The Decameron as a landmark of world literature

Boccaccio's Decameron was occasioned by the greatest natural disaster in European history: the Black Death, a combination of bubonic, pneumonic, and septicaemic plague strains which, between 1347 and 1351, killed off between one quarter and one half of the European population. Millions also died in China and India; the entire Islamic world was engulfed by the plague by 1349 and one third of its population perished. By the late spring of 1350 between 35 percent and 40 percent (perhaps as many as 50 percent) of Londoners had died. Avignon, then the home of the papacy, buried 11,000 people in a single graveyard in one six-week period, lost at least one third of its cardinals and half its population. Scandinavia lost half of its people, Iceland perhaps 60 percent; Christian settlement in Greenland came to an end altogether. Estimates of the deathrate in Boccaccio's Florence range from 45 percent to 75 percent. Boccaccio saw his own father and his stepmother die. Suddenly, at the age of thirty-five (the mid-life age, nel mezzo del cammin, at which Dante stages the journey of his Commedia) Boccaccio found himself head of his own household in a city where the familiar forms of civilized life (which for a Florentine were synonymous with civic life) had come to an end.