Chapter 34: The Flagellants

Stoicism taught that one should endure suffering; Judeo-Christianity taught one to love it. From punishment as proof of divine love to the love of punishment was only a step. Did not the markets in dereliction, death and fear count among the most profitable for the Church?

The appearance in Perugia around 1250 of the movement of the Flagellants inscribed itself in a conjuration of events — the famine of 1250, the plague of 1259, the bloody struggle between the Guelphs and the Ghibellins — that was propitious for the nourishment of the sentiment that the displeasure of losing oneself carried the consolation of involving the whole world in that loss. The Joachimite expiration date once more catalyzed the tumult of passions that a impossible life easily turned towards the outlet of death.

At first encouraged by the Church, hysterical and collective self-punishment — due to its pretensions to exclusivity — rapidly came to threaten the privileges of afflicting and consoling reserved by the clergy. The hell claimed for earth removed all credit from the merchants of the beyond. Surrendering oneself to outrages and tormenting the flesh identified one with the Christ and released one from all duties to the Church.

For a long time, flagellation counted among the self-punitive practices admitted by the Church. It expressed the ordinary scorn for terrestrial life and pleasure inherent in all religions, without (for all that) curtailing an existence denuded of attractions by the quest for a sanctifying punishment, as in the New Prophecy or the Cathars’ endura.

It was in the crowded Italian towns that organized flagellant processions appeared for the first time. The movement was launched in 1260 by a hermit of Perugia and spread southwards to Rome and northwards to the Lombard cities with such rapidity that to contemporaries it appeared a sudden epidemic of remorse. Led usually by priests, masses of men, youths and boys marched day and night, with banners and burning candles, from town to town. And each time they came to a town they would arrange themselves in groups before the church and flog themselves for hours on end. The impact which this public penance made upon the general population was great. Criminals confessed, robbers returned their loot and usurers the interest on their loans, enemies were reconciled and feuds forgotten. Even the two warring parties which were dividing Italy, the Guelphs or supporters of the Pope and the Ghibellines or the supporters of the Emperor, for a moment lost some of their intransigence. Whole towns became involved in the movement — at Reggio the chief magistrate, the bishop and all the guilds took part. As the processions moved along they constantly increased in size, until they were many thousand strong. But if at times people of all classes would join in, it was the poor who persevered; so that in the latter stages of the movement they alone remained.

The circumstances under which this first outbreak of mass self-flaggellation occurred are significant. Even by medieval standards, conditions in Italy at that moment were exceptionally hard. In 1258 there had been famine, in 1259 a serious outbreak of plague. Above all, incessant warfare between Guelph and Ghibelline had reduced the country to a state of the utmost misery and insecurity. The situation of the Guelph towns was particularly desperate, for their cause had just suffered a heavy blow when the Florentines were defeated at Montaperto, with fearful slaughter, by the Tuscan Ghibellines. Frederick II’s son, Manfred, seemed well on the way to establishing his sway over the whole of Italy. It was not for nothing that the flagellant movement started in a Guelph city and flourished among Guelphs. Yet all these afflictions were felt to be but a prelude to a final and overwhelming catastrophe. A chronicler remarked that during the flagellant processions people behaved as though they feared that as a punishment for their sins God was about to destroy them all by earthquake and by fire from on high. It was in a world which seemed poised on the brink of the abyss that these penitents cried out, as they beat themselves and threw themselves upon their faces: ‘Holy Virgin take pity on us! Beg Jesus Christ to spare us!’ and ‘Mercy, mercy! Peace, peace!’ — calling ceaselessly, we are told, until the fields and mountains seemed to echo with their prayers and musical instruments fell silent and love-songs died away.[398]

Through the sentiment of an intolerable existence, from which so often came the obscure wish for universal annihilation, the principle of hope also marked out a path. The phenix reborn from its cinders. Thus the most diverse traits [and people] were mixed together in the flagellant movement: the refusal of the Church and the clergy; the divine freedom to which the most disinherited (thus those who suffered the most) acceded by right; those who — like the Beghards of Cologne, the Beguines of Schweidnitz and the ancient Messalians — overcame the ordeal of sorrow and entered into the promised land of Edenic happiness; but also those oppressed people whose resentment turned this way and that against the [various] powers and, most often due to the ordinary insanity [sanie] of cowardice and sadism, tortured and massacred Jewish men, women and children.

In 1349, the Pope blamed the Flagellants when he declared: “Most of them or their followers, beneath an appearance of piety, set their hands to cruel and impious works, shedding the blood of Jews whom Christian piety accepts and sustains.”[399]

In 1261 and 1262, the movement crossed the Alps, went up the Rhine and entered southern Germany, where it took a turn that was more popular, more anti-clerical and more faithful to Joachimite eschatology. The appeals to purity of soul and faith didn’t fail to revive the anti-Semitic core, which had been cultivated by Emico of Leningen, the Master of Hungary and an anonymous clergyman from Passau (the author of a chronicle of the second half of the Thirteenth Century that attributed all the world’s misfortunes to the Jews and heretics.)

If one participated in a procession of flagellants, the duration of which was 33-and-a-half days (in memory of Christ’s age), it was deemed enough to assure one of impeccability whatever one did and, evidently, freedom from the Church and its sacraments. After 1262, the on-going threat to clerical profitability would justify the prohibition announced against the hysterical hordes who exhibited their bloody wounds and pled Christic sorrow in the countrysides and the towns so to be able to devote themselves without sin to coupling, libations, rape and pillage.

The Black Plague of 1348–1349 revived the propensity to merciful suffering, on which the Church of the Fifteenth Century would base its lucrative market in death. Possessed by a holy fury, groups of 50 to 500 people paraded in successive waves in Germany, the Netherlands and Hungary, exorcizing through an exemplary expiation the just anger with which God overwhelmed his creatures. England, little concerned with a redemption obtained by a cynical, higher bid in misfortune, rejected the flagellant movement.

Repressed in Strasbourg in 1296, Bergamo in 1334, and Cremone in 1346, the Flagellants still managed to invade Bruges, Ghent, Tournai and Dordrecht. The bishops sometimes tolerated them and tried in vain to temper their devastating zeal.

As the excess of horrors accumulating in the 1350s raised suffering to the dignity of supreme good, millenarianism reappeared to be the logical consequence of the project of annihilation conducted by God with a great power of conviction. A mysterious Celestial Letter, which no doubt issued from Segarellism, announced the decision of the Lord — as dictated to a prophet by his friends — to exterminate mankind. Angered by the unworthy conduct of his creatures and, in particular, the rich, God would only spare humanity in exchange for a general repentance and a contrition embellished by the whip. One still had to receive clemency through the intercession of Mary. The egalitarianism of the adepts of voluntary poverty was far from the movement of the nobility, which sometimes ceded to penitential solicitations. Did not Clement VI prescribe the virtues of flagellation? He would retract his support and in 1349 condemned the movement, with the result that the messianism of the artisans and peasants would turn to confrontation with the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie and the clergy, the hedonism of which — judged to be contrary to the wishes of God — aroused celestial anger.

Anti-clericalism frequently gave way to anti-Semitism. The pogroms permitted the profitable disposal of the marginals condemned by the disgrace imputed to them by the Church to serve as scapegoats when they ceased to fill the coffers of the bishops and princes. The Jewish communities of Frankfurt, Mayence, Cologne and Brussels were exterminated. (In 1146, Pierre de Cluny could already ask, “What good does it do to go to the end of the world (...) to combat the Saracens when we let live among us other infidels who are guiltier with respect to the Christ than the Mahometans?”[400]

In Thuringa, Konrad Schmid led the millenarianist flagellants. He revived the legend of the return of Frederic, the Emperor of the Last Days, to whom Dolcino imprudently gave a political potential.

Renewing the tradition of the itinerant Christs, Schmid demanded an absolute submission to his person. He decreed that self-flagellation was the prelude to the birth of an Edenic age to come in 1369. The Inquisition would hasten to seize Schmid and burn him in Nordhausen in 1368, one year in advance of the due date.

By reinforcing its repression, Rome would try, as it was accustomed, to recuperate the movement to its profit. The Spaniard Vincent Ferrier, the leader of the penitents, who were severely supervised and controlled, would win his sanctification by giving an orthodox coloration to the stripes of the whip. He was only partially successful. Seeing him overwhelmed on all sides, [Jean Charlier de] Gerson adjured in 1417 by renouncing his stinging apostolate.

From then on, the Inquisition took the initiative. The pyres (principally in Germany) reduced to cinders some 90 flagellants in 1414, 300 in 1416, a dozen in Nordhausen in 1446 and Sonderhausen in 1454. The last victims would succumb around 1480.

the Flagellants’ doctrine hardly bothered with theological subtlties. Konrad Schmid advocated a second baptism, a baptism of blood, which conferred [personal] salvation and doomed the Church, the clergy and the sacraments to uselessness. The refusal to pay tithes and the denunciation of the trade in indulgences belonged to all the popular movements that the Church did not cease to arouse against it and its clerical bureaucracy. The rejection of the cult of the saints and purgatory would form [Martin] Luther’s heritage, as would anti-Semitism, all things considered.

Dominico Savi, also called Mecco Sacconi, burned in 1344 in Scoli, attested to the penetration of Free-Spirit ideas even in the destructive fury of the Flagellants. Indeed, he taught the following theses, here re-transcribed by the spirit of the inquisitors who sentenced him to death.

Their impudence went as far as saying that pleasure was not a sin; men and women praying together in the obscurity of the night do not commit sin, whatever else they might be doing at the time; it is permitted for women to flagellate themselves for their sins, nude and publicly; lay people also have the faculty of absolving all of their sins.[401]