The Discovery of the Plague
The birth hour of the modern age is marked by a severe illness of the European humanity: smallpox. This does not mean that the plague was the cause of the modern age, but rather the opposite: the "modern age" existed first, and it was through it that the plague arose. Every era creates its own diseases, just as its art, religion, physics, economics, and all other manifestations are its own products. The new spirit brought a kind of developmental illness to European humanity, a general psychosis, and one form of this sickness, the most striking one, was smallpox.
But where this new spirit came from, why it appeared here and now, and why it arose, no one knows. It is also completely unsolved under what specific circumstances the plague suddenly took possession of Europe. Some claim that it was brought in by the Crusades, but it is noteworthy that among the Arabs it did not reach the dreadful proportions it did in Europe. Others place its origin in China. Contemporaries blamed the alignment of the stars, the general sinfulness, the celibacy of priests, and the Jews for it.
It arrived all at once, first in Italy, and then slowly crept across the entire continent. It did not spread rapidly, like most epidemics, but slowly, yet irresistibly, moving from house to house, country to country. It attacked Germany, France, England, Spain, and finally the northern countries, all the way to Iceland. What made it even more frightening was its unpredictability: at times it spared entire regions, such as eastern France, and jumped over certain houses. It often disappeared suddenly and reappeared years later. Even in the second half of the 15th century, chronicles recorded its reappearance.
Most likely, it was bubonic plague: it manifested in swollen lymph nodes, known as plague buboes, severe headaches, great weakness, and apathy, sometimes delirium, and death came by the first, second, or at the latest the seventh day. The mortality rate was staggering everywhere. For example, at its peak in Bern, 60 people died per day, in Cologne and Mainz, 100 per day, in Elbing, 13,000 in total, two-thirds of the Oxford student body, and three-fifths of the Yorkshire clergy. When the Minorites counted their dead after the two-year epidemic ended, they were over 120,000, and Europe's total loss, according to later estimates, amounted to 25 million. However, the people of that time believed it was easier to count the survivors than the dead.
The accompanying phenomenon of the plague was the pilgrimages of the self-flagellants. The flagellants, religious fanatics, marched in large groups from town to town, waving flags, singing somber songs, dressed in black cloaks and strange hats with a red cross on them. At their appearance, all bells rang, and everyone poured into the church. There, they fell to the ground and, amid hours of songs and prayers, whipped themselves. They read out letters that had fallen from the sky, which cursed the sinful activities of laypeople and priests and urged repentance. Their teachings, if such a thing can be called teaching, were undoubtedly heretical: they taught that flagellation was the true Eucharist, as during it their blood mixed with the blood of the Savior, and they regarded priests as unworthy and unnecessary, not allowing any churchman to join their devout practices. Their influence on the Church and on the terrified and desperate humanity was enormous. It wasn't simply the physical consequences of the plague, but very likely a parallel epidemic, the further symptom of the general psychosis, superficially linked to the plague.
The Jewish persecutions of the time also had a pathological and epidemic nature. In southern France, a rumor suddenly spread that the Jews had poisoned the wells, and this news spread even faster than the plague itself to neighboring countries. Terrible massacres of Jews followed, with the flagellants forming the vanguard, and the Jews demonstrated that same blind heroism that had manifested throughout their history. They threw themselves into flames after their families, set fire to the synagogue, or set themselves on fire.
It wasn't only people; the heavens and the earth also rebelled. Ominous comets appeared, terrible storms ravaged England, huge swarms of locusts tormented the lands, and earthquakes devastated the countryside. The fertile land refused to offer its gifts: weeds and drought everywhere ruined the harvest. But man, who doubted both the present and the future amid all these disasters and contradictions, staggered about in fear, searching for something solid. The more serious ones withdrew completely into their God or the Church, fasting, praying, repenting for their sins, while the unrestrained ones threw themselves into worldly tumult, opening all gates to greed and sin. Many awaited the final judgment. Both the pessimistic and ascetic currents and the unhealthy joy of life trembled with a general apocalyptic atmosphere. The human instinct was absolutely right: the world truly was ending. The world that had existed until then, the medieval world, with its uniquely narrow and bright, clear and confused, soaring and constrained nature, sank into the depths of time and eternity amid moaning and thunder.
Egon Friedell "Az újkori kultúra története I." Holnap Kiadó, Budapest, 1989