It is a terrible history, this of a plague. Nevertheless, if we were capable of surveying such events from an elevated position, where past and future were revealed to our view, and the whole scheme of creation unfolded to our knowledge, we should doubtless discover that even plagues and pestilences play their parts for the welfare and advancement of the human race. Nor are we without some glimpses of their utility. Viewing the matter, in the first place, in a quite physiological light, let us suppose that disease has been generated in a great city, that debilitated parents give birth to feeble offspring, that the fever, or whatever it may be, is wasting the strength of whole classes of the population, is it not better that such disease should attain a power and virulence that will enable it to sweep off at once a whole infected generation, men, women, and children, leaving the population to be replaced by the healthier who would survive? would not this be better than to allow the disease to perpetuate itself indefinitely, and thus to continue to multiply from an infected stock? The poison passes on, and searches out other neighbourhoods where the like terrible remedy is needed. Ay, but it passes, you say, into cities and districts where no such curative process, no such restoration of the breed, was called for. But it is always thus with the great laws of nature, or of Providence. Thus far, and no farther! is said to the pestilence as well as to the ocean; but the line along the beach is not kept or measured with that petty precision which a land-surveyor would assuredly have suggested. Man’s greatness arises in part from this struggle with an external nature, which threatens from time to time to overwhelm him. There is, according to his measurement of things, a dreadful surplus of power and activity, both in the organic and the inorganic world. Nowhere are the forces of nature exactly graduated to suit his taste or convenience. Happily not. Man would sink into the tameness and insipidity of an Arcadian shepherd, or the sheep he feeds and fondles, if every wind that blew were exactly tempered to his own susceptibility.
But the moral effects of plague and pestilence—what good thing can be said of them? A general dissoluteness, an unblushing villany, for the most part prevails: a few instances of heroic virtue brighten out above the corrupted mass. Well, is it nothing, then, that from time to time our nature should be fully revealed to us in its utmost strength for good or for evil? A very hideous revelation it may sometimes be, but not the less salutary on this account. The mask of hypocrisy is torn off a whole city; in one moment is revealed to a whole people what its morality, what its piety is worth. Of the island of Cyprus, we are told, that an earthquake shook its foundations, and was accompanied by so frightful a hurricane that the inhabitants, who had slain their Mahometan slaves in order that they might not themselves be subjected by them, fled in dismay in all directions. Who had slain their Mahometan slaves! Their Christianity had brought them thus far on the road of moral culture! At Lübeck, the Venice of the North, the wealthy merchants were not, in this extremity, unmindful of the safety of their souls; they spent their last strength in carrying their treasures to monasteries and churches. Useless for all other purposes, their gold would now purchase heaven. To such intelligent views of Christianity had they attained! But the treasure had no longer any charm for the monks; it might be infected; and even with them the thirst for gold was in abeyance. They shut their gates upon it; yet still it was cast to them over the convent walls. “People would not brook an impediment to the last pious work to which they were driven by despair.”
Did all desert their post, or belie their professions? No; far from it. Amongst other instances, take that of the Sisters of Charity at the Hotel Dieu. “Though they lost their lives evidently from contagion, and their numbers were several times renewed, there was still no want of fresh candidates, who, strangers to the unchristian fear of death, piously devoted themselves to their holy calling.”
But how cruel had their fears made the base multitude of Christendom! They rose against the Jews. They sought an enemy. The wells were poisoned; the Jews had poisoned them. Sordid natures invariably strive to lose the sense of their own calamity in a vindictive passion against some supposed author of it. For this reason it is, that, whatever the nature of the public distress may be, they always fasten it upon some human antagonist, whom they can have the luxury of hating and reviling. If they cannot cure, they can at least revenge themselves.
“The noble and the mean fearlessly bound themselves by an oath to extirpate the Jews by fire and sword, and to snatch them from their protectors, of whom the number was so small, that throughout all Germany but few places can be mentioned where these unfortunate people were not regarded as outlaws, and martyred and burnt. Solemn summonses were issued from Berne, to the towns of Basle, Freyburg, and Strasburg, to pursue the Jews as prisoners. The burgomasters and senators, indeed, opposed this requisition; but in Basle the populace obliged them to bind themselves by an oath to burn the Jews, and to forbid persons of that community from entering their city for the space of two hundred years. Upon this all the Jews in Basle, whose number could not be inconsiderable, were enclosed in a wooden building, constructed for the purpose, and burnt together with it, upon the mere outcry of the people, without sentence or trial, which indeed would have availed them nothing. Soon after the same thing took place at Freyburg. A regular diet was held at Bennefeeld, in Alsace, where the bishops, lords, and barons, as also deputies of the counties and towns, consulted how they should proceed with regard to the Jews: and when the deputies of Strasburg—not, indeed, the bishop of this town, who proved himself a violent fanatic—spoke in favour of the persecuted, as nothing criminal was substantiated against them, a great outcry was raised, and it was vehemently asked why, if so, they had covered their wells and removed their buckets?” [The wells were not used in the mere suspicion that they were poisoned, and then the covering of them up became a proof with these reasoners that they had been poisoned]. “A sanguinary decree was resolved upon, of which the populace, who obeyed here the call of the nobles and superior clergy, became but the too willing executioners. Wherever the Jews were not burnt they were at least banished, and so being compelled to wander about, they fell into the hands of the country people, who without humanity, and regardless of all laws, persecuted them with fire and sword. At Spires the Jews, driven to despair, assembled in their own habitations, which they set on fire, and thus consumed themselves with their families.”
The atrocities, in short, that were committed against this unhappy people were innumerable. At Strasburg 2000 men were burnt in their own burial-ground. At Mayence, 12,000 are said to have been put to a cruel death. At Eslingen the whole Jewish community burned themselves in their own synagogue. Those whom the Christians saved they insisted upon baptising! And, as fanaticism begets fanaticism, Jewish mothers were seen throwing their children on the pile, to prevent their being baptised, and then precipitating themselves into the flames. From many of the accused the rack extorted a confession of guilt; and as some Christians also were sentenced to death for poisoning the wells, Dr Hecker suggests that it is not improbable the very belief in the prevalence of the crime had induced some men of morbid imagination really to commit it. When a faith in witchcraft, he observes, was prevalent, many an old woman was tempted to mutter spells against her neighbour. The false accusation had ended in producing, if not the crime itself, yet the criminal intention.
When we remember what took place in England under the reign of one Titus Oates, we shall not conclude that these terrible hallucinations of the public mind are proofs of any very peculiar condition of barbarism. Then, as at the later epoch to which we have alluded, a very marvellous plot was devised and thoroughly credited. All the Jews throughout Christendom were under the control and government of certain superiors at Toledo—a secret and mysterious council of Rabbis—from whom they received their commands. These prepared the poison with their own hands, from spiders, owls, and other venomous animals, and distributed it in little bags, with injunctions where it was to be thrown. Dr Hecker gives us, in an appendix, an official account of the “Confessions made on the 15th September, in the year of our Lord 1348, in the castle of Chillon, by the Jews arrested in Neustadt on the charge of poisoning the wells, springs, and other places, also food, &c., with the design of destroying and extirpating all Christians.” These confessions were, of course, produced by the rack, or by the threat of torture, and the manifest inutility of any defence or denial. Nor must it be forgotten, that the official report was drawn up after the whole of the Jews at Neustadt had been burnt on this very charge. Amongst these confessions is one of Balaviginus, a Jewish physician, arrested at Chillon “in consequence of being found in the neighbourhood.” He was put for a short time upon the rack, and, after being taken down, “confessed, after much hesitation, that, about ten weeks before, the Rabbi Jacob of Toledo sent him, by a Jewish boy, some poison in the mummy of an egg: it was a powder sewed up in a thin leathern pouch, accompanied by a letter, commanding him, on penalty of excommunication, and by his required obedience to the law, to throw the poison into the larger and more frequented wells of Thonon.” Similar letters had been sent to other Jews. All Jews, indeed, were under the necessity of obeying these injunctions. He, Balaviginus, had done so; he had thrown the poison into several wells. It was a powder half red and half black. Red and black spots were produced by the plague; it was right that this poison should partake of these two colours.
Conveyed over the lake from Chillon to Clarens to point out the well into which he had thrown the powder, Balaviginus, “on being conducted to the spot, and having seen the well, acknowledged that to be the place, saying, ‘This is the well into which I put the poison.’ The well was examined in his presence, and the linen cloth in which the poison had been wrapped was found. He acknowledged this to be the linen which had contained the poison; he described it as being of two colours—red and black.” We follow in imagination this Jewish physician. Taken from the rack to his cell, he repeats whatever absurdity his unrelenting persecutors put into his mouth. Rabbi Jacob of Toledo—mummy of an egg—what you will. Conducted to the well—yes, this was the well; shown the very rag—yes, this was the rag;—and the powder? yes, it was red and black. What scorn and bitterness must have mingled with the agony of the Jewish physician!
Amidst all this we hear the scourge and miserable chant of the Flagellants, stirring up the people to fresh persecutions, and infecting their minds with a superstition as terrible as the vice it pretended to expiate. This was not, indeed, their first appearance in Europe; nor did the Flagellants do more, at the commencement, than exaggerate the sort of piety their own church had taught them. Happily, as their fanaticism rose, they put themselves in opposition to the hierarchy, and were thus the sooner dispersed. In their spiritual exultation they presumed to reform or to dispense with the priesthood. They found themselves, therefore, in their turn subjected to grave denunciations, and pronounced to be one cause of the wrath of Heaven.
All this time what were the physicians doing? In the history of the plague, written by a physician, the topic, we may be sure, is not forgotten. But the information we glean is of a very scanty, unsatisfactory character. As to the origin of the plague—“A grand conjunction of the three superior planets, Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars, in the sign of Aquarius, which took place, according to Guy de Chauliac, on the 24th March 1345, was generally received as its principal cause. In fixing the day, this physician, who was deeply versed in astrology, did not agree with others; wherefore there arose various disputations of weight in that age, but of none in ours.” The medical faculty of Paris pronounced the same opinion. Being commissioned to report on the causes and the remedies of this Great Mortality, they commence thus: “It is known that in India, and the vicinity of the Great Sea, the constellations which emulated the rays of the sun, and the warmth of the heavenly fire, exerted their power especially against that sea, and struggled violently with its waters.” Hence vapours and corrupted fogs; hence no wholesome rain, or hail, or snow, or dew, could refresh the earth. But notwithstanding this learning, quite peculiar to the age, they were not more at fault than other learned bodies have been in later times, in the practical remedies they suggested against the disease. They were not entirely occupied in fixing the day when Jupiter, Mars, and Saturn, had combated the sun over the great Indian Ocean. “They did,” as Dr Hecker says, “what human intellect could do in the actual condition of the healing art; and their knowledge of the disease was by no means despicable.” When fevers have attained to that malignancy that they take the name of plagues, they have escaped, we suspect, from the control of the physician;—just as when fires take the name of conflagrations, you must devote all your efforts to the saving of what is yet unconsumed, and checking the extension of the flames.