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1. AMS, sec. 10, 1580 [2]. 5 this sickness of catarrh Receive the sick poor who wander the city unassisted, with this sickness of catarrh. —ruy gómez T he guard against the plague hadcontinuedduringtheMorisco crisis and seemed effective, though disgruntled city residents complained about the restrictions. During the cabildo meeting of Friday , 5 August, chief constable Lope Zapata Ponce de León stated that the residents of the city “receive much vexation by being sent to guard” against the plague. Furthermore, it had been expensive for the city. Lope Zapata argued that “this business has no effect, and no other place in the kingdom is guarded except Seville.” Indeed, Seville was free of the plague but not free of deadly disease. Later in the day a new warning of serious sickness in the city emerged. The council sent three veinticuatros, Diego Caballero de Cabrera, Gaspar Ruiz, and Don Diego de Portugal, as well as the jurado Diego del Postigo, to ask the hospital administrators, and especially those of the Cinco Llagas and Cardenal Hospitals, to admit the poor who were suffering with “fevers.” They were to stress the importance of the sick being accommodated and treated, given “the harm that could result.”1 Three days later, the council’s first item of business was a petition presented by Dr. Rodrigo de León, the administrator of the Amor de Dios Hospital, who asked that something be done about the way the sick were collected and cured because there was no more space in the hospitals. A crisis had begun, but it was not the plague that caused city officials and hospital administrators to scurry around searching for solutions. Seville, along with most of the Iberian Peninsula, found itself in the midst of a deadly influenza 46 | the plague files 2. Ibid.; Vicente Pérez Moreda, Las crisis de mortalidad en la España interior, siglos XVI–XIX (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1980), 252–53, notes great mortality throughout Spain from“catarro contagioso” in 1580, beginning in August. See also Betrán, La peste en Barcelona, 93–94. 3. AMS, sec. 10, 1580 [2]. The Colegio de Maese Rodrigo was founded in 1505 by Master Rodrigo de Santaella, Queen Isabel’s canon priest, who wanted to establish a university in Seville. In 1508 the canon obtained papal permission to create a medical school with the same rights and privileges as the University of Salamanca. By the 1580s the university had grown both in size and prestige. See Morales Padrón, La ciudad del quinientos, 286–88. outbreak. The sickness did not spare the king and queen. On 14 September the cabildo received news from Badajoz that Philip II, while engaged in his Portuguese campaign, had become “indisposed,” though the Sevillians soon learned that he had improved. The queen, Anna of Austria, however, succumbed the following month.2 When the council met on Friday, 23 September, the meeting was presided over by the deputy governor, Licentiate Juan de Aguilera. He reported what everyone feared, “that the sickness of catarrh and fevers is so universal in this city that it is believed that two-thirds of all the people are sick, and more are becoming sick every day.” He recommended that city officials and the Count of Villar form a commission with physicians and “with their advice provide some remedies in this city and other expedient things for the health of the people.” Bartolomé de Hoces recommended that the veinticuatros García de León, Don Gonzalo de Saavedra, and Diego de Almansa, along with jurados García de Bustamante and Bernaldino Ramírez, should meet at three o’clock that afternoon in the count’s apartments at the Alcázar to discuss the issue. All agreed, and the chief constable, Lope Zapata Ponce de León, urged that they should also send these deputies to the Cathedral Chapter to “plead on behalf of the city that general processions and prayers be ordered in all the churches, appealing to Our Lord for general health, because the sickness of catarrh is intensifying and there have been some sudden deaths.”He suggested that after the deputies visited the cathedral they should attempt to bring together in the School of Maese Rodrigo “the best and most efficient doctors” available in the city to discuss possible remedies “to purify the air, which appears to be spoilt and causes all these sicknesses.”3 Lope Zapata exhorted his colleagues to heed the physicians ’ recommendations and...

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