Plague At Pistia

No Plague at Pistoia Pistoia, which was a city that was affected by the plague, created a set of ordinances to stop the spreading of the plague. On May second of 1348, Pistoia’s government forced twenty-three ordinances onto the citizens of Pistoia which became known as the Ordinances Against the Spread of Plague at Pistoia. In this paper, I will be demonstrating why some of these ordinances are counterproductive because they are too strict on the citizens of Pistoia, they are unnecessary due to the conditions of the plague, and some of the ordinances are common sense rules that would not typically be broken in the first place. These three issues are crucial details which prove that many of these ordinances set by government of Pistoia
They set rules that appeared to punish the citizens of Pistoia; the citizens even had to pay a penalty for each ordinance that they did not follow. The extreme harshness of these ordinances can be seen in ordinance number twelve which stated, “No one shall dare or presume to raise a lament or crying for anyone who has died outside Pistoia, or summon a gathering of people other than the kinsfolk and spouse of the deceased, or have bells rung, or use criers or any other means to invite people throughout the city to such a gathering; penalty 25 pence from each person involved” (450). There is absolutely no reason for people not being able to cry or too feel sorrow for the death of somebody who has passed away outside of Pistoia. It was also unnecessarily strict for the government of Pistoia to make the citizens pay a fine of twenty-five pence if they did not follow this ordinance. Another reason that these ordinances were too strict was because people were having to adjust the way they lived to be able to follow these ordinances. Ordinance number eight states, “To avoid waste and unnecessary expense, no one shall dare or presume to wear new clothes during the mourning period or for the the next eight days; penalty 25 pence. This shall not apply to the wife of the deceased, who may if she wished wear a new garment of any fabric without penalty” (449). The government
These ordinances were pointless and they should have never been an ordinance. Ordinance number five states, “No one, of whatever condition, status, or standing, shall dare or presume to bring a corpse into the city, whether coffined or not; penalty 25 pence. And the guards at the gates shall not allow such bodies to be brought into the city; same penalty, to be paid by every guard responsible for the gate through which the body was brought” (449). This was probably never an issue in the first place. I could be assumed that nobody in their right mind would have brought a dead body into the city of Pistoia during the plague. Also, some of these ordinances seemed like they had already been ordinances way before the plague. Ordinance number four states, “To avoid the foul stench which comes from dead bodies each grave shall be dug two and a half arms lengths deep, as this is reckoned in Pistoia; penalty 10 pence from anyone digging or ordering the digging of a grave which infringes the statute” (449). They should have been doing this way before the plague anyway. Just because it is the plague does not mean you have to dig deeper. Dead bodies are dead bodies; they are all going to