As Maximus, first bishop of Turin, wrote in the early fifth century, “the martyrs protect us while we live in our bodies and take care of us after we have left our bodies. The well-to-do sought burial inside the church, usually under the floor or in a crypt, preferably as close to the altar as possible, since the bodies of saints or some of their relics were enshrined at or in the altars of churches, and the faithful wished to be buried in proximity to them. As in other cultures, medieval Christians were often interred with jewelry and emblems attesting to their rank and their faith excavated tombs have yielded important treasures ( 17.192.145 95.15.79). In the Christian kingdom of the Visigoths of Spain, simply decorated plaques of terracotta served to mark tombs ( 1985.147). For centuries the wealthy perpetuated the Roman tradition of carving marble sarcophagi with Christian narrative ( 1991.366) and emblems of their faith ( 25.120.590). In keeping with Roman and Jewish practice born of sanitary concerns, the first Christians were buried outside the city, often in subterranean catacombs, into the walls of which gold glass disks were set as memorial markers. While the story of the plague is well known, the artistic record from across medieval Europe offers a broad picture of various ways in which people coped with death, reflecting not only a keen awareness of its presence in daily life ( 17.190.306), but also of Christian belief in the afterlife and the desire to honor and memorialize the dead. Boccaccio’s descriptions of the pandemic of bubonic plague that struck Europe in the mid-fourteenth century highlight not only the horrors of the disease but also the inability of anyone, regardless of status, to escape it ( 69.86). This famous description of the Black Death appears in The Decameron, written by the Florentine humanist Giovanni Boccaccio, who goes on to describe the course of the rapidly fatal disease and also the speed with which the dead were buried. It spread without stop from one place to another until, unfortunately, it swept over the west … Such was the cruelty of heaven and to a great degree of man that between March and the following July it is estimated that more than 100,000 human beings lost their lives within the walls of Florence.” “In…1348 the deadly plague broke out in the great city of Florence…Whether through the operation of the heavenly bodies or because of our own iniquities, which the just wrath of God sought to correct, the plague had arisen in the east some years before, causing the death of countless human beings.
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