Until recent years it was generally believed that no certain record
of bubonic plague existed prior to that of Procopius (_c._ A.D.
490-560). It would seem to be necessary to revise this opinion in the
face of a fragment of the writings of Rufus of Ephesus, preserved by
Oribasius,[120] the Christian physician of the Emperor Julian (A.D.
355-63). He writes: ‘The buboes called pestilential are most fatal and
acute, especially those that are seen occurring about Libya, Egypt,
and Syria, and which are mentioned by Dionysius Curtus. Dioscorides
and Posidonius make much mention of them in the plague, which occurred
in their time in Libya: they say it was accompanied by acute fever,
pain, and prostration of the whole body, delirium, and _the appearance
of large and hard buboes_, which did not suppurate, not only in the
accustomed parts, but also in the groins and armpits:’ and further:
‘One can foresee an approaching plague by paying attention to the ill
condition of the seasons, to the mode of living less conducive to
health, and to the death of animals that precedes its invasion.’
Rufus is believed to have flourished in the reign of Trajan (A.D.
98-117), and may have been his physician. Dioscorides and Posidonius
were probably Alexandrine physicians who flourished soon after the
Christian era. The identity of Dionysius Curtus is conjectural, but
there is some reason to think that he practised medicine in Alexandria
in the third century B.C. Accepting these dates, one must admit that
the evidence for the existence of bubonic plague in epidemic form in
northern Africa and the Levant as early as the third century B.C.
is exceedingly strong. Even if we conceive buboes to have been more
common than nowadays in the course of other acute infectious diseases,
the above record can hardly denote anything but bubonic plague. The
reference to buboes as occurring with greater frequency in other parts
than the groins and armpits does not appear to have received from
medical writers the attention it deserves.
We have already adduced evidence to show that Hippocrates also was
familiar with bubonic plague in its sporadic, but probably not in its
epidemic form. Galen,[121] too, discusses the relation of buboes to
fever in such a manner as to show that he also was acquainted with a
severe bubonic malady, distinct from ordinary septic buboes. Oribasius
also is cognizant of bubonic fevers, but it may be asserted generally
that neither Galen nor Oribasius shows any signs of knowing them as
a prevalent epidemic pestilence. We may, then, justly say that the
narrative of Procopius affords the first unequivocal description of an
epidemic of bubonic plague.
According to Procopius[122] the plague began at the ill-starred
Pelusium, spreading in one direction through Alexandria and Egypt, in
another through Palestine, and thence throughout the world, which would
have meant to him from the eastern limits of Persia as far westward
as the shores of the Atlantic. In the light of modern knowledge it
is probable that Pelusium was no more than a distributing centre
_en route_, and that the true focus of origin lay much further back
along the commercial highways to the east or south. Of its pandemic
character, however, we have the fullest confirmation in a succession
of historical records. Evagrius[123] says that its total duration was
fifty-two years, and this also it is possible to substantiate from the
annexed table of its offsets, along with the names of the authorities
for each locality.
_Date._ _Locality._ _Authority._
A.D. 540 Antioch Evagrius.
A.D. 542 Byzantium Procopius.
A.D. 549 Arles Gregory of Tours.
A.D. 558 Byzantium Agathias.
A.D. 565 Liguria Paul the Deacon.
A.D. 567 Auvergne Gregory of Tours.
Narbonne Gregory of Tours.
A.D. 587 Marseilles Gregory of Tours.
A.D. 590 Rome Gregory of Tours.
Paul the Deacon.
John the Deacon.
A.D. 590 Avignon Gregory of Tours.
A.D. 591 Strasbourg Oseas Schadaeus.
Procopius describes the plague as progressing by definite stages,
expending its virulence on one country before passing to another, as
though intent on overlooking nothing. Indeed, if at first it touched
a place lightly, it always returned to it subsequently, till the full
measure of punishment was exacted. Always beginning at the sea-coast
it spread into the interior, so that the infection in the first place
was clearly sea-borne. He states that it took over a year to reach
Byzantium, where it made its appearance in the spring of A.D. 542. We
know, however, from Evagrius that plague was already in Antioch in A.D.
540, earlier, therefore, than the date of its alleged appearance in
Pelusium.
In his discussion of etiology Procopius borrows much of the phraseology
of Thucydides, but neither here nor elsewhere does he show the least
sign of being influenced by the substance of the Thucydidean narrative.
Thucydides, it will be remembered, evidently attributed the plague of
Athens to natural causes, declining to speculate as to what could have
produced such a disturbance of nature (μεταβολή).
Procopius says that those who pretended to knowledge ascribed the
pestilence to things darting down from heaven (τοῖς ἐξ οὐρανοῦ
ἐπισκήπτουσιν). This is indeed harking back to primitive conceptions.
But he adds that they do so without a fragment of evidence, merely
for the sake of deceiving, ascribing to nature what is clearly the
handiwork of God and nothing else. This opinion he bases on the ground
that the plague did not confine its ravages to any single country nor
fall specially on either sex or any age, but spread over the whole
world, regardless of season and of differences of habit. The argument,
in so far as it was negative, was certainly a strong one in the light
of the medical knowledge of his time, which referred much of the
distinction of different maladies to variations of climate, soil,
season, habit, and other accidental circumstances. Visual and auditory
hallucinations were not lacking. Procopius says that many that were
stricken by the plague saw, either when awake or when asleep, visions
of spirits arrayed in human forms. Some seemed to hear in their sleep
a voice saying that they were enrolled in the number of the dead. They
fancied that these spectres in human form struck them in some part of
the body, and immediately they were seized with the disease. To avoid
these demons some shut themselves up in their houses and would not come
out on any account. Others tried to escape the demons by invoking that
the most sacred names and by every form of expiation.
This idea of pestilential demons seems to be of oriental origin. We
have already encountered it in the story of Apollonius of Tyana at
Ephesus. It figures in early Indian medicine, and also in Mahometan
lore. Mahomet seems to have adopted it directly from Magian tradition,
as embodied by Zoroaster in the Zendavesta. The Magians conceived
one supreme God and Creator of the universe, from whom also emanated
two active principles, personified as Ormusd, the principle or angel
of light or good, and Ahriman, the principle or angel of darkness or
evil, a demon. From these two opposite principles the universe was
compounded, and in the direction of its affairs these two conflicting
elements were always striving for mastery. So long as the angel of
light was in the ascendant it was well with the affairs of men; but if
for a while the demon of darkness prevailed, then sorrow and suffering
and sin were the lot of mortal man. It was inevitable that a shepherd
race, tending their flocks beneath a star-lit sky in the plains of
Arabia and the uplands of Central Asia should see in the light and
the darkness two hostile personalities dominating their existence for
better or for worse.
Mahometans believed that spirits were sent by God armed with bows and
arrows to disseminate plague as a punishment for sin. Spectres of a
black colour dealt fatal wounds, but those dealt by white spectres were
not fatal. We shall presently find this same fancy figuring in the
literature and art of mediaeval Italy. It is not without interest to
have traced the conception spreading, like the plague itself, from an
endemic focus in the East, first to Byzantium, and then by slow stages
to Italy and the West.
In Byzantium many succumbed to the disease without any premonitory
visions. In these there was a sudden onset of a mild fever without any
grave symptoms, so that the victim had no apprehension of dying. Then
either the same day, or a day or two after, appeared a bubo (βουβών),
either in the groin or armpit, or behind the ear, or elsewhere. So
far as these symptoms went, all suffered in pretty much the same way.
The Byzantine plague was therefore characteristically bubonic, and
the buboes seem to have been distributed in the different parts of
the body, much as we find them to-day. In this and in all essential
points bubonic plague still exhibits a striking conformity to the
picture drawn by Procopius some 1,400 years ago. Indeed Procopius
has afforded an admirable outline sketch of oriental plague, to
which the most recent medical science has added little beyond some
elaboration of detail. We can decipher in his narrative at least
four recognized types—the bubonic, the pustular, the pneumonic, and
the tonsillar—as having prevailed during this epidemic in Byzantium.
Unlike Thucydides, Procopius rejects the idea of contagion, as opposed
to his own observations. Physicians, nurses, and those who buried the
dead were not, in his experience, specially affected, in spite of their
constant contact with the sick; and contrariwise, many contracted the
disease without any contact at all. The belief of Procopius in the
pestilence as a special act of God almost necessitated his being a
non-contagionist. He was at a loss whether to attribute the varied
manifestations of the disease to differences of constitution, or to
the will of the Author of the plague. In one case profound lethargy
prevailed, in another maniacal delirium. The lethargic lay simply
regardless of everything and died of starvation, unless food was
pressed on them. The delirious in their terror tried to flee: they
struggled with their attendants in the attempt to throw themselves out
of windows, or to drown themselves. Their desire was not to assuage
their thirst, for often they threw themselves into the sea. This is
evidently a criticism of the suggestion of Thucydides that it was
thirst that drove the victims to throw themselves into cisterns.
Procopius says that the physicians conceived that the source of the
disease lay in the buboes. This was a not unnatural inference from the
fact that, in cases of simple suppuration of the bubo, the sufferer
usually recovered, as though some virulent humour had escaped by this
channel. For the same reason in later years incision was performed,
and suppuration encouraged, whenever practicable. When, however, the
physicians opened the buboes in the hope of discovering the cause, they
found nothing but a horrible growth, like a carbuncle (ἄνθραξ). The
Byzantine physicians evidently regarded the disease as a morbid process
within the confines of recognized pathology.
There was a pustular type of the disease, and those who got a crop of
black pustules all over the body, as large as a lentil, died at once.
Procopius in his φλυκταίναις μελαίναις, ὅσον φακοῦ μέγεθος, ἐξήνθει
τὸ σῶμα echoes the language of Thucydides, ᾄφλυκταίναις μικραῖς καὶ
ἓλκεσιν ἐξηνθηκός: and it is noteworthy that ulcers were no feature of
the Byzantine plague.
Many dropped dead from spontaneous vomiting of blood, probably from the
lungs, as is not infrequent in the pneumonic form of plague.
Some escaped with a defect in the speech, so that as long as they lived
they stammered or stuttered, and were unintelligible. This may well
have been a sequel of the tonsillar type.
The plague lasted in epidemic virulence in Byzantium for four months in
all, and was at its height for three. This again, speaking broadly, has
been a feature of most European and Levantine outbreaks. At the worst
the daily mortality reached the appalling total of ten thousand.
Procopius dwells at length on the accumulation of dead bodies in the
streets and the neglect of funeral rites. At first each man buried the
dead members of his own household, sometimes throwing them into graves
prepared for others; but soon buriers failed, and then corpses began to
litter the streets. These Justinian commissioned his agent Theodorus
to bury. When all the existing burial-grounds were filled, huge
burial-pits were dug wherever they could find space all round the city.
Finally, when the digging of graves could no longer keep pace with the
deaths, they mounted the towers of the city walls in Sycae, the port of
Byzantium, and removing the roofs threw in the bodies promiscuously:
when these were filled, the roofs were replaced. But when the wind
set from that quarter, the awful stench proved most distressing to
the citizens. Many corpses were simply cast out on the shore, where
they were piled in barges and turned adrift out to sea. We shall see
these various conditions strikingly reproduced during the plague of
Marseilles in A.D. 1721. John of Ephesus states that the ambulance
arrangements made by Justinian for the burial of the dead met all the
requirements, but it is impossible to accept his statement in face of
the precise and detailed account of Procopius.
The horrors of the plague, according to Procopius, turned men from
dissoluteness to piety, for fear that their own death was imminent. If,
however, they fell sick and recovered, they became even more dissolute
than before, in the belief that they were now safe for the future.
According to Thucydides, the Athenian Greeks became reckless from the
first and gave themselves over to pleasure, seeing that the disease
smote virtuous and vicious alike. Perhaps, however, the difference
lay more in the mental attitude of the observer than in the actual
demeanour of those observed.
All work came to a standstill in Byzantium, so that famine supervened
in the city, where usually everything was in profusion. Justinian
himself became infected and suffered from an attack, in which a bubo
appeared.
Such in brief is the account that Procopius gives of the plague of
Byzantium, as he saw it with his own eyes. Unquestionably he had
before him the description of the plague of Athens, for now and again
he slips into an identical turn of language. But to speak of him as a
flagrant plagiarist of Thucydides is sheer absurdity. Rather he gives
the impression of maintaining a critical attitude towards Thucydides,
and of emphasizing the points of dissent. Procopius has no doubt that
he is describing the same disease as Thucydides, and is impressed by
the clinical differences he has observed. The tone of Thucydides is
subjective: he attempts a general description, but cannot keep in
the background the symptoms of his own case. The tone of Procopius
is wholly objective: he writes as an intensely interested onlooker,
retailing his own observations, supplemented by the statements of those
who have had the disease and recovered. The apparent resemblance of the
two accounts is really no more than surface deep.
An account of an offset of this pandemic at Antioch survives from the
pen of the historian Evagrius,[124] who was born in A.D. 536 and spent
the greater part of his life at Antioch. Apparently he knew nothing of
the records of Procopius or Agathias, for he says that the history of
this pestilence had not been written previously. He knew the narrative
of the plague of Athens, for he says that this plague was ‘in some
respects much like that which Thucydides described, in others quite
unlike’: it cannot be said to have influenced either the form or the
substance of his description. He says that it first reached Antioch
in 540 B.C., whereas it did not appear at Byzantium till the spring
of 542 B.C., and that the pandemic lasted altogether fifty-two years,
exceeding ‘all the diseases that had ever been before Philostratus
wondered at the plague, which was in his time, because it continued
fifteen years’. This is presumed to have been the Antonine pestilence,
for Philostratus was born in Lemnos about A.D. 170, but spent most of
his life in Rome and died there in A.D. 245. Evagrius had the fullest
opportunities of observing the plague at close quarters, for as a boy
at school he himself suffered from an inguinal bubo, and in later years
he lost his wife and several children of plague. He was but three
years old when it first reached Antioch, so that his description must
represent the disease after it had been rife for many years. Evagrius
traces its origin further back than does Procopius, placing it in
Ethiopia, so that it may actually have originated in an endemic area
in Central Africa. Spreading over the whole world, it attacked cities
quite irrespective of season, summer and winter alike. Evagrius has no
doubt whatever of the contagiousness of the distemper. Those, he says,
who escaped one year were attacked the next, and those who fled to
places free from disease were the first to succumb, as they carried the
contagion with them. Infection seemed to be taken in various ways—by
sharing beds, by actual contact, by visiting infected houses, or even
by casual meeting in the market-place. Some, however, escaped in spite
of running every risk of infection.
The description that Evagrius gives of the symptoms of the disease,
though brief, is wonderfully comprehensive. It shows that he was
cognizant of the tonsillar, the bubonic, and the carbuncular or
pustular types at least, and the rapidity of a fatal issue in a
proportion of the cases suggests that pneumonic and septicaemic forms
were also rife. ‘The disease’, he writes, ‘was compound and mixt with
many other maladies. It took some men first in the head, made their
eyes as red as blood and puffed up their cheeks: afterwards it fell at
their throat, and whomsoever it took it dispatched him out of the way.
It began with some with a fire and voiding of all that was within them,
in others with swellings about the secret parts of the body, and there
arose burning fires, so that they died thereof within two or three days
of the furthest in such sort and of so perfect a remembrance as if they
had not been sick at all; others died mad, and carbuncles that arose
out of the flesh killed many.’
Agathias[125] (b. A.D. 536) describes a recrudescence of this pandemic
in Byzantium in A.D. 558. He carried on the history of Procopius from
its termination to A.D. 558. He says that the disease had never really
disappeared since the first outbreak in A.D. 542, when it burst out
furiously a second time in the spring of this year. Many persons fell
as though stricken with apoplexy: those who held out longest died
on the fifth day. Buboes and continuous fever were the outstanding
features, as in the previous visitation. ‘People of all ages perished
indiscriminately, but especially the young and vigorous and those in
the flower of youth: and of them the males, for the females were not
so much affected.’ With an epidemic recurrence such as this, the chief
incidence would necessarily be on the young, who had neither resisted,
nor acquired immunity from, a previous attack. The character of their
occupation or of their habits of life would doubtless explain the
special liability of the males to infection.
Gregory of Tours[126] (A.D. 540-94) testifies to the widespread
character of the plague in France. In A.D. 549 he says that it
depopulated the province of Arles, and afterwards devastated Narbonne.
Here Felix, bishop of Nantes,[127] succumbed to the sloughing of his
legs caused by the application of cantharides plasters to a crop of
pustules.
In A.D. 566, before the plague invaded the Auvergne,[128] a succession
of portents terrified the district. Three or four great brilliant
lights made their appearance around the sun, which nevertheless
underwent almost complete eclipse in October, looking dark and
discoloured and like a bag. The heaven also seemed to be on fire, and
many strange signs were seen. Then in A.D. 567 the epidemic raged
throughout the district, causing an immense mortality. Lyons, Bourges,
Chalons, and Dijon also lost a large part of their population. Coffins
for the dead soon failed, and as many as ten bodies would be placed
in the same grave. One Sunday no less than three hundred corpses were
counted in the church of St. Peter at Clermont. Death seized the
victims with dramatic suddenness. ‘There grew in the groin or armpit
a lesion in the shape of a serpent, the effect of which was such that
men yielded up their souls on the second or third day, and its violence
completely took away their senses.’
In this epidemic buboes were evidently most frequently found in
the groins, for Gregory repeatedly speaks of the disease as _lues
inguinaria_ or _morbus inguinalis_ and the like.
Plague broke out at Marseilles[129] in A.D. 587, brought there by
a merchant ship from Spain, which concealed its contact with a
plague-stricken port. Several people made purchases from it, and in
consequence eight inhabitants of one house were fatally infected. As in
the epidemic of A.D. 1720, the disease did not spread immediately to
the whole town. Bishop Theodore and a few of his suite shut themselves
up in the church of St. Victor, and there, amid the general desolation,
implored the mercy of God with prayer and vigil till the epidemic was
at an end. On the return of the fugitive populace a belated outbreak
exacted its appointed tribute.
Around Avignon[130] celestial portents foretold the plague that broke
out in A.D. 590. The earth was illuminated at night by a light as
bright as the midday. Balls of fire were seen tracking the sky during
the night. A violent earthquake was felt at dawn in mid-June. The
sun suffered almost complete eclipse in mid-August. Abundant autumn
thunderstorms and rain raised the rivers in flood.
Meantime Italy, too, had been in like case. Paul the Deacon[131] (A.D.
720-90) briefly refers to a plague that had devastated Liguria in A.D.
565. He says that the plague was presaged by the sudden appearance of
marks on houses, doors, utensils, and clothing, and the more they tried
to efface them the more conspicuous they became. Eusebius[132] in like
manner told of moulds on the walls of houses in a previous pestilence,
and in Leviticus[133] we read of greenish and reddish marks on houses
infected with leprosy. Towards the end of the year buboes began to
attack the people, followed by a fever that killed in three days. The
inhabitants fled, leaving property and cattle and crops, and desolation
reigned supreme.
But it was on the head of hapless Rome that the full fury of the
expiring storm was destined to spend its virulence. Both Gregory of
Tours[134] and Paul the Deacon have left a record of the havoc. Gregory
says that he obtained his information from his own deacon, who happened
to be in Rome at the time. Paul the Deacon[135] seems to borrow his
material from Gregory of Tours. An inundation of the Tiber in A.D. 589
resulted in the destruction of many old buildings on its banks and in
the flooding of the granaries of the church, so that immense stores of
grain were spoilt. The river yielded up a multitude of serpents, and
a dragon of extraordinary size was seen to float through the city on
its passage to the sea. Probably these were eels from the muddy bed
of the Tiber, metamorphosed after the manner of Ovid into serpents:
the dragon no one seems to have seen at close quarters. The inundation
was followed in A.D. 590 by a severe outburst of bubonic plague
(_pestilentia, quam inguinariam vocant_).
Portents were not confined to Rome. According to Evagrius,[136] a great
earthquake in A.D. 589 laid Antioch in ruins, destroying the sanctuary
of the Mother of God, and taking sixty thousand lives. In Upper Italy
also there were extensive inundations due to overflowing of the
mountain streams in Venetia, Liguria, and the sub-Alpine plains.
It is instructive to contrast the records of these chroniclers of the
Church of the West with those of Procopius and Evagrius, and still more
so with that of the pagan historian Thucydides. So intent are they on
the mental and moral features of the distemper, that they say almost
nothing of its physical features. They dilate at length on the visions
and hallucinations that haunted the distracted fancy of the sufferers,
which Thucydides disregards, though such must have accompanied the
wild delirium he describes. Demons stalking the streets, ineffaceable
marks and moulds on houses, voices from the grave, and celestial
portents were the creations of the delirious fancy, and are faithfully
reproduced in the pages of the Christian writers. One is sensible
of something of the spirit in which Fra Angelico portrayed the joys
of heaven and the torments of hell, when pestilence lay heavy on
mediaeval Italy. The mortality in Rome was appalling. Death was rampant
everywhere. At first the dead bodies were gathered up and flung in
loads into great gaping graves, but after a while none were left even
to bury the dead, and putrid corpses littered the streets. All business
was at a standstill, and such as survived were huddled, panic-stricken
like sheep, in the insecure sanctuary of the churches. To add to the
general consternation, Pope Pelagius perished on February 8, A.D. 590.
The choice of a successor lay with the clergy and people of Rome,
subject to confirmation by the Emperor. With one accord they haled
Abbot Gregory from the seclusion of his monastery to the pontifical
chair in anticipation of the Imperial assent. Gregory of Tours, Paul
the Deacon, and John the Deacon all tell of Gregory’s unwillingness
to obey the summons, and of his attempt to intercept the letter of
election on its way to the Emperor in Constantinople. But meantime,
as the plague showed no sign of abating, Gregory determined to try to
appease the wrath of God by a special act of contrition. Ascending
the pulpit of St. John Lateran, he preached a memorable sermon, which
has been preserved by the hand of Gregory of Tours. He implored them
to make their sufferings an instrument for their conversion, and a
means by which to soften the hardness of their hearts. He besought
them, as Cyprian had done before, as Borromeo and Belsunce were to
do hereafter, not to let the suddenness with which death seized them,
sweeping away numbers at a time, and giving no opportunity for tears of
penitence, find them unprepared to meet their God. Let them call their
sins to mind and purge them away with weeping, for God wills not the
death of a sinner, but rather that he may turn from his wickedness and
live. Let no man despair because of the multitude of his offences. Did
not God forgive the people of Nineveh of old, when they did penance for
three days, and did He not give the reward of everlasting life to the
dying thief? Let them therefore turn with him to God with importunity
of prayer, or ever the sword of punishment descend. Does He not say by
the mouth of the Psalmist: call upon Me in the time of trouble: so will
I hear thee and thou shalt praise Me. Let them all come with contrite
hearts and mended moods at early dawn on the fourth day from then to
the celebration of a sevenfold litany, and with lamentation in their
souls, so that the stern Judge may remit the sentence of damnation He
has purposed to pass upon them. Let the clergy then start from the
church of the martyr-saints Cosmo and Damian, along with the priests
of the sixth region. All the abbots with their monks from the church
of the martyrs Gervase and Protasius, along with the priests of the
fourth region. All the abbesses with their flocks from the church of
the martyr-saints Marcellinus and Peter, along with the priests of the
first region. All the children from the church of the martyr-saints
John and Paul, along with the priests of the second region. All the
laity from the church of the protomartyr-saint Stephen, along with the
priests of the seventh region. All the widowed women from the church
of St. Euphemia, along with the priests of the fifth region. And the
married women from the church of the martyr-saint Clement, along with
the priests of the third region. Let them all go forth from these
several churches with prayer and lamentation, to meet at the basilica
of the Blessed Virgin Mary the Mother of Christ, there with long and
earnest supplication to implore pardon for their sins.
So Gregory distributed the remnant that the plague had spared according
to the seven ecclesiastical regions of Rome, bidding his clergy spend
the three days’ interval in ceaseless psalms and prayers for mercy.
Then on the fourth day, the festival of St. Mark, in the pale light
of the early April morning, the great procession set out. With solemn
chant of doleful _Miserere_, these seven trains of human suffering
wended their slow way sadly amid the ruined monuments of ancient Rome.
No other sound broke the stillness, but the faint rustle of sweeping
garments and the silent shuffle of sick men’s feet. Now and again one
fell stricken and lay as he fell, for Death was moving hither and
thither among the moving ranks.[137] No less than eighty breathed out
their lives before the church of the Mother of God was reached. There
again Gregory fervently exhorted the people to repentance, so that the
plague might cease.
A legend has it that as Gregory, heading his train of penitents,
reached the Aelian Bridge, there, right before him, on the summit
of Hadrian’s mole, a heavenly vision met his eyes. There stood the
Archangel Michael, restoring a flaming sword to its sheath, in token
that the plague was stayed. It is to this legend that the mausoleum
owes the name of Castel S. Angelo, that it has borne since the tenth
century at least. A bronze figure of the Archangel sheathing his sword
still hovers on the summit, fifth of a series that have stood there at
different times.
The legend of the angel is not mentioned by either of Gregory’s
biographers, the deacons Paul and John, or by Bede or Gregory of Tours.
Though of earlier origin than the tenth century, the first written
records of it are in a German sermon of the twelfth or thirteenth
century and in the _Legenda Aurea_ of the end of the thirteenth century
Caxton has rendered it thus:
‘And because the mortality ceased not, he ordained
a procession, in which he did do bear an image of our
Lady, which, as is said, St. Luke the Evangelist made,
which was a good painter, he had carved it and painted
it after the likeness of the glorious Virgin Mary. And
anon the mortality ceased, and the air became pure and
clear, and about the image was heard a voice of angels
that sung this Anthem:
Regina Coeli laetare! Alleluia.
Quia quem meruisti portare: Alleluia.
Resurrexit sicut dixit: Alleluia.
and St. Gregory put thereto
Ora pro nobis, deum rogamus: Alleluia.
At the same time St. Gregory saw an angel upon a
castle, which made clean a sword all bloody, and put
it into the sheath, and thereby St. Gregory understood
that the pestilence of this mortality was passed, and
after that it was called the Castle Angel.’
In memory of this legend the great processions from S. Marco, until the
prohibition of processions in A.D. 1870, used to strike up the antiphon
‘Regina Coeli’, as soon as they came to the bridge of Hadrian.
For the true source of this legend there is no need to look beyond
the vision of the angel at the threshing-floor of Araunah: ‘And David
lifted up his eyes, and saw the angel of the Lord stand between the
earth and the heaven, having a drawn sword in his hand stretched out
over Jerusalem.’ In the Capitoline Museum is an altar dedicated to Isis
by some traveller on his safe return, and bearing the customary imprint
of two feet. The devout believed these to be the footprints of the
angel that appeared to Gregory, and the altar once stood in the church
of Ara Coeli.
[Illustration: GREGORY AND THE ANGEL
Photograph by Giraudon, Paris]
It is certain that at least as early as this time pictures were carried
in public procession. Theophylactus[138] has described two occasions
on which a sacred effigy of Christ, believed not to have been made
by human hands, was carried into battle for the sake of inspiring
valour and discipline into the soldiery (A.D. 586 and 588). Among the
many gems in which Bede’s _Ecclesiastical History_[139] abounds is
that picture of the arrival of Augustine and his companions in Thanet
‘bearing a silver cross for their banner, and the image of our Lord
and Saviour painted on a board’ (A.D. 597). The sixteenth-century
chronicler Baronius says, that the picture which Gregory carried
in this plague procession of A.D. 590 was that of the Madonna, now
preserved in the church of S. Maria Maggiore on the Esquiline, and
still believed to protect Rome from plague and pestilence. Rome has
no fewer than four pictures of the Madonna attributed like this one
to the hand of Luke the Physician, and all of them reputed to have
wonder-working powers. Expert opinion, alas! pronounces the oldest of
them a fifteenth century production.
Gregory’s procession has afforded a favourite theme for art. It is
the subject of one of the frescoes in the Lady Chapel of Winchester
Cathedral executed under the direction of Prior Silkstede at the
beginning of the sixteenth century. The scene is also shown in a
picture in the Chiesa del San Pietro at Perugia, in a modern picture by
the Austrian painter Hiremy Hirsch, and in several others elsewhere.
The miniature figured on the opposite page is one of two from a
beautiful Livre d’Heures, of the early fifteenth century, and once
the property of the Duc de Berry. It is now in the Musée Condé of the
Château de Chantilly.
An Italian tradition refers the custom of saying ‘Bless you’, when a
person sneezes, to the time of the pestilence of Gregory, in which all
those that sneezed were said to have died. Boersch, quoting from the
local chronicles of Kleinlauel and of Oseas Schadaeus, would trace its
origin to the plague at Strasbourg in A.D. 591.[140] ‘And when any one
sneezed, he gave up the ghost forthwith. Hence the saying “God help
you”. And when any one yawned, he died. Hence it comes that when any
one yawns, one makes the sign of the cross before the mouth.’ Probably
the association is even older than this, for Thucydides speaks of
sneezing in the plague of Athens. Sneezing and yawning were prominent
features of the Sweating Sickness.
[Illustration: PLATE V (Face Page 95)
FRESCO IN S. PIETRO IN VINCOLI, ROME
Photograph by Anderson, Rome]
FOOTNOTES:
[120] _Œuvres de Oribase, Bussemaker et Daremberg_, lib. 44. c. 17.
[121] _De Differ. Febr._ i, tom. vii, p. 2; 96, ed. Kuhn.
[122] _De Bello Persico_, ii. 22-3.
[123] _Hist._ iv. 28.
[124] _Hist._ iv. 28.
[125] _Hist._ v. 12.
[126] _Hist. Francorum_, iv. 5.
[127] vi. 14.
[128] iv. 31.
[129] _Hist. Francorum_, x. 1.
[130] x. 23.
[131] _De Gestis Langobardorum_, ii. 4.
[132] _Hist. Eccles._ vii. 22.
[133] xiv. 37.
[134] _Hist. Francorum_, x. 1.
[135] _De Gestis Langobardorum_, iii. 24.
[136] _Hist._ vi.
[137] This penitential procession has been wonderfully depicted by
Dudden in his _Gregory the Great_, vol. i, p. 217.
[138] _Hist._ ii. 3, and iii. 1.
[139] Bk. I, c. 25.
[140] _Essai sur la mortalité à Strasbourg_, p. 79.