The common belief that God was punishing mankind for its sins led to an increase in sinful behavior. What was the use, many reasoned, in repenting when everyone died anyway? While life remained, didn't it make sense to live it to the full? For some this meant the kind of debauchery that would have made Caligula flinch.
Others reasoned far differently. Contrition was the only road to salvation, and penitential processions through the streets were one way of calling God's attention to the willingness of the participants to repent. Such processions went back centuries; The Procession of Saint Gregory, painted for Les Très Riche Heures, depicts the sixth-century pope leading penitents through the streets in what must have been a familiar sight in the fourteenth century. As was the custom in the middle ages, the subjects are represented in medieval dress, and in both the first and second panels we can see today what people might have seen during the Black Death.
In such a spirit of appeasing God arose the flagellants. These fanatics took public displays of penitence to the extreme. Groups of flagellants went from one town to another, parading through the streets and whipping themselves. Each group was organized and led by a Master, who governed them with all the authority of a king -- or pope. In fact, the governing authorities looked on the flagellants with disfavor, for they began to criticize the status quo and rail against the Church for its evident failure to follow God's law.
But neither the Catholic Church nor the secular authorities took any steps to control the flagellants until things went altogether too far.
The flagellants soon shifted their focus of wrath from the authorities to the most popular target of the medieval Christian: the Jew. Already rumors had begun that the Jews had brought about the plague by poisoning wells in a far-reaching conspiracy. Although the pope pointed out that Jews were dying as quickly as Christians, and that the plague spread where there were no Jews, logic had little effect. The mysterious disease had to have a cause, and those who suffered had to be avenged.
In a series of events that foreshadowed and almost rivaled the Holocaust of the 20th century, Jews were persecuted and killed by the thousands. The entire Jewish community of Basel was burned alive in a structure built expressly for the purpose. The 2,000 Jews of Strasbourg were taken to the burial ground where they were given a chance to convert; those who refused were tied to the stakes that awaited them and burned, as well, before the plague ever reached the city.
The flagellants instigated further persecutions, rushing to the Jewish quarter of any town they entered, gathering the discontented as they went, and screaming for revenge on the "well-poisoners." In this manner, thousands of Jews were murdered all across Belgium, Germany, Holland, and the Netherlands, and in some places decrees were issued barring Jews from settling there in the future. In Mainz, the Jews attempted to defend themselves, killing 200 of the mob that attacked them; but this only served to infuriate their persecutors and bring an even more terrible retribution upon them for killing Christians. It is believed a total of 6,000 Jews died before all was said and done in Mainz.
Many who tried to stop the persecution were overthrown from power and otherwise endangered themselves. But by October, 1349, the pope and other authorities were at last ready to stop the flagellants. Clement VI issued a bull calling for their dispersal and arrest; King Philip VI forbade public flagellation on pain of death; and the University of Paris publicly denied the flagellants' claim of "Divine inspiration." Local rulers could now confidently arrest and execute the fanatics, who fled, the groups disintegrating, and hid for fear of their lives.
But it was another ten years before the flagellants disappeared completely. And the scars wrought by their hysteria did not easily fade from the medieval psyche.
Please visit Part Three of The Great Mortality: Death's Aftermath.
Sources and Suggested Reading
- The Black
Death
by Philip Ziegler
The Great
Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most
Devastating Plague of All Time
by John Kelly
The Black Death:
Natural and Human Disaster in Medieval Europe
by Robert S. Gottfried
Life in Medieval
Times
by Marjorie Rowling
