The Black Death And The Flagellants
The middle of the fourteenth century was a period of extraordinary
terror and disaster to Europe. Numerous portents, which sadly frightened
the people, were followed by a pestilence which threatened to turn the
continent into an unpeopled wilderness. For year after year there were
signs in the sky, on the earth, in the air, all indicative, as men
thought, of some terrible coming event. In 1337 a great comet appeared
in
the heavens, its far-extending tail sowing deep dread in the minds of
the ignorant masses. During the three succeeding years the land was
visited by enormous flying armies of locusts, which descended in myriads
upon the fields, and left the shadow of famine in their track. In 1348
came an earthquake of such frightful violence that many men deemed the
end of the world to be presaged. Its devastations were widely spread.
Cyprus, Greece, and Italy were terribly visited, and it extended through
the Alpine valleys as far as Basle. Mountains sank into the earth. In
Carinthia thirty villages and the tower of Villach were ruined. The air
grew thick and stifling. There were dense and frightful fogs. Wine
fermented in the casks. Fiery meteors appeared in the skies. A gigantic
pillar of flame was seen by hundreds descending upon the roof of the
pope's palace at Avignon. In 1356 came another earthquake, which
destroyed almost the whole of Basle. What with famine, flood, fog,
locust swarms, earthquakes, and the like, it is not surprising that many
men deemed the cup of the world's sins to be full, and the end of the
kingdom of man to be at hand.
An event followed that seemed to confirm this belief. A pestilence broke
out of such frightful virulence that it appeared indeed as if man was to
be swept from the earth. Men died in hundreds, in thousands, in myriads,
until in places there were scarcely enough living to bury the dead, and
these so maddened with fright that dwellings, villages, towns, were
deserted by all who were able to fly, the dying and dead being left
their sole inhabitants. It was the pestilence called the "Black Death,"
the most terrible visitation that Europe has ever known.
This deadly disease came from Asia. It is said to have originated in
China, spreading over the great continent westwardly, and descending in
all its destructive virulence upon Europe, which continent it swept as
with the besom of destruction. The disease appears to have been a very
malignant type of what is known as the plague, a form of pestilence
which has several times returned, though never with such virulence as on
that occasion. It began with great lassitude of the body, and rapid
swellings of the glands of the groin and armpits, which soon became
large boils. Then followed, as a fatal symptom, large black or
deep-blue spots over the body, from which came the name of "Black
Death." Some of the victims became sleepy and stupid; others were
incessantly restless. The tongue and throat grew black; the lungs
exhaled a noisome odor; an insatiable thirst was produced. Death came in
two or three days, sometimes on the very day of seizure. Medical aid was
of no avail. Doctors and relatives fled in terror from what they deemed
a fatally contagious disease, and the stricken were left to die alone.
Villages and towns were in many places utterly deserted, no living
things being left, for the disease was as fatal to dogs, cats, and swine
as to men. There is reason to believe that this, and other less
destructive visitations of plague, were due to the action of some of
those bacterial organisms which are now known to have so much to do with
infectious diseases. This particular pestilence-breeder seems to have
flourished in filth, and the streets of the cities of Europe of that day
formed a richly fertile soil for its growth. Men prayed to God for
relief, instead of cleaning their highways and by-ways, and relief came
not.
Such was its character, what were its ravages? Never before or since has
a pestilence brought such desolation. Men died by millions. At Basle it
found fourteen thousand victims; at Strasburg and Erfurt, sixteen
thousand; in the other cities of Germany it flourished in like
proportion. In Osnabrueck only seven married couples remained unseparated
by death. Of the Franciscan Minorites of Germany, one hundred and
twenty-five thousand died.
Outside of Germany the fury of the pestilence was still worse; from east
to west, from north to south, Europe was desolated. The mortality in
Asia was fearful. In China there are said to have been thirteen million
victims to the scourge; in the rest of Asia twenty-four millions. The
extreme west was no less frightfully visited. London lost one hundred
thousand of its population; in all England a number estimated at from
one-third to one-half the entire population (then probably numbering
from three to five millions) were swept into the grave. If we take
Europe as a whole, it is believed that fully a fourth of its inhabitants
were carried away by this terrible scourge. For two years the pestilence
raged, 1348 and 1349. It broke out again in 1361-62, and once more in
1369.
The mortality caused by the plague was only one of its disturbing
consequences. The bonds of society were loosened; natural affection
seemed to vanish; friend deserted friend, mothers even fled from their
children; demoralization showed itself in many instances in reckless
debauchery. An interesting example remains to us in Boccaccio's
"Decameron," whose stories were told by a group of pleasure-lovers who
had fled from plague-stricken Florence.
In many localities the hatred of the Jews by the people led to frightful
excesses of persecution against them, they being accused by their
enemies of poisoning the wells. From Berne, where the city councils
gave orders for the massacre, it spread over the whole of Switzerland
and Germany, many thousands being murdered. At Mayence it is said that
twelve thousand Jews were massacred. At Strasburg two thousand were
burned in one pile. Even the orders of the emperor failed to put an end
to the slaughter. All the Jews who could took refuge in Poland, where
they found a protector in Casimir, who, like a second Ahasuerus,
extended his aid to them from love for Esther, a beautiful Jewess. From
that day to this Poland has swarmed with Jews.
This persecution was discountenanced by Pope Clement VI. in two bulls,
in the first of which he ordered that the Jews should not be made the
victims of groundless charges or injured in person or property without
the sentence of a lawful judge. The second affirmed the innocence of the
Jews in the persecution then going on and ordered the bishops to
excommunicate all those who should continue it.
Of the beneficial results of the religious excitement may be named the
earnest labors of the order of Beguines, an association of women for the
purpose of attending the sick and dying, which had long been in
existence, but was particularly active and useful during this period. We
may name also the Beghards and Lollards, whose extravagances were to
some extent outgrowths of earnest piety, and their lives strongly
contrasted with the levity and luxury of the higher ecclesiastics. These
societies of poor and mendicant penitents were greatly increased by the
religious excitement of the time, which also gave special vitality to
another sect, the Flagellants, which, as mentioned in a former article,
first arose in 1260, during the excesses of bloodshed of the Guelphs of
northern Italy, and thence spread over Europe. After a period of
decadence they broke out afresh in 1349, as a consequence of the deadly
pestilence.
The members of this sect, seeing no hope of relief from human action,
turned to God as their only refuge, and deemed it necessary to
propitiate the Deity by extraordinary sacrifices and self-tortures. The
flame of fanaticism, once started, spread rapidly and widely. Hundreds
of men, and even boys, marched in companies through the roads and
streets, carrying heavy torches, scourging their naked shoulders with
knotted whips, which were often loaded with lead or iron, singing
penitential hymns, parading in bands which bore banners and were
distinguished by white hats with red crosses.
Women as well as men took part in these fanatical exercises, marching
about half-naked, whipping each other frightfully, flinging themselves
on the earth in the most public places of the towns and scourging their
bare backs and shoulders till the blood flowed. Entering the churches,
they would prostrate themselves on the pavement, with their arms
extended in the form of a cross, chanting their rude hymns. Of these
hymns we may quote the following example:
"Now is the holy pilgrimage.
Christ rode into Jerusalem,
And in his hand he bore a cross;
May Christ to us be gracious.
Our pilgrimage is good and right."
The Flagellants did not content themselves with these public
manifestations of self-sacrifice. They formed a regular religious order,
with officers and laws, and property in common. At night, before
sleeping, each indicated to his brothers by gestures the sins which
weighed most heavily on his conscience, not a word being spoken until
absolution was granted by one of them in the following form:
"For their dear sakes who torture bore,
Rise, brother, go and sin no more."
Had this been all they might have been left to their own devices, but
they went farther. The day of judgment, they declared, was at hand. A
letter had been addressed from Jerusalem by the Creator to his sinning
creatures, and it was their mission to spread this through Europe. They
preached, confessed, and forgave sins, declared that the blood shed in
their flagellations had a share with the blood of Christ in atoning for
sin, that their penances were a substitute for the sacraments of the
church, and that the absolution granted by the clergy was of no avail.
They taught that all men were brothers and equal in the sight of God,
and upbraided the priests for their pride and luxury.
These doctrines and the extravagances of the Flagellants alarmed the
pope, Clement VI., who launched against the enthusiasts a bull of
excommunication, and ordered their persecution as heretics. This course,
at first, roused their enthusiasm to frenzy. Some of them even pretended
to be the Messiah, one of these being burnt as a heretic at Erfurt.
Gradually, however, as the plague died away, and the occasion for this
fanatical outburst vanished, the enthusiasm of the Flagellants went with
it, and they sunk from sight. In 1414 a troop of them reappeared in
Thuringia and Lower Saxony, and even surpassed their predecessors in
wildness of extravagance. With the dying out of this manifestation this
strange mania of the middle ages vanished, probably checked by the
growing intelligence of mankind.