invested with the imperial title; and the admiration of his subjects,
who revered him almost as a deity, may be justified in some degree by
the praise or confession of his bitterest enemies. Although he was lame
of a hand and foot, his form and stature were not unworthy of his rank;
and his vigorous health, so essential to himself and to the world, was
corroborated by temperance and exercise. In his familiar discourse he
was grave and modest; and if he was ignorant of the Arabic language, he
spoke with fluency and elegance the Persian and Turkish idioms. It was
his delight to converse with the learned on topics of history and
science; and the amusement of his leisure hours was the game of chess,
which he improved or corrupted with new refinements.
In his religion he was a zealous, though not perhaps an orthodox,
Mussulman; but his sound understanding may tempt us to believe that a
superstitious reverence for omens and prophecies, for saints and
astrologers, was only affected as an instrument of policy. In the
government of a vast empire, he stood alone and absolute, without a
rebel to oppose his power, a favorite to seduce his affections, or a
minister to mislead his judgment.
Timur might boast that at his accession to the throne Asia was the prey
of anarchy and rapine, while under his prosperous monarchy a child,
fearless and unhurt, might carry a purse of gold from the East to the
West. Such was his confidence of merit that from this reformation he
derived an excuse for his victories and a title to universal dominion.
The four following observations will serve to appreciate his claim to
the public gratitude; and perhaps we shall conclude that the Mongol
Emperor was rather the scourge than the benefactor of mankind. If some
partial disorders, some local oppressions, were healed by the sword of
Timur, the remedy was far more pernicious than the disease. By their
rapine, cruelty, and discord the petty tyrants of Persia might afflict
their subjects; but whole nations were crushed under the footsteps of
the reformer. The ground which had been occupied by flourishing cities
was often marked by his abominable trophies--by columns, or pyramids of
human heads. Astrakhan, Karizme, Delhi, Ispahan, Bagdad, Aleppo,
Damascus, Bursa, Smyrna, and a thousand others were sacked or burned or
utterly destroyed in his presence and by his troops; and perhaps his
conscience would have been startled if a priest or philosopher had dared
to number the millions of victims whom he had sacrificed to the
establishment of peace and order. His most destructive wars were rather
inroads than conquests. He invaded Turkestan, Kiptchak, Russia,
Hindustan, Syria, Anatolia, Armenia, and Georgia, without a hope or a
desire of preserving those distant provinces. From thence he departed
laden with spoil; but he left behind him neither troops to awe the
contumacious nor magistrates to protect the obedient natives. When he
had broken the fabric of their ancient government, he abandoned them in
their evils which his invasion had aggravated or caused; nor were these
evils compensated by any present or possible benefits. The kingdoms of
Transoxiana and Persia were the proper field which he labored to
cultivate and adorn as the perpetual inheritance of his family. But his
peaceful labors were often interrupted, and sometimes blasted, by the
absence of the conqueror. While he triumphed on the Volga or the Ganges,
his servants, and even his sons, forgot their master and their duty. The
public and private injuries were poorly redressed by the tardy rigor or
inquiry and punishment; and we must be content to praise the
_Institutions_ of Timur as the specious idea of a perfect monarchy.
Whatsoever might be the blessings of his administration, they evaporated
with his life. To reign, rather than to govern, was the ambition of his
children and grandchildren--the enemies of each other and of the people.
A fragment of the empire was upheld with some glory by Sharokh, his
youngest son; but after his decease the scene was again involved in
darkness and blood; and before the end of a century Transoxiana and
Persia were trampled by the Usbegs from the north, and the Turcomans of
the black and white sheep. The race of Timur would have been extinct if
a hero, his descendant in the fifth degree, had not fled before the
Usbeg arms to the conquest of Hindustan. His successors--the great
Mongols--extended their sway from the mountains of Cashmere to Cape
Comorin, and from Kandahar to the Gulf of Bengal. Since the reign of
Aurungzebe, their empire has been dissolved; their treasures of Delhi
have been rifled by a Persian robber; and the richest of their kingdoms
is now possessed by a company of Christian merchants, of a remote island
in the Northern Ocean.
DANCING MANIA OF THE MIDDLE AGES
A.D. 1374
J. F. C. Hecker[59]
The black death, which originated in Central China about
1333, appeared on the Mediterranean littoral in 1347,
ravaged the island of Cyprus, made the circuit of the
Mediterranean countries, spread throughout Europe northward
as far as Iceland, and in 1357 appeared in Russia, where it
seems to have been checked by the barrier of the Caucasus.
Scarce had its effects subsided, and the graves of its
25,000,000 victims were hardly closed, when it was followed
by an epidemic of the dance of St. John, or St. Vitus, which
like a demoniacal plague appeared in Germany in 1347, and
spread over the whole empire and throughout the neighboring
countries. The dance was characterized by wild leaping,
furious screaming, and foaming at the mouth, which gave to
the individuals affected all the appearance of insanity.
The epidemic was not confined to particular localities, but
was propagated by the sight of the sufferers, and for over
two centuries excited the astonishment of contemporaries.
The Netherlands and France were equally affected; in Italy
the disease became known as _tarantism_, it being supposed
to proceed from the bite of the tarantula, a venomous
spider. Like the St. Vitus' dance in Germany, tarantism
spread by sympathy, increasing in severity as it took a
wider range; the chief cure was music, which seemed to
furnish magical means for exorcising the malady of the
patients.
The epidemic subsided in Central Europe in the seventeenth
century, but diseases approximating to the original dancing
mania have occurred at various periods in many parts of
Europe, Africa, and the United States. Nathaniel Pearce, an
eye-witness, who resided nine years in Abyssinia early in
the nineteenth century, gives a graphic account of a similar
epidemic there, called _tigretier_, from the Tigré district,
in which it was most prevalent. In France, from 1727 to
1790, an epidemic prevailed among the Convulsionnaires, who
received relief from brethren in the faith known as
Secourists, very much after the rough methods administered
to the St. John's dancers and to the _tarantati_. About the
same period nervous epidemics of a similar character,
largely propagated by sympathy, were very prevalent in the
Shetland Islands and in various parts of Scotland, but were
for the most part eradicated by cold-water immersion.
An epidemic of _chorea sancti Viti_, recorded by Felix
Robertson of Tennessee (Philadelphia, 1805), found vent in
an unparalleled blaze of enthusiastic religion, which spread
with lightning-like rapidity in almost every part of
Tennessee and Kentucky, and in various parts of Virginia, in
1800, being distinguished by uncontrollable and infectious
muscular contractions, gesticulations, crying, laughing,
shouting, and singing. To similar epidemics are attributed
the uncontrollable acts which, till late in the nineteenth
century, were a feature of North American camp meetings for
divine service in the open air, and which exhibited the same
form of mental disturbance as did the St. Vitus' dance in
mediæval Europe.
So early as the year 1374, assemblages of men and women were seen at
Aix-la-Chapelle who had come out of Germany, and who, united by one
common delusion, exhibited to the public both in the streets and in the
churches the following strange spectacle. They formed circles hand in
hand, and, appearing to have lost all control over their senses,
continued dancing, regardless of the bystanders, for hours together in
wild delirium, until at length they fell to the ground in a state of
exhaustion. They then complained of extreme oppression, and groaned as
if in the agonies of death, until they were swathed in cloths bound
tightly round their waists, upon which they again recovered, and
remained free from complaint until the next attack. This practice of
swathing was resorted to on account of the tympany which followed these
spasmodic ravings, but the bystanders frequently relieved patients in a
less artificial manner, by thumping and trampling upon the parts
affected. While dancing they neither saw nor heard, being insensible to
external impressions through the senses, but were haunted by visions,
their fancies conjuring up spirits whose names they shrieked out; and
some of them afterward asserted that they felt as if they had been
immersed in a stream of blood, which obliged them to leap so high.
Others, during the paroxysm, saw the heavens open and the Saviour
enthroned with the Virgin Mary, according as the religious notions of
the age were strangely and variously reflected in their imaginations.
Where the disease was completely developed, the attack commenced with
epileptic convulsions. Those affected fell to the ground senseless,
panting and laboring for breath. They foamed at the mouth, and suddenly
springing up began their dance amid strange contortions. Yet the malady
doubtless made its appearance very variously, and was modified by
temporary or local circumstances, whereof non-medical contemporaries but
imperfectly noted the essential particulars, accustomed as they were to
confound their observation of natural events with their notions of the
world of spirits.
It was but a few months ere this demoniacal disease had spread from
Aix-la-Chapelle, where it appeared in July, over the neighboring
Netherlands. In Liège, Utrecht, Tongres, and many other towns of Belgium
the dancers appeared with garlands in their hair, and their waists girt
with cloths, that they might, as soon as the paroxysm was over, receive
immediate relief on the attack of the tympany. This bandage was, by the
insertion of a stick, easily twisted tight. Many, however, obtained more
relief from kicks and blows, which they found numbers of persons ready
to administer; for, wherever the dancers appeared, the people assembled
in crowds to gratify their curiosity with the frightful spectacle. At
length the increasing number of the affected excited no less anxiety
than the attention that was paid to them. In towns and villages they
took possession of the religious houses; processions were everywhere
instituted on their account and masses were said and hymns were sung,
while the disease itself, of the demoniacal origin of which no one
entertained the least doubt, excited everywhere astonishment and horror.
In Liège the priests had recourse to exorcisms, and endeavored, by every
means in their power, to allay an evil which threatened so much danger
to themselves; for the possessed, assembling in multitudes, frequently
poured forth imprecations against them and menaced their destruction.
They intimidated the people also to such a degree that there was an
express ordinance issued that no one should make any but square-toed
shoes, because these fanatics had manifested a morbid dislike to the
pointed shoes which had come into fashion immediately after the "great
mortality," in 1350. They were still more irritated at the sight of red
colors, the influence of which on the disordered nerves might lead us to
imagine an extraordinary accordance between this spasmodic malady and
the condition of infuriated animals; but in the St. John's dancers this
excitement was probably connected with apparitions consequent upon their
convulsions. There were likewise some of them who were unable to
endure the sight of persons weeping. The clergy seemed to become daily
more and more confirmed in their belief that those who were affected
were a kind of sectarians, and on this account they hastened their
exorcisms as much as possible, in order that the evil might not spread
among the higher classes, for hitherto scarcely any but the poor had
been attacked, and the few people of respectability among the laity and
clergy who were to be found among them were persons whose natural
frivolity was unable to withstand the excitement of novelty, even though
it proceeded from a demoniacal influence. Some of the affected had
indeed themselves declared, when under the influence of priestly forms
of exorcism, that, if the demons had been allowed only a few weeks more
time, they would have entered the bodies of the nobility and princes,
and through these have destroyed the clergy. Assertions of this sort,
which those possessed uttered while in a state which may be compared
with that of magnetic sleep, obtained general belief, and passed from
mouth to mouth with wonderful additions. The priesthood were, on this
account, so much the more zealous in their endeavors to anticipate every
dangerous excitement of the people, as if the existing order of things
could have been seriously threatened by such incoherent ravings. Their
exertions were effectual, for exorcism was a powerful remedy in the
fourteenth century; or it might perhaps be that this wild infatuation
terminated in consequence of the exhaustion which naturally ensued from
it; at all events, in the course of ten or eleven months the St. John's
dancers were no longer to be found in any of the cities of Belgium. The
evil, however, was too deeply rooted to give way altogether to such
feeble attacks.
A few months after this dancing malady had made its appearance at
Aix-la-Chapelle, it broke out at Cologne, where the number of those
possessed amounted to more than five hundred, and about the same time at
Metz, the streets of which place are said to have been filled with
eleven hundred dancers. Peasants left their ploughs, mechanics their
workshops, housewives their domestic duties, to join the wild revels,
and this rich commercial city became the scene of the most ruinous
disorder. Secret desires were excited, and but too often found
opportunities for wild enjoyment; and numerous beggars, stimulated by
vice and misery, availed themselves of this new complaint to gain a
temporary livelihood. Girls and boys quitted their parents, and servants
their masters, to amuse themselves at the dances of those possessed, and
greedily imbibed the poison of mental infection. Gangs of idle
vagabonds, who understood how to imitate to the life the gestures and
convulsions of those really affected, roved from place to place seeking
maintenance and adventures, and thus, wherever they went, spreading this
disgusting spasmodic disease like a plague; for in maladies of this kind
the susceptible are infected as easily by the appearance as by the
reality. At last it was found necessary to drive away these mischievous
guests, who were equally inaccessible to the exorcisms of the priests
and the remedies of the physicians. It was not, however, until after
four months that the Rhenish cities were able to suppress these
impostors, which had so alarmingly increased the original evil. In the
mean time, when once called into existence, the plague crept on, and
found abundant food in the tone of thought which prevailed in the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and even, though in a minor degree,
throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth, causing a permanent disorder
of the mind, and exhibiting, in those cities to whose inhabitants it was
a novelty, scenes as strange as they were detestable.
Strasburg was visited by the dancing plague, or St. Vitus' dance,[60] in
the year 1418, and the same infatuation existed among the people there
as in the towns of Belgium and the Lower Rhine. Many who were seized at
the sight of those affected, excited attention at first by their
confused and absurd behavior, and then by their constantly following the
swarms of dancers. These were seen day and night passing through the
streets, accompanied by musicians playing on bagpipes, and by
innumerable spectators attracted by curiosity, to which were added
anxious parents and relations, who came to look after those among the
misguided multitude who belonged to their respective families. Imposture
and profligacy played their part in this city also, but the morbid
delusion itself seems to have predominated. On this account religion
could only bring provisional aid, and therefore the town council
benevolently took an interest in the afflicted. They divided them into
separate parties, to each of which they appointed responsible
superintendents to protect them from harm and perhaps also to restrain
their turbulence. They were thus conducted on foot and in carriages to
the chapels of St. Vitus, near Zabern and Rotestein, where priests were
in attendance to work upon their misguided minds by masses and other
religious ceremonies. After divine worship was completed, they were led
in solemn procession to the altar, where they made some small offering
of alms, and where it is probable that many were, through the influence
of devotion and the sanctity of the place, cured of this lamentable
aberration. It is worthy of observation, at all events, that the dancing
mania did not recommence at the altars of the saint, and that from him
alone assistance was implored, and through his miraculous interposition
a cure was expected, which was beyond the reach of human skill. The
personal history of St. Vitus is by no means unimportant in this matter.
He was a Sicilian youth, who, together with Modestus and Crescentia,
suffered martyrdom at the time of the persecution of the Christians,
under Diocletian, in the year 303. The legends respecting him are
obscure, and he would certainly have been passed over without notice
among the innumerable apocryphal martyrs of the first centuries, had not
the transfer of his body to St. Denis, and thence, in the year 836, to
Corvey, raised him to a higher rank. From this time forth, it may be
supposed that many miracles were manifested at his new sepulchre, which
were of essential service in confirming the Roman faith among the
Germans, and St. Vitus was soon ranked among the fourteen saintly
helpers (_Nothhelfer_ or _Apotheker_). His altars were multiplied, and
the people had recourse to them in all kinds of distresses, and revered
him as a powerful intercessor. As the worship of these saints was,
however, at that time stripped of all historical connections, which were
purposely obliterated by the priesthood, a legend was invented at the
beginning of the fifteenth century, or perhaps even so early as the
fourteenth, that St. Vitus had, just before he bent his neck to the
sword, prayed to God that he might protect from the dancing mania all
those who should solemnize the day of his commemoration, and fast upon
its eve, and that thereupon a voice from heaven was heard, saying,
"Vitus, thy prayer is accepted." Thus St. Vitus became the patron saint
of those afflicted with the dancing plague, as St. Martin of Tours was
at one time the succorer of persons in smallpox.
The connection which John the Baptist had with the dancing mania of the
fourteenth century was of a totally different character. He was
originally far from being a protecting saint to those who were attacked,
or one who would be likely to give them relief from a malady considered
as the work of the devil. On the contrary, the manner in which he was
worshipped afforded an important and very evident cause for its
development. From the remotest period, perhaps even so far back as the
fourth century, St. John's Day was solemnized with all sorts of strange
and rude customs, of which the originally mystical meaning was variously
disfigured among different nations by super-added relics of heathenism.
Thus the Germans transferred to the festival of St. John's Day an
ancient heathen usage, the kindling of the _Nodfyr_, which was forbidden
them by St. Boniface, and the belief subsists even to the present day
that people and animals that have leaped through these flames, or their
smoke, are protected for a whole year from fevers and other diseases, as
if by a kind of baptism by fire. Bacchanalian dances, which have
originated in similar causes among all the rude nations of the earth,
and the wild extravagancies of a heated imagination, were the constant
accompaniments of this half-heathen, half-Christian festival. At the
period of which we are treating, however, the Germans were not the only
people who gave way to the ebullitions of fanaticism in keeping the
festival of St. John the Baptist. Similar customs were also to be found
among the nations of Southern Europe and of Asia,[61] and it is more
than probable that the Greeks transferred to the festival of John the
Baptist, who is also held in high esteem among the Mahometans, a part of
their Bacchanalian mysteries, an absurdity of a kind which it but too
frequently met with in human affairs. How far a remembrance of the
history of St. John's death may have had an influence on this occasion
we would leave learned theologians to decide. It is of importance here
to add only that in Abyssinia, a country entirely separated from Europe,
where Christianity has maintained itself in its primeval simplicity
against Mahometanism, John is to this day worshipped as protecting saint
of those who are attacked with the dancing malady. In these fragments of
the dominion of mysticism and superstition, historical connection is not
to be found.
When we observe, however, that the first dancers in Aix-la-Chapelle
appeared in July with St. John's name in their mouths, the conjecture is
probable that the wild revels of St. John's Day, A.D. 1374, gave rise to
this mental plague, which thenceforth has visited so many thousands with
incurable aberration of mind and disgusting distortions of body.
This is rendered so much the more probable because some months
previously the districts in the neighborhood of the Rhine and the Maine
had met with great disasters. So early as February both these rivers had
overflowed their banks to a great extent; the walls of the town of
Cologne, on the side next the Rhine, had fallen down, and a great many
villages had been reduced to the utmost distress. To this was added the
miserable condition of Western and Southern Germany. Neither law nor
edict could suppress the incessant feuds of the barons, and in Franconia
especially the ancient times of club law appeared to be revived.
Security of property there was none; arbitrary will everywhere
prevailed; corruption of morals and rude power rarely met with even a
feeble opposition; whence it arose that the cruel, but lucrative,
persecutions of the Jews were in many places still practised, through
the whole of this century, with their wonted ferocity. Thus, throughout
the western parts of Germany, and especially in the districts bordering
on the Rhine, there was a wretched and oppressed populace; and if we
take into consideration that among their numerous bands many wandered
about whose consciences were tormented with the recollection of the
crimes which they had committed during the prevalence of the black
plague, we shall comprehend how their despair sought relief in the
intoxication of an artificial delirium. There is hence good ground for
supposing that the frantic celebration of the festival of St. John, A.D.
1374, only served to bring to a crisis a malady which had been long
impending; and if we would further inquire how a hitherto harmless
usage, which like many others had but served to keep up superstition,
could degenerate into so serious a disease, we must take into account
the unusual excitement of men's minds and the consequences of
wretchedness and want. The bowels, which in many were debilitated by
hunger and bad food, were precisely the parts which in most cases were
attacked with excruciating pain, and the tympanitic state of the
intestines points out to the intelligent physician an origin of the
disorder which is well worth consideration.