Plague and pestilence in literature and art

by Sir Raymond Henry Payne Crawfurd

It should be set to the credit of Clement VI that he extended his personal protection to the Jews at Avignon, issuing two bulls, asserting their innocence, and calling on Christians to refrain from persecution. The Emperor Charles IV did what lay in his power, short of drawing the sword, to check the outrages perpetrated by the Bohemian nobles. Duke Albert of Austria exacted from the persecutors punishments only less cruel than they themselves had inflicted, but even so did not avail to save hundreds of Jews from the flames, in his own fortress of Kyberg. Other lesser princes, more often for bribes than for pity, extended some measure of protection to the wretched Jews, earning for themselves the sobriquet of ‘Jew-masters’. It was no light matter for a private person to shelter a Jew, for the penalty was often exacted on the rack or at the stake.

Basnage[153] states that the large number of Jews in modern Poland may be traced to the fact that King Casimir the Great (a.d. 1333-70), yielding to the entreaties of a favourite Jewess, Esther, granted sanctuary to such Jews as sought it. But actually Casimir only confirmed an edict of protection promulgated in a.d. 1264, and Poland had then already afforded a haven of refuge to the Jews, who had fled from the cruel massacres perpetrated in the enthusiasm of the first Crusade.

In England the Black Death served to revive the perennial charges brought against the Jews—that they stole Christian children and killed them, especially at Easter-time, a charge that Chaucer, mindful of Hugh of Lincoln, has enshrined in the pathetic verse of his Prioress. They were charged also with outraging the Host, as well as with spreading poison.

The Black Death seems to have fallen with greater violence on Austria than on Germany,[154] perhaps on account of its close contact with Italy. It devastated Vienna from Easter to Michaelmas of a.d. 1349, carrying off thirty thousand out of a population of less than one hundred thousand persons. The excited populace personified it as the Pest-Jungfrau, who had only to raise her hand to infect a victim. She was to be seen flying through the air in the form of a blue flame, and also proceeding out of the mouths of dead and dying. Some saw the plague poison descend in the form of a ball of fire. One such was seen hovering over the town, but a bishop exorcised it by prayer, so that it fell harmless to earth. A stone effigy of the Madonna was set up in the street, where it fell. All medical aid proved useless, and amulets, potions, and preservative electuaries were in general use. Segregation of the sick was attempted, by nailing up doors and windows of infected houses, but even so dead bodies littered the streets. Huge plague pits were dug for the reception of the dead. Flagellant processions sought to excite divine compassion by the ritual of peripatetic penitence.

The genesis of the Flagellant movement must be looked for further back in the history of pestilence than the Black Death. The idea of mortifying the flesh by the penance of scourging is of ancient origin, and at least as early as the eleventh century brotherhoods were devoted to this ritual. The processions of these Devoti, as they were termed in Italy, were originated by St. Anthony in a.d. 1231, and we hear of them under the name of Flagellants in Vienna during the plague of a.d. 1261.

One Monachus Paduanus, quoted by Hecker, has left a record of the early days of the Devoti.

‘When the land was polluted by vices and crimes, an unexampled spirit of remorse suddenly seized the minds of the Italians. The fear of Christ fell upon all: noble and ignoble, old and young, and even children of five years of age, marched through the streets with no covering but a scarf round the waist. They each carried a scourge of leather thongs, which they applied to their limbs, amid sighs and tears, with such violence that the blood flowed from the wounds. Not only during the day, but even by night, and in the severest winter, they traversed the cities with burning torches and banners, in thousands and tens of thousands, headed by their priests, and prostrated themselves before the altars. They proceeded in the same manner in the villages: and the woods and mountains resounded with the voices of those whose cries were raised to God. The melancholy chaunt of the penitent alone was heard. Enemies were reconciled: men and women vied with each other in splendid works of charity, as if they dreaded that Divine Omnipotence would pronounce on them the doom of annihilation.’

Before this mediaeval pageant of penitence the mind insensibly reverts to the ancient ritual of the Salii on this same Italian soil, to their choric hymn of expiation, to the supplicationes, and to the love-feast of the lectisternium of later days.

Under the stimulus of the Black Death, the Brotherhood of the Cross, or Cross-bearers, arose out of the ranks of the Flagellants, first in Hungary, and afterwards in Germany. Ditmar[155] has left the following account of their processions:

‘Their heads covered as far as the eyes: their look fixed on the ground, accompanied by every token of the deepest contrition and mourning. They were robed in sombre garments, with red crosses on the breast, back and cap, and bore triple scourges, tied in three or four knots, in which points of iron were fixed. Tapers and magnificent banners of cloth of gold were carried before them: wherever they made their appearance they were welcomed by the ringing of the bells: and the people flocked from all quarters, to listen to their hymns and to witness their penance, with devotion and tears.’