During quarantine, what did people do without? Food, for one thing. If they were not starving before the plague arrived, they probably were once it reached their town or reached the towns that normally supplied them. Virtually every plague report, whether from villages or major cities, mentioned that people were hungry, though many, of course, had been hungry before the plague arrived.1 “Consider where we are, the disease hated above all others, and the number of poor people, and you will find hunger and need. And more are dying of that than of anything else, because the land here just yields stones,” wrote a priest from Pasajes. “What little we got from the sea has ceased altogether, and thus those who used to care for the poor are unable today to take care of themselves.”2 The occasional open gate may have alleviated some towns’ needs for some products at certain times, but in general business was bleak. Meanwhile people were starving, “the most cruel of all deaths,” as Don Quijote told Sancho.3