Abstract
In the aftermath of the plague, between 1349 and 1353, the city of Florence succeeded in extending its authority beyond the contado by subjugating several neighboring and previously autonomous communes. At first glance, the chronological coincidence between the epidemic and this process of subjugation leaves little doubt as to the causal relationship uniting the two phenomena. And yet, in all the documents that form the legal basis for subjugation, not a single word refers, even indirectly, to the passage of the plague. This silence is all the more disconcerting in that it contrasts with the image of chaos conveyed by a number of contemporary accounts. Such a gap between narrative sources and practical acts raises the question of the nature and consistency of the documentary traces of the plague, which we will attempt to grasp here on the basis of the archives produced in Florence at the time of the epidemic. Between the obvious and the indifferent, these archives mark out a contradictory path for the historian in search of the plague.
