Plague and pestilence in literature and art

by Sir Raymond Henry Payne Crawfurd

In Switzerland especially, but also in southern Germany and south-eastern France, wooden statues of Sebastian are commonly met with, mostly belonging to the three centuries following the Black Death. Several may be seen in the Historical Museum at Basle, more or less archaic in character, and a very fine example in the Cluny Museum at Paris. The same museum also possesses a pair of quaint coloured high reliefs in wood of St. Sebastian and St. Roch respectively. These wooden effigies are naturally most common in districts where wood-carving has been extensively pursued.

PLATE IX (Face Page 102)

SS. MARK, SEBASTIAN, ROCH,
COSMAS AND DAMIAN.
BY TITIAN

Photograph by Naya, Venice

It must not be supposed that the cult of Sebastian was widespread from the first, or that the record of its growth is continuous and unbroken from its inauguration in this Roman plague of a.d. 683. Circumstance chanced to be arrayed against its continuity. The seventh century was not a notable period of plague in Europe, and that was now the dominating epidemic. There was famine and pestilence in Ireland,[144] but its nature is not known, and the kings of Erin faced their Irish question in the spirit of Cromwell. In a season of famine they summoned the leading clergy and laity to a council to consider the situation. No one, in the circumstances, will dispute the propriety of their injunction to clergy and laity to observe a fast. But the further injunction that they should employ their hours of abstinence in praying that some sickness might carry off the surplus of the lower orders, as the excess of population was the cause of the famine, is more debatable. (‘Petebant ut nimia multitudo vulgi per infirmitatem aliquam tolleretur, quia numerositas populi erat occasio famis.’) At the instance of St. Gerald, who contended that the Almighty could relieve the situation more suitably and quite as easily by multiplying the fruits of the earth, it was proposed to recommend this course to His adoption, at any rate as a preliminary measure. But clergy and laity, headed by the holy St. Fechin, were in no mood for such half-hearted measures as promised no finality, and St. Gerald’s suggestion was set aside. Pestilence followed in due course, and the Divine working was made manifest in that it claimed St. Fechin and the two kings of Erin among its innumerable victims.

In spite of the retrocession of plague from Europe after the seventh century, Syria,[145] the Euphrates valley, and Irak were still devastated at frequent intervals by recurring epidemics. From this persistent source it spread as far as Constantinople in a.d. 697 and 794, in the latter case almost completely depopulating Constantinople according to Nicephoras Byzantinus. Constantinople was in such intimate relation, commercial and political, with Syria and Central Asia that transference of plague was wellnigh inevitable. After this there was a long lull in Europe, and to a less extent in Syria, until the eleventh century. It is often confidently stated that the Crusades brought plague back to Europe, but it must not be forgotten that there was a severe epidemic of plague on that continent in a.d. 1094, before the Crusades commenced. Doubtless they served to maintain the continuity of infection. The pestilence that decimated the army of Louis IX and carried off him and his son was by no means certainly bubonic plague. The surviving accounts suggest rather cholera or dysentery. Again, in a.d. 1167, the army of Frederick Barbarossa, while encamped before Rome, was swept away by a pestilence, that seems to have been bubonic plague, which penetrated into the city also and worked great havoc. Thomas à Becket, writing to Pope Alexander III after the retreat of Frederick, congratulates him on the Lord having destroyed Sennacherib’s army. Again, in a.d. 1230, a destructive inundation of the Tiber was followed by plague, that led the Romans to recall the banished pope, Gregory IX. In a.d. 1244 plague was in Florence, and led to the institution of the Compagnia della Misericordia. Its foundations were laid in the fines paid by wool-porters for the use of foul and blasphemous language at their meeting-house. One of them, the good old Piero di Luca Borsi, induced them, when the total had reached a large sum, to spend it in the provision of six litters, one for each ward of the city, and to select two of their members weekly for each litter, to carry sick persons to the hospitals or dead bodies to the mortuaries.

In a.d. 1294 plague was again widespread and severe in Europe, and a succession of scattered epidemics, of which the most severe were those of a.d. 1320 and 1333 respectively in southern France and Spain, led up to the virulent pandemic of a.d. 1348 and after, commonly known as the Black Death.