Politics in Times of Plague and Pogroms
*** This chapter is part of a book I am preparing about the the history of Belgium. The working title is ‘The Necessary Accident. Essential Tales from Belgium’s Tumultuous History’.***
With an absent mumble of thanks, the aging monk received the letter and shut the side door of the Saint-Donatian’s Church before the messenger could utter another word. He shuffled through the corridors to the abbot’s office. ‘Another letter from brother Heyligen’, he said as he entered his superior’s office. ‘What theological urgency is there now?’, sighed the abbot as he took the letter, broke the seal of the chancellery of the Pope of Avignon, and started reading. Despite his appreciation for brother Heyligen as an esteemed intellectual — he was an intimate friend of Petrarch, who called him Socrates — his letters were often a bore. The abbot hushed the Latin words between his teeth while he started reading ‘Anno preterito in mense septembri … last year in September …’[i].
As the abbot continued reading, he stopped whispering the words. His eyes raced incredulous across the page as he turned ever paler. From India, the letter related, ships had brought back a terrible disease to France. It seemed as if the Grim Reaper himself was visiting France. In the scope of no more than three months, ‘sixty-two thousand bodies of death were buried in Avignon’.
Some, Heyligen continued, felt pain in their contaminated lungs and spit blood. For them, ‘there is no escape and they will live no more than two days’. They would soon be followed into death by ‘anyone who had visited them, had taken some of their belongings with them, or carried them to their grave’. This disease wasn’t only lethal, it was extremely contagious, too. Other symptoms included abscesses underneath the arms which were so big one suffocated. Still others complained of pain in the groin, before they suddenly died.
The letter wasn’t a theological decree discussing the sex of angels, but a panicked warning from a friend. ‘My dear friends, I write to you so you know in which grave danger we now are. And if you want to protect yourself, the best advice is to drink and eat with measure, beware of the cold, and don’t commit any excesses. And above all, there should be little contact between men (…). The best thing is to stay at home, because this epidemic will pass’. He fatalistically concluded: ‘I am in the hands of God and to Him I commend myself’.
The plague — or as the Swedish later called it: the Black Death — arrived to the Low Countries in 1349. The locals called the epidemic the ‘hot disease’, because of the high fever it caused, or the ‘swift disease’, as death would follow within days of the first symptoms. Gilles Li Muisit, an abbot of a convent in Tournai estimated ‘that in many places between a quarter and a third of the population died because of it’.
The plague caused such a devastation that very few eye witness accounts from the Low Countries have been passed on. For a long time, historians have therefore believed that the area got ‘lucky’ in the first wave of the plague; that the plague somehow hadn’t wreaked havoc in one of the most densely populated areas of Europe. The clues in the historical archives, however, tell a different story. On the 15th of August 1349, the count of Flanders allowed the city of Bruges to ‘order the construction and consecration of two new cemeteries’, because of ‘the great number of people in the city who die every day, and because of the small cemetery within the city walls, from which a corrupted air comes up to the living people, who might die sooner because of it’.
It’s nigh on impossible to calculate the exact number of people who died in the Low Countries, but we do know more about the horrendous psychological whiplash caused by the plague. Convinced that the plague was a punishment of God, large groups of flagellants roamed the countryside for a symbolic 33 and a half days, one day for each year Jesus lived, whipping themselves in penance. According to the chronicler Froissart, ‘the object of this penance was to entreat God to put a stop to the mortality’. The penitents ‘scourged themselves with whips of hard knotted leather with little iron spikes. Some made themselves bleed very badly between the shoulders and some foolish women had cloths ready to catch the blood and smear it on their eyes, saying it was miraculous blood’. In Tournai, the local abbot reported, a group of penitents of Bruges came to preach at the height of the epidemic. The locals were deeply impressed, and ‘they too started to hurt themselves and to thank God for this penance, which seemed to them very effective’[ii].
With little medical knowledge, desperate and anxious, people were willing to try anything to survive the epidemic. In some cases, fear of the unknown disease turned into outright hatred for the unknown neighbour. The Tournai abbot mentioned ‘widespread rumours that the Jewish race attempted to destroy the Christian people by poisoning water sources, wells and other water supplies’. All-over Western Europe, an underlying anti-Semitism erupted into a heinous volcano of violence against the Jewish population. It started in Strasbourg, France, where 2.000 Jews were killed, but it didn’t pass the Low Countries.
Since the early 13th century, small Jewish communities had settled along the commercially important land route between Flanders and Cologne in the Brabantian cities of Brussels, Leuven, Tienen, Zoutleeuw and Sint-Truiden. Famously, the widow of the Duke Henry III of Brabant had asked none other than Thomas Aquinas for advice on how to treat the Jewish communities after her dying husband had ordered them removed. Jewish families expelled from France had found a refuge in Hainaut.
The Jews of Brabant and Hainaut were now the scapegoat. Many were persecuted by city councils dominated by their debtors and suffered a violent, painful death. Some were killed by sword, some were drowned, and others ‘in Brabant lost their life in the fire’[ii]. The Jews of Hainaut also met their miserable end by burning at the stake, while their possessions were impounded by the count.
The end of the plague was not the end of the pogroms. By 1370, there were only ten Jewish families left in Brabant. Still, spurred on by their debtors, crowds blamed them for disasters. In order to cover up a money-lending scheme between one of the Jews and two Brussels’ priests, the Jews were accused of desecrating the holy host by piercing some stolen wafers with a knife. According to the legend, the wafers bled. The accused were burned, and the rest of the Jewish community was banished from Brabant. These events were commemorated with a yearly festive procession, which only stopped after the Second World War. To this day, the Brussels’ cathedral still features a glass-stained window vilifying the Jews piercing the wafers.
The plague also changed Europe. In the ongoing struggle between castles and belfries, between titles and money, it shifted the balance further in favour of the rich urban elite. Since a third of Europe’s population had been wiped out, for the first time since centuries, the value of land dropped sharply. Rents from property fell. This was a problem for the old land nobility, who had lived off the income from their inherited lands. As their tenants succumbed one after the other to the mysterious disease, their wealth dissipated with them.
Another victim of the plague was the purchasing power of the working classes. Since more money was available per person, inflation was rampant. Prices rose, but many workers were stuck with wages that had been fixed before the advent of the plague. This meant they could buy far less with their wage in 1350 than in 1348. Day labourers worked as hard as before, but they could afford less and less.
The ones who profited, were the merchants and the top artisans. Over the past century, they had transformed themselves from master artisans to something more akin to modern entrepreneurs. Their ateliers had grown ever bigger, employing more people, and they were less and less involved in the actual production process. Bucking the European trend, the Flemish guilds managed to freeze the wages of their employees and to stifle social mobility by making all the important positions in the guilds hereditary. To avoid a war for the scarce talent which had survived the plague, they agreed between themselves to limit production. Adjusting for the inflation the plague had caused, they now asked more money for their products, while the wages of their employees were frozen. In short, their profit margins grew and they got richer at a faster pace than before.
After fifty years of tug-of-war between noblemen and guilds, between castles and belfries, between the sword and the goedendag, between cavalry and city militias, between inherited prestige and entrepreneurial money, the plague had finally pulled the rope to the side of the city elites. In the century to come, guildsmen would patron the arts. Their pious faces would adorn the altarpieces of the great cathedrals. The world revolved around them.
At the same time, however, the success bore within itself the seeds of the eventual downfall of the cities. The rich guildsmen ruled the cities in Flanders with an iron hand and literally dictated the law. Their economic and political stranglehold of the cities made the life for the ordinary labourers unbearable. The meagre wages coupled with high prices meant that mere survival was a difficult task within the city walls. For the first time in living memory, life outside the walls as a farmer was comparatively attractive. Rents in the countryside were low, normal people could farm their own lands and sell their own produce at a price they set themselves. After three centuries of breakneck urbanisation in Flanders, the growth of Ghent, Bruges and Ypres finally plateaued.
[i] This chapter is mainly based on : Vermeersch, J. 1349. Hoe de Zwarte Dood Vlaanderen veranderde ; Cluse, C. Studien zur Geschichte der Juden in den mittelalterlichen Niederlanden. The Latin text by Heyligen is transcribed in Welkenhuysen, A. 1988 La Peste en Avignon (1348) Décrite par un Témoin Oculaire, Louis Sanctus de Béringen. [Edition Critique, Traduction, Eléments de Commentaire]. In: R. Lievens, et al., eds. Pascua Mediaevalia: Studies voor Prof. Dr. J. M. de Smet. 1983. Louvain: Universitaire Pers, pp. 452–492.
[ii] Quoted in Vermeersch, J., p 30.
[iii] Cluse, C. Studien zur Geschichte der Juden in den mittelalterlichen Niederlanden, p. 243.
