7. When Rumors of Mass Poisoning Led to Mass Panic
In the seventeenth century, people throughout much of Europe were highly susceptible to fears of poisoning. Such fears sometimes mushroomed into episodes of mass panic. Specifically, people fretted that nefarious others planned to spread a plague throughout Christendom via sinister means, such as sorcery and witchcraft, or mysterious “poisonous gasses”. Those standing fears spiked into widespread panic and collective hysteria in the city of Milan, Italy, in 1629, when its governor received an alarming message from King Philip IV of Spain.
The royal message warned the authorities to be on the lookout for four Frenchman who had escaped from a Spanish prison. They might be en route to Milan, His Majesty noted, in order to spread the plague via “poisonous and pestilential ointments“. The result was mounting tensions in Milan, as alarmed citizens kept a wary lookout for suspicious characters. The public’s concern grew steadily, and the Milanese grew steadily more stressed out and frazzled as fears mounted of an imminent poisoning. The city sat thus on a powder keg for months, before it finally erupted into a mass panic that came to be known as “The Great Poisoning Scare of Milan”.
