CHAPTER V
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, andthe 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 centuryb.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 asearly as the third centuryb.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 centreen 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.
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 ofa.d.542. We know, however, from Evagrius that plague was already in Antioch ina.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 thepestilence 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 wascompounded, 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 ofdetail. 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 theywere piled in barges and turned adrift out to sea. We shall see these various conditions strikingly reproduced during the plague of Marseilles ina.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 iswholly 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 ina.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 540b.c., whereas it did not appear at Byzantium till the spring of 542b.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 abouta.d.170, but spent most of his life in Rome and died there ina.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 contagiousnessof 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 ina.d.558. He carried on the history of Procopius from its termination toa.d.558. He says that the disease had never really disappeared since the first outbreak ina.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 previousvisitation. ‘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. Ina.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.
Ina.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 ina.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 thegroins, for Gregory repeatedly speaks of the disease aslues inguinariaormorbus inguinalisand the like.
Plague broke out at Marseilles[129]ina.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 ofa.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 ina.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 ina.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 ina.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 ina.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 ina.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 visionsand 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 andBelsunce 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 theMother 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 dolefulMiserere, 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 thirteenthcentury and in theLegenda Aureaof 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.
Regina Coeli laetare! Alleluia.Quia quem meruisti portare: Alleluia.Resurrexit sicut dixit: Alleluia.
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 ina.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.
GREGORY AND THE ANGELPhotograph by Giraudon, Paris
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’sEcclesiastical 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 ofa.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 itsorigin to the plague at Strasbourg ina.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.
PLATE V(Face Page 95)FRESCO IN S. PIETRO IN VINCOLI, ROMEPhotograph by Anderson, Rome
PLATE V(Face Page 95)
FRESCO IN S. PIETRO IN VINCOLI, ROME
Photograph by Anderson, Rome