In Boccaccio's The Decameron, when the plague ravaged Florence, ten men and women left the city and took refuge in a country villa. They spent their days playing and feasting, each telling one story a day to pass the time.
Yet in the history recorded by Machiavelli, a Florentine said, "People gather in cities across Italy, and every one of them is prone to corruption. The young idle away their days, the old are licentious and shameless, and men and women, young and old alike, are full of vices. Even good laws are powerless to correct them when poorly enforced."
One commoner put it this way: wealth and poverty divide us into noble and lowly. Conscience has nothing to do with us, so there is no need to consider it. People like us must often worry about hunger, imprisonment, or losing our heads. The fear of going to hell can neither possibly nor rightly have any influence on us.
The victors, no matter what means they used to win, are remembered only for their glory.
Thus, only "sheep" deserved to live in fear.
The Romans claimed they had been raised by a she-wolf. Perhaps these people made their living carding wool, but that did not mean they were willing to live that way. Once the opportunity came, they would shed their coats and return to their true forms.
After the great unrest began, they started setting fires and looting Florence, Europe's richest city, seemingly believing that once the wealth was in their own hands, they would no longer have to go hungry.
Agriculture required a large population, at least before agricultural mechanization. When huge numbers died in the Black Death, it was not only the farmers who were gone. Vast tracts of land were left idle and barren, and there