THE PILGRIMAGE OF THE FLAGELLANTS. THE annals of religious fanaticism, wild and extraordinary though they be, and abounding in startling episodes, hardly include a more curious page than that recording the proceedings of a sect of half-crazed enthusiasts, which, after a century's existence in Italy, spread northwards, towards the middle of the fourteenth century, through Switzerland into Germany. Propagandism was the object of a crusade, whose banner and emblem were the scourge instead of the cross; and numerous proselytes, due sometimes to force, but more often to free will, swelled, as it proceeded, the ranks of the strange expedition. To comprehend the motives that brought the Flagellants across the Alps, and the reasons of the rapid, although temporary extension of their barbarous and bloody tenets, it is necessary to refer, in some detail, to other circumstances of the times. In Germany, the first half of the fourteenth century was a period of unbounded corruption and immorality, of violence, rapine, and disorder. Serfdom still existed; the lower orders were oppressed and degraded; in the cities, the burghers but just began to feel the strength that union gives, and to cling together in corporate bodies for mutual protection and support. Neither citizens nor peasants were yet strong enough to defend themselves against the exactions and aggressions of the robber knights and tyrannical nobles, who levied black mail, how and when they pleased, and with it kept high festival in their sumptuous and wellfortified castles. The patrician families of the free cities of the Empire were connected and allied with these aristocratic banditti; the offspring of their intermarriages were reared from the cradle in a spirit of cruelty and violence towards their inferiors. The divisions between the higher classes in the towns-patricians, merchants, councillors, rich burgesses strongly marked, and were characterised by a jealous and hostile spirit; whilst the mass of the people, the peasants of the environs, the mecha were nics, who were not admissible into the guilds formed by their superiors, the large number of persons who sold their services to the first purchaser for daily bread and nightly shelter, led dissolute and criminal lives, and were not to be restrained from evildoing, even by the barbarously cruel punishments whose application is so frequently recorded in the chronicles of the time. When good example is thus scarce amongst the laity of all degrees, one yet may hope to find it amongst the clergy. In the present instance, the search but further exposes the prevalent and deeply-rooted depravity. The entire body of priests and monks, from the great dignitaries of the church down to the mendicant friars, who tramped their daily round with staff and wallet, had fallen into discredit and contempt by the corruption of their lives. The people condemned them with one voice, and that was the voice of incontestible truth. The Emperor, Charles IV., himself, in a public assemblage of the princes of the Empire at Mayence, spoke openly of their misconduct, and no voice was uplifted in reply or refutation. Bishops, neglecting their dioceses, girded sword and brandished lance in unjust wars, and even in frays and highway robberies;―undignified prelates, abbots, and canons, passed their days in the chase and the tournament, and at the theatre; their nights in carousing, dancing, and worse things still. The convents were the temples of every vice, and to take the veil mcant in those days neither more nor less than to enter upon a course of profligacy. Princes of the church were withheld by no sense of shame from exhibiting themselves in the characters of dashing sportsmen, dissolute soldiers, and fierce banditti. At church-doors it was no unusual spectacle to behold hounds and huntsmen assembled, waiting for the abbot or prior then engaged in the celebration of the mass; nay, into the very interior of the sanctuary the robber-knights often penetrated, dogs and attendants at their heels, to summon to the joys of the chase their clerical friends and boon companions. Even the least enlightened of the people were struck by the mockery of receiving in the morning absolution from a priest whom they had seen, the night before, reeling drunk upon the street, and shocked by the desecration of a sacrament administered by notorious evil livers. Men told each other how they had met priests galloping through the forest, with blast of horn and loud halloo, all dripping with the blood of deer and boars, on their way to say mass, and many tales were circulated of the cruelty and vindictiveness of those whose profession should have made them merciful and prompt to pardon. It was related of the canons of Limburg, on the Lahn, how they seized a poor woodcutter, accused of poaching, and chained him upon a stag, which fled far before it was slain and the expiring wretch detached from its back. Many such tales were told, and unfortunately they were for the most part true, until at last the priesthood lost all influence with the people, who, at the same time, began to disregard every restraint of legal and social order. It was when vice and irreligion had thus attained almost the utmost height to which it seemed possible for the inventive sinfulness of man to carry them, that Germany was visited by a chastisement, the like of which was unknown within the memory of any then living. The Asiatic plague was a guest which, in those days, when the precautions taken against it were few and inadequate, made its appearance in eastern Europe at very brief intervals. It was nothing unusual, according to old German chronicles, for a man to witness, in the course of his lifetime, three distinct and formidable inroads of that terrible pestilence. The one that took place exactly in the middle of the fourteenth century was unparalleled in malignity. The terrified and ignorant populace revived the old fable of the poisoning of the wells by the Jewsa fable supported, if not originated, by numbers who were interested to persecute that oppressed race, either for the sake of plunder, or to get rid by violence of inconvenient creditors. The cry had never been raised with such terrible and murderous effect as upon that occasion. It was a period of disorder, and of contempt of all authority; the virulence of the plague was unprecedented; the authorities were impotent, the revenue insufficient to take the necessary measures for the enforcement of law and protection of property. An old German writer, Sigmund von Birken, in his Mirror of the Honours of the Archducal House of Austria,* gives aquaint and horrible picture of the universal alarm, of the ravages of the plague, and of the cruelties exercised on the Hebrews. "At that time," he says, "all Christendom was in a calamitous state by reason of an unheard-of cruel pestilence, which, after long desolating Asia, at last came into Europe, and, in 1348, began its ravages, which endured for three years. It is believed that there was then no place in the world that was spared by this scythe of death, which, for six years long, swept over the whole earth. Pope Clement had appointed a jubilee for the year 1350, when a vast multitude of persons made the pilgrimage to Rome; but so grievous was the mortality, that, out of every thousand, scarcely ten ever returned to their homes. In view of which, it was considered that, since the time of the Deluge, death had never been so busy upon earth. There perished a third, or, as others affirm, the half of mankind. At last most of the villages were left without inhabitants, and the poor cattle ran at large in the fields, for none were there to take charge of them. The cause of this mortality was said to be the Jews, who, arguing, from the discord between the Pope and the Emperor, the approaching downfal of Christianity, had formed a conspiracy against the Christians, to destroy them secretly by poison. There were several Jews in Helvetia who, having been seized for other offences, confessed, under the torture, that they had thrown poison into the wells. Search was made, the poison was found, and the fact was communicated to other cities. Thereupon, the draw-wells were everyNuremberg, 1668. where shut up, the buckets taken away, and water was fetched from cisterns, ponds, and rivers. At the same time there was a cruel persecution of the Jews; and in Strasburg, Basle, and other places, there were great revolts against the authorities who strove to protect them. At Strasburg eighteen hundred Jews were burned; also in Zurich a great number in their own burying-ground. At Mayence they were roasted in such fashion, that in St Quentin's church tower a fine bell and the lead round the windows were melted. At Basle they took them to an island on the Rhine, fastened them into a wooden house, and burned it over their heads. Elsewhere, they threw them into the wells they had poisoned, drowned or stabbed them, or hurled them from the tops of houses, and in all imaginable ways slew and executed them." Even had they possessed the power, it was not to be expected that the clergy would exert themselves to protect those whom they denounced as the eternal foes of Christianity, addicted to the black art and to all unholy practices, and who, moreover, were their formidable rivals in the trade of usury. In those days, he who needed a loan, addressed himself either to a rich Jew or to a wealthy convent; and it not unfrequently happened that, the convent proving the most Jewish of the two in the rate of interest it demanded, the preference was given to the Hebrews, in whose dependence a great number of nobles and citizens found themselves, as a natural consequence of the necessities entailed by their dissolute and spendthrift lives. To these unscrupulous borrowers, a massacre of the Jews, a conflagration of their dwellings-in which bonds and receipts might be reduced to ashes-were anything but unwelcome sights; and certainly they were not the men to shield their unbelieving creditors from popular fury. The Jews' only safety consisted in the purchase, by heavy subsidies, of Imperial protection. This was accorded them, in return for a large annual tribute, to receive which, to hear their complaints, and to defend them in case of need, vögte or bailiffs were appointed. Thus be friended, the Jews, who were known by the style of the Kammer-Knechte, (servants or vassals of the Imperial chamber or exchequer,) indulged-at least the richer ones amongst them— in luxury and ostentation, which greatly augmented the hate, and aroused the envy, of the burghers, and even of the nobles. By a lavish expenditure in clothes, and at their feasts, they strove to indemnify themselves for the many restraints imposed upon them by the usages of those days, which prohibited their appearance, even as spectators, at public tournaments, patrician festivals, Imperial elections, and such like pageants and ceremonies. They were compelled to wear caps of a peculiar form; and although they decorated these with gold embroidery, and even with precious stones, they were never safe, when they appeared in public, from the abuse and hootings of the mob. Braving all perils, however, and spurred by curiosity, members of this oppressed race not unfrequently ventured, in disguise, to mingle with the throng at some grand procession or ceremonial, whence, if discovered, they were fortunate if they escaped alive. To put an end to such risks, to enable their wives and daughters to display their beauty and their jewels in the high places of the Christian, no sacrifice appeared too great to the wealthy and ambitious descendants of Abraham. The jingle of their money-bags was a wellknown and a welcome sound at the Imperial court of Prague. Charles IV. was constantly at his wits' end for money; and the Jews were ever ready to bid high for favours and privileges which should ultimately increase their wealth and narrow the broad line of demarcation between them and their Christian fellow-citizens. Never was all the protection they could possibly obtain-even at the sacrifice of their entire worldly goods -more urgently needed by the Jews of Germany than during the frightful pestilence of 1348. Spreading like wildfire over the land, the Plague, as if sent by God to punish the prevalent corruption, struck down its victims by thousands. The haughty robber knight, the arrogant patrician, the venomous pompous counsellor, the wealthy mer- have overtaken any who dared refuse them shelter. From the villages and hamlets near which they passed, the country people joined them in crowds, and when they entered a town they became de facto its rulers. Every master of a house had then to fear that serfs and servants would quit him without a word of notice, and return, perhaps, a few hours later, arrayed in the becrossed garment of the Flagellants, to impose themselves as pampered guests upon those whose domestics they had, till that day, been. Fearful of exciting a general revolt, the authorities dared not interfere; the clergy, well knowing that one of the objects of the Flagellants was to rouse the people against them, and rendered timid by their evil consciences, shut themselves in their convents, leaving the undisturbed possession of the churches to the intruders, who had already supplanted them in the favour of the people. Proclaiming themselves chosen instruments to bring the whole of mankind to penance and to reconciliation with God, the Flagellants abode but a short time in one place, and so were the more patiently endured-things relapsing, after their departure, into their former tranquillity. In every town where they halted for a while, they held solemn processions; singing their grim chorus, scourging themselves, and compelling the sacristans and church-servants to accompany their rites with ringing of bells. And so unsettled was the religious feeling of the time, so great was the craving after some fixed creed upon which to lean in those days of pestilence and sudden death, that this dismal fanaticism, so opposed in every way to the mild doctrines of pure Christianity, made its way into families of the higher classes; and persons of rank and fortune, ashamed to join the public processions of the Flagellants, scourged themselves in private to such a degree as to injure health, and even endanger life. If the objects of the Flagellants were originally disinterested, they did not long continue so, and their efforts soon ceased to be solely directed to the conversion and reformation of their fellow men. Spoiled by power and by the homage paid them, they became overbearing, and covetous of earthly pleasures and advantages. Their strict abstinence was in most instances a mere hypocritical veil for sensual indulgences; their lives were dissolute, their excesses innumerable. Their persecution of the Jews, first instituted on religious grounds, and on the pretext of the poisoned wells, redoubled in fierceness when its object became to obtain possession of the wealth of the unfortunate unbelievers, whose plundered houses and burned bodies marked the passage of the fanatics through Switzerland, Swabia, and Alsatia, to the flourishing Free City of Frankfort on the Maine. A period so eventful as that whose leading features we have sketched, affords tempting opportunities to the romance-writer. It has suggested to Mr George Döring, a novelist, much better known in Germany than in England, a striking groundwork for his tale of the Geiselfahrt, which opens, on the eve of the entrance of the Flagellants into Frankfort, with a meeting, in a pleasant valley of the Taunus mountains, between Pater Clarus, a mendicant friar, and Salentine vom Rhein, the eldest son of a patrician family in the Free City, who is returning home after completing his medical studies in Paris, in the eager hope of restoring sight to his blind mother, and of doing good service to his fellow-citizens in that day of pestilence and mortality. When descending the Rhine from Strasburg, the Physician-Knight has encountered a column of the Flagellants, whom he compares to a swarm of locusts, marking their passage by ravage and desolation. "Woe to him," he says, "who refuses to accompany them, or who denies them respect and all things that they require! A frightful delirium, begotten beneath the glowing sky of Italy, has taken possession of them; they rave against themselves, they curse themselves, and make confession of the most horrible crimes; they reject all control, whether secular or ecclesiastical; blood alone is to reconcile them with the Divinity! Many thousand men and women, greyheaded patriarchs, young maidens and children, fill the churches and the adjacent squares; their howl of la mentation fills the air, their bleeding lacerated bodies excite horror and disgust. But how many are there not amongst them, with whom this frenzy serves merely as a mask for the gratification of the basest appetites!" After accompanying Salentine to the honse of his father, Hanns vom Rheine, who holds the high and respected office of Imperial rögt, or guardian of the Jews in Frankfort, the reader is conducted into a forest, distant from that city but a few short leagues. On a small clearing, separated from the highroad by a birch-wood, and bounded on the other sides by the rugged wail of a semicircular stone quarry, whose two extremities extend to the trees, a band of strolling players have established their bivouac, and watch, in hungry anticipation, the bubbling of a mighty kettle, to which various foragers have contributed their quota -not always acquired, to judge from appearances, in a manner strictly legitimate. The fowl and hare, goose and sucking pig, beans and turnips, emit, however, as savoury an odour as if they had been purchased instead of pillaged. A small barrel of wine, produced from the single cart which conveys the whole property and properties of the company, perfects the feast, under whose favourable influence the players, some of whom act important parts in the novel, are introduced to the reader by the nicknames by which at that time it was customary for persons of that profession to be known. Thus Felician, the dux or manager, has received, by reason of the amiable grin with which it is his custom to invest his countenance when speaking or spoken to, the significant surname of Sweetbutter; the prima donna and jeune première of the troop, a young lady of some beauty and great pretensions, is known as Vanity Peal-o'-bells, an appellation for which she was certainly not indebted to her parents and sponsors; whilst the languishing and outrageously conceited guitar-player, who accompanies Miss Vanity's trills and roulades, is spoken of only as Muskflower. Besides these prominent personages, the troop includes a Jackpudding or buffoon, strongly suspected of Judaism, and a number of other men and women, rope-dancers, jug |
