The Epidemics of the Middle Ages

by J. F. C. Hecker; John Caius

In Upper Italy such considerable floods occurred in all the river districts, in the year 1527, that the astrologers announced a new Deluge. There was a repetition of them to an equal extent, and with equal damage, in the following year, so that it may have been concluded, not without some ground, that there was an accumulation of snow on the highest mountain ranges of Europe. On the 3rd of July, 1529, there followed a violent earthquake in Upper Italy, and immediately afterwards a blood-rain, as it was called, in Cremona[192].

In October, 1530, the Tiber rose so much above its banks that in Rome and its neighbourhood about 12,000 people were drowned. A month later, in the Netherlands, the sea broke through the dykes, and Holland, Zealand, and Brabant suffered very considerably from the overflow of the waters, which again took place two years afterwards[193].

In 1528 there appeared in the March of Brandenburg, during the prevalence of a south-east wind and a great drought[194], (the rains did not commence in Germany before 1529,) swarms of locusts[195], as if this prognostic too of great epidemics was not to be wanting. Of fiery meteors, which also frequently appeared in the following years, and in the aggregate plainly indicated an unusual condition of the atmosphere, much notice, after the manner of the times, is occasionally taken[196]. Particular attention was excited by a long fiery train which was seen on the 7th of January, 1529, at seven o’clock in the morning, throughout Mecklenburg and Pomerania[197]. Another fiery sign (chasma) was seen in the March on the 9th of January, at ten o’clock at night[198], as likewise similar atmospherical phenomena in other localities.

Comets appeared in the course of this year in unusual number[199]. The first on the 11th of August, 1527, before daybreak; it was seen throughout Europe, and it has often been confounded by more recent writers with an atmospherical phenomenon resembling a comet which appeared on the 11th of October[200]. The second was seen in July and August, 1529, in Germany, France, and Italy. Four other comets are also said to have made their appearance this year at the same time; but it is probable that these were only fiery meteors of an unknown kind[201]. The third was in 1531, and was visible in Europe from the 1st of August till the 3rd of September. This was the great comet of Halley, which returned in the year 1835[202]. The fourth was in 1532, visible from the 2nd of October to the 8th of November; it appeared again in 1661[203]. Lastly, the fifth, in 1533, seen from the middle of June till August[204].

Contemporaries agree remarkably in their accounts of the insufferable state of the weather in the eventful year 1529. The winter was particularly mild, and the vegetation was far too early, so that all the world was rejoicing at the mildness and beauty of the spring. The people wore violets, at Erfurt, on St. Matthew’s day, (the 24th of February,) little expecting that this friendly omen was to precede so severe a calamity[205]. Throughout the spring and summer wet weather continued to prevail. Constant torrents of rain overflowed the fields, the rivers passed their banks; all hopes of the cultivation were entirely frustrated[206], and misery and famine spread in all directions. A heavy rain of four days’ continuance, which took place in the south of Germany in the middle of June, and was called the St. Vitus’s Torrent, is still remembered in modern times as an unheard-of event. Whole districts of country were completely laid under water, and many persons perished who had not time to save their lives[207]. A similar, very widely extended, and perhaps universal, storm again occurred on the 10th of August, and occasioned great floods, especially in Thuringia and Saxony[208]. Upon the whole, the sun rarely broke through the heavy dark clouds. The latter part of the summer and the whole of the autumn, with the exception of a series of hot days which commenced the 24th of August[209], remained gloomy, cold, and wet. People fancied they were breathing the foggy air of Britain[210].

We ought not to omit here to notice that in the north of Germany, and especially in the March of Brandenburg, eating fish, which were caught in great abundance, was generally esteemed detrimental. Malignant and contagious diseases were said to have been traced to this cause, and it was a matter of surprise that the only food which nature bounteously bestowed was so decidedly injurious[211]. It might be difficult now to discover the cause of this phenomenon, of which we possess only isolated notices, yet, passing over all other conjectures, it is quite credible either that an actual fish poison was developed[212], or, if this notion be rejected, that a disordered condition of life, such as must be supposed to have existed in a great famine, rendered fish prejudicial to health, in the same way as sometimes occurs after protracted intermittent fevers, when the functions of the bowels are disturbed in a manner peculiar to this disease.

But it was not the inhabitants of the water alone which were affected by hidden causes of excitement in collective organic life; the fowls of the air likewise sickened, who, in their delicate and irritable organs of respiration, feel the injurious influence of the atmosphere much earlier and more sensitively than any of the unfeathered tribes, and have often been the harbingers of great danger, ere man was aware of its approach. In the neighbourhood of Freyburg in the Breisgau, dead birds were found scattered under the trees, with boils as large as peas under their wings, which indicated among them a disease, that in all probability extended far beyond the southern districts of the Rhine[213].

The famine in Germany, during this year, is described by respectable authorities in a tone of deep sympathy. Swabia, Lorraine, Alsace, and the other southern countries bordering on the Rhine, were especially visited, so that misery there reached the same frightful height as in France. The poor emigrated and roved over the country, solely to prolong their wretched existence. Above a thousand of these half-starved mendicants came to Strasburg out of Swabia. They obtained shelter in a monastery, and attempts were made to revive them, yet many were unable to bear the food that was placed before them. Attention and nourishment did but hasten their death. Another body of more than eight hundred came in the autumn from Lorraine. These unfortunate people were kept in the city, and fed during the whole winter[214], yet it is easy to conceive that this benevolence, which was no doubt likewise exercised in other cities[215]—for when was humanity ever found wanting in Germany?—could only occasionally alleviate this deeply rooted calamity. In the Venetian territories, many hundreds are said to have perished with hunger, and a like distress probably prevailed all over Upper Italy.

In the north of Germany, including the extensive sandy plains, on which wet weather is not so injurious in its effect as on a heavy clayey soil, the state of the country was upon the whole more tolerable[216]; yet, independently of the innumerable evils to which a scarcity gives rise, suicide was more frequent[217], which was certainly a rarity in the sixteenth century, and only explicable by supposing, that the powers of the mind became exhausted by the many and various passions, which in every individual locality, excited a spirit of hatred and party feeling. The consequence of such a state of turmoil is a cold disgust of life, which finds, in the first adverse event that may occur, a pretext for self-destruction, that want alone would seldom if ever occasion: for man, if his spirit be unbroken, runs the chance of starvation in times of famine, and trusts to the faintest gleam of hope, rather than, of his own accord, abandon the enjoyment of life.

It is no less in point here to notice a kind of faint lassitude, which, to the great astonishment of the people, was felt, especially in Pomerania, in June and July[218], up to the very period when the Sweating Sickness broke out. In the midst of their work, and without any conceivable cause, people became palsied in their hands and feet, so that even if their lives had depended upon it, they were incapable of the slightest exertion[219]. The treatment which was found successful, was to cover the patients warmly, and to supply them with nourishing food, of which they ate plentifully, and thus recovered again, in three or four days. Phenomena of this kind, which in the present instance evidently depended on atmospherical influence, are but the extreme gradations of a generally morbid dullness of vital feeling, which might easily pass into an actual disgust of life, such as would lead to suicide.