screen displayed a pale sfumato of a winter landscape without snow. The villagers in their muddy fields rested their hands on the handles of their tools and watched the ambulance go past. An unnaturally ugly child ran up to the road and threw a stone that clanged against the metal. The driver stopped for a moment and threw back several Romanian swear words. We continued and turned right, into a forest of birch trees and I was lulled to sleep by the monotony of their white trunks bent by the northern wind. As Robert later told me, Mr. Smooth was an officer of the infamous Securitate who had recently been put in charge of all the lepers in the country. He saw to it that they reached their designated destination and, equally important, that they stay there.
The procedure for dealing with leprosy had not changed significantly throughout the several millennia of its known existence. Two simple conditions had to be fulfilled to prevent a drastic spread of the disease: Firstly, lepers’ freedom of movement had to be severely restricted; secondly, they had to be prevented from coming into contact with the healthy. It was the same under Ramses II, Charles V or Ivan the Terrible. In the Middle Ages, lepers sometimes made the acquaintance of the stake. Just tell common people about the ungodliness of the contagion and its carriers.
Since the church was not bound by compassion, lepers were forced to establish communities on the peripheries of settlements, seeking their salvation in refuse, medicinal herbs and sour wild fruits. With time, these colonies would become restless and hordes of lepers would plunder nearby villages and rob people travelling to the city. This state of affairs would last several weeks or months depending on the resolve of the city dignitaries to saddle the guard’s horses, light torches and go on a small crusade against the sons and daughters of the devil.
The events in Sensotregiore, a city of eight thousand souls one hundred kilometres from Florence, contributed significantly to changing the relationship towards lepers in the sixteenth century. A colony of lepers located just a stone’s throw from the city walls had been established in the late fifteenth century at the time of Pope Innocent VIII. The mild and above all dry climate made the area popular with the lepers of southern Europe, and it was not unusual for lepers to arrive from distant parts of Scandinavia, Spain or the British isles. A good supply of herbs, abandoned military stables and a network of roads which allowed gangs of lepers to extort money and food helped the colony grow to a population of two or three thousand by the beginning of the sixteenth century. When a group of colonists brutally raped three under-aged girls (tales speak of them being butchered and eaten at the bacchanalias held that same evening) the city fathers, with the pope’s blessing, gathered two hundred heavily armed mercenaries: a force intended to expel this perverted rabble and exact bloody punishment. A battle ensued, and blood-curdling cries were heard until the early hours.
When the curious and vindictive inhabitants of Sensotregiore looked out at the battlefield in the morning light, they were horrified to see a well-ordered army of lepers holding up the heads of their enemies. Now the maddened horde yelled in fury as it converged on the city’s fragile gates. Within two hours Sensotregiore had become a Sodom at the mercy of the hungry and disfigured. The humiliated ones now indulged in all the worldly pleasures that had been denied them for years and gave their brutal impulses free rein. A frenzy of rape, plunder, loathsome orgies and cruel murders descended on the city, turning it into a hellhole. The inhabitants, mad with fear of the disease, fled towards the northern gates and out into the hills.
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