[12] Some say sixteen.
[13] Much the same libels on Catherine’s physical condition were spread about her as had already been said about Elizabeth.
[14] Macaulay makes such fun of the poor doctors, with many sensational adjectives, but I shall not reprint it here.
[15] A Freudian would say that Frederick’s dirtiness simply represented an unconscious revolt against the tyranny of his father.
[16] Probably he was some crazy fellow of the minor clergy. The whole world seems to have gone mad at this time; it only shows us what the Crusades really meant to Europe.
[17] Plague and Pestilence in Art and Literature, by Raymond Crawfurd.
[18] Friedlander, taking his account of it entirely from Galen, considered it to have been “petechial typhus,” or smallpox. The sanitary condition of Rome must have been perfectly frightful, and to read Friedlander makes one shudder.
[19] Probably Mus Rattus, the black rat, at that time. Mus decumanus, the brown rat, does not seem to have begun to conquer the black rat till the eighteenth century.
[20] Epidemics of the Middle Ages.
[21] Of course this mainly refers to the poor. It is said that the serfs deforested Europe in order that their betters might have a weekly hot bath.