But the turning point came with the declaration of war by the Church. In May 1348 Pope Clement VI had himself patronized ceremonies involving public flagellation within the precincts of his palace at Avignon but he took fright when he saw that he could not control the movement which he had encouraged. Left to himself he would probably have turned against them sooner, but members of the Sacred College prevailed on him to hold his hand. In mid-1349, the Sorbonne was asked for its opinion and sent to Avignon a Flemish monk, Jean da Fayt, who had studied the phenomenon in his homeland. It seems that his advice was decisive. Shortly after his arrival, on 20 October 1349, a papal Bull was published and dispatched to the Archbishops. This was followed by personal letters to the Kings of France and England. The Bull denounced the Flagellants for the contempt of Church discipline which they had shown by forming unauthorized associations, writing their own statutes, devizing their own uniforms and performing many acts contrary to accepted observances. All prelates were ordered to suppress the pilgrimages and to call on the secular arm to help if it seemed necessary.
That the Pope meant business was shown when a party of a hundred Flagellants arrived in Avignon from Basle. Clement promptly interdicted public penance and prohibited their pilgrimages under threat of excommunication. Emboldened by his example, the rulers of Europe turned on the Brethren. Manfred of Sicily threatened to execute any Flagellant who appeared in his lands;{175} Bishop Preczlaw of Breslaw made threats reality and had a Master burned alive. The German prelates took up the attack with especial relish. The Flagellants were denounced from the pulpit as an impious sect and harsh penalties were threatened against any who failed to return humbly to the bosom of the Church. Even those who obeyed were likely to find themselves in trouble if they had played a prominent part in the movement and hundreds were incarcerated, tortured or executed. In 1350 many Flagellants were in Rome enjoying a busman’s penance by being beaten in front of the High Altar of St Peter’s.
The Brethren of the Cross ‘vanished as suddenly as they had come, like night phantoms or mocking ghosts.’{176} The movement did not die, indeed it was still to be encountered in the fifteenth century, but, as a threat to society or an additional headache to those grappling with the problems of the Black Death, it had effectively ceased to exist.
It is easy to poke fun at these misguided fanatics. Their superstitions were ridiculous, their practices obscene, their motivation sometimes sinister. But before condemning them one must remember the desperate fear which drove the Flagellants into their excesses. These were men who put themselves to great pain and inconvenience; in part, certainly for the sake of their own souls and their own glory, but in part also in the hope that their sacrifice might induce God to lift from his people the curse that was destroying them. There were few saints among them but, on the whole, they were not bad men. And it is impossible not to feel some sympathy for the person who, when disaster threatens, tries to do something to oppose it, however futile, instead of waiting, in abject despair, for death to strike him down.
They did achieve something. In some at least of the towns they visited they brought about a spiritual regeneration, ephemeral, no doubt, but still real while it lasted. Adulterers confessed their sins, robbers returned stolen goods. They provided some diversion at the places along their route and left behind them a fleeting hope that their pain might bring an end to the greater sufferings of the plague-stricken. But when the Flagellants had passed, often leaving new centres of infection in their wake; when the miracles did not happen, the sick did not recover, the plague did not pass; then the condition of those they left behind them must have been even worse than before they came. On the whole they probably did more harm than good.
One thing at least it is hard to forgive. In his Bull condemning them, Pope Clement VI complained that ‘most of them… beneath an appearance of piety, set their hands to cruel and impious work, shedding the blood of Jews, whom Christian piety accepts and sustains’. The persecution of the Jews during the Black Death deserves special attention. The part which the Flagellants played in this repugnant chapter was only occasionally of the first importance but it was nonetheless barbarous for that.
