During cursory reading about the Black Plague, I hear constant reference to quarantines across Europe. How were these quarantines set up and enforced without officials just getting sick and dying?

by lurking_for_sure

It seems paradoxical to me that during a period when most people avoided other people (literally) like the plague, that there would be any enforcers for these quarantines. Was it mostly voluntary?

I tried asking this a few weeks back but got no reply, trying again.

mikedash

While you're waiting for fresh answers, you might like to check on a couple of existing ones.

I wrote a long response on the question of whether or not Poland escaped the ravages of the Black Death, which looked in some detail at the idea (commonly encountered online) that the country's then king successfully impose a strict quarantine along its borders. My response (the main discussion occurs towards the bottom of the thread) shows that this idea is likely based on misinterpretation of one very inadequate source, and calls the idea that Poland was quarantined at all into serious doubt.

The other polity commonly thought to have benefitted from strict quarantine at the time of the black Death is the Italian city state of Milan. Part of our FAQ discusses events in this city. While it is far easier to believe than an effective quarantine could be imposed on a walled city than on a country with thousands of miles of poorly defined borders, my feeling, having extensively researched the Polish side of the problem, is that I would like to see properly peer reviewed work based on contemporary sources before I reached a firmer conclusion about the supposed quarantine of Milan.