The Plague Files: Crisis Management in Sixteenth-Century Seville (review)

During the first three quarters of the sixteenth century, the population of the kingdoms collectively known as Spain expanded. While important outbreaks of epidemic disease were by no means absent, and Spain’s population remained small in comparison to other major European powers, in general, the sixteenth century was a period of relative health and demographic growth. In the 1580s and especially in the calamitous 1590s, however, the situation changed. The peninsula experienced repeated bad harvests and waves of epidemic disease, and urbanites and rural dwellers alike fell prey to maladies like influenza, typhus, and the dreaded plague. Together with its hinterland, Seville, Spain’s gateway to the Americas and one of the peninsula’s most populous and prosperous cities, was regularly threatened by these outbreaks of infectious disease. Alexandra Parma Cook and Noble David Cook’s new book chronicles the efforts of city leaders in Seville to contain an outbreak of plague in 1579–1581, while simultaneously contending with numerous other pressing problems. Over the course of about thirty months, Seville’s royal governor (asistente) and the aldermen and councilmen (veinticuatros and jurados) that made up its municipal council (cabildo) struggled with wave after wave of crises—not just disease, but crop failures, famine, civil unrest, a rumored uprising of local moriscos (the descendents of Muslim converts to Catholic Christianity), and a host of other troubles.

The authors follow the documentary record generated by the beleaguered cabildo, supplementing it with material drawn from notarial and other archives and from contemporary writers on an array of related topics. The result is not a study of an outbreak of plague but a fine-grained portrait of city officials and citizens as they grappled with near continuous difficulties and disasters. The authors hew closely to their primary source material, perhaps a little too closely. We hear the voices of dozens of individuals, from the talkative veinticuatro Diego Ortiz Melgarejo to the humble muleteer Francisco Bernáldez, and catch glimpses of people of both sexes and of all social stations, but the authors’ emphasis on officials’ day-to-day struggles and the back and forth of the cabildo’s debates often results in a disjointed and confusing reader experience. Events and issues are often thinly contextualized and under-explained—what, for example, is really at stake in the contest between the city councilmen and the judges of the Inquisition over seating arrangements in the funeral observances for Anna of Austria? Why did the official physician of the town of Puebla de los Infantes so violently oppose the activities of the itinerant healer Maese Martín? What kinds of documentation did travelers seeking entrance into Seville have to present, and where did they get it? The reader learns only that these events happened, but receives little insight into their broader significance or what they might tell us about things like jurisdictional competition, the professionalization of medicine, or the coming of the passport.

That said, the overall picture of officials diligently engaged in the daily business of government is an interesting one. Particularly worthy of note are the lengths to which officials went in gathering information on rumored plague cases and the movements of possibly infected individuals. Commissioned with assessing the progress of the disease in several of Seville’s subordinate towns, city councilmen conducted dozens of interviews, inspected hospitals and private homes, and even opened private correspondence to ferret out travelers’ true points of origin. The cabildo then used these hard-won data to make policy decisions that shaped the city’s response to the changing situation on the ground. Readers interested in urban history and in public health will find this book particularly valuable, and will appreciate the illustrative maps and images, as well as the glossary and index.