A Seventeenth Century Poison Panic
Europeans of the seventeenth century were prone to fears that nefarious people planned to spread a plague throughout Christendom through sinister means like sorcery and witchcraft, or mysterious “poisonous gasses”. Such fears were exacerbated in the city of Milan, Italy, after its governor received an alert in 1629 from King Philip IV of Spain. It warned him to be on the lookout for four Frenchman who had escaped from a Spanish prison and might be headed to Milan to spread the plague via “poisonous and pestilential ointments“.
Tensions mounted in Milan as the alarmed citizens kept a wary lookout for suspicious characters, and continued to rise for months after the royal warning. People grew steadily more stressed out and frazzled as fears mounted of an imminent poisoning. The city sat thus on a powder keg for some time, before it finally erupted in what came to be known as “The Great Poisoning Scare of Milan”. The panic began on the night of May 17th, when some citizens thought they saw mysterious people place what appeared to be poison in a cathedral partition.
