When dealing with the lot of the poorer sorts under early modern plague legislations, most of the recent and less recent scholarship has tended to frame the issue mostly in the (obviously relevant) terms of the repression and marginalization of the different classes of the poor (beggars, vagrants, prostitutes etc.). However, another, more benign aspect was at least equally relevant. This paper argues that, once the attention is shifted away from the repressive facet of plague regulations, a whole different side of the relationship between city authorities and the poor begins to appear. A mixed set of legal, medical, religious and political values presided over a “moral economy” that regulated the distribution of resources to the lower classes, thus revealing the (normally) implicit social compact that kept those at the top and those at the bottom of society together. Using some of the most relevant early modern Italian plague tracts as sources, I firstly make a list of the main forms of assistance provided to the poor by early modern city governments; I then try to disentangle the different (and sometimes conflicting) values underlying this moral economy of epidemics; finally, I show how this peculiar arrangement could give the poor some degree of agency.