Today in History—July 27: When and Where the World’s First Quarantine Began

Every generation remembers its first plague: Ours is 2020 and COVID-19. But for the citizens of Ragusa—the Adriatic merchant republic we now call Dubrovnik—it was the year 1348, the Black Death’s first blow. It spread to every country in Europe, and it nearly emptied Ragusa.

The disease continued to return over the next three decades, leading city leaders to try something no one had ever attempted before.

On this day in 1377, the lawmakers there instituted the first quarantine in the world.

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Anyone arriving from a plague-stricken place would be stopped at the gate and made to sit 30 days (later extended to 40) in isolation, either on the nearby uninhabited island of Mrkan or in the town of Cavtat, before stepping inside. Ships likewise were made to anchor off the coast to be sure the crew and their goods were not infected. Residents were barred from visiting them.

The order was copied into the city’s lawbook, the Liber Viridis, or “Green Book,” which still survives in Dubrovnik’s archives. The word still survives too: quarantine from quaranta, Italian for 40.

The ruling was remarkable in its foresight. To detain people who looked perfectly healthy, Ragusa’s councillors had to grasp that a disease might incubate unseen—an intuition that arrived roughly five centuries before germ theory could explain it.

For a republic that lived on trade, the gamble was a huge risk. Ragusa’s rocky soil was too poor to feed its people, so grain came in by ship from Sicily and the Levant, and plague often rode in with it. Sealing the harbor was never an option, so the city adapted instead with its first recorded Health Office, patrol boats that visited the quarantine island, and officials who traced the sick and everyone they’d come into contact with.

It worked. Ragusa passed a full 44 years without any instances of the plague and shook off outbreaks that decimated the population of other regions. The system was running years before Milan laid its first sanitary cordon in 1400 or Venice opened its first plague hospital in 1423, making Ragusa the pioneer of an idea that would spread instead.

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