The Open Gate: Municipal Tactics during the 1597–1602 Plague in Castile

• In Event: The Mechanics of Mobility in the Renaissance World I: Roads and Gates

Abstract

My paper examines the movement of people along the roads of Castile during the massive plague epidemic of 1597-1602. Though inhabitants of quarantined towns were supposedly prevented from traveling, local governments were desperate for information and dispatched envoys, inspectors, and spies in all directions. If this did not spread the disease, a notion which contemporary notions of contagion would have supported, it certainly spread common understandings of its origins and paths, and it also spread lies, for the information the men carried was often untrue. Also jostling for space on northern Spain's networks of roads were groups expelled from pestilent towns and people denied lodging or banished for quarantine violations, along with townspeople visiting shrines used not for religious purposes but rather as supply depots, neutral zones where they could get food. The incessant traffic illuminates how, despite catastrophic disease, the administrative, fiscal, and ideological wheels of Castile kept turning.

Author

• Ruth MacKay, Independent Scholar