It has, no doubt, struck the reader that each of the five eruptions in England lasted much longer than the single one which occurred in Germany and the north of Europe. This, too, might well depend upon peculiarities in the English soil. But let us now endeavour to render manifest, by means of phenomena actually observed, that unknown something in the atmosphere of 1551, the θεῖον of the great Hippocrates, which announces its presence by the sickening of the people; for beyond this it is not granted that human researches should penetrate. The winter of 1550–51 was dry and warm in England; the spring dry and cold; the summer and autumn hot and moist[401]. The weather of the whole year was uncommon in many particulars, without, however, influencing the lives of plants and animals so much or through so great a range as at the time of the fourth epidemic of Sweating Sickness. It was even in some places praised as fruitful[402]. On the 10th of January a violent tempest occurred, which in Germany left no small traces[403] of its effects on houses and towers. The same day brought considerable floods in the river district of the Lahn, which must be noticed on account of the very unusual season of the year[404]. On the 13th of January, again at an unusual season, there followed a great storm with heavy rains[405], which spread over the north of Germany; and on the 28th of January there occurred a considerable earthquake in Lisbon, whereby about two hundred houses were overthrown, and nearly a thousand people were destroyed; whilst a fiery meteor appeared, which, according to the unsatisfactory descriptions of the time, resembled most a northern light, and therefore was, in all probability, of electrical origin[406]. This was succeeded in Germany by a great frost in February[407]. On the 21st of March, at seven o’clock in the morning, two mock suns, with three rainbows, were seen at Magdeburg and in its vicinity, and in the evening two mock moons[408]. The same mock suns were also observed at Wittenberg, but without the rainbows. A similar phenomenon with two rainbows was again seen on the 27th of March[409]; and mock suns had been observed at Antwerp as early as the 28th of February[410]. About the same time (21st of March) the Oder overflowed its banks[411], and floods followed after continued rains during the month of May in Thuringia and Franconia[412]. Great tempests were not wanting[413], and, after considerable heat, there occurred, on the 26th of June, a thick summer fog in the districts of the Elbe which deprived the besiegers of Magdeburg of the sight of that city. It may, therefore, be supposed that this phenomenon took place throughout a greater extent of country[414]. On the 22nd of September a meteor, like a northern light, was again seen, and on the 29th of that month, after some clear weather, a heavy fall of snow was followed by continued cold[415].
These facts are sufficient plainly to prove that the course of the year 1551 was unusual, that the atmosphere was overcharged with water, and that the electrical conditions of it were considerably disturbed; nor must we omit to notice that, for the first time since 1547, mould spots again appeared in Germany on clothes, and red discolorations of water, as likewise an exuberance of the lowest cryptogamic species of vegetation[416].
Sect. 4.—Diseases.
During the years of scarcity, from 1528 to 1534, it excited general surprise that malignant fevers, more especially the plague, petechial fever, and encephalitis, which in the individual accounts we can seldom sufficiently distinguish from each other, were constantly recurring, and, creeping slowly as they did from place to place, had no sooner finished their wandering visitations of whole districts of country, than they again made their appearance where they had broken out in former years[417]. It was a century of putrid malignant affections, in which typhous diseases were continually prevailing—a century replete with grand phenomena affecting human life in general, and continuing so, long after the period to which our researches refer.
There existed also an epidemic flux which, during a cold summer[418] in 1538, spread over a great part of Europe, and especially over France, so that, according to the assurance of an eminent physician, there was scarcely any town exempt from it[419]. Of this flux we have unfortunately but very defective reports, among which we find a statement, not without importance, that there were no extraordinary forerunners, such as are observed in phenomena of this kind, to account for this epidemic[420]. Two years earlier, however, (12th of July 1536,) Erasmus died of the flux[421]. This disease seldom occurs sporadically, but usually as an epidemic, and thus, perhaps slighter visitations of this rheumatic malady may be assumed to have preceded that greater one which took place in 1538.
A period remarkable for plague followed in the year 1540, and ended about 1543. The summer of the first named year is especially mentioned in the chronicles as having been hot, and throughout the whole century it continued to be in great repute on account of the excellent wine it produced[422]. A spontaneous conflagration of the woods was frequent, and an earthquake was felt in Germany on the 14th of December[423]. Thereupon, in 1541, there followed in Constantinople a great plague[424] which, in the year 1542, spread by means of a Turkish invasion into Hungary, its superior importance being indicated by the presence of accompanying phenomena, among which the swarms of locusts that appeared this year are especially worthy of note. They came from the interior of Asia, and travelled in dense masses over Europe, passing northward over the Elbe[425], and southward as far as Spain[426]. Kaye saw a cloud of locusts of this description in Padua; their passage lasted full two hours, and they extended further than the eye could reach[427]. The plague quickly spread in Hungary and caused a similar destruction to the imperial army, which was fighting against the Turks under Joachim the Second, Elector of Brandenburg, as it had formerly caused the French before Naples[428]. Whether this pestilence may have been the original oriental glandular plague, or whether we may assume that it had already degenerated into the Hungarian Petechial Fever, such as likewise broke out in the year 1566, in the camp near Komorn, during the campaign of Maximilian the Second, and thence, by means of the disbanded lansquenets, spread in all directions[429], cannot now well be determined for want of ascertained facts. In the following year, 1543, however, this plague broke out in Germany, namely, in the Harz districts in the provinces of the Saale[430], and still more malignantly at Metz[431], yet upon the whole it did not cause any considerable loss of life.
In the years 1545 and 1546 we again find the Trousse-galant in France[432]. It proved fatal to the Duke of Orleans, second son of Francis the First, in the neighbourhood of Boulogne, and, according to the testimony of French historians, to ten thousand English in that fort, so that the garrison was obliged to pitch a camp outside the town, and the reluctant reinforcements felt that they were encountering certain death[433]. The disease spread itself also among the French troops, and we have seen that it extended its dominion beyond the Alps of Savoy[434].
It thus appears, that, up to the period of which we have been speaking, the year 1544 alone was free from great visitations of disease, but it would be difficult from thenceforth satisfactorily to define the individual groups of epidemics, if the connexion of the epidemic Sweating Sickness of the year 1551 with them is to be made out; for there was, to use an expression of the schools, a continued typhous constitution, which extended throughout this whole period, manifesting itself on the slightest causes by malignant diseases; so that the visitations of sickness which we have hitherto been describing do but appear as exacerbations of them, with a predominance sometimes of one and sometimes of another set of symptoms.
The camp fever, which prevailed in the spring of 1547 among the imperial troops, there is good ground for considering to have been petechial. A great many soldiers fell sick of it, and it was so much the more malignant because the imperial army was composed of a variety of soldiery, Spaniards, Germans, Hungarians, and Bohemians. Those who were seized complained, as in encephalitis, of insufferable heat of the head, their eyes were swollen and started glistening from their sockets, their offensive breath poisoned the atmosphere around them, their tongues were covered with a brown crust, they vomited bile, their skin was of a leaden hue, and a deep purple eruption broke forth upon it. The disease, the fresh seeds of which the imperial hussars had brought with them out of Hungary, proved fatal as early as the second or third day, and it may be taken for granted, that both before and after the battle of Muhlberg (24th of April) it made no small ravages in Saxony[435]; yet it did not become general.
After a short interval the unusual phenomena of 1549 again increased; the chronicles of central Germany record blights and murrains in that year. They speak likewise of a northern light seen on the 21st of September, and of a malignant disease which, till the winter set in, carried off young people in no small numbers[436]. According to all appearance this disease was a petechial fever, which in the following year, 1550, likewise visited the March of Brandenburg, Thuringia and Saxony[437]. The mortality was particularly great at Eisleben, where, in less than four weeks from the 14th September, 257 fell a sacrifice to it, and after this period it happened often that from twenty to twenty-four bodies were buried in one day; so that the loss in this little town may be reckoned at least at 500[438]. From this slight example the great malignity of the plagues of the sixteenth century will be perceived, and it would be still more evident if the physicians of those times had made more careful observations, and historians had more accurately recorded facts of this kind.