The details of the daily horrors are very similar to those in the cities of Italy and France and there is no need to labour them again. One point of difference is the abnormally large number of churchmen who died during the epidemic. It seems indeed that the plague fell with exceptional violence on the German clergy; because, one must suppose in the absence of other explanation, of the greater fortitude with which they performed their duties. Conrad Eubel, basing his calculations almost entirely on German sources,{160} shows that at least thirty-five per cent of the higher clergy died in this period. The figure would not be exceptionally high if it related to parish priests but becomes astonishing when it applies to their normally cautious and well-protected superiors. But so far as the monks were concerned it seems that it was not only devotion to duty which led to a thinning of their ranks. Felix Fabri{161} says that in Swabia many religious houses were deserted: ‘For those who survived were not in the monasteries but in the cities and, having become accustomed to worldly ways of living, went quickly from bad to worse….’ The monks of Auwa are said to have moved in a body to Ulm where they dissipated the monastery’s treasure in riotous living.
For a variety of reasons, therefore, the German Church found itself short of personnel in 1349 and 1350. One result was a sharp increase in plural benefices. In one area, between 1345 and 1347, thirty-nine benefices were held by thirteen men. In 1350 to 1352 this had become fifty-seven benefices in the hands of twelve men. Another was the closing of many monasteries and parish churches; a third the mass ordination of young and often ill-educated and untrained clerics. As a sum of these factors, the German Church after the Black Death was numerically weaker, worse led and worse manned than a few years before: an unlucky consequence of the losses which it had suffered by carrying out its responsibilities courageously. The many benefactions which it received during the terror ensured that its spiritual and organizational weakness was matched by greater financial prosperity, a disastrous combination which helped to make the church despised and detested where formerly it had been loved, revered or, at least, accepted. By 1350 the Church in Germany had been reduced to a condition where any energetic movement of reform was certain to find many allies and weakened opposition.
One by one the cities of Germany were attacked. As always, firm statistics are few and far between and, where they do exist, are often hard to reconcile with each other. Reincke{162} has estimated that between half and two thirds of the inhabitants of Hamburg died and seventy per cent of those in Bremen; yet in Lübeck only a quarter of the householders are recorded as having perished. Most country areas were seriously affected, yet Bohemia was virtually untouched. Graus{163} has suggested that this was due to Bohemia’s remoteness from the traditional trade routes yet, in the far milder epidemic of 1380, the area was ravaged by the plague. An impression is left that Germany, using the term in its widest possible sense to include Prussia, Bohemia and Austria, suffered less badly than France or Italy, but such an impression could hardly be substantiated. The Black Death in Germany, however, is of peculiar interest since that country provided the background for two of its most striking and unpleasant by-products: the pilgrimages of the Flagellants and the persecution of the Jews.
The Flagellant Movement,{164} even though it dislocated life over a great area of Europe and at one time threatened the security of governments, did not, in the long run, amount to very much. It might reasonably be argued that, in a book covering so immense a subject as the Black Death, it does not merit considered attention. In statistical terms this might be true. But the Flagellants, with their visions and their superstitions, their debauches and their discipline, their idealism and their brutality, provide a uniquely revealing insight into the mind of medieval man when confronted with overwhelming and inexplicable catastrophe. Only a minority of Europeans reacted with the violence of the Flagellants but the impulses which drove this minority on were everywhere at work. To the more sophisticated the excesses of the Flagellants may have seemed distasteful; to the more prudent, dangerous. But to no one did they seem meaningless or irrelevant – that there was method in their madness was taken for granted even by the least enthusiastic. It is this, the fact that some element of the Flagellant lurked in the mind of every medieval man, which, more than the movement’s curious nature and intrinsic drama, justifies its consideration in some detail.
Flagellation as a practice seems to be almost as old as man himself. Joseph McCabe has pursued the subject with loving detail through the ages:{165} from the Indians of Brazil who whipped themselves on their genitals at the time of the new moon through the Spartans who propitiated the fertility goddess with blood until finally he arrived at the thirteenth and fourteenth century – the ‘Golden Age of Pious Flagellation’. Most of these exercises were clearly if unconsciously erotic in their nature. As such, they were far removed from the pilgrimages of the Brethren of the Cross. It would be rash to assert that the Flagellants of 1348 did not satisfy, by their self-inflicted torments, some twisted craving in their natures, but ‘erotic’, in its normal sense of awakening sexual appetites, is not a word which can properly be applied to their activities.
The practice of self-scourging as a means of mortifying the flesh seems to be first recorded in Europe in certain Italian monastic communities early in the eleventh century. As a group activity it was not known for another two hundred years. At this point, in the middle of the thirteenth century, a series of disasters convinced the Italians that God’s anger had been called down on man as a punishment for his sins. The idea that he might be placated if a group of the godly drew together to protest their penitence and prove it by their deeds seems first to have occurred to a Perugian hermit called Raniero. The project was evidently judged successful, at any rate sufficiently so for the experiment to be repeated in 1334 and again a few years later, when the pilgrimage was led by ‘a virtuous and beautiful maid’. This last enterprise ran foul of the authorities and the maid was arrested and sentenced to be burnt at the stake. Either her virtue or her beauty, however, so far melted the hearts of her captors that she was reprieved and ultimately released.
The pilgrimage of 1260 drew its authority from a Heavenly Letter brought to earth by an angel which stated that God, incensed by man’s failure to observe the Sabbath day, had scourged Christendom and would have destroyed the world altogether but for the intercession of the angels and the Virgin and the altogether becoming behaviour of the Flagellants. Divine grace would be forthcoming for all those who became members of the Brotherhood: anybody else, it was clear, was in imminent danger of hellfire. A second edition of this letter was issued in time for the Black Death by an angel who was said to have delivered it in the Church of St Peter in Jerusalem some time in 1343.{166} The text was identical with the first except for an extra paragraph specifically pointing out that the plague was the direct punishment of God and that the aim of the Flagellants was to induce God to relent.
The ‘Brotherhood of the Flagellants’ or ‘Brethren of the Cross’ as the movement was called in 1348, traditionally originated in Eastern Europe, headed, according to Nohl in a pleasant conceit for which he unfortunately fails to quote authority, by various ‘gigantic women from Hungary’.{167} It is to be deplored that these heroic figures quickly faded from the scene. It was in Germany that the Flagellant movement really took root. It is hard to be sure whether this was the result of circumstances or of the nature of the inhabitants. Dr Lea suggests that the German people had had their religious sensibilities stirred by the papal interdict against Louis of Bavaria and the recent earthquakes. But, if such were the causes, there would have been quite as much reason to expect the outbreak in Italy, the original home of collective scourgings, deprived as it was of its Pope and in a mood of striking melancholia.