Last Things

by Bynum, Caroline Walker; Freedman, Paul;

  Second, Heinrich made oblique reference to other apocalyptic prophecies, namely to the same Cedar of Lebanon prophecy that John Clynn inserted into his chronicle when he described the plague’s progress in Ireland. The reference came in Heinrich’s one hundredth, and final, chapter, under his entry for the year 1349, in which he described a number of disturbing events: the appearance of a ghost or phantasm, the killing of the Jews for the charge of well-poisoning (a claim Heinrich strongly disputed), the progress of plague, and the appearance of the flagellants. Heinrich condemned the flagellants for their contumacy and disrespect for the clergy, even describing how they had killed two Dominican friars. He opened his discussion of the obstreperous flagellants by saying, “In this year, a race [gens] without a head suddenly arose in all parts of Germany, causing universal admiration for the suddenness of their appearance and for their huge numbers.”55 He added that they were called without a head “as if prophetically,” both because they literally had no head or leader and because they figuratively had no head or prudence guiding them. The phrase “race without a head” comes from the Cedar of Lebanon prophecy. This prophecy, as mentioned above, described a period of torment, then a fifteen-year period of peace, and finally its end when “there will be heard news of Antichrist.”56 Thus in dubbing the flagellants the “race without a head,” Heinrich was inviting his readers to see their appearance as part of the apocalyptic scenario laid out in the Cedar of Lebanon vision. In fact, Heinrich had already specifically connected the flagellants with the “race without a head” and the appearance of Antichrist in the introductory matter to his hundredth chapter. There, in a summary list of the notable events that had occurred around the year 1348, he simply stated, “A race of flagellants, without a head, foretold the advent of Antichrist.”57

  In addition to quoting Scripture and prophecy to link up his own times to end times, Heinrich further implicitly sounded an apocalyptic alarm simply by the sheer number of signs, portents, torments, and mirabilia that he described in the final two decades of his chronicle (ca. 1337–55). Beginning in 1337, Heinrich told of a rain of blood, the births of several monsters, a plague of locusts (echoes of Revelation 9: 3?), visions, phantasms, conspiracies, and rebellions, as well as the earthquake, fire from heaven, and rain of toads surrounding the outbreak of plague. In fact, in the introduction to the final chapter of his chronicle, Heinrich pointedly observed that “the beginning of the reign of this Charles [IV of Bohemia, r. 1346–78] seems to be memorable on account of the number of monsters, portents, and other singular happenings that then appeared.”58 He then strung together a list of all the various portents and mirabilia that he had already mentioned or would describe in the pages to come. Heinrich did not here specify what we are to make of this clustering of signs, but, given his quotations of Scripture and prophecy, we are perhaps to conclude that, like Matthew Paris in 1250, Heinrich saw the increased number of marvelous phenomena as an indication that the world was nearing its end.

  In the final pages of Heinrich’s chronicle, however, he interjected that note of caution sounded so frequently in medieval discussions of the end’s timing.59 “And note,” he wrote, “that this eighth year of Charles’s reign was the 5317th from the beginning of the world, the 3661st from Noah’s exit from the ark,” and so on, listing counts of years for various other chronological schemes.60 As Richard Landes has pointed out for the early Middle Ages, such countdowns were inherently eschatological, by either explicitly or implicitly allowing readers to calculate the number of years left until the world’s fated 6000th year.61 Heinrich here followed Bede’s calculation of the age of the world, a figure much smaller than other estimates of its age and one that put the end of the sixth (and presumably final) millennium several centuries distant even from Heinrich’s time. Further—and here Heinrich showed his realization that this type of countdown could be apocalyptic—Heinrich felt compelled to continue with a discussion of the unknowability of the time of the end. “The time remaining in this sixth age,” he reminded his readers, “is known only to God. It is not for men to know the times or moments that the father has reserved to his power” (Acts 1: 7).62 Indeed, in Augustinian fashion, he stated that the seventh age of repose for the blessed, “its door quietly opened,” had begun with the sixth age and ran along concurrently with it.63 While Heinrich was quite willing to string together contemporary apocalyptic signs and quotations from Scripture, he showed understandable and customary caution in definitely announcing the immediacy of the end.

  Although this sort of caution frequently accompanied apocalyptic predictions, the explicit pointers to eschatological texts and prophecies in the chronicles of Heinrich of Herford, John Clynn, John of Winterthur, and William Dene strongly suggest that the constellation of bizarre mirabilia described by other chroniclers, such as the earthquakes, hail, and rains of toads and snakes with which I began this essay, were also meant to have apocalyptic echoes. Thunder, hail, and fire falling from heaven figure not simply among the plagues of Egypt (Ex. 9: 23–26), but also in Revelation, in which the first trumpet blast of the seven angels with seven trumpets results in hail and fire mingled with blood (Rev. 8: 7), and the pouring out of the seventh of the vials of God’s wrath brings about earthquakes, thunderings, and a plague of enormous hailstones that destroy the city of Babylon (Rev. 16: 21). Indeed, in the letter of Louis Heyligen quoted by the anonymous Flemish chronicler, the reference to “thunder, lightning, and hail of marvelous size,” may well be a nod to Revelation 16, in which “every [hail] stone [was] about the weight of a talent” (Rev. 16: 21).64 The same anonymous chronicler even more ominously described a hailstorm in 1349 in which the egg-sized hailstones had faces, eyes, and tails.65

  Fire and smoke were other apocalyptic signs featured in fourteenth-century texts about the plague. Stinking smoke attendant on heavenly fire appears in both the Neuberg monastery chronicle and Heyligen’s letter among the causes of the outbreak of the plague in the east. The image of fire raining down from the heavens as described in words in these fourteenth-century chronicles could have triggered visual memories of illustrations connected with Revelation.66 God sends fire from heaven to destroy Satan’s army after his final unloosing in Revelation 20: 9. And fetid smoke emerges from the bottomless pit, along with locusts, in Revelation 9: 2–3.

  Frogs, too, have scriptural resonances. They number among the plagues of Egypt (the second plague, Exodus 8: 1–15; also Psalms 78 and 105), along with a plague of festering boils (Exodus 9: 8–12). The rain of toads and frogs in fourteenth-century writings about the Black Death also would remind readers of the unclean spirits of Revelation 16: 13, spirits in the form of frogs (in modo ranarum) that issue from the mouths of the dragon, the beast, and the false prophet. These frogs, too, are depicted in illustrations of Revelation, and commentators equated the frogs’ croaking voices with the blasphemous words issuing from the mouths of the preachers of Antichrist.67

  Thus, the unusual precipitation of fire, hail, snakes, and toads reported in the chronicles of Heinrich of Herford and the Neuberg monastery and in the letter of Louis Heyligen had an implicitly apocalyptic meaning.68 The message did not need to be spelled out. With or without quotations from Scripture and prophecy, such chroniclers presented the plague in a decidedly apocalyptic fashion.

  Earthquakes, Frogs, Snakes, and Storms as Part of a Natural Explanation of Plague

  If the frogs, hail, earthquakes, and other unusual weather surrounding the outbreak of the plague in the east could be read as apocalyptic portents, they nonetheless figure as well in fourteenth-century scientific explanations of the plague. In fact, the whole cluster of bizarre signs associated with the initial outbreak of plague in the chronicles of Heinrich of Herford and others finds its way into medical and scientific treatises as well. These phenomena form part of the natural causes of plague detailed in fourteenth-century scientific writings about the disease. Further, the very chroniclers who insert apocalyptic portents into their treatment of plague sometimes
explain these signs using natural philosophy. In scientific writings as well as in monastic chronicles, fourteenth-century authors presented the plague as simultaneously a sign of God’s final wrath and a phenomenon capable of receiving a natural explanation.

  The best-known scientific discussion of plague from the mid-fourteenth century is the treatise composed by the medical faculty of the University of Paris. As historians frequently note, the Paris physicians blamed the plague on the famous “triple conjunction” of Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars on March 20, 1345.69 But this conjunction forms only a part of the faculty’s analysis of the causes of the plague, which they argue had both a remote cause (the heavens) and a proximal cause (the earth). The conjunction of March 1345 was the remote and universal cause of the plague, and it had the effect, argued the Paris physicians, of drawing up warm, moist vapors from the earth, which were corrupted by Mars (which ignited them and particularly caused corruption because it was retrograde) and Jupiter (whose quartile aspect with Mars [?] caused a bad disposition in the air inimical to human nature). The configuration of the heavens also had the effect of generating many winds, particularly warm, moist southern winds. Thus the triple conjunction served as a universal remote cause of plague.70

  The Paris doctors also described a more proximal cause of plague, namely air corrupted by bad vapors (also a result of the triple conjunction) and spread about by the south wind. Corrupt air was even more harmful to the body than corrupt food or water, asserted the doctors, because it could more rapidly penetrate to the lungs and heart. Such pestiferous vapors could arise from stagnant water or unburied bodies or could even escape directly from the earth during an earthquake. When they rose and mixed with the air, the whole air would be corrupted, and an epidemic would result.71 In other words, earthquakes functioned not simply as signs of divine wrath, but in a medical understanding of plague they also were the source of noxious vapors that corrupted the air, causing disease in humans.

  Another proximal cause of plague in the Paris medical faculty’s opinion was a change in weather. Here, the physicians were following good Hippocratic teaching, which looked to changes in weather as a cause of epidemics. In particular, unusual weather throughout the four seasons could produce a pestilential year, the Paris doctors argued, and they noted that the preceding winter had been warmer and rainier than usual. Further, they feared that the next spring might bring yet another round of pestilence should the winter again prove abnormally warm and wet.72 While the Paris physicians do not directly mention hail as a feature of plague-generating weather, they nonetheless finger an excess of warm rains (presumably some of which would be accompanied by thunder, lightning, and hail) as culprits in a pestilential year.

  Furthermore, the Paris doctors, like the chroniclers with whom I began, added a geographical component to their description of plague’s origins. The Paris physicians pointed to the south and east as the ultimate source of plague and the location of the most noteworthy phenomena associated with the corruption of air and outbreak of pestilence. The physicians had stated that the upcoming year might well be another plague year should the winter again be warm and wet. Nonetheless, they asserted that any such plague would be less dangerous in France than in “southern or eastern regions” because the conjunctions and other causes detailed in their treatise would have more effect in those regions. And, they noted, there had been “numerous exhalations and inflammations, such as a draco and falling stars.”73 The sky had in fact taken on a distinct yellow and red tone from the scorched vapors, the doctors declared, and there had been frequent lightning, thunderings, and intense winds from the south, carrying great amounts of dust with them. These winds, said the doctors, “are worse than all others, [in] quickly and more completely spreading bodies of putrefaction, especially strong earthquakes, [and] a multitude of fish and dead animals at the seashores, and in many regions trees [have been] covered by dust.” Further, the doctors noted that “some say they have seen a multitude of frogs and reptiles which are generated from putrefaction.” All of these, the faculty of medicine wrote, “appear to precede great putrefaction in the air and the earth.”74 “No wonder if we fear that there is a future epidemic coming!”75 Because the work of the south wind was so crucial in spreading corruption in their explanation, the doctors implied that corruption would arise in the south and east and be dispersed by the winds.

  Certainly the faculty of medicine in Paris were no scientific revolutionaries. Their explanation of epidemics arising from corrupted air was completely standard according to Galenic medical theory. And their list of signs and causes of corruption, from unusual weather to earthquakes to frogs and dead fish, again was completely standard. Scholastic science held that frogs, toads, snakes, and worms could be generated from corrupt matter and that such animals were inherently poisonous.76 In early modern Europe, there would be a strong association between toads and the plague, and persons of all social strata would wear amulets containing various preparations made from toads and arsenic to guard against pestilence.77

  Nonetheless, the way in which these phenomena cluster together in the Paris medical faculty’s treatise is striking. In fifteen lines (of printed text), we move from a reference to southern and eastern regions, to falling stars, to a reddened sky, to thunder and lightning, to dust storms, to earthquakes, to dead fish, to trees overcome by dust, and at last to frogs and other reptiles.78 One could just as easily be reading the work of Heinrich of Herford as that of the Paris medical faculty. A reader might indeed think these were the “signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars” of Luke 21: 25. And yet they fit entirely within the medical explanation of the plague arising from corruption in the air.

  Earthquakes occupy the central position in another fourteenth-century scientific explanation of the plague, a quaestio entitled “Whether the mortality of these years is due to divine command or from some natural cause?”79 The author of this treatise dismissed the astrological explanation of the plague that featured so prominently in the Paris physicians’ treatise (and in other treatises) with the remark that the plague had lasted much longer than the conjunction (some five or six years, whereas Saturn spends at most two and a half years in any one sign of the zodiac).80 Rather, the author of the quaestio, following “Ypocrates,” concluded that the most probable natural cause of the current mortality was a “corrupt and venomous exhalation from the earth, which infected the air in various parts of the world and which, when breathed in by humans, immediately suffocated them with a manner of extinction.”81 He noted that air that is shut up in the earth in caverns or in the bowels of the earth is corrupted by earthly fumes and becomes poisonous to humans, as happens in the case of wells that have long been sealed up. When they are opened, the first people who go down into them frequently suffocate, causing ignorant vulgares to assume that there is a basilisk down in the well.82 The author also explained that earthquakes were caused by “the exhalation of fumes closed up in the bowels of the earth, which, when they beat against the sides of the earth and cannot get out, shake and move the earth, as is apparent from natural philosophy.”83 In regards to the current epidemic, he specifically cited the Carinthia earthquake on the feast of St. Paul in 1347 (the same earthquake mentioned by Heinrich of Herford and others), noting that the plague had begun its journey through German-speaking lands in Carinthia after the earthquake there.84 He blamed the actions of the winds for spreading the corrupt air about haphazardly, explaining the desultory pattern of the plague’s spread.

  The quaestio’s author continues with a rather curious observation. In further proof that the fumes inside the earth were noxious to humans, the author noted that “according to Avicenna and Albertus [Magnus], in some earthquakes men are changed (transsubstanciati) into rocks, and chiefly into salt rocks on account of the strong mineral virtue in terrestrial vapors.”85 If the vapors released by earthquakes could effect such a dramatic transubstantiation, surely they also could initiate a pestilential corruption of the air. What is most re
markable in this statement is not so much the logic, but the assertion that earthquakes can change men into rocks. While the author almost certainly had in mind the biblical story of Lot’s wife being changed into a pillar of salt, Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 19 were destroyed in a rain of fire and brimstone from heaven, not an earthquake. The whole discussion is, however, vaguely reminiscent of the chronicle of the monastery of Neuberg, which described both an earthquake and the subsequent poisonous vapors that changed men into stone in the east, followed by rains of fire, poisonous snakes, and worms, and finally the outbreak of the plague.86 Perhaps the author of this treatise was aware of the same traditions that informed the Neuberg chronicler’s description of men being transformed into stones. He presumably was writing in some southern German or Austrian region because he mentions specifically only the Carinthia earthquake (and indeed makes reference to the destruction of Villach, as does the Neuberg chronicle). But the author of this quaestio offers an explanation of the phenomenon drawn from natural philosophy, probably from commentaries on Aristotle’s Meteorology.

  The medieval scholastic understanding of earthquakes in fact depended upon the explanation put forth in the second book of Aristotle’s Meteorology. Aristotle had explained that earthquakes arise when the sun warms an earth made moist by rains, giving rise to winds (evaporation) inside the earth, which causes the earthquake. The most violent earthquakes result in those places where the sea flows into subterranean caverns, thereby impeding the outward flow of wind. As a result, a great amount of wind is compressed into a small space, from which it eventually breaks forth with great violence.87 Because earthquakes are generated by moisture, evaporation, and wind in this theory, they are a species of weather.

  Medieval commentators elaborated upon Aristotle’s theories. Albertus Magnus discussed earthquakes in book 3 of his De meteoris, under the general rubric of impressions caused by cool, dry vapors. According to Albert, earthquakes happened when dry vapors trapped within the earth were too heavy to escape easily. He noted that the vapors that were emitted from the earth during an earthquake were frequently laden with dust, causing the sun, moon, and stars to appear bloody or blackened. Furthermore, Albert stated that the vapors enclosed within the earth, deprived of light and air, possessed the nature of poison. In the days before an earthquake, such vapors would seep out through the “pores” of the earth and kill animals that kept their mouths to the ground, such as sheep. Then, after a large eruption of such vapors in an earthquake, a pestilence would almost invariably follow. As if to confirm this line of reasoning, Albert added that he himself had witnessed an incident in Padua in which a long-closed well was opened up. The first and second persons to enter the well to clean it out died instantly “from the vapor of that cavern,” while a third, who merely leaned into the well, was indisposed for the next two days.88