LIFE IN A TIME OF PESTILENCE

From the Middle Ages onwards, deadly epidemics swept through portions of Spain repeatedly, but the Castilian Plague at the end of th e sixteenth century was especially terrible. In late 1596, a ship carrying the plague docked in Santander, and over the next five ye ars the disease killed some 500,000 people in Castile, around 10 percent of the population. Plague is traditionally understood to ha ve triggered chaos and madness.