Part III. Italy Chapter 57. After the Healing [April 13, 1348] Cultural Explanations

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	In this chapter Bávlos is arrested as a suspected cause of the Plague.

In this chapter, Bávlos falls victim to the suspicions and persecution that faced many in the aftermath of the Plague year. The descriptions of the Plague hysteria contained in the chapter are accurate: Jews were murdered en masse as suspected poisoners, as were Gypsies, orphans, pilgrims and mendicant friars. On July 7, 1348, the pope forbade further persecution of the Jews, ending a killing spree that was almost as lethal as the Plague itself. In the story, Bávlos has been in prison for months, and it is now nearly a year later, in April 1349. That year is important for the next chapter.

Torture in France and Italy had become a part of court proceedings only in 1335, where it was first introduced as a means of extracting confessions from suspected witches. A papal bull of 1252, however, had explicitly permitted it in cases in which the evidence against a suspected heretic was already strong. In 1348 and 1349, the practice was widely used to extract confessions from Jews and others as to their culpability for spreading the Plague. Torture was not abandoned in most European countries until the seventeenth century, and even then, some Western states have continued to claim the right or need to torture in certain situations down to the present. Other states practice torture in clandestine information-gathering facilities, or farm the practice out to other countries where the public outcry against the practice would not be so loud. Described as "enhanced interrogation," it can be openly defended nearly seven hundred years after the torture interrogation of the Plague year.