The really big one (part 2)
Roving bands seek redemption, revenge and an end to the pestilence by shunning the Church, flogging themselves and killing their neighbors.
Missed part 1? It’s right here. Read this already? Here’s part 3, part 4 and part 5.
Flagellants and pogromists
The scholars of the University of Paris produced the officially accepted explanation for the plague in 1348: in Tuchman’s paraphrase, “a triple conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars in the 40th degree of Aquarius said to have occurred on March 20, 1345.”
This (notably secular) explanation was acknowledged for its venerable learning—and ignored. In its place, two other hypotheses ignited the popular imagination:
God is enraged and determined to punish, if not completely exterminate, humanity, and
the Jews are poisoning the wells.
These theories don’t obviously square with each other, but paranoia and communal violence have an evil logic all their own.
The doctors of the Church tried to counter the well-poisoning libel: they pointed out that Jews died of the plague just as often as Christians, and Christians died at appalling rates whether there were any Jews around or not.
But the flagellants, while devoutly Catholic, were not inclined to listen to the Pope. Fervently anti-clerical, a band of flagellants would consider any ceremony infiltrated by priests (or women) to be invalid.
Right so, who were these flagellants?
They were the desperate, spontaneous expression of the idea that God was angry with creation and intended to scourge if not destroy it. Almost as soon as the plague broke out, bands comprised mostly of peasant men began to assemble by the hundreds and move from town to town, whipping themselves to a pulp in the hope that, by recreating the sufferings of Christ, they could once again redeem humanity through blood.
This mission of Christian redemption more than implied a challenge to the ecclesiastical hierarchy, but in case the Church missed the message, flagellant leaders claimed the right to hear confession and dispense penance and absolution. They required their followers, who would generally join for spells of about a month, to be celibate (unless rumors of masochistic orgies are to be believed). And as mentioned, they considered priests to be a polluting, rather than a cleansing, presence.
The flagellants, to give them an anachronistic label, were populists. Tuchman, giving them another, refers to “a great proletarian crowd.”
Their movement, if that’s the word, defied and temporarily wrested spiritual autonomy from an increasingly corrupt clergy: the practice of granting indulgences, that is, selling forgiveness of sins, was right on the cusp of its pun-intended golden age. That, arguably, is the admirable part of the flagellants’ populism.
Unfortunately, they also succumbed to the familiar traps of populist and proletarian movements: bigotry, paranoia and an itch for mob violence. Tuchman puts it best:
The self-torturers, meanwhile had found a better victim. In every town they entered, the flagellants rushed for the Jewish quarter, trailed by citizens howling for revenge up on the “poisoners of wells.” In Freiburg, Augsburg, Nürnberg, Munich, Königsberg, Regensburg, and other centers, Jews were slaughtered with a thoroughness that seemed to seek the final solution. […] In Cologne the Town Council repeated the Pope’s argument that Jews were dying of the plague like everyone else, but the flagellants collected a great proletarian crowd of “those who had nothing to lose,” and paid no attention. […] Six thousand were said to have perished at Mainz on August 24, 1349. Of 3,000 Jews at Erfurt, none was reported to have survived.
The authorities, like the Cologne Town Council, frequently made a show of checking the zealots’ violence and defending the Jews. But Tuchman notes that by and large they gave into the populists’ demands for blood, “not without an eye to potential forfeit of Jewish property.”
In some places, the authorities did more than just look the other way. In 1348 in Savoy, officials held trials at which they presented evidence of, in Tuchman’s words, “an international Jewish conspiracy” to foul the water supply. Confessions were extracted under torture, and 11 condemned were burnt at the stake.
Next time, The really big one (part 3): Marcel and the Jacques—a peasant uprising tries to exterminate the aristocracy and the mayor of Paris tries to harness it against the captive king.