Late Middle Ages

The flagellant movement and the Black Death

In the summer of 1349, bands of laymen, stripped to the waist and carrying leather whips tipped with iron spikes, were processing in disciplined columns through the streets of towns from the Rhine to the Elbe, from the Alps to the Baltic. They scourged themselves three times a day. They sang the Vexilla regis and the Stabat Mater. They marched, two by two, with a leader at their head and another at their rear, for thirty-three and a half days — a day for every year of the life of Christ. By the time the procession reached its end, the leaders could often point to a town in which the plague had visibly abated. The flagellant movement was, for a few months, the most popular religious response to the Black Death in Europe, and the most alarming.

The wider context is set out in the overview of the Black Death and the cultural and religious impact of the Black Death. The flagellants’ visual afterlife in the art of the late Middle Ages is treated in How the Black Death influenced medieval art. The other major lay response — the development of new confraternities of the sick and the dead — is set out in Late medieval plague saints and folk beliefs.

The Road from Speyer

The flagellant movement had no single founder. The first major procession is recorded in the German city of Speyer, on the Upper Rhine, in the spring of 1348, within weeks of the first reports of the plague in the region. The story, recorded in several contemporary chronicles, is that a group of laypeople, desperate at the death of so many of their neighbours, gathered in the market square, stripped to the waist, took up whips, and began to march through the streets singing the Vexilla regis — the great hymn of the Passion. Within a few weeks similar processions were recorded at Strasbourg, Mainz, Cologne, Erfurt, and a dozen other towns of the Rhine valley.

The movement then spread rapidly, following the major trade routes and the Rhine-Danube corridor into the Low Countries, Bavaria, Austria, Bohemia, and Hungary, and along the great roads into the Baltic. By the summer of 1349 there were flagellant bands in nearly every German-speaking city, in many Polish and Hungarian towns, and in a number of French and Italian cities. The contemporary chronicler Henry of Diessenhofen, writing from the Council of Constance, gave one of the most detailed accounts. He reported that the flagellants “marched in silence when the priests and clergy walked in front, and sang hymns when the laymen walked in front. They marched in a long column, two by two, with their heads uncovered, their eyes cast down, and their whips in their hands.” The blood, he added, “flowed freely” and the processions were greeted by enormous crowds.

The quick diffusion of the movement is striking, and it has provoked a long debate among historians. The older interpretation, of a spontaneous popular movement driven by terror, has been complicated by the work of scholars such as Robert E. Lerner, who have shown that the flagellant bands were highly organised, that they followed a single ritual programme, and that the ritual had clear precedents in the Geißler processions of the previous two centuries. The new element in 1348 was the scale and the speed: the Black Death provided an occasion for an old ritual to be performed on a continental scale.

Anatomy of a Procession

The ritual of a flagellant procession was remarkably uniform across the continent. A typical band, of between 50 and 500 men, would enter a town led by a magister or meister, who wore a long red cross on his breast and on his back. Behind him marched the lay brothers in a disciplined column, two by two, with another master at the rear. On entering a town the band would process directly to the church, where the priests would receive them, hear their general confession, and grant them the papal indulgence that Pope Clement VI had issued in 1343 to those who performed public penance on feast days. The flagellants then performed their penance three times a day.

The first scourging was performed in private, in the morning, in the hostel where the band was lodged. The second was performed in public, after lunch, in the market square. The men stripped to the waist, knelt in a long row, and beat their bare backs with their whips three times around the row — once for each of the three persons of the Trinity, according to the chroniclers. The third scourging was performed in the church, before vespers, and the band would then process through the streets to the accompaniment of hymns.

The duration of the procession was fixed at thirty-three and a half days — a year of the life of Christ for each day, plus the half-day of the Sabbath — and during this period the flagellants were bound by strict rules: no shaving or washing, no lying down in a bed, no speaking to women, no eating meat, no taking money or gifts, no converse with anyone outside the band. The discipline was severe, and breaches were punished by expulsion. At the end of the thirty-three and a half days, the members were received back into the ordinary life of the church.

The ritual was clearly a lay version of the monastic round of psalmody and penance, transposed from the cloister to the open road. It is also clearly a kind of public theatre, designed to be seen: the blood, the hymns, the long columns, the masters at front and back, were a piece of religious performance that depended for its effect on the crowds that watched it pass. The chronicler of the Speyer procession noted that the blood on the streets of the town was “a foot deep” by the end of the day, and that the people who watched “wept and prayed and beat their breasts.”

A Theology of Blood

The flagellants’ theology, although conventional in its broad outlines, contained a number of heterodox implications that alarmed the bishops. The basic claim was that the plague was a punishment for the sins of humanity, and that the appropriate response was a public penance of such intensity that it would move God to spare the survivors. The flagellants also held that the blood they shed was being mingled, in some mysterious way, with the blood of Christ, and that the merit of their penance was equal to the merit of the martyrs. Some flagellants claimed that the letters I.N.R.I. (Jesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum), inscribed in gold on a banner carried at the head of the procession, were being read by Christ in person from heaven.

Several specific heterodox practices were reported by the bishops. The flagellants set up their own makeshift altars in the open air, sometimes on the steps of a church, and heard one another’s confessions — a direct infringement of the church’s monopoly on the sacrament of penance. They gave their own blessings, in the name of the Trinity, to bystanders and to the dying. They claimed that their penitence was a substitute for the sacraments of the church, and that those who had received the flagellants’ blessing had no need of priestly absolution. Some bands also made prophecies about the imminent end of the world, and some developed millenarian ideas about a coming angelic pope or a Last Emperor.

The combination of these claims and practices produced deep suspicion in the church hierarchy. The bishops, who had been trying for some years to suppress the Brethren of the Cross and other lay penitential movements, saw the flagellants as yet another parallel church, offering their own version of the sacraments. The bulls of Clement VI that had licensed the Geißler processions of earlier decades were read in the most restrictive way possible. The bishop of Magdeburg, the bishop of Prague, and the archbishop of Mainz all attempted to suppress the movement in their own dioceses.

Clement VI and the Bull Inter solitas

The decisive blow fell in the autumn of 1349. On 20 October 1349, Pope Clement VI issued the bull Inter solitas, in which he condemned the flagellant movement in the strongest terms. The bull argued that the flagellants were guilty of “presumption” (praesumptio) in believing that their penitence could be effective in staying the plague, that their hearing of one another’s confessions infringed the exclusive right of the priesthood, and that the claim of equality with the martyrs was blasphemous. The bull ordered the secular authorities to arrest the leaders of the bands, to disperse the members, and to forbid the further performance of the processions.

The bull of October 1349 was not, in itself, immediately effective. Clement had to issue a second bull in November, Quia nonnulli, and then a third in January 1350, Super illius specula, before the movement was finally suppressed. The implementation was uneven: in some cities, such as Erfurt, the local council cooperated; in others, the authorities were themselves sympathetic to the flagellants. But by the spring of 1350 the great bands had largely dissolved, the leaders had been arrested or executed, and the survivors had returned to their homes. Smaller bands continued to appear in times of crisis — at the time of the Pestis Secunda of 1361, again in 1375, and sporadically in the fifteenth century — but they never recovered the scale of the 1349 movement.

The memory of the movement lived on, however, in the chronicles and in popular imagination. The chronicler Jean Froissart, who saw flagellant bands in France, reported that some of the flagellants were good men “who did this for the salvation of their souls,” but that others were “evil men who used the movement for robbery and false gain.” The German chronicles, particularly the chronicle of Königshofen, preserved a more sympathetic account, and the memory of the Speyer procession lived on in the popular imagination for centuries. The Geißler processions of the late medieval and early modern periods, in central Europe, were conscious imitations of the 1348 bands, and the German folk-song of the Geißlerlieder preserved the hymns that the bands had sung.

A Movement in the Historiographical Crossfire

The flagellant movement has been the subject of an unusually rich historiographical debate. Nineteenth-century historians, working in the tradition of the Kulturkampf, tended to read the movement as a precursor of the Protestant Reformation, a sign of the decay of the late medieval church and of the imminent break-up of the old religious order. The mid-twentieth-century reading, exemplified by the work of Norman Cohn in The Pursuit of the Millennium (1957) and by Marc Bloch in Les rois thaumaturges (1924), placed the movement in the broader context of millenarian movements of the later Middle Ages. Cohn in particular argued that the flagellant movement was an example of a “persecution hysteria” that the Black Death released, and that its character was apocalyptic.

The more recent scholarship, of which Robert E. Lerner’s study of the Heretics of the High Middle Ages is the most representative, has complicated these readings. Lerner argued that the flagellant movement was not so much a proto-Protestant or a millenarian movement as a thoroughly conventional lay-penitential movement, the kind of which the central Middle Ages had seen several. The novelty was the scale. The Black Death provided an occasion for an old ritual, and the response of the church was the response that the church had always given to lay penitential movements: cautious approval, then nervous supervision, then suppression.

Whatever the final historical verdict, the flagellant movement remains one of the most striking images of the Black Death years, and one of the most useful for understanding the religious psychology of a population under siege. The processions through the streets of Speyer, Strasbourg, Erfurt, and Prague were not only acts of penance. They were also acts of desperate hope — a last attempt to take the remedy for the plague out of the hands of the doctors and into the hands of the laymen who had, in the spring of 1349, no other remedy to try.

References

  • Lerner, Robert E. The Heresy of the Free Spirit in the Later Middle Ages. University of California Press, 1972.
  • Cohn, Norman. The Pursuit of the Millennium. Secker & Warburg, 1957. (Revised edition, Oxford University Press, 1970.)
  • Boureau, Alain. La papesse Jeanne. Aubier, 1988. (For the broader history of medieval flagellant movements.)
  • Caro Baroja, Julio. Las brujas y su mundo. Alianza, 1961. (Translated as The World of the Witches, University of Chicago Press, 1964.)
  • Dickson, Gary. The Children’s Crusade: Medieval History, Modern Mythology. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. (For comparative material on the social psychology of medieval mass movements.)