At Villard-le-Lans is a chapel of St. Sebastian. It has no windows, and a doorway hewn in the rock. It was prepared as a theatre for presenting a Mystery play in a.d. 1446. But following the plague of 1565 it was converted, in fulfilment of a rich man’s vow, into a chapel adorned with frescoes illustrating the story of St. Sebastian. The frescoes survive to this day, and have been fully described by M. l’Archiviste de Jussin.
If we may credit local legend, the Oberammergau Passion Play had a similar origin in a.d. 1633. One Gaspard Schueler, a native of Oberammergau, but living at Eschenlohe, where plague was rife, determined to pay a hasty and surreptitious visit to his wife and children. He did so, and carried the plague to Oberammergau, where he died of it himself. Between the day of his death and the festival of SS. Simon and Jude, thirty-three days later, eighty-four persons died of plague at Oberammergau. A meeting of the inhabitants was summoned, and six women and twelve men took a solemn vow to produce every ten years a play representing the sufferings of Christ. They were rewarded by the immediate cessation of the plague.
CHAPTER X
Throughout the fourteenth and two succeeding centuries Venice was visited by a constant succession of epidemics of plague. This was the price she was doomed to pay for the enjoyment of her Oriental commerce. Standing, as she stood, at the meeting-place of east and west, so long as the commerce of the east passed to the west by way of Syria and Egypt, Venice knew no rival but Genoa, until the Turk appeared at Constantinople to challenge her ascendancy. Plague and commerce alike passed through Venice on their way to the countries of Central and Northern Europe. Plague was in some sense the measure of Venetian opulence, and with the loss of this opulence the number of her plagues declined.
Venice had two main trade routes by sea,[174] one to the east and one to the west, and two land routes to the north.
The first maritime route lay down the Adriatic, past the Ionian Isles, and round Cape Matapan to Crete, where it divided into four branch routes: (a) northwards to the Dardanelles, Constantinople, the Black Sea, and the Sea of Azov; (b) along the shores of the Morea and through the Aegean Islands to the Dardanelles; (c) to the ports of Asia Minor, Smyrna, and Aleppo, Cyprus, Syria, Alexandretta, and Beirut; (d) to Alexandria and Egypt. These two last branches linked Venice to the caravan routes that led from Ormuz on the Persian Gulf to Aleppo and Beirut, and from Suez to Alexandria, and at their far end penetrated into the heart of Asia, Persia, India, and Cathay.
The second maritime route lay by way of the Adriatic westward to Sicily, where it divided into two branch routes: (a) to Tunis, Tripoli, and the ports of Spain; (b) through the Straits of Gibraltar northwards as far as England and Flanders, bringing London and Bruges into touch with the east.
The land routes from Venice to Central Europe lay for the most part outside the confines of Venetian territory. One passed by way of the Ampezzo valley northward to the Pusterthal and on to Innsbruck and Munich; the other along the Po to Brescia and Bergamo, and thence by Lake Como and the Splügen Pass to Constance. From Constance trade lines diverged to all parts of Northern Europe.