Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (93 page)

One major disruption came in the sudden catastrophe which afflicted all Europe in the years after 1348. Already by 1300, worsening economic conditions had probably made Europe's population growth level out, and people's general resistance to disease was weakened by a steadily less sustaining diet. There then appeared from the east a disease, now generally thought to be a variant of bubonic plague, which quickly came to be known as the Black Death. As if the Mongols had not intentionally spread enough death and destruction, it was a siege by plague-stricken Mongols from the Kipchak Khanate of a Genoese trading post in the Crimea in 1346 which first brought Europeans into contact with the Black Death. Genoese fleeing the horror instead took the disease first to Constantinople, then around the whole circuit of the Mediterranean. Knowledge of the plague sped before it; far to the north in Oslo in 1348, a group of worried townsfolk endowed an altar in their cathedral for St Sebastian, celebrated for warding off the plague. Sebastian did not put up an impressive performance.
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Through several years, 1348-53, the effect of the Black Death in Europe was more thoroughgoing than any other recorded disaster: proportionally, it was far more destructive than the First World War, with perhaps as many as one in three of the population dying, and in some places up to two-thirds.

In Central Asia, this same plague hastened the ruin of the Church of the East during the fourteenth century (see p. 275). In Europe, the institutions of the Church had support from the political institutions around them, which ensured that overall survival would be easier, but the blow to society's morale was deep and bitter. One major emergency plague cemetery to have been systematically investigated, in East Smith-field in London, reveals the particular horror of the disease, that it disproportionately attacked those who were the symbols of adult vigour and sustainers of families in society. The peak age of death of those buried there whose ages could be estimated was between twenty-six and forty-five, and males were also revealed as more vulnerable than females.
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The sheer concentration of sudden and squalid death underlined the fact already perceptible in less dire times that death's visitation did not exempt clergy; in fact unwittingly they probably helped to spread plague as they ministered to the dying. The Church was revealed as better at celebrating the end of catastrophe than preventing or halting it. Once the plague had begun retreating in intensity, there was a widespread impulse to build chapels and votive shrines on the part of survivors wanting to express their gratitude (and perhaps guilt) for their survival, but while plague still raged, there was an equally powerful impulse to seek someone to blame for God's anger: either oneself, collective sin in society or some external scapegoat.

All three thoughts united in a renewed and much grimmer version of the flagellant movement which had begun in Italy in 1260 (see p. 400) but now found widespread expression in northern Europe.
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There was no trace of the earlier flagellants' emphasis on peace-making. On the contrary, outbreaks of flagellant activity became associated with quite exceptional anti-Semitic violence, which included the torturing and burning alive of Jews in groups. This was justified by accusations that Jews had poisoned wells and food supplies: the torture supplied the necessary confessions. In the Rhineland and in some other central European regions, Jewish communities were effectively wiped out; overall this was 'the most severe persecution of Jews before the twentieth century'.
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By autumn 1349 Pope Clement VI, lobbied by alarmed monarchs, bishops and city authorities, issued a bull,
Inter Sollicitudines
, which forbade flagellant processions, specifically linking them to anti-Jewish violence; he tried to confine religious flagellation to private houses, or exercises in churches supervised by clergy.
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Certainly the Church came to take over and regularize a good deal of flagellant activity, so that in Italy the members of one major variety of gild, confraternity or religious association took the name '
batti
' from their practice of penitential self-flagellation. In one small north Italian town called San Sepolcro, by 1400 practically every adult male belonged to one of several flagellant gilds, and this pattern might be paralleled elsewhere.
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Yet renewed outbreaks of plague repeatedly broke through the Church's supervision, bringing renewed panic, renewed flouting of Pope Clement's prohibition on flagellant public processions and renewed troubles for the Jews.

The need for consolation in the wake of disaster intensified the personalized devotion which had grown up in the thirteenth century, and singled out the themes of suffering, the Passion and death. In northern Europe, new shrine cults of relics of Christ's blood sprang up. These were associated with the rising devotion to his body and blood in the Eucharist, but they took some time to gain acceptance. They always remained controversial, particularly because they were usually the result of unregulated local enthusiasms, and in any case they raised some awkward theological questions about the mechanism of transubstantiation. One of the earliest, Henry III's effort to start a Holy Blood cult in Westminster Abbey in the mid-thirteenth century, to rival King Louis IX's sensational acquisition of the Crown of Thorns in Paris (see p. 475), never aroused popular enthusiasm and rapidly faded away; it had appeared prematurely.
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By contrast, after the Black Death, blood cults gathered momentum, and like so much else in Passion devotion they acquired an anti-Semitic edge, because they were often associated with stories that Jews had attacked wafers of eucharistic bread. So the anti-Semitism which had been such a feature of Western Christianity since the era of the early Crusades continued to intensify.

In 1290 in Paris a Jew had supposedly stabbed a eucharistic wafer with a knife and it started bleeding. Among the hundred or so blood cults which appeared over the next three centuries, mainly in the Holy Roman Empire, a majority involved a story of Jewish desecration. There were further stories of deliberate Jewish maltreatment of the host apart from the pilgrimage cults - some are likely to have reflected real assaults by angry Jews, themselves inspired, ironically, by the myth that such assaults had happened.
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In an allied development, particularly in Iberia, Christ's earliest days also came often to be associated with the shedding of his blood through the Feast of the Circumcision: this happy celebration of Jesus's identification with his Jewish people, which so delighted the Viennese beguine Agnes Blannbekin, was turned into a Jewish assault on the child, rather like the atrocities against children imagined in the 'blood libel' against the Jews (see pp. 400-401). I remember the shock of seeing in the Museo de Arte Antica in Lisbon an example of one of these Circumcision paintings from an anonymous sixteenth-century Portuguese master. Lying naked in the centre was the Christ Child, over whom stood a rabbi, bishop-like in a mitre, about to wield the knife (and interestingly wearing spectacles, symbolizing his distorted vision, an anti-Semitic visual cliche with a long life ahead of it). On the Child's right were Mary and Joseph, Joseph a befuddled but harmless old man, so a non-threatening sort of Jew, and Mary looking distinctly worried. On the other side stood as vicious a crowd of Jews as one could expect to meet, gleefully brandishing the Ten Commandments.

European society in the wake of the Black Death remained preoccupied by death and what to do about it. No wonder the eleventh- and twelfth-century development of the doctrine of Purgatory was one of the most successful and long-lasting theological ideas in the Western Church. It bred an intricate industry of prayer: a whole range of institutions and endowments, of which the most characteristic was the chantry, a foundation of invested money or landed revenues which provided finance for a priest to devote his time to singing Masses for the soul of the founder and anyone else that the founder cared to specify (since either separate buildings or distinct parts of a church were customarily set apart for this purpose, there is often confusion between the chantry foundation and the chantry chapel in which the foundation operated). Easing the passage of souls through Purgatory with the prayer of the Mass or simply with the prayers of good Christian folk addressed that age-long human sense of bafflement and helplessness in the face of death, for it suggested that there was indeed something constructive to be done for the dead. Moreover, while the dead were languishing in the penitential misery of Purgatory preparatory to being released to eternal joy, they might as well get on with showing some gratitude for the prayers of the living by returning prayer back to them for future use. It was a splendidly mutual system, and a particularly neat aspect was the developed institution of indulgences, which had originated in the first enthusiasm of the Crusades (see p. 384).
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To understand how indulgences were intended to work depends on linking together a number of assumptions about sin and the afterlife, each of which individually makes considerable sense. First is the principle which works very effectively in ordinary society, that a wrong requires restitution to the injured party. So God demands an action from a sinner to prove repentance for a sin. Second is the idea that Christ's virtues or merits are infinite since he is part of the Godhead, and they are therefore more than adequate for the purpose of saving the finite world from Adam's sin. Additional to Christ's spare merits are those of the saints, headed by his own mother, Mary: clearly these are worthy in the sight of God, since the saints are known to be in Heaven. Accordingly, this combined 'treasury of merit' is available to assist a faithful Christian's repentance. Since the pope is the Vicar of Christ on earth, it would be criminal meanness on his part not to dispense such a treasury to anxious Christians. The treasury of merit can then be granted to the faithful to shorten the time spent doing penance in Purgatory. That grant is an indulgence.

All these ideas were explicitly drawn together on the very eve of the Black Death in a bull of Pope Clement VI,
Unigenitus
('The Only Begotten [Son of God]'), in 1343, by which time the Pope was seeking to rationalize a system of indulgence grants already well established, 'now for total, now for partial remission of punishment due for temporal sins'.
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It was only natural for pious Christians to show gratitude for such an act of charity on the Church's part. Eventually their thanks-offerings became effectively a payment for the indulgence, although all indulgences were very careful to lay down proper conditions for use, particularly instructions to the purchasers to go to confession, and also, in a specialized form of welfare relief, free indulgences were offered to the destitute. There were good reasons to cherish indulgences and their sale: they were very useful for fund-raising for good causes, such as the rebuilding of churches or the support of the charitable homes for the elderly and infirm called hospitals (themselves a part of the Purgatory industry, since their grateful inmates were expected to pass their time praying for the welfare of the souls of their benefactors). Indulgences were as ubiquitous as the modern lottery ticket, and indeed the earliest dated piece of English printing is a template indulgence from 1476.
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That same year, unknown to the printer in Westminster, a very considerable extension of the system's potential had occurred when the theologian Raimund Peraudi argued that indulgences were available to help souls of people already dead and presumed to be in Purgatory, as well as living people who sought and received an indulgence; a papal bull followed to implement this suggestion. With that the system was complete, and ready to have its disastrous effect on Martin Luther's volcanic temper (see pp. 608-10).

Perhaps significantly for the Reformation, the development of an obsession with Purgatory was not uniform within Europe. It seems to have been the north rather than the Mediterranean area, perhaps most intensively the Atlantic fringe from Galicia on the Spanish Atlantic seaboard round as far as Denmark and north Germany, which became most concerned with prayer as a ticket out of Purgatory. Dante Alighieri's detailed descriptions of Purgatory in his fourteenth-century masterwork the
Divina Commedia
might suggest that southerners were indeed concerned with Purgatory, but his Italian readers do not seem to have transformed their delight in his great poem into practical action or hard cash. This action can be monitored through the contents of late medieval wills - one of the rare ways in which we meet thousands of individuals facing death across the centuries. In the north, will-makers put big investment into such components of the Purgatory industry as Masses for the dead. In Germany there was a phenomenal surge in endowment of Masses from around 1450, with no signs of slackening until the whole system imploded under the impact of Luther's message in the 1520s.
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Samplings from Spain and Italy do not reveal the same concern. Several studies of localities in southern Europe suggest that such activity was imported by reforming 'Counter-Reformation' Catholic clergy in the late sixteenth century, and only then created a piety reminiscent of that which the Protestants were destroying in much of northern Europe. A similar process of transfer southwards occurred at the same time with the devotion of the rosary, originally German.
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Another important symptom of a north-south difference on salvation occurs in the many books published to provide clergy with models for sermons about penitence. These books were widely bought throughout Europe in the fifteenth century, because the faithful particularly demanded sermons during the penitential season of Lent, and expected their clergy to urge them to use the confessional properly at that time. However, different books sold well in northern and in southern Europe, and contrast in emphasis in what they say about penance. In the north, the preacher throws the spotlight on the penitents themselves, on the continual need for penance in their everyday lives and on the importance of true contrition and satisfaction when they come to confession; the priest in confession is cast in the role of judge, assessing the sincerity of all this busy work. In the south, the sermons pay more attention to the role of the priest, who is seen as doctor or mediator of grace in absolution of sin; the preacher is not so concerned to urge the layperson on to activity.
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