died that autumn without a parent or a child beside them, without a priest to hear confession, without a notary to write a will. Every institution that had organized life in that city — family, parish, law — simply stopped functioning, not because it was abolished but because the people who constituted it walked away.
Friar Michele recorded one exception:
“Cats and … livestock followed their master to death.”
Only Messina’s animals maintained the old traditions of loyalty and faithfulness.
The same thing, a year later, in Florence. Boccaccio watched it happen in a city a visiting Venetian had once called “a clean, beautiful, happy place”:
“It was not merely a question of one citizen avoiding another … this scourge had implanted such a great terror in the hearts of men and women that brothers abandoned brothers, uncles their nephews, sisters their brothers, and in many cases, wives deserted husbands. But even worse, and almost incredible, was the fact that fathers and mothers refused to nurse and assist their own children, as though they did not belong to them.”
Those who fell ill, he wrote, were left to “the charity of friends, who were few and far between.”
Source: John Kelly, The Great Mortality — in-vault full text. Friar Michele da Piazza on Messina; Boccaccio’s account is from the introduction to the Decameron.
What it argues
Connection is an achievement, not a background condition. We talk about friendship and community as though they’re the default state that modern life is eroding — as if leaving people alone would let it regrow. Medieval Florence had every institution a Putnam reader could want: parish, guild, extended kin, neighbours who knew your name for four generations. It dissolved in months.
Two ways to use it, and they point opposite directions — pick deliberately:
- For the thesis: social bonds are load-bearing structures that can fail completely and fast. Treating them as automatic is how you end up surprised.
- Against the thesis, honestly: if thick medieval community collapsed under pressure anyway, “rebuild third places” may be a weaker remedy than it sounds. Raise this yourself before an opponent does.
The line that lands is the animals. It’s the only sentence in either account that produces a physical reaction in a listener — and it works because the reversal is complete: the creatures with no concept of duty were the only ones who kept it. → Loss of Connection - Position Card
Pairs with
The Gates of Hamburg — Altona 1713: refugees refused entry to Hamburg for fear of infection, died outside the walls. Same mechanism, 365 years apart.