El año de la plagamecanismos de defensa ante la peste de 1648 en la ciudad de Murcia

Resumo

Through the example that the City of Murcia offers, we will analyze the progressive collapse of economic and social structures, in the wake of a plague epidemic. The documentation studied about the contagion of 1648, invites us to delve into the daily life of a modest Castilian city of the seventeenth century, besieged by an invisible enemy. The present work examines the consequences of the disease from different aspects, to answer our biggest question. Was the high mortality rate that followed the pest due to the very nature of the disease, or did other factors intervene? Following the advice of the most outstanding doctors of the time, the Crown tried to launch a series of prophylactic measures, based on the isolation of the plagued populations, as the only effective remedy against the advance of the disease. However, its strict application entailed serious damages for the very survival of the populations, so that sometimes the local authorities refused to apply them. The epidemic crisis of the mid-six hundred, is a reflection on the prevalence of the particular interests of local oligarchies, against drastic decisions for the common good, at the cost of a high price, while requiring us to reflect on how events could unfold, given the "new pestilences" that threaten our society. Our objective will be to try to demonstrate the lamentable effects that were derived from the inaction of the murcian authorities before an epidemic of bubonic plague. We believe that the members of the council not only deliberately concealed the presence of contagion, but also never showed a real interest to completely isolate the city, for the counterparts that, especially in the economic field, had quarantines for the local economy. We suspect that this lack of commitment was largely due to the strong economic interests maintained by the ruling class with the main market of Murcia: silk. We will delve into the characteristics of the demographics of the Old Regime, marked by high birth and death rates, as well as the cyclical crises of subsistence (famine), epidemic and mixed. The second part of our work is focused exclusively on the plague epidemic of Murcia in 1648, whose main source is in the Chapter Acts of the city council, of those years. Given the vastness of the information collected between (1647-1652), we decided to order it according to the methodology proposed by Bennasar, distinguishing by chapters the following aspects: political, health, economic, religious and social. We opted for the use of the comparative method, so that whatever we were finding we could compare it with the available bibliographic sources. It is an interdisciplinary study that has drawn from the sources of different humanistic branches, whose final conclusion most remarkable was the discovery that, at least Murcia, the factor that determined their fate during the plague of 1648 and ultimately the most important It was no other than the economic one.