The Black Death

by Philip Ziegler

  As this side of the movement’s character attracted more attention, so a clash with the Church became inevitable. Already the claim of the Masters to grant absolution from sins infringed one of the Church’s most sacred and, incidentally, lucrative prerogatives. A number of dissident or apostate clerics began to secure high office in the movement and these turned with especial relish on their former masters. The German Flagellants took the lead in denouncing the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, ridiculing the sacrament of the eucharist and refusing to revere the host. Cases were heard of Flagellants interrupting religious services, driving priests from their churches and looting ecclesiastical property. Other heretics – the Lollards, the Beghards and the Cellites – made common cause with them in contesting the authority of the Catholic Church.

  The parallel between the Pilgrimage of the Flagellants and the preceding ‘People’s Crusades’ became more apparent. According to John of Winterthur, the people were eagerly awaiting the resurrection of the Emperor Frederick who was expected to massacre the clergy and break down the barriers between rich and poor.{172} This delectable vision fused in the popular mind with the apocalyptic ambitions of the Brethren. The movement took on a revolutionary character and began to direct the hostility of its audiences as much against the rich layman as the cleric. What was left of the merchants and nobles now deserted the movement in disgust, leaving the extremists free to direct its passions as they wished.

  The loss of its bourgeois members in itself would probably have mattered little to the Flagellant Crusade. But as they trekked from plague centre to plague centre, often bearing infection with them to those whom they were supposed to succour, it was inevitable that many of their older members should perish, including the responsible leaders who had set the standards for the rest. To make up numbers, pilgrims were recruited less remarkable for their piety or their dour asceticism than for their failure to fit into any regular pattern of life. Bandits too discovered that a convenient way to enter a guarded town was to tack themselves on to the tail of a Flagellant procession. Little by little the more respectable citizens of Europe began to look with diminished favour on their turbulent visitors.

  Up to the middle of 1349, the Flagellants had things pretty much their own way. Central and southern Germany was their favoured hunting ground but they spread freely over Hungary, Poland, Flanders and the Low Countries. In March they were in Bohemia; April, Magdeburg and Lübeck; May, Würzburg and Augsburg; June, Strasbourg and Constance; July, Flanders. Their numbers were formidable and their needs often strained the resources of their hosts. A single monastery in the Low Countries had to provide for 2,500 pilgrims in a matter of six months; in two and a half months 5,300 Flagellants visited Tournai; when the crusade arrived at Constance it was even claimed that there were 42,000 men in the company. If anyone opposed them their reaction was ferocious. Mendicant friars in Tournai who objected to their pretensions were dismissed as scorpions and Antichrists and, near Meissen, two Dominicans who tried to interrupt a meeting were attacked with stones and one of them killed before he could escape.

  From the start, however, a few doughty spirits had declined to be intimidated. The magistrates of Erfurt refused entry to the Flagellants and neither from the Brethren themselves nor from the citizens was there any attempt to defy their ruling. Archbishop Otto of Magdeburg suppressed them from the start. In Italy they made little impression; perhaps the example had not been forgotten of Uberto Pallavicino of Milan who, in 1260, hearing that a Flagellant procession was on the way, erected three hundred gibbets outside his city. The hint was taken and the pilgrims never came. In France they were beginning to gather popular support when Philip VI, showing unusual determination, prevented their penetrating beyond Troyes.

  According to Robert of Avesbury they arrived in London in May (or possibly September) 1349,{173} but Walsingham, who also records the visit, puzzlingly delays it to 1350, by which time the movement had long been on the wane.{174} ‘…there came into England,’ wrote the latter, ‘certain penitents, noblemen and foreigners, who beat their naked bodies very sharply until the blood ran, now weeping, now singing. Yet, as was said, they did this too unadvisedly, since they had no licence from the Apostolic See.’ Robert of Avesbury puts their numbers at more than six score, ‘for the most part coming from Zealand and Holland’. They are only known to have held one ceremony in London, on the open plot in front of St Paul’s. They seem to have met with indifference or even hostility and were rapidly deported as unwanted guests.

  But the turning point came with the declaration of war by the Church. In May 1348 Pope Clement VI had himself patronized ceremonies involving public flagellation within the precincts of his palace at Avignon but he took fright when he saw that he could not control the movement which he had encouraged. Left to himself he would probably have turned against them sooner, but members of the Sacred College prevailed on him to hold his hand. In mid-1349, the Sorbonne was asked for its opinion and sent to Avignon a Flemish monk, Jean da Fayt, who had studied the phenomenon in his homeland. It seems that his advice was decisive. Shortly after his arrival, on 20 October 1349, a papal Bull was published and dispatched to the Archbishops. This was followed by personal letters to the Kings of France and England. The Bull denounced the Flagellants for the contempt of Church discipline which they had shown by forming unauthorized associations, writing their own statutes, devizing their own uniforms and performing many acts contrary to accepted observances. All prelates were ordered to suppress the pilgrimages and to call on the secular arm to help if it seemed necessary.

  That the Pope meant business was shown when a party of a hundred Flagellants arrived in Avignon from Basle. Clement promptly interdicted public penance and prohibited their pilgrimages under threat of excommunication. Emboldened by his example, the rulers of Europe turned on the Brethren. Manfred of Sicily threatened to execute any Flagellant who appeared in his lands;{175} Bishop Preczlaw of Breslaw made threats reality and had a Master burned alive. The German prelates took up the attack with especial relish. The Flagellants were denounced from the pulpit as an impious sect and harsh penalties were threatened against any who failed to return humbly to the bosom of the Church. Even those who obeyed were likely to find themselves in trouble if they had played a prominent part in the movement and hundreds were incarcerated, tortured or executed. In 1350 many Flagellants were in Rome enjoying a busman’s penance by being beaten in front of the High Altar of St Peter’s.

  The Brethren of the Cross ‘vanished as suddenly as they had come, like night phantoms or mocking ghosts.’{176} The movement did not die, indeed it was still to be encountered in the fifteenth century, but, as a threat to society or an additional headache to those grappling with the problems of the Black Death, it had effectively ceased to exist.

  It is easy to poke fun at these misguided fanatics. Their superstitions were ridiculous, their practices obscene, their motivation sometimes sinister. But before condemning them one must remember the desperate fear which drove the Flagellants into their excesses. These were men who put themselves to great pain and inconvenience; in part, certainly for the sake of their own souls and their own glory, but in part also in the hope that their sacrifice might induce God to lift from his people the curse that was destroying them. There were few saints among them but, on the whole, they were not bad men. And it is impossible not to feel some sympathy for the person who, when disaster threatens, tries to do something to oppose it, however futile, instead of waiting, in abject despair, for death to strike him down.

  They did achieve something. In some at least of the towns they visited they brought about a spiritual regeneration, ephemeral, no doubt, but still real while it lasted. Adulterers confessed their sins, robbers returned stolen goods. They provided some diversion at the places along their route and left behind them a fleeting hope that their pain might bring an end to the greater sufferings of the plague-stricken. But when the Flagellants had passed, often leaving new centres of infection in thei
r wake; when the miracles did not happen, the sick did not recover, the plague did not pass; then the condition of those they left behind them must have been even worse than before they came. On the whole they probably did more harm than good.

  One thing at least it is hard to forgive. In his Bull condemning them, Pope Clement VI complained that ‘most of them… beneath an appearance of piety, set their hands to cruel and impious work, shedding the blood of Jews, whom Christian piety accepts and sustains’. The persecution of the Jews during the Black Death deserves special attention. The part which the Flagellants played in this repugnant chapter was only occasionally of the first importance but it was nonetheless barbarous for that.

  * * *

  When ignorant men are overwhelmed by forces totally beyond their control and their understanding it is inevitable that they will search for some explanation within their grasp. When they are frightened and badly hurt then they will seek someone on whom they can be revenged. Few doubted that the Black Death was God’s will but, by a curious quirk of reasoning, medieval man also concluded that His instruments were to be found on earth and that, if only they could be identified, it was legitimate to destroy them. What was needed, therefore, was a suitable target for the indignation of the people, preferably a minority group, easily identifiable, already unpopular, widely scattered and lacking any powerful protector.

  The Jews were not the only candidates as victims. In large areas of Spain the Arabs were suspected of playing some part in the propagation of the plague. All over Europe pilgrims were viewed with the gravest doubts; in June 1348 a party of Portuguese pilgrims were said to be poisoning wells in Aragon and had to be given a safe conduct to get them home.{177} In Narbonne it was the English who were at one time accused.{178} But it was the leper who most nearly rivalled the Jew as popular scapegoat. The malign intentions of the leper had long been suspected by his more fortunate fellows. In 1346 Edward III declared that lepers were no longer to enter the City of London since:

  …some of them, endeavouring to contaminate others with that abominable blemish (that so, to their own wretched solace, they may have the more fellows in suffering) as well in the way of mutual communication, and by the contagion of their polluted breath, as by carnal intercourse with women in stews and other secret places, detestably frequenting the same, do so taint persons who are sound, both male and female, to the great injury of the people dwelling in the city…

  But it is one thing to try to infect others with one’s own disease for the sake of the extra companionship, another to spread the plague out of sheer devilry. When in Languedoc, in 1321, all the lepers were burnt on suspicion of poisoning wells, it was claimed that they had been bribed to do so by the Jews who, in their turn, were in the pay of the King of Granada.{179} There were one or two cases, notably in Spain, where lepers suffered during the Black Death on suspicion of complicity but there do not seem to be any where the Jews were not accorded the leading role and the lepers cast as the mere instruments of their wickedness.

  One reason for this was that nobody had cause for envying the lepers or economic reason for wishing them out of the way. It was very different with the Jews whose popular image was that of the Prioress’s Tale:

  …sustened by a lord of that contree

  For foule usure and lucre of vileynye,

  Hateful to Christ and to his compaignye.[3]

  In Germany, and to some extent also in France and Spain, the Jews provided the money-lending class in virtually every city – not so much by their own volition as because they had been progressively barred from all civil and military functions, from owning land or working as artisans. Usury was the only field of economic activity left open to them; an open field, in theory at least, since it was forbidden to the Christian by Canon Law. In cities such as Strasbourg they flourished exceedingly and profited more than most during the economic expansion of the thirteenth century.{180} But the recession of the fourteenth century reduced their prosperity and the increasing role played by the Christian financiers, in particular the Italian bankers, took away from them the cream of the market. In much of Europe the Jew dwindled to a small money-lender and pawnbroker. He acquired a large clientele of petty debtors so that every day more people had cause to wish him out of the way. ‘It can be taken for granted,’ wrote Dr Cohn, ‘that the Jewish money lenders often reacted to insecurity and persecution by deploying a ruthlessness of their own.’{181} It is fair to criticize the medieval Jews for exacting exorbitant rates of interest from their victims but it is also only fair to remember the extreme precariousness of their business, dependent on the uncertain protection of the local ruler and with virtually no sanctions at their disposal to enable them to recover their money from a reluctant debtor. To ensure their own safety the luckless Jews were forced to pay ever larger bribes to the authorities and, to raise the money for the bribes, they had to charge higher interest and press their clients still more harshly. Animosity built up and, by the middle of the fourteenth century, Shylock had been born. The Jew had become a figure so hated in European society that almost anything might have served to provoke catastrophe.

  But though the economic causes for the persecution of the Jews were certainly important it would be wrong to present them as the only, or even as the principal reason for what now happened. The Jew’s role as money-lender predisposed many people to believe any evil which they might hear of him but the belief itself was sincere and had far deeper roots. The image of the Jew as Antichrist was common currency in the Middle Ages. It seems to have gained force at the time of the First Crusade and the Catholic Church must accept much of the responsibility for its propagation. The vague enormity of such a concept was quickly translated into terms more comprehensible to the masses. In particular the more irresponsible priests spread rumours that the Jews kidnapped and tortured Christian children and desecrated the host. They were represented as demons attendant on Satan, portrayed in drama or in pictures as devils with the beards and horns of a goat, passing their time with pigs, frogs, worms, snakes, scorpions and the horned beasts of the field. Even the lay authorities seemed intent on fostering public belief in the malevolence of the Jews; in 1267, for instance, the Council of Vienna forbade purchases of meat from Jews on the ground that it was likely to be poisoned.

  Today such fantasies seem ludicrous. It is hard to believe that sane men can have accepted them. And yet Dr Norman Cohn{182} has drawn a revealing parallel between anti-Semitism in the fourteenth century and under the Third Reich. On 1 May 1934 Der Stürmer devoted a whole issue to alleged murders of Christian children by the Jews; illustrating its text with pictures of rabbis sucking blood from an Aryan child. Most Germans were no doubt revolted by such vicious propaganda but Buchenwald, Auschwitz and Belsen live vividly enough in the memory to save this generation from any offensive sense of superiority to its ancestors. Nor do the still more recent Chinese accusations that American airmen, in 1952, showered the countryside around Kan-Nan Hsien with voles infected with Pasteurella pestis, the bacillus of bubonic plague, suggest that man’s infinite capacity for thinking ill of man is in any way on the wane.{183}

  The Black Death concentrated this latent fear and hatred of the Jews into one burning grievance which not only demanded vengeance but offered the tempting extra dividend that, if the Jews could only be eliminated, then the plague for which they were responsible might vanish too. There was really only one charge levelled against the Jews; that, by poisoning the wells of Christian communities, they infected the inhabitants with the plague. The Polish historian, Dlugoss, claimed that they also poisoned the air{184} but this view does not seem to have been at all widely shared. Some of the more fanciful reports alleged that the Jews were working under the orders of a conspiratorial network with its headquarters in Toledo; that the poison, in powdered form, was imported in bulk from the Orient, and that the same organization also occupied itself in forging currencies and murdering Christian children. But these were decorative frills, the attack on the sou
rces of drinking water was the central issue.

  The emphasis on this accusation is surprising. With the exception of the Faculty of Medicine at Paris, which suggested that a minor contributory cause of the epidemic might be the pollution of the wells as a result of earthquakes, none of the contemporary experts seem to have tried to link infection with the drinking of tainted water. There were other ways of spreading the plague which must have seemed at least as plausible to medieval man. Alfonso of Cordoba’s vision of the infection of air by the release of a ‘certain confection’ into a ‘strong, slow wind’ has already been mentioned{185} and in subsequent epidemics Jews were accused of passing around clothes taken from the dead or smearing walls and windows with an ointment made from the buboes of plague victims.

  A partial explanation may be that many wells in built-up areas were polluted by seepage from nearby sewage pits. The Jews, with their greater understanding of elementary hygiene, preferred to draw their drinking water from open streams, even though these might often be farther from their homes. Such a habit, barely noticed in normal times, would seem intensely suspicious in the event of plague. Why should the Jews shun the wells unless they knew them to be poisoned and how could they have such knowledge unless they had done the poisoning themselves? This theory is supported by Tschudi who, in the Helvetian Chronicle, records not only that the Jews knew the wells to be contaminated by ‘bad, noxious moistures and vapours’ but also that, in many places ‘they warned the people against them.’{186} If they did, the warnings seem to have gone unheeded and certainly those who received them were little disposed to feel gratitude to the Jews for their consideration.