The Power of Plagues. Irwin W. Sherman

with the uninfected members of the family. Under these conditions, household quarantine did not prevent the spread of the disease; rather, it resulted in higher mortality.

      Plague undermined confidence in local church leaders, and many people left on pilgrimages to seek salvation elsewhere. Pilgrimages increased the number of travelers on the highways, and these strangers provoked hostility; at the same time they were also the “seeds” for spreading the infection. To restrict the movements of such strangers, cordons sanitaires were established. Towns closed their gates to travelers. These measures circumscribed plague to certain towns while protecting others. Restricting the long-distance movement of people and baggage from infected cities may also have helped to reduce the spread of the disease.

      Discrimination

      Restrictions such as cordons sanitaires and quarantine frequently were expanded to limit personal freedom, and to identify the culprits. The medieval public wanted to know who was to blame. They found in their community likely sources—strangers, lepers, beggars, the poor, prostitutes, and the Jews. Plague aided in the spread of anti-Semitism, a practice already begun when Jews were slaughtered beginning with the First Crusade in 1096. In some Muslim countries it was the Christians who were blamed; in both Christian and Muslim countries, however, the Jews were blamed. Although Jews, as the largest cultural minority, had been free to practice their religion by both Roman and canon law, once plague claimed the lives of the political leaders of a town, such freedom was soon abrogated. Early in 1348 the rumor arose that Jews were spreading the disease by poisoning the Christian wells. Though this appeared absurd to the kings and popes, and Pope Clement VI of Avignon (France) tried to discredit the charge by issuing a bull calling the accusations “unthinkable,” Jews continued to be blamed and persecuted. By the fall of 1348 formal accusations were brought against Jews, and when court officials extracted confessions, the rumors began to be believed. “Well poisoning” by Jews spread from Avignon to Strasbourg and then to all of Germany and Poland. Riots occurred in Strasbourg, and when the members of the local government tried to protect the Jews, they were thrown out of office. With a new government in place, more than 900 Jews, about half the entire community, were rounded up, and on February 14, 1349, they were burned on the grounds of the Jewish cemetery. At Freiburg all Jews were placed in a large wooden building and burned to death. In northern Italy legislation was enacted to identify the suspect groups—they chose a color, yellow—and Jews were required to wear a yellow Star of David on their clothing; prostitutes were also forced to have yellow labels. (It is ironic that yellow was traditionally used to identify lepers and criminals.) And because Jews were prohibited from owning land, they had become merchants, bankers, financiers, moneylenders, and pawnbrokers. Although they had the knowledge for mercantile trade, they were still discriminated against, especially in Germany and France. Killing of the Jewish moneylenders and bankers had another benefit—no loans to repay. The king of Poland, Casimir, had a Jewish mistress and needed the expertise of the Jews, and so they were invited to settle in Poland; as a consequence, in western Russia and Poland, Jews became a significant part of the population after the Black Death. (Their numbers would once again be reduced 3 centuries later by pogroms and gas chambers, latter-day instruments of anti-Semitism).

      Church

      In cities of 50,000 people, more than 500 died each day. Priests who gave last rites had a very high mortality rate, and there was a loss of faith in the clergy because they seemed so powerless to prevent death or the spread of death from disease. There was also a decline in papal authority. The Church passed the responsibility for plague on to God, suggesting that this was Judgment Day, that people had sinned and so nothing could be done to reduce the suffering. All of the monks of a monastery near Avignon and another near Marseilles succumbed.

Fear of plague also led to a greater consciousness of religion, especially the “magical religion” embodied in the cults of healer saints. These patron saints, who not only knew suffering but also had the power to heal the sick and provide comfort, usurped the veneration of God alone and set the stage for long and divisive debates over the nature of religion. One of these healer saints was St. Sebastian, and another was St. Roch (Fig. 4.3). Although it is not known whether the life of St. Roch is truth or fiction, his story comes to us in written form in 1414 from the Venetian humanist and scholar Francisco Diedo. Roch was born in Montpellier, France, in 1295, and he is said to have had a birthmark in the form of a red cross on his breast. As a young man he gave to the poor and embarked on pilgrimages to Rome. Wherever he traveled there was plague, and he was able to cure the afflicted by placing his hands on the buboes. He eventually contracted the disease, was expelled from Montpellier, and died in 1327. St. Roch is often depicted as a pilgrim carrying a purse and a staff and pointing to a bubo on his inner thigh.

Figure 4.3 St. Roch, the patron saint of those suffering from plague. The original hangs in the Galleria Dell’ Academia, Venice, Italy, Courtesy Wikipedia.com

      Another threat to the Church was a pilgrim movement of another sort. The Brethren of the Flagellants began in eastern Europe, but its strongest bases were in Germany and France. The flagellants, sometimes as many as a thousand, marched in procession through the town; they were led by a master carrying a banner of purple velvet and were dressed in cloth of gold. Masked and dressed in dark clothing emblazoned with a red cross, each flagellant carried a whip made of leather thongs and tipped with metal studs, with which they beat their backs and chests. (This is graphically shown in Goya’s painting of the flagellants as well as in Ingmar Bergman’s movie The Seventh Seal.) The flagellants were a counterculture to the Church, and they claimed divine authorization for their mission, the alleviation of the plague. Pope Clement VI initially encouraged the flagellant movement, and up until 1349 the flagellants had their way in recruiting other pilgrims, but when the pope saw he could not control it, he issued a bull denouncing the movement and its practices. Eventually the movement ceased for reasons not fully understood. In its time, however, the flagellant movement did some good: it brought about a spiritual revival, sinners confessed and robbers returned stolen property, hope was raised (albeit temporarily), and it provided a theatrical diversion. But in the final analysis, the movement did more harm than good. Jews became the special victims of the flagellants, and their persecutions were the forerunners of the pogroms. In Frankfurt in 1349 the flagellants rushed into the Jewish quarter and incited the people to engage in wholesale slaughter. In Brussels the mere announcement of their arrival triggered a massacre of 600 Jews. Death from the Black Death itself coupled with that due to virulent anti-Semitism virtually wiped out Jewish communities in many parts of Europe and also led to permanent shifts in their populations to Poland and Lithuania.

      Medicine

Medicine was also affected. Medieval society had four kinds of medical practitioners: academic physicians, who knew theory but did not care for the sick; surgeons, who learned their trade as apprentices and who were the principal caregivers of the sick; barbers, who did bloodletting and minor surgery; and those who practiced folk medicine, mostly women. Academic physicians were generally older men who relied on the teachings of Galen, who believed, as did Hippocrates before him, that disease was a result of an imbalance in the four humors of the body (blood, phlegm, and black and yellow bile). But since plague appeared to have little to do with humoral changes, confidence in the academic physicians diminished. When these holders of the chairs of medicine at the great European universities died, the newer and younger appointees could move into other clinical areas, such as anatomy. Surgeons, who wore a costume with a beak containing perfume or spices, a cloak of waxy leather, eye lenses, and a wand with incense