Famine, the Black Death, and the Afterlife

Famine.

Despite the divisive fourteenth-century power struggles that shook the papacy and church hierarchy, there were other events which even more gravely affected the religious outlook of all Christians. A devastating famine that ravaged Europe between 1315 and 1317 delivered its most violent shocks throughout much of northern Europe. Weather patterns during those years that produced extremely cold winters and rainy summers resulted in crop failures that left many urban dwellers without food. Significant failure of wheat crops in France caused prices to double. In England it was much worse, and livestock were forced to go with little food. Fish and meat became scarce, as the fishing industry in Holland was affected by the imbalance of trade, and diseases began to kill the cattle in England that had survived the famine. Germany may have fared the worst. The toll on human lives may have reached twenty percent of the northern European population, affecting the wealthy as well as the poor. The monasteries and convents were particularly devastated. In addition to large numbers of religious succumbing to starvation and related disease, properties had to be sold off at greatly reduced rates. There are harrowing stories of religious going without food in order to save the lives of their tenant farmers and families. Such devastation was thought, in part, to be linked to God's wrath upon sinful humanity. Thus, both in popular consciousness and in church doctrine, notions relating to death, heaven, hell, and purgatory became the subject of speculation. The famine, as such, never became a subject of religious and popular literature, but it created conditions of psychic unease that planted the seeds for the proliferation of literature concerning sin, human destruction, and death that would burst on to the scene during the period of the bubonic plague (1347–1350).

The Black Death.

As northern Europe barely began to recover from the famine, the bubonic plague known as the "Black Death" plunged much of Europe into a state of widespread contagion. Some estimate that as many as one-half of Europe's population perished (possibly thirty million lives). As with the famine, no social class, station, faith, or age group escaped the ravages, save those in a few isolated cities who had the luck or foresight to quarantine themselves (a practice invented in Venice around 1360). The clergy were particularly concerned with ministering to the dying and, of course, burial. Sacramental anointing of the dying, extreme unction, had been reduced in the thirteenth century to a much simpler formula of forgiveness that could be administered by one priest, usually at the time near death. Given the necessity of such contact with the infected, it is surprising that any priests survived. Due to the resulting shortage of priests in England, the bishop of Bath gave permission to the people to confess their sins to laity, men or women, if no priest was available. Canons were appointed to the parishes of dead secular priests. There are also French accounts of cowardly parish priests fleeing their stations, leaving members of the religious orders with the task of ministering to the dying. It has been suggested that the friars were the division of religious with the largest number of afflicted. The cloistered groups were particularly susceptible to the plague once it entered their community. Hundreds of monasteries and convents were completely wiped out.

Persecutions.

In the midst of this devastation, attempts were made to determine its causes. Aside from the scientific theories of physicians, irrational blame began to be directed toward certain social groups: Muslims in Spain, strangers in small villages, pilgrims, ethnic minorities, those who spoke foreign languages, lepers, and, most virulently, Jews. Sporadic and spontaneous attacks upon Jewish people were common throughout the time of the plague. They were most often accused of poisoning the wells and drinking water of Christians. Punishments ranged from imprisonment to burning. Accounts of mass incineration are documented in the German cities of Worms, Dresden, Stuttgart, Erfurt, Memmingen, Freiburg, and Lindau. Other murders took place in Speyer, Cologne, and Mainz. Clement VI called for the excommunication of Christians who persisted in persecuting the Jews. Pedro IV of Aragon attempted to give protection to the Jews of his kingdom and prosecuted Christian assailants. Efforts at stemming the violence were also made at Cologne and in Austria. Despite such attempts, the attacks upon European Jews did not substantially subside until after the plague ended.

The Flagellant Movement.

The religious fervor accompanying the Black Death could be seen in a most extreme form in the practice of flagellation, self-administered whippings that were intended to punish the body as penance, both for personal sins and for the sins of mankind which were thought to have caused the plague. The flagellant movement had been going on for some time in the Middle Ages (dating to the twelfth century), when individuals punished their sinful flesh or brought it under control through the sting of the beatings. These inflictions were often done in public by groups connected to the movement, accompanied by procession and the singing of psalms. The earlier practices were condemned by church authorities, but during the bubonic plague they seem to have made a strong reappearance. Some believed the plague was signaling the end of the world, and groups of flagellants began to organize and march about Europe calling for general repentance. Processions of hundreds of flagellants are recorded, marching in twos, with crosses and purple banners (purple was seen as the color of penitence). The groups would often move into village squares, or to local churches, announced by the ringing of bells, strip off their outer hooded garments, lie upon the ground with outstretched arms (cruciform) and begin to take turns scourging one another, chanting as they proceeded. Their whips were made of leather thongs, and many brandished instruments with barbed metal tips. Spectators frequently were so moved by the emotional and disturbing scene that they themselves joined in the penance.

The Cult of the Afterlife.

One outcome of the plague for most Europeans was a preoccupation with the afterlife. It was not an issue of whether or not there was an afterlife, since the need for hope amid daily experiences of loss assured the continuation of that expectation. But there were a number of different approaches to the question of how to maintain a spirit of hope and how to avoid dying without proper preparation of the soul. One development that occurred was the rise of treatises called Ars moriendi (literally "art of dying"), intended to prepare Christians for the act of death. These treatises taught contemptus mundi, the hatred of the goods of the world and an awareness of the transience of the flesh, illustrated in a form of popular poetry that asked the question ubi sunt ("Where are they?") of long lists of kings, queens, beautiful women, and heroes who are, inevitably, dead. Doctrines and popular notions of the world beyond included the notion of purgatory. Even in earliest medieval Christianity, prayers were regularly said on behalf of those who had died but whose souls were still awaiting eternal reward. Only a few heretical theologies dismissed the notion of purgatory: the Waldensian, the Cathar, and the Wycliffite. With so many people involved in some form of religious life, it was easy to see by contrast that spiritual perfection,

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which must be the key to heaven, was not easy to attain. Hell was for the worst of sinners; purgatory was for the rest. The period of one's stay in purgatory depended upon the number of unrepentant venial sins that a person died with. If so many would be in the state of purgation from life's sins before entering heaven, there was need for prayers, devotions, and even strategies for making the stay less punishing. The theologian Peter Lombard in the twelfth century had addressed many of these issues, which were further considered by thirteenth-century philosophers and theologians such as William of Auvergne, Alexander of Hales, Bonaventure, Albertus Magnus, and Thomas Aquinas. A culminating statement came from the Council of Lyon in 1274, the year of Aquinas' death, and by the early fourteenth century, the beliefs were so widespread that they served as the basis for Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy of heaven, hell, and purgatory. Thus, in the wake of the plague, prayers were said, masses were offered, and indulgences were earned or purchased to assist both self and loved ones with the arduous task of navigating the afterlife. Fraternal and guild organizations starting in the thirteenth century compiled lists of members needing prayer. Thousands of these confraternities existed throughout the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries all over Europe. Protestant theologians during the sixteenth century would reject these beliefs.

sources

Marcia Colish, "The Development of Lombardian Theology," in Centres of Learning. Ed. J. W. Drijvers and A. McDonald (Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 2001).

David Herlihy, The Black Death and the Transformation of the West. Ed. Sam K. Cohn, Jr. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997).

Rosemary Horrox, The Black Death (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1994).

William Chester Jordan, The Great Famine: Northern Europe in the Early Fourteenth Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996).

Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).

Philip Zeigler, The Black Death (London: Penguin, 1969).