For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes in divers places. (Matt. 24: 7)
Then the angel took the censer, filled it with fire from the altar, and threw it to the earth. And there were noises, thunderings, lightnings, and an earthquake. So the seven angels who had the seven trumpets prepared themselves to sound. The first angel sounded: and hail and fire followed, mingled with blood, and they were thrown to earth. (Revelation 8: 5–7)
Before the outbreak of the universal pestilence later known as the Black Death, according to a letter seen by the fourteenth-century chronicler Heinrich of Herford, a tremendous earthquake struck the Austrian region of Carinthia. In the same year, “fire falling from Heaven consumed the land of the Turks for sixteen days”; “it rained toads and snakes for several days,” by which many men perished; and “pestilence gathered strength” in many parts of the world.1 Similarly, the chronicle of the Austrian monastery of Neuberg recorded both the Carinthia earthquake and disturbing phenomena associated with the initial outbreak of the plague “in eastern parts.” First, through the corruption of the air, men and beasts were changed into stone.2 Second, a “lethal rain” mixed with pestiferous snakes and worms fell “in the regions where ginger comes from,” which instantly killed all it touched. And, third, not far away, “a terrible fire burned from the sky” and consumed all it fell on, so that the very stones “burned as if they had been naturally changed into dry wood.” The smoke from that fire was extremely contagious and killed many merchants a long way away. Even those who escaped carried its deadly contagion with them and so brought the plague to Greece, Italy, Rome, and neighboring regions.3
A similar confluence of signs appears in a letter written in Avignon by Louis Heyligen and quoted in the chronicle of an anonymous Flemish cleric. According to this letter, a province in the eastern regions of India had suffered terrible and unheard-of storms for three days. On the first day “it rained frogs, snakes, lizards, scorpions, and other poisonous animals.” On the second day, there was thunder and lightning, and “hailstones of an incredible size fell,” killing nearly every person. On the third day, “fire with a fetid smoke descended from heaven” and killed the remaining people and animals in the area and destroyed all the cities and towns there. According to Heyligen’s letter, it was assumed that these storms had caused the great plague that then spread with south winds blowing from India to Christendom.4
Earthquakes at home. Rains of fire, hail, snakes, and toads in the east. These contemporary authors described the onset of the great pestilence not just with terrifying omens, but specifically with language drawn from Christian apocalyptic. Plagues, after all, feature both in Revelation (16: 8–11, 18: 8) and in the apocalyptic portions of the gospels (Matt. 24: 7, Luke 21: 11).5 Chroniclers who described such portents at home and abroad mapped God’s apocalyptic torments onto an orb whose image already was pregnant with the religious meanings apparent in the great mappaemundi. In these chronicles, snakes, toads, hail, and fire all rained down in the east: the land of marvels and monsters, of Prester John and Gog and Magog, of the enemies of the faith and of potential Christians. Plague moved from east to west, from pagans to Christians. Mapping its progress represented an attempt to understand, and thereby control, the disease.6 But it also helped situate plague within an apocalyptic frame of reference. At the same time, these signs and prodigies were not without meaning in scientific efforts to explain plague. Earthquakes, snakes, toads, and stinking smoke also formed part of medical descriptions of the plague’s etiology. The plague treatises, I will argue, form a critical moment in a longer trend of attempts to naturalize the apocalypse. This trend in turn was one aspect of the larger late-medieval project to naturalize marvels by extending the explanatory scope of natural philosophy. At a time when scientific speculations about the apocalypse had become problematic, plague writings reopened the door to such an analysis. They did so by their reliance on phenomena that defied strict categorization either as purely natural causes or as wholly supernatural apocalyptic signs.
In summary, plague in many ways both invited and defied the attempt at naturalizing. By mapping plague onto a geography with eschatological import and by locating its causes in apocalyptic-sounding signs, I will argue, fourteenth-century authors entered into a tangled web of symbols. Each aspect of their treatment of the plague set off a whole host of free-associations in the realms of natural philosophy and of apocalyptic. Fourteenth-century writers appeared to be unwilling to say that plague was either entirely natural or entirely apocalyptic. Their writings, by their very ambiguity, opened up the possibility that plague might be simultaneously natural and apocalyptic. By implication, these treatises raised the possibility that the apocalypse might indeed be explained by natural causes. Thus, the speculations plague engendered helped set the stage for a thoroughgoing scientific investigation of the apocalypse in the following century.
In the fourteenth-century writings about the plague mentioned above, the authors locate the most bizarre phenomena associated with the outbreak of pestilence in the distant east. Likewise, according to physicians at the University of Paris, the effects of the triple conjunction of 1345 that caused the plague would be felt more in “southern and eastern regions,” areas in which their text strongly implies a number of portents such as falling stars have been seen.7 These phenomena, which, as we shall see, had meaning in both apocalyptic and scientific interpretations of the plague, explained the observed fact that the disease traveled from east to west. Mapping has been called a form of conquest and control of territory,8 and mapping plague’s progress was perhaps an attempt at mastering and possessing the feared disease, just as the naturalizing of its causes, as we shall see, marked an effort to bring inexplicable tragedies under the control of human understanding. But in plotting plague’s progress on a map of the world, fourteenth-century authors found themselves mapping plague on an earth that already had religious meaning, and, specifically, eschatological import.
Home to the plague’s origin and the most striking phenomena associated therewith, the east had, in fact, long been associated with both marvels and with apocalyptic traditions. From classical times, the east was the land of monstrous races, unusual animals, untold-of wealth, and incredible diversity. It was the site of both the earthly paradise and of flesh-eating scarcely human monsters.9 If fire and worms were going to rain down anywhere, why not in the east? But if plague was mapped onto a world that put the disease’s mysterious origin in the already marvelous east, that same mappamundi provided localization for aspects of the drama of end times, whose nearness the plague and its harbingers seemed to indicate. It was clear, for example, that the last act of that drama would be played out in and around Jerusalem (Rev. 20: 9), the world’s center in the mappaemundi and the setting of history’s central moment: the crucifixion.10 In The Travels of Sir John Mandeville (probably written in the first decade after the appearance of the Black Death), the author asserts that the Last Judgment will take place at the foot of Mount Tabor in the Vale of Jehosaphat.11 One strand of the considerable body of Antichrist lore put that fiend’s birth or at least his youth in the cities of Capernaum, Chorozin, and Bethsaida in Galilee.12 But, just as the mappaemundi visually depicted the history of salvation moving in time and space from Eden, at the map’s top, to Jerusalem, at its center, a fuller chronology of end times would also have to show a movement from the periphery in towards that center.
One aspect of an apocalyptic movement from periphery inwards appears in the Cedar of Lebanon vision that circulated from the early thirteenth century and found a new life in the hands of a number of chroniclers in the wake of the outbreak of the Black Death. That prophecy, like other late medieval visions of the apocalypse, looked to a period of peace and calm before the final confrontation that would usher in the world’s end. Among the features of that time of peace would be a universal conversion to the Christian faith or, as the Cedar of Lebanon vision expressed it, “Within fifteen years there will be one God and one faith. . . . And the lands of the barbarians will be converted.”13 This prediction rested ultimately upon the passage in the gospel of Matthew in which Jesus tells his disciples, “And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in all the world as a witness to all the nations, and then the end will come” (Matt. 24: 14).14 After the conversion of the barbarians, according to the same vision, there was to be “a universal passage of all the faithful” to the Holy Land prior to the appearance of Antichrist. Mapping this scenario in space and time would produce a movement from the periphery—locus of conversion—to Jerusalem, the center and goal of pilgrimage.15 And since Christendom had already reached the western limits of the world, as Hugh of St. Victor had pointed out in the twelfth century, by the fourteenth century everybody knew that the lands to be converted lay to the east (beginning, lamentably, with the Holy Land itself).16 This final conversion was one of the goals of the thirteenth-century Franciscan missionaries to Asia like William of Rubruck and was the hope implicit in both Mandeville’s Travels and the belief in Prester John, a Christian king somewhere off in the mysterious east.17 The eastern locus of this end-time missionizing thus meant that the movement of the unfolding apocalypse—at least insofar as conversion was concerned—would be a movement from east to west, just as plague itself moved from east to west, from the lands of infidels to the lands of Christians.
In fact, several fourteenth-century chronicles dealing with plague adduce an anecdote that reflects at least the hope that these eastern lands would be converted to the faith in plague’s train. The English chronicles of Henry Knighton and the monastery of Meaux, for example, relate how an eastern ruler or people decided that the plague raging in their lands was the result of their lack of Christian faith. Sending representatives to Christendom in order to begin the process of conversion, they discover that plague is present among Christians as well and return home with the conclusion that their planned conversion would in fact be futile.18 This tale may be read as anti-apocalyptic; after all, plague does not initiate a final universal conversion in the story. Nonetheless, it demonstrates that the plague’s appearance at least engendered the hope that the anticipated universal conversion was at hand.
Another type of motion embodied within apocalyptic beliefs has to do with the movement of enemies. Again, here, plague writings appear to parallel this eschatological geography. As described in Revelation, when Satan is released after being bound for a thousand years, “he will go out to deceive the nations which are in the four corners of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle” (Rev. 20: 8). These forces will advance upon Jerusalem (“the camp of the saints and the beloved city”), where they at last will be consumed by a fire from heaven (Rev. 20: 9). In this movement of apocalyptic enemies, there is also a motion from periphery to center, from the four corners of the earth to Jerusalem. Unlike the movement of universal conversion, however, this amassing of enemies was understood in the fourteenth century to be not simply a movement from east to west, but also a movement from west to east. In the final days, there would be enemies without and enemies within Christendom, all of whom would converge upon Jerusalem. As Roger Bacon wrote, “For [Gog and Magog] must obey [Antichrist]: therefore, if they break out from one part of the world, he will come forth from the opposite direction.”19 But who precisely was meant by the phrase “Gog and Magog,” and whence would they come?
One tradition increasingly elaborated in the Middle Ages equated Gog and Magog with enemies from without, specifically with the barbarian, indeed almost antihuman, tribes long since enclosed behind an iron gate by Alexander the Great. By the fourteenth century, these enclosed peoples had also been firmly identified with the ten lost tribes of Israel and were associated with the Amazons (who were said to be either their guards, their wives, or their overlords). Near the end, according to this series of traditions, Alexander’s gates would be opened, and Gog and Magog would rush out to join the forces of Antichrist and to terrorize Christians.20 Where exactly one might find Alexander’s gates and the enclosed nations was less clear, however. By most accounts Gog and Magog were to be found somewhere in Asia. But some authors placed them in the Caspian Mountains; some, in the northern extremes of Asia; others, in islands of the northern sea; and yet others, in the extreme northeast corner of the orb.21 Even with these discrepancies, it is apparent that the release of Gog and Magog from the iron gates would result in a roughly east to west movement as the forces of Antichrist moved on from Asia towards Jerusalem.22 Could this east-to-west movement of enemies have been linked to the westward progress of plague?
There may indeed have been some interconnections, as fourteenth-century chroniclers mapped the plague’s progress onto an east-west trajectory already understood to have eschatological significance. Here again the bizarre signs that accompany the plague’s eastern outbreak in the fourteenth-century chronicles come into play. Interestingly, textual descriptions of the enclosed tribes of Gog and Magog not infrequently are accompanied by references to snakes, worms, and reptiles—the very portents fourteenth-century authors localized to the initial focus of the plague in the east. The widely read Revelationes of pseudo-Methodius, for example, describes the enclosed tribes as living filth, who on their release not only will feed upon human flesh and blood, but also “will eat unclean serpents, scorpions, and all of the most filthy and abominable kinds of beasts and reptiles which crawl upon the earth.”23 In Mandeville’s Travels, the ten lost tribes (Gog and Magog) are enclosed within a range of mountains surrounded by a great intraversible desert that is so “fulle of dragounes, of serpentes, and of other venymous bestes that no man dar not passe.”24 And Roger Bacon in the Opus maius reported the very words by which Alexander the Great supposedly described these horrid tribes as poisonous reptiles: “O Earth, mother of dragons, nurse of scorpions, guardian of serpents, and sinkhole of demons, it would have been easier for you for this hell to be enclosed within you than to give birth to such races! Woe to the earth, producer of fruit and honey, when so many serpents and beasts assail her!”25 Snakes, scorpions, vermin, and reptiles textually accompany the outbreak of the plague in the east as well as the release of Gog and Magog and the peoples enclosed by Alexander.
A second tradition about Gog and Magog, stemming from an Augustinian reading of Revelation, interpreted the names allegorically as referring simply to the enemies of God in general and not to any literal race of peoples in any specific geographical location. This interpretation encouraged Christians to see Gog and Magog as the enemy within, reinforcing the equation of Gog and Magog with Jews, not so much the ten lost tribes, but those Jews still living among medieval Christians.26 These two interpretive traditions could come together, as in the treatment of Gog and Magog in Mandeville’s Travels. There the author avers that when the enclosed Gog and Magog (ten lost tribes) break out in the final days, they will join forces with Jews living among Christians, who will lead them into Christendom “for to destroye the Cristene peple”27 and then, presumably, to march on Jerusalem. Gog and Magog in Mandeville, although localized and identified specifically as Jews, combine the notions of internal and external enemies of Christendom.
This eschatological movement of enemies coming from within may also have been in the minds of fourteenth-century chroniclers writing about the plague. The massive burnings of Jews in the plague years, after all, rested upon the belief in an international conspiracy of Jews to poison the water supplies of Christendom, a conspiracy seen as an alliance of enemies without and enemies within.28 The interpretation of Gog and Magog as enemies within finds expression also in the fourteenth-century chronicle of the cathedral priory of Rochester. The chronicle’s author, probably William Dene, asserts that the recalcitrance of now-scarce laborers after the plague must arise from the influence of Gog and Magog. “It is therefore much to be feared,” he writes, “that Gog and Magog have returned from hell to encourage such things and to cherish those who have been corrupted.”29 William Dene seems to lean towards the Augustinian exegesis by saying that “Gog and Magog have returned from hell,” for he neither identifies Gog and Magog with any known enemy, such as the Muslims or the Jews, nor gives them a specific earthly home base. Rather, they are belched forth from hell—literally the bowels of the earth—not unlike the earthquakes described by other fourteenth-century authors. In contrast to the eastern rains of snakes, worms, frogs, and fire, earthquakes in fourteenth-century plague writings take place close to home: in Carinthia for Heinrich of Herford, in England itself for the chronicler of the Yorkshire abbey of Meaux.30 Spewing out noxious fumes from the belly of the earth, earthquakes bespoke internal corruption hiding under the surface and waiting to break out, just like the enemy within, be it the Jews or the lax Christians who would be Antichrist’s prey.31 The earthquakes close to home in plague chronicles resounded with reminders of the enemy within, just as snakes and poisonous reptiles raining in the east pointed to the enemy without.
The geography of the apocalypse thus could impose itself upon and provide one set of meanings to the geography of plague. Its progress mapped, charted, and analyzed by fourteenth-century authors, plague nonetheless defied the possession and control that geographical knowledge represented. Even as authors attempted to “tame” plague by mapping its progress, the multiple meanings in the places associated with plague could lead readers and authors into an endless web of free associations in which earthquakes, snakes, and toads served simultaneously as metaphors for corruption, apocalyptic signs, and natural causes of disease. The same pattern is apparent in fourteenth-century authors’ attempts to give plague a natural explanation. Although they appear to believe that explaining plague by natural causes will lay their apocalyptic fears to rest and bring the disease within the control of human understanding—if not prevention and cure—their explanations lead them into the same web of eschatological signs, portents, and free associations. It is almost an unspoken hope in these writings that if plague can be explained in natural terms, then it cannot betoken the nearness of the end. But it proved impossible to read the plague as entirely natural and not at all apocalyptic. Fourteenth-century chronicles can jarringly announce the apocalypse and naturalize the very signs that indicate its nearness without comment or coming down on one side or the other.
Many fourteenth-century authors described plague in overtly or implicitly apocalyptic terms by relating the epidemic to other physical signs associated with the end in scripture and prophecies. The understanding of such signs had gone through a number of changes in the centuries leading up to the Black Death, however. Whereas previously medieval Christians had assumed that such apocalyptic portents would be sent directly by God, in the thirteenth century some natural philosophers were assigning natural causes, such as astrological configurations, to apocalyptic portents.32 By century’s end, however, there had been a backlash against a scientific study of the apocalypse.
According to Scripture, key signs and portents would herald the nearness of the apocalypse. Many of these signs figure in the fourteenth-century plague writings. Earthquakes, for example, had particular religious meaning. Earthquakes appear frequently in Scripture, not simply as manifestations of divine anger and mechanisms for the deliverance of the just, but also specifically as apocalyptic signs. For example, in Isaiah 29: 6–7, God’s promised deliverance of Jerusalem from her enemies is effected by thunder, earthquake, storm, and devouring fire. An earthquake accompanies Christ’s death on the cross and rolls back the stone covering his tomb in Matthew. Yet another earthquake frees the apostles Paul and Silas from prison in Acts 16: 26. Most importantly, earthquakes feature among the signs of the end enumerated in the synoptic gospels (Matt. 24: 7, Mark 13: 8, Luke 21: 11). And the largest constellation of earthquakes occurs in Revelation itself, in which there are no fewer than five earthquakes accompanying the torments unleashed therein against the enemies of God (Rev. 6: 12, 8: 5, 11: 13, 11: 19, 16: 18).33 Earthquakes in Scripture thus can be direct manifestations of God’s anger, including the fury reserved for the enemies at end times.
Many medieval chroniclers interpreted earthquakes along similar lines, as the result of God’s wrath or as warnings thereof. These earthquakes have—it is implied—supernatural causes. For example, in Gregory of Tours’s History of the Franks, earthquakes appear among a number of other portents (visions in the skies, comets, unusual weather, and rains of snakes and blood) announcing disasters, including epidemics of plague and dysentery and the appearance of false prophets. Gregory implies that these are signs of the end by quoting apocalyptic texts from Matthew and Mark alongside his enumeration of such portents. He also describes these portents as “the kind which usually announce the death of a king or the destruction of entire regions,” again likely envisioned as the result of God’s direct action and not the workings of secondary causes.34
The thirteenth-century chronicler Matthew Paris, too, made much of earthquakes and other supernatural portents as apocalyptic signs. His writings demonstrate the way in which, under the influence of Aristotelian natural philosophy, authors were carefully separating out natural and supernatural events. In Matthew Paris’s conception, such phenomena point to the apocalypse precisely because they can have no natural causes. As he wound up his Chronica majora in the year 1250, for example, Matthew noted the singular number of “prodigies and amazing novelties” in this twenty-fifth half-century “since the time of grace,” a half-century he fully anticipated would be the world’s last. Among these prodigies were eclipses, floods, unexplainably large numbers of falling stars, and earthquakes.35 Not simply the number of portents, but specifically their inability to be explained by natural causes pointed towards the looming apocalypse. For example, Matthew Paris had described an earthquake that happened in England in 1247, thought to be particularly significant of “the end of the aging world” in that England lacked the “underground caverns and deep cavities in which, according to philosophers, [earthquakes] are usually generated.”36 A large number of falling stars was particularly troubling again because it defied natural explanation. Since “no apparent reason for this can be found in the Book of Meteors [Aristotle’s Meteorology],” Matthew concluded that “Christ’s menace was threatening mankind.”37 Matthew thus implied that earthquakes and other phenomena arising from natural causes were noteworthy but not apocalyptic. But those for which no natural cause could be found pointed menacingly toward the end.
Matthew Paris’s analysis of earthquakes and falling stars reflects the thirteenth-century scholastics’ ongoing project of explaining more and more events—and particularly mirabilia—through natural causes.38 Phenomena that appear as wonder-inducing signs in early medieval chronicles—like rains of fire—meet with scientific explanations, often highly dependent on astrological theories, in thirteenth-century authors such as Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, and Roger Bacon. One might conceivably use natural philosophy to investigate and explain most marvels and prodigies. The logical extension of this movement would be that even those phenomena associated with the Last Days in prophecies and Scripture could be explained scientifically, with the assumption that God regularly can and does act through secondary causes.
In fact, the bleeding edge (to borrow a computer term)39 of this project of naturalizing marvels was the attempt to apply scientific reasoning to the study of religion and, in particular, the apocalypse. The preferred mode of analysis for such an investigation was astrology. The thirteenth-century Franciscan Roger Bacon was the most outspoken advocate for the application of mathematics to eschatology. According to Bacon, astrology was particularly useful in looking to general changes on earth, such as changes in laws and sects, meaning that one could use the stars to predict such changes in religion as the arrival of Antichrist.40 Bacon used astrological theories to conclude that only one more major religious sect was to appear on earth in the future. That final sect had to be the lying, magical sect of Antichrist. Bacon was confident that further study of the stars would tell him when that sect would arrive, and in the Opus maius he offered this advice to Pope Clement IV: “I know that if the Church should be willing to consider the sacred text and prophecies . . . and should order a study of the paths of astronomy, it would gain some idea of greater certainty regarding the time of Antichrist.”41
After the Parisian condemnations of 1277, however, in which a number of astrological propositions were condemned, few were willing to take up Bacon’s charge. Bishop Stephen Tempier’s list of condemned propositions contained several dealing with astrology. His caricature of the science of the stars associated it with the worst sort of condemned fatalism: an affront on human free will and God’s omnipotence.42 Probably as a result, several authors in Paris around the year 1300 in fact expressed skepticism about the ways in which astrology might be used to predict the time of Antichrist’s advent. Arnau de Vilanova, for example, was quite happy to use scriptural figures to set an exact date for Antichrist’s arrival: 1378. Nonetheless, he completely dismissed astrologers’ claims to be able to predict the time of the end, asserting, “Just as [God] acted supernaturally in the work of the world’s creation, so, too, he will accomplish the world’s consummation supernaturally.”43
John of Paris, writing in response to Arnau’s treatise, flatly denied that humans could have certain knowledge of the time of Antichrist’s advent, whether using Scripture, prophecy, or astrology to calculate that time. John was willing, however, to use the movements of the stars to offer a conjecture of the world’s age. That figure, in turn, he fitted to prophecies about how long the world would endure in order to conjecture that the world would end in some two hundred years.44 All the same, John rejected the notion that astrology could generate a certain prediction of the time of Antichrist’s advent.
Henry of Harclay, responding to both John’s and Arnau’s treatises, even more sharply attacked the claims that astrology—or any method of calculating—could predict the time of Antichrist’s arrival. Ridiculing a number of apocalyptic prognostications, Henry thundered that the predictions of astrologers and other calculators were “vanissimi.”45 And, concluding, he specifically stated that the apocalyptic signs of Mark 13: 24 (a darkening of the sun and moon) would be miraculous, and not natural eclipses.46
The message of all three authors was that end times were not susceptible to any kind of natural explanations or predictions based thereon, precisely what Matthew Paris had argued in 1250. In the mid-fourteenth century, one of England’s most prominent astrologers would rush to proclaim that he had predicted the outbreak of plague and would spend pages using astrology to investigate the date of Creation, but he would shy away from any attempt to use astrology to predict the time of the end.47 But by the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, astrological predictions of the world’s end were increasingly common. The plague writings of the mid-fourteenth century helped effect that change. They did so by presenting the plague ambiguously as both an apocalyptic sign and a natural event.
Indeed, earthquakes and other prodigies supported a sometimes open and sometimes implicit apocalyptic discourse in several fourteenth-century chronicles about the plague. By linking the plague and the portents surrounding it with other apocalyptic signs drawn from Revelation or the Gospels, or by quoting key prophecies and passages from Scripture, these chroniclers—usually writing in the immediate wake of the initial outbreak of plague—interpret the appearance of pestilence as one of several signs of the end.
A number of authors associated the plague with known apocalyptic prophecies. For example, the Irish chronicler John Clynn, who apparently perished in the plague himself, inserted in his chronicle the widely circulated Cedar of Lebanon prophecy, now said to have been revealed in a vision to a Cistercian monk in Tripoli in 1347.48 Along with the now long-past falls of Tripoli and Acre, the prophecy foretold famines, great mortality, and other torments prior to a fifteen-year period of peace and then the final onslaught of Antichrist. Clynn followed up his quotation of the prophecy with the remark, “It is unheard of since the beginning of the world that so many men would have died in such a [short] time on earth, from pestilence, famine, or some other infirmity.” And he made specific reference to an earthquake “which extended for thousands of miles, [and] toppled, absorbed, and overthrew cities, villages, and towns” and to the [subsequent?] pestilence that deprived these settlements of any inhabitants.49 Thus, for Clynn, the earthquake was directly linked to the plague, and both numbered among the apocalyptic torments described in the Cedar of Lebanon prophecy.
Within this context, perhaps, are to be understood other signs and portents Clynn listed in the years prior to 1348. For the year 1337, for example, he described flooding, freezing weather, a sheep and cattle murrain, and the unexpected appearance of roses on willow trees in England during Lent (which were taken to various locations and displayed as a spectacle).50 And for the year 1335, Clynn related that a large cross was erected in the square in Kilkenny, and many people had themselves branded with the sign of the cross (with a burning iron) as a sign of their pledge to go to the Holy Land. The Cedar of Lebanon prophecy Clynn would quote for 1348 predicted a “general passage by all the faithful” to the Holy Land following the times of tribulation. Looking back in 1348, those pledges too might be seen as a fulfillment of prophecy. The Cedar of Lebanon vision seems to have offered Clynn an overarching explanation for all the various signs he described. In pointing to a period of peace after torments, the prophecy could offer hope and comfort as well as provide meaning to the calamitous events.51
Scripture itself provided a key for understanding plague’s apocalyptic meaning for other fourteenth-century authors. For example, John of Winterthur, a Swiss Franciscan, remarked upon an earthquake in the Austrian region of Carinthia that preceded the outbreak of the plague, as he traced the disease’s progress from “lands overseas” to Christendom (although without describing any marvelous portents such as a rain of fire in the east). “The aforesaid earthquake and pestilence,” he wrote, “are the evil harbingers of the final abyss and the tempest, according to the words of the Savior in the gospel: ‘There will be earthquakes in various places, and pestilence, and famines, etc.’ ” (Matt. 24: 7; Luke 21: 11).52 Another chronicler, William Dene, writing in the chronicle of the cathedral priory of Rochester, did not dwell on apocalyptic signs or portents before the plague. Nonetheless, as noted above, he specifically drew a line linking the demands imposed by now-scarce laborers after the plague to the work of Gog and Magog, God’s enemies in the Last Days (Rev. 20: 8).53 Chroniclers like John of Winterthur and William Dene described the events of the mid-fourteenth century as fulfilling the predictions of Scripture.
Heinrich of Herford, one of the authors quoted at the outset of this essay, brought both Scripture and prophecy to bear upon his analysis of plague’s role as harbinger of apocalypse. In his chronicle, tracing the world’s history up to 1355, he, too, left several pointed indications that the plague and other current happenings were to be understood in apocalyptic terms. First, like John of Winterthur and William Dene, he cited scriptural passages that pointed to the Last Days. Immediately before he described the earthquake and rain of fire, serpents, toads that preceded the plague (in his entry for 1345), Heinrich lamented the sorry state of the world around him, a world full of “dissensions, rebellions, conspiracies, plots, and intrigues . . . among both secular and regular clergy”; “disturbances of young against old, ignoble against noble in many cities, monasteries, and congregations”; simony, to the extent that clerics traded appointments “for money, women, and sometimes for concubines” or gambled for them over dice; and many “disturbances and contests over kingdoms, principalities, archbishoprics, bishoprics, prebends, and other things of that kind.” To Heinrich, it looked as if things were turning out “just as the apostle foretold in 2 Timothy 3[: 1–7] and 2 Corinthians 12[: 20].”54 The references were apocalyptic. In 2 Corinthians 12: 20, Paul had written, “For I fear, lest, when I come, I shall not find you such as I would.” Promising that “in the last days perilous times shall come,” Paul had detailed in the overtly apocalyptic 2 Timothy 3 the selfishness, disobedience, dissensions, and lawlessness that would reign near the end. Even before he began to discuss the plague and the prodigies surrounding its appearance, Heinrich implied that current events pointed to just those “perilous times” of which the apostle had warned.
Second, Heinrich made oblique reference to other apocalyptic prophecies, namely to the same Cedar of Lebanon prophecy that John Clynn inserted into his chronicle when he described the plague’s progress in Ireland. The reference came in Heinrich’s one hundredth, and final, chapter, under his entry for the year 1349, in which he described a number of disturbing events: the appearance of a ghost or phantasm, the killing of the Jews for the charge of well-poisoning (a claim Heinrich strongly disputed), the progress of plague, and the appearance of the flagellants. Heinrich condemned the flagellants for their contumacy and disrespect for the clergy, even describing how they had killed two Dominican friars. He opened his discussion of the obstreperous flagellants by saying, “In this year, a race [gens] without a head suddenly arose in all parts of Germany, causing universal admiration for the suddenness of their appearance and for their huge numbers.”55 He added that they were called without a head “as if prophetically,” both because they literally had no head or leader and because they figuratively had no head or prudence guiding them. The phrase “race without a head” comes from the Cedar of Lebanon prophecy. This prophecy, as mentioned above, described a period of torment, then a fifteen-year period of peace, and finally its end when “there will be heard news of Antichrist.”56 Thus in dubbing the flagellants the “race without a head,” Heinrich was inviting his readers to see their appearance as part of the apocalyptic scenario laid out in the Cedar of Lebanon vision. In fact, Heinrich had already specifically connected the flagellants with the “race without a head” and the appearance of Antichrist in the introductory matter to his hundredth chapter. There, in a summary list of the notable events that had occurred around the year 1348, he simply stated, “A race of flagellants, without a head, foretold the advent of Antichrist.”57
In addition to quoting Scripture and prophecy to link up his own times to end times, Heinrich further implicitly sounded an apocalyptic alarm simply by the sheer number of signs, portents, torments, and mirabilia that he described in the final two decades of his chronicle (ca. 1337–55). Beginning in 1337, Heinrich told of a rain of blood, the births of several monsters, a plague of locusts (echoes of Revelation 9: 3?), visions, phantasms, conspiracies, and rebellions, as well as the earthquake, fire from heaven, and rain of toads surrounding the outbreak of plague. In fact, in the introduction to the final chapter of his chronicle, Heinrich pointedly observed that “the beginning of the reign of this Charles [IV of Bohemia, r. 1346–78] seems to be memorable on account of the number of monsters, portents, and other singular happenings that then appeared.”58 He then strung together a list of all the various portents and mirabilia that he had already mentioned or would describe in the pages to come. Heinrich did not here specify what we are to make of this clustering of signs, but, given his quotations of Scripture and prophecy, we are perhaps to conclude that, like Matthew Paris in 1250, Heinrich saw the increased number of marvelous phenomena as an indication that the world was nearing its end.
In the final pages of Heinrich’s chronicle, however, he interjected that note of caution sounded so frequently in medieval discussions of the end’s timing.59 “And note,” he wrote, “that this eighth year of Charles’s reign was the 5317th from the beginning of the world, the 3661st from Noah’s exit from the ark,” and so on, listing counts of years for various other chronological schemes.60 As Richard Landes has pointed out for the early Middle Ages, such countdowns were inherently eschatological, by either explicitly or implicitly allowing readers to calculate the number of years left until the world’s fated 6000th year.61 Heinrich here followed Bede’s calculation of the age of the world, a figure much smaller than other estimates of its age and one that put the end of the sixth (and presumably final) millennium several centuries distant even from Heinrich’s time. Further—and here Heinrich showed his realization that this type of countdown could be apocalyptic—Heinrich felt compelled to continue with a discussion of the unknowability of the time of the end. “The time remaining in this sixth age,” he reminded his readers, “is known only to God. It is not for men to know the times or moments that the father has reserved to his power” (Acts 1: 7).62 Indeed, in Augustinian fashion, he stated that the seventh age of repose for the blessed, “its door quietly opened,” had begun with the sixth age and ran along concurrently with it.63 While Heinrich was quite willing to string together contemporary apocalyptic signs and quotations from Scripture, he showed understandable and customary caution in definitely announcing the immediacy of the end.
Although this sort of caution frequently accompanied apocalyptic predictions, the explicit pointers to eschatological texts and prophecies in the chronicles of Heinrich of Herford, John Clynn, John of Winterthur, and William Dene strongly suggest that the constellation of bizarre mirabilia described by other chroniclers, such as the earthquakes, hail, and rains of toads and snakes with which I began this essay, were also meant to have apocalyptic echoes. Thunder, hail, and fire falling from heaven figure not simply among the plagues of Egypt (Ex. 9: 23–26), but also in Revelation, in which the first trumpet blast of the seven angels with seven trumpets results in hail and fire mingled with blood (Rev. 8: 7), and the pouring out of the seventh of the vials of God’s wrath brings about earthquakes, thunderings, and a plague of enormous hailstones that destroy the city of Babylon (Rev. 16: 21). Indeed, in the letter of Louis Heyligen quoted by the anonymous Flemish chronicler, the reference to “thunder, lightning, and hail of marvelous size,” may well be a nod to Revelation 16, in which “every [hail] stone [was] about the weight of a talent” (Rev. 16: 21).64 The same anonymous chronicler even more ominously described a hailstorm in 1349 in which the egg-sized hailstones had faces, eyes, and tails.65
Fire and smoke were other apocalyptic signs featured in fourteenth-century texts about the plague. Stinking smoke attendant on heavenly fire appears in both the Neuberg monastery chronicle and Heyligen’s letter among the causes of the outbreak of the plague in the east. The image of fire raining down from the heavens as described in words in these fourteenth-century chronicles could have triggered visual memories of illustrations connected with Revelation.66 God sends fire from heaven to destroy Satan’s army after his final unloosing in Revelation 20: 9. And fetid smoke emerges from the bottomless pit, along with locusts, in Revelation 9: 2–3.
Frogs, too, have scriptural resonances. They number among the plagues of Egypt (the second plague, Exodus 8: 1–15; also Psalms 78 and 105), along with a plague of festering boils (Exodus 9: 8–12). The rain of toads and frogs in fourteenth-century writings about the Black Death also would remind readers of the unclean spirits of Revelation 16: 13, spirits in the form of frogs (in modo ranarum) that issue from the mouths of the dragon, the beast, and the false prophet. These frogs, too, are depicted in illustrations of Revelation, and commentators equated the frogs’ croaking voices with the blasphemous words issuing from the mouths of the preachers of Antichrist.67
Thus, the unusual precipitation of fire, hail, snakes, and toads reported in the chronicles of Heinrich of Herford and the Neuberg monastery and in the letter of Louis Heyligen had an implicitly apocalyptic meaning.68 The message did not need to be spelled out. With or without quotations from Scripture and prophecy, such chroniclers presented the plague in a decidedly apocalyptic fashion.
If the frogs, hail, earthquakes, and other unusual weather surrounding the outbreak of the plague in the east could be read as apocalyptic portents, they nonetheless figure as well in fourteenth-century scientific explanations of the plague. In fact, the whole cluster of bizarre signs associated with the initial outbreak of plague in the chronicles of Heinrich of Herford and others finds its way into medical and scientific treatises as well. These phenomena form part of the natural causes of plague detailed in fourteenth-century scientific writings about the disease. Further, the very chroniclers who insert apocalyptic portents into their treatment of plague sometimes explain these signs using natural philosophy. In scientific writings as well as in monastic chronicles, fourteenth-century authors presented the plague as simultaneously a sign of God’s final wrath and a phenomenon capable of receiving a natural explanation.
The best-known scientific discussion of plague from the mid-fourteenth century is the treatise composed by the medical faculty of the University of Paris. As historians frequently note, the Paris physicians blamed the plague on the famous “triple conjunction” of Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars on March 20, 1345.69 But this conjunction forms only a part of the faculty’s analysis of the causes of the plague, which they argue had both a remote cause (the heavens) and a proximal cause (the earth). The conjunction of March 1345 was the remote and universal cause of the plague, and it had the effect, argued the Paris physicians, of drawing up warm, moist vapors from the earth, which were corrupted by Mars (which ignited them and particularly caused corruption because it was retrograde) and Jupiter (whose quartile aspect with Mars [?] caused a bad disposition in the air inimical to human nature). The configuration of the heavens also had the effect of generating many winds, particularly warm, moist southern winds. Thus the triple conjunction served as a universal remote cause of plague.70
The Paris doctors also described a more proximal cause of plague, namely air corrupted by bad vapors (also a result of the triple conjunction) and spread about by the south wind. Corrupt air was even more harmful to the body than corrupt food or water, asserted the doctors, because it could more rapidly penetrate to the lungs and heart. Such pestiferous vapors could arise from stagnant water or unburied bodies or could even escape directly from the earth during an earthquake. When they rose and mixed with the air, the whole air would be corrupted, and an epidemic would result.71 In other words, earthquakes functioned not simply as signs of divine wrath, but in a medical understanding of plague they also were the source of noxious vapors that corrupted the air, causing disease in humans.
Another proximal cause of plague in the Paris medical faculty’s opinion was a change in weather. Here, the physicians were following good Hippocratic teaching, which looked to changes in weather as a cause of epidemics. In particular, unusual weather throughout the four seasons could produce a pestilential year, the Paris doctors argued, and they noted that the preceding winter had been warmer and rainier than usual. Further, they feared that the next spring might bring yet another round of pestilence should the winter again prove abnormally warm and wet.72 While the Paris physicians do not directly mention hail as a feature of plague-generating weather, they nonetheless finger an excess of warm rains (presumably some of which would be accompanied by thunder, lightning, and hail) as culprits in a pestilential year.
Furthermore, the Paris doctors, like the chroniclers with whom I began, added a geographical component to their description of plague’s origins. The Paris physicians pointed to the south and east as the ultimate source of plague and the location of the most noteworthy phenomena associated with the corruption of air and outbreak of pestilence. The physicians had stated that the upcoming year might well be another plague year should the winter again be warm and wet. Nonetheless, they asserted that any such plague would be less dangerous in France than in “southern or eastern regions” because the conjunctions and other causes detailed in their treatise would have more effect in those regions. And, they noted, there had been “numerous exhalations and inflammations, such as a draco and falling stars.”73 The sky had in fact taken on a distinct yellow and red tone from the scorched vapors, the doctors declared, and there had been frequent lightning, thunderings, and intense winds from the south, carrying great amounts of dust with them. These winds, said the doctors, “are worse than all others, [in] quickly and more completely spreading bodies of putrefaction, especially strong earthquakes, [and] a multitude of fish and dead animals at the seashores, and in many regions trees [have been] covered by dust.” Further, the doctors noted that “some say they have seen a multitude of frogs and reptiles which are generated from putrefaction.” All of these, the faculty of medicine wrote, “appear to precede great putrefaction in the air and the earth.”74 “No wonder if we fear that there is a future epidemic coming!”75 Because the work of the south wind was so crucial in spreading corruption in their explanation, the doctors implied that corruption would arise in the south and east and be dispersed by the winds.
Certainly the faculty of medicine in Paris were no scientific revolutionaries. Their explanation of epidemics arising from corrupted air was completely standard according to Galenic medical theory. And their list of signs and causes of corruption, from unusual weather to earthquakes to frogs and dead fish, again was completely standard. Scholastic science held that frogs, toads, snakes, and worms could be generated from corrupt matter and that such animals were inherently poisonous.76 In early modern Europe, there would be a strong association between toads and the plague, and persons of all social strata would wear amulets containing various preparations made from toads and arsenic to guard against pestilence.77
Nonetheless, the way in which these phenomena cluster together in the Paris medical faculty’s treatise is striking. In fifteen lines (of printed text), we move from a reference to southern and eastern regions, to falling stars, to a reddened sky, to thunder and lightning, to dust storms, to earthquakes, to dead fish, to trees overcome by dust, and at last to frogs and other reptiles.78 One could just as easily be reading the work of Heinrich of Herford as that of the Paris medical faculty. A reader might indeed think these were the “signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars” of Luke 21: 25. And yet they fit entirely within the medical explanation of the plague arising from corruption in the air.
Earthquakes occupy the central position in another fourteenth-century scientific explanation of the plague, a quaestio entitled “Whether the mortality of these years is due to divine command or from some natural cause?”79 The author of this treatise dismissed the astrological explanation of the plague that featured so prominently in the Paris physicians’ treatise (and in other treatises) with the remark that the plague had lasted much longer than the conjunction (some five or six years, whereas Saturn spends at most two and a half years in any one sign of the zodiac).80 Rather, the author of the quaestio, following “Ypocrates,” concluded that the most probable natural cause of the current mortality was a “corrupt and venomous exhalation from the earth, which infected the air in various parts of the world and which, when breathed in by humans, immediately suffocated them with a manner of extinction.”81 He noted that air that is shut up in the earth in caverns or in the bowels of the earth is corrupted by earthly fumes and becomes poisonous to humans, as happens in the case of wells that have long been sealed up. When they are opened, the first people who go down into them frequently suffocate, causing ignorant vulgares to assume that there is a basilisk down in the well.82 The author also explained that earthquakes were caused by “the exhalation of fumes closed up in the bowels of the earth, which, when they beat against the sides of the earth and cannot get out, shake and move the earth, as is apparent from natural philosophy.”83 In regards to the current epidemic, he specifically cited the Carinthia earthquake on the feast of St. Paul in 1347 (the same earthquake mentioned by Heinrich of Herford and others), noting that the plague had begun its journey through German-speaking lands in Carinthia after the earthquake there.84 He blamed the actions of the winds for spreading the corrupt air about haphazardly, explaining the desultory pattern of the plague’s spread.
The quaestio’s author continues with a rather curious observation. In further proof that the fumes inside the earth were noxious to humans, the author noted that “according to Avicenna and Albertus [Magnus], in some earthquakes men are changed (transsubstanciati) into rocks, and chiefly into salt rocks on account of the strong mineral virtue in terrestrial vapors.”85 If the vapors released by earthquakes could effect such a dramatic transubstantiation, surely they also could initiate a pestilential corruption of the air. What is most remarkable in this statement is not so much the logic, but the assertion that earthquakes can change men into rocks. While the author almost certainly had in mind the biblical story of Lot’s wife being changed into a pillar of salt, Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 19 were destroyed in a rain of fire and brimstone from heaven, not an earthquake. The whole discussion is, however, vaguely reminiscent of the chronicle of the monastery of Neuberg, which described both an earthquake and the subsequent poisonous vapors that changed men into stone in the east, followed by rains of fire, poisonous snakes, and worms, and finally the outbreak of the plague.86 Perhaps the author of this treatise was aware of the same traditions that informed the Neuberg chronicler’s description of men being transformed into stones. He presumably was writing in some southern German or Austrian region because he mentions specifically only the Carinthia earthquake (and indeed makes reference to the destruction of Villach, as does the Neuberg chronicle). But the author of this quaestio offers an explanation of the phenomenon drawn from natural philosophy, probably from commentaries on Aristotle’s Meteorology.
The medieval scholastic understanding of earthquakes in fact depended upon the explanation put forth in the second book of Aristotle’s Meteorology. Aristotle had explained that earthquakes arise when the sun warms an earth made moist by rains, giving rise to winds (evaporation) inside the earth, which causes the earthquake. The most violent earthquakes result in those places where the sea flows into subterranean caverns, thereby impeding the outward flow of wind. As a result, a great amount of wind is compressed into a small space, from which it eventually breaks forth with great violence.87 Because earthquakes are generated by moisture, evaporation, and wind in this theory, they are a species of weather.
Medieval commentators elaborated upon Aristotle’s theories. Albertus Magnus discussed earthquakes in book 3 of his De meteoris, under the general rubric of impressions caused by cool, dry vapors. According to Albert, earthquakes happened when dry vapors trapped within the earth were too heavy to escape easily. He noted that the vapors that were emitted from the earth during an earthquake were frequently laden with dust, causing the sun, moon, and stars to appear bloody or blackened. Furthermore, Albert stated that the vapors enclosed within the earth, deprived of light and air, possessed the nature of poison. In the days before an earthquake, such vapors would seep out through the “pores” of the earth and kill animals that kept their mouths to the ground, such as sheep. Then, after a large eruption of such vapors in an earthquake, a pestilence would almost invariably follow. As if to confirm this line of reasoning, Albert added that he himself had witnessed an incident in Padua in which a long-closed well was opened up. The first and second persons to enter the well to clean it out died instantly “from the vapor of that cavern,” while a third, who merely leaned into the well, was indisposed for the next two days.88
In Pierre d’Ailly’s late fourteenth-century treatise on weather (De impressionibus aeris), the discussion of earthquakes immediately follows a treatment of winds. D’Ailly attributed earthquakes to the actions of warm, dry vapors enclosed within the earth (spiritus), which, on account of their subtle nature, seek to escape from the earth. When their free escape is impeded, an earthquake results.89 He explained a number of phenomena associated with earthquakes based upon the actions of these vapors, including the strange noises that frequently accompany earthquakes (rumblings and the fact that in Aristotle’s phrase, “the earth seems to moo”) and the sun’s darkened appearance during earthquakes.90 At times, an earthquake could cause both vapors and stones to be thrown from the earth, in a boiling fashion, as vapors brought small stones up with them, and those stones falling caused other stones to dislodge.91 Thunderous rumblings, darkening of the sun, and a rain of stones—many of the signs associated with plague by chroniclers—all could result from the actions of earthquake-causing vapors, according to d’Ailly.
Further, d’Ailly compared earthquakes to sicknesses in the human body, associating earthquakes with disease metaphorically, just as the chroniclers, Paris doctors, and anonymous quaestio had associated earthquakes literally with the plague. First, following Aristotle, d’Ailly noted an earthquake’s similitude to bodily paralysis or tremors in animals.92 In such cases, d’Ailly said, a superheated vapor within the body (the animal’s or the earth’s) causes a trembling motion. Second, d’Ailly adds that a similar effect is sometimes seen in humans after they produce urine, when subtle vapors sneak into the body through the natural paths of the urine (per vias naturales urinales), disperse throughout the other inner parts of the body, and cause a tremor of the whole body as they exit through the pores.93 D’Ailly also explained the pattern of aftershocks following an earthquake by comparison to disease, in this case tertian or quartan fever, in which the entire amount of the febrile vapor seeking expulsion was not released in the original fever (or earthquake).94 Earthquakes thus behaved much as sicknesses in the body of the earth in which excessively warm vapors were expelled from the earth’s body. By equation of macrocosm and microcosm, earthquakes pointed to sicknesses in the human body and in fact were noted to be a cause of epidemics.95
Earthquakes, bizarre weather, toads, worms, and serpents all featured in medical analyses of plague because they caused or resulted from the corruption that was the epidemic’s cause. Yet these phenomena were also the very signs that gave plague its apocalyptic punch. Indeed, the earthquakes, thunder and lightning, rains of blood, worms, and snakes, and the other marvelous phenomena that show up in fourteenth-century writings about the plague had multiple significances. There was an overlap between their apocalyptic and scientific connotations even within the same treatise. Such language set up a chain of associations in readers’ minds, so that an earthquake could at the same time serve to release corrupt air and to point to Matthew 24 or other apocalyptic passages in Scripture. By and large the authors of such treatises left these overlaps unexplained without comment. These phenomena neither served as natural causes of the apocalypse, as they might have for Roger Bacon, nor appeared specifically as supernatural, and therefore apocalyptic, signs, as they might have for Matthew Paris or the Parisian authors around 1300. The very ambiguity of these portents, as I will argue, was profoundly important. Perhaps nowhere is this overlap and ambiguity between the natural and the supernatural more apparent than in the chronicle of Heinrich of Herford.
Heinrich of Herford’s Liber de rebus memorabilioribus is particularly noteworthy for the number of signs and portents the author describes in the final decades of his chronicle, which ends in 1355. As noted above, Heinrich makes specific mention of a cluster of portents at the start of the reign of the emperor Charles of Bohemia in 1348.96 Given his citation of apocalyptic texts from 2 Timothy and 2 Corinthians, his use of other apocalyptic language,97 and his deliberate pointing to the cluster of portents around the time of the plague, it is apparent that Heinrich meant to give his text an apocalyptic slant. And yet, Heinrich also frequently appended to his descriptions of just such marvels explanations drawn from natural philosophy. No longer are these portents seen through the lens of an either/or dichotomy either as natural events or as supernatural apocalyptic signs. In Heinrich’s chronicle, the same events are often uncomfortably and unexplainedly both.
For example, for the year 1337, Heinrich described in immediate succession the following prodigies: a rain of blood in Erfurt, a nine-year-old girl bearing a child by her father, and the birth of a baby girl with breasts, pubic hair, and menstrual periods. Then he immediately quoted a passage from Albertus Magnus’s Physica in which Albert explained just such a monstrous birth. Such monsters, according to Albert, result from an abundance of the material of the first seed and the strength of the heat and virtue forming the infant. “And in my own times,” Albert wrote—and Heinrich quoted him—“there was displayed a girl who had been born with breasts and with hair under her arms and in her groin, and her mother asserted that she also suffered from a monthly flow, which without doubt happened on account of the heat that formed and matured [the fetus].”98 This same principle is at work in the births of children who already have teeth, according to Albert. The sexually precocious girls of 1337 thus could be explained by natural causes. Heinrich did not offer here an explanation—marvelous or scientific—for the rain of blood in Erfurt, although he was careful to note that he himself had seen “its drops captured in a white linen cloth.”99 (The same sort of attention to first-person observation marks the pages of Albert’s treatises also.) Several pages later, however, the reader is again inundated with a wave of portents and with a scientific explanation of them.
Under the year 1345, Heinrich opened his discussion of the Black Death, with his quotation of a letter describing the earthquake in Carinthia on the feast of the conversion of St. Paul, a rain of fire in the land of the Turks, and a rain of toads and snakes. Under the same year, he recounted the stories of a number of battles, the appearance of a devil (dyabolus) who killed or harassed several men in the household of one Thyderic Sobben, and ghosts (fantasmata) who were carousing in a church in Mendene.100 In the following brief entry for the year 1346, Heinrich noted some important political events: the election of Charles of Bohemia as king of the Romans and the death of King Philip of France. The bulk of his remarks for the year 1346, however, concerned yet another marvelous phenomenon, this time the birth in Westphalia of a lamb with two heads, the lower one a lamb’s head and the upper one a bird’s head. The monster seemed “both to have been a portent and to be attributed to the virtue of the stars.”101 Heinrich again appended quotations from Albertus Magnus’s Physica and De meteoris offering explications of the birth of monsters. These quotations, however, can apply not simply to the two-headed lamb that Heinrich has just described, but also to the portents in the east in the letter he had quoted with respect to the outbreak of plague.
Following the description of the two-headed lamb, Heinrich quoted three passages from Albertus Magnus. In the first, from the Physica, Albert explained monstrous births similar to the two-headed lamb Heinrich described, using as an example the birth of piglets with human faces. In such a case where the offspring had the characteristics of two very different beings, the operation of the heavenly bodies had to be at work, for the seeds of humans and pigs (or, mutatis mutandis, sheep and birds) were too different for any progeny to be engendered. Rather, the seeds would mutually corrupt one another. But the planets could induce the pig’s seed to take on a form outside of its ordinary capacity, as, for example, when the sun, moon, and some other planets were all in a certain region of Aries and no human could be generated.102 Presumably, the lamb’s bird head was formed in this manner. Next, and with no explanation of why, Heinrich quoted two passages from Albertus Magnus’s De meteoris. Both dealt with the generation of animals in an unusual manner, but not this time with two-headed sheep, human-headed pigs, or even pig-headed humans. Rather, the two passages Heinrich lined up here describe the generation of animals in the clouds, with resulting rains of small frogs, fish, worms, and, even once, a calf. Heinrich seems to be thinking back to his entry for the previous year about the rain of toads and snakes in the east that preceded the outbreak of plague.
According to the passages Heinrich quoted from Albert, these phenomena, too, were susceptible of natural explanations. As heat causes rainwater to evaporate, Albert had argued, it can draw up a little earthly matter mixed in with the moisture. That mixture, once taken up into the air, begins to harden and to become skin. The continual exposure to heat produces a spirit within that skin, to which the virtue of the stars adds a sensitive soul, so that an animal results. The beings so generated are usually aquatic animals like frogs, fish, and worms because in such rains the watery element prevails over the earthy element.103 As in the case of the calf that fell from the sky, however, the body of a perfect animal could be formed in the clouds, a fact to be explained by the virtue of the stars.104 The joint actions of evaporation and the stars, thus—although Heinrich does not explicitly draw this connection—could be responsible for the marvelous rain of toads and serpents that preceded the plague as well.
The same conflation of the natural and the apocalyptic comes in Heinrich’s treatment of the flagellants. On the one hand, his most overtly apocalyptic language comes in his description of the flagellants, of whom he wrote, “[the appearance of] a race of flagellants without a head foretold the advent of Antichrist.”105 At the same time, here, too, comes his most blatant scientific explanation of a presumed apocalyptic sign. Heinrich dwelt at length on the flagellants (for more than four pages in the modern edition), whom he condemned as imprudent, defiant, and a corrupting influence. He apparently was drawing on firsthand experience of their rituals, saying that he himself had seen the sharp points at the ends of their whips embedded in their flesh so that they could not easily be pulled out and noting with the empathy of one who had been there that “it would take a heart of stone to watch such behavior without shedding tears.”106 He also quoted at length (perhaps in its entirety) a treatise on the flagellants composed by one Gerhardus de Cosvelde, “rector of the scholars in the city of Münster in Westphalia.”107 This remarkable treatise offered an explanation of the flagellant movement based entirely on astrology.
Gerhardus’s analysis of the flagellants rested upon the horoscope he erected for the moment of the sun’s entry into Aries on March 12, 1349, the beginning of the astrological year. (The horoscope is also reproduced in Heinrich’s chronicle.) For Gerhardus, the key component of this horoscope was the third mundane house, beginning with Aries and containing the planets of the sun, Saturn, Mars, and Mercury.108 According to Gerhardus, the third mundane house presided over faith, religion, and mutations of religion. The sun was in a position of particular strength in this horoscope (Gerhardus indeed dubs the sun the “lord of the year”), and its position in the mundane house signifying religion meant that it would “multiply a religion and sect.”109 Further, Gerhardus declared that the new sect foretold by the horoscope would have its origins “in the east,” since Aries was an eastern sign having significance mainly over Germany, according to Alchabitius, author of a widely used medieval textbook of astrology. Thus the new sect would thrive chiefly in Germany.110 The fact that Mars and Mercury were in conjunction in the horoscope signified beatings with whips and the effusion of blood.111 Because the two planets were in Jupiter’s domus, their influence would lead men to join this sect—and not without hypocrisy (all attributed to Alchabitius).112
Every detail of the flagellants’ activities finds an astrological explanation in the treatise Heinrich quotes. The flagellants wear a grey hood before their eyes, and thus a saturnine aspect, because in the horoscope Saturn is in the sign of Aries, which has significance for the head.113 In their rituals, they “fall down to the ground horribly” because the planets signifying the flagellants are in one of the “falling” (cadens) mundane houses.114 The cause of their (partial) nudity is found in the fact that Saturn is both combust (i.e., within a given number of degrees of the sun) and in Aries, the sign of its dejection. Their strange garments arise from the influence of Venus, which is in Saturn’s domus in the horoscope and is a signifier of women’s clothing.115 The flagellants claim to be inspired by a stone tablet brought down from heaven by an angel. This “fiction” is caused by the falling Saturn (i.e., the planet is in its dejection and in a cadent mundane house), which signifies about heavy things like stones, as well as about oracles and the apparition of secret things.116 The lying nature of the sect, as well as its instability, result from the baleful appearance of the sign of Scorpio in the midheaven (the tenth mundane house in a horoscope), for Scorpio signifies sorrow, lying, and instability. The fact that Scorpio appears in the tenth mundane house, the domus of Jupiter, results in people believing the flagellants’ lies and calling them miracles, “on account of Jupiter’s faith.”117 In short, Gerhardus concludes, “I say that in my estimation this sect is purely natural, and that they are acting under a species of fury called mania. . . . And the sect will not last long, but will end quickly and with confusion and infamy.”118 The apocalyptic “race without a head” is now explained entirely by the stars. If this is not Heinrich’s conclusion also, he gives us no sign here, for he moves immediately to a discussion of political events and leaves the flagellants behind.119
Even the succeeding passages in Heinrich’s text, however, leave the reader poised between marvelous and scientific explanations of events. Under the year 1351, Heinrich described an unusual plague in the town of Hameln. A pit was being dug and cleared out in grounds belonging to one of the town’s citizens when one of the workers suddenly fell down and at once expired. A second worker went into the pit to retrieve the body and suffered the same fate. The word quickly spread, but no one knew the cause of the plague. A third worker was sent into the pit, but this time with a rope tied around his waist, so that he could quickly be hauled out. Again, the pit proved poisonous, but the worker was able to give a sign as he was becoming stiff and stupefied and was pulled out half-dead. A fourth worker entered the pit and died as the first two had. Opinion was divided, according to Heinrich, on the cause of this singular plague. Some leaned towards a marvelous explanation. They maintained that there must be a basilisk in the pit, able to kill instantly by its breath or even its very glance. Others tended towards a scientific analysis. They held that the earth in the pit had been poisoned by the fact that in the past there had been many latrines in the same place. At length, the pit was filled with a brothlike mixture of boiling water and flour, and the plague was ended, either by the death of the basilisk or by the purging of the poisons from the pir.120
This story very closely parallels passages from scientific treatises on earthquakes. In the De meteoris, for example, Albertus Magnus claims to have witnessed just such an incident when a long-closed well in Padua was opened up, a happening he attributed not to a basilisk, but to the venomous nature of vapors remaining enclosed within the earth for a long time.121 There is also a like passage in the anonymous quaestio attributing the Black Death to earthquakes. The author of that quaestio, like Albert, adduced such a scenario to prove how poisonous were the fumes released by earthquakes. He further remarked that ignorant people attributed deaths just like those Heinrich here described to the existence of a basilisk in the pit, whereas the explanation was properly to be found in the poisonous vapors enclosed within the earth.122 Heinrich is clearly aware of both sorts of explanations as he describes the venomous pit of Hameln. Just as he does with the monstrous births and rain of worms and snakes in his chronicle, however, he refuses here to give the nod to either a purely marvelous or a purely scientific explanation. This little “plague” in Hameln, like the universal bubonic plague, is ambiguous in Heinrich’s chronicle, capable of multiple interpretations. In the case of the little Hameln plague, Heinrich offers us two competing, and by implication mutually exclusive, explanations. Either there is a basilisk in the pit or the latrines once on that site poisoned the soil. In the case of the universal pestilence, however, the interpretation is not posed in either/or terms. We may understand the earthquakes, fire from heaven, rain of toads, and pestilence at the same time as proceeding from God’s wrath, as being signs of the approaching end, and as resulting from natural causes.
Why might plague in the minds of fourteenth-century authors bear such a multivalent analysis? Why might one aspect of a description of the plague—frogs, say—carry us effortlessly from biblical imagery (Exodus and Revelation) to natural philosophy? Why does the same cluster of phenomena (earthquakes, frogs, worms, rains of fire) pop up as readily in a natural philosopher’s analysis of the disease as in an apocalyptic letter about marvelous prodigies in distant and nearby lands? How is it that an author like Heinrich of Herford came to move effortlessly from apocalyptic texts to Albertus Magnus’s De meteoris?
First, nature was not a category separable from theology. “Caeli ennarrant gloriam dei” (The heavens proclaim the glory of God; Ps. 18: 2). For medieval Christians, the world was God’s handiwork, and any effort to understand the world—such as natural philosophy—came square up against the fact that nature was the fabric of God’s plan. That meant that the earth was never just the earth, but that even for a naturalizing author such as Roger Bacon the world was also the orb of the mappaemundi, the area in which God’s plan of salvation unfolded, sometimes literally—as in the Ebstorff map—the body of Christ. Any time one mapped events on the earth, one was fitting them into a geography and a chronology put in place by the Creator. Place, time, and event all had eschatological meaning. The sorts of slippages in meaning and free associations I have been detailing here were the logical outgrowth of this cosmology. Once an author began to map a phenomenon like the plague onto that orb, he was entangled in an endless string of associations and cross-references. If plague began in the east and moved toward the west, one could not help but think of both Prester John and Gog and Magog, of the potential Christians and the feared enemies of end times. If the plague was accompanied by earthquakes, one’s mind was drawn to both Matthew 24 and Galenic medicine. One could follow a trail of snakes and worms that led from apocalyptic portents to meteorology to medicine and finally to the geography of Gog and Magog.
It is not surprising that the same cluster of phenomena appear in monastic chronicles and medical discussions of the plague. An event like plague could not be understood entirely apart from God. Once an author began to describe plague with the language of natural philosophy, miasma-generating earthquakes inevitably shaded into apocalyptic earthquakes, and corrupt vapors inside the earth began to look like corrupt enemies within Christendom. Existing eschatology shaped and informed the map on which fourteenth-century Christians plotted the epidemic’s course. While mapping can indeed represent the act of possession, of physically and intellectually grasping space, mapping the fourteenth-century Black Death rather inserted it into an orb already freighted with meaning, where earthquakes, plague, frogs, and hail hovered in a polysemic limbo between physical undoing and apocalyptic unveiling.
Second, the ambiguity of the portents in the fourteenth-century plague treatises must be seen additionally as a species of caution in predicting the time of the end, whether reading portents or using astrology or some other branch of natural philosophy to do so. By leaving open the question of whether this plague and these earthquakes were a sign of end times or simply a manifestation of a bad run of weather, fourteenth-century authors could hedge their bets. Heinrich of Herford softens his quotations from 2 Timothy, 2 Corinthians, and the Cedar of Lebanon vision by offering a horoscope explaining how the action of the heavens could engender the appearance of “the race without a head.” Flagellants now appear as sufferers of a form of mania and perhaps not as the harbingers of Antichrist. John Clynn reproduces the apocalyptic Cedar of Lebanon vision, yet leaves blank pages at the end of his chronicle “for the continuation of this work, if perhaps in the future any human witness should remain, or any member of the human race.”123 The Paris doctors mention falling stars, thunder, lightning, earthquakes, and frogs, yet set these apocalyptic emblems within a clearly scientific context. These multivalent signs allowed fourteenth-century authors safely to predict and not predict the end at the same time.
This reluctance to come down firmly on one side or the other is apparent in the plague writings discussed above, texts that hover between natural and apocalyptic explanations of the plague. The Paris physicians, for example, end their discussion of the plague’s astrological and earthly causes with the remark that epidemics sometimes proceed from God’s will.124 The author of the quaestio on earthquakes suggests in his introductory question that there is an either/or opposition between a divine cause of the plague and a natural one. At the end of the quaestio, however, he collapses that distinction, noting that God can as easily lift a naturally caused plague as he can one proceeding from supernatural causes.125 The portents mentioned by chroniclers like Heinrich of Herford meet in the same chronicle sometimes with an apocalyptic interpretation and sometimes with one drawn from natural philosophy. And in the chronicle of Neuberg monastery, apocalyptic-sounding fire falling from heaven, a rain of snakes and worms, and the changing of men into stones are all explained as resulting from “a malign impression of the superior bodies acting as efficient cause.”126
In their very caution, however, the authors of these plague treatises played a pivotal role in allowing a rehabilitation of the thirteenth-century attempts to naturalize the apocalypse. Unwilling to call the plague definitely either an apocalyptic sign or a natural event, mid-fourteenth-century authors simply had it both ways. In so doing, they collapsed the post-1277 distinction that insisted—as had John of Paris, Arnau de Vilanova, and Henry of Harclay—that the apocalypse would be a supernatural event and therefore could not be predicted by natural philosophy or astrology. The unspoken implication in plague writings is that there are scientific explanations behind the portents associated with the apocalypse and that, insofar as it is possible, God will work through natural causes in the destruction of the world. Thus one might indeed use natural philosophy to investigate the apocalypse. The very hesitancy of fourteenth-century plague authors to announce the end thus opened the door to renewed speculation about the apocalypse using natural philosophy.
By the early fifteenth century, the latest apocalyptic-seeming disaster, the Great Schism, had engendered just such an analysis. Spurred on by a reading of Roger Bacon, the French cardinal Pierre d’Ailly began cautiously using astrology to investigate the time of the end. Before he made his predictions, d’Ailly offered a careful defense of astrology and its ability to predict religious change. His defense hit at the very issues raised by Parisian authors around 1300 like John of Paris, namely, the extent to which the appearance of Antichrist would arise from natural or supernatural causes. D’Ailly’s conclusion, following Bacon, was that all religions save Christianity and Judaism were under the control of the stars. Even those two faiths, inasmuch as they had natural components, were subject to astrological control (the stars, for example, could explain Jesus’ excellent physical complexio). D’Ailly’s subtle distinction of the realms of natural and supernatural causality meant that the other religions, such as the anticipated sect of Antichrist, would fall under the heavens’ sway. Using that justification and cautiously hedging his calculations by nodding to the will of God, d’Ailly offered an astrological prediction of Antichrist’s advent for the year 1789.127
A generation later, in 1444, an astrologer named Jean de Bruges was even more confidently applying astrological reasoning to the study of the apocalypse.128 Relying heavily on the example set by Pierre d’Ailly, Jean based his prediction of the end on the pattern of conjunctions made by the planets Saturn and Jupiter. He paid particular attention to the triplicity, or group of zodiacal signs, in which each conjunction occurred. (Astrologers divided the zodiac into four triplicities, each of which was held to share the characteristics of one of the four elements: earth, water, air, and fire. Successive conjunctions of the two planets tend to stay within the same triplicity for around 240 years.)129 According to Jean, the world’s end would have to take place when Saturn-Jupiter conjunctions entered the fiery triplicity around the year 1765. Just as a conjunction in one of the watery signs had signaled the Flood, the future return to the fiery triplicity would have to bring about the world’s end in a deluge of fire. In his prognostication, then, Jean did not simply use the stars to predict the time of the world’s end. He also specifically provided an astrological explanation of the phenomena that would bring about that consummation, namely the rain of fire of Revelation 20: 9.130 More sure in his predictions than Pierre d’Ailly, Jean unabashedly described the apocalypse in natural terms. He was no outlier. By the early sixteenth century, such predictions were abundant.131
In this context of renewed natural speculation about the apocalypse, we can perhaps begin to understand the zeal that drove Christopher Columbus on his famous voyages across the Atlantic. As Pauline Moffit Watts has demonstrated, Columbus acted under a clear sense that the world’s end was at hand and that his own travels marked the beginning of the universal missionizing and conversion of the final days. Heir to speculations reopened in the wake of the plague, he derived his date for the apocalypse from a reading of Pierre d’Ailly’s writings on astrology. But, again like the authors of the fourteenth-century plague treatises, Columbus also was aware of the geography of the apocalypse and its motion from periphery to center. His ultimate goal thus was not simply to reach the east by sailing west, or even to bring about the conversion of the Indies, but rather to see a crusade to Jerusalem, where history would reach its culmination. In a letter urging Ferdinand and Isabella to undertake just such a crusade, Columbus cited d’Ailly as his source for the prediction that the world would not endure beyond one hundred and fifty-five more years—and divine inspiration for his confidence that the crusade would succeed.132
In the decades following the Parisian condemnations of 1277, it was not at all clear that such astrological prediction of the apocalypse would survive. Authors like Arnau de Vilanova, John of Paris, and Henry of Harclay around 1300 had asserted—as Matthew Paris had implied in 1250—that the world’s end would not be accomplished through natural causes and therefore could not be forecast using natural philosophy. Roger Bacon’s confident prediction that mathematical sciences would help the church foreknow the time of Antichrist lay unfulfilled. But by the fifteenth century, scholars again began to use the science of the stars to examine the world’s end, cautiously at first, then with more alacrity. In between those two moments, the plague writings of the mid-fourteenth century played a pivotal role. On the one hand, fourteenth-century authors clearly set the outbreak of pestilence in an apocalyptic frame of interpretation, mapping plague’s progress in a course that paralleled the eschatological geography of the mappaemundi and highlighting the disease’s outbreak with apocalyptic signs like earthquakes, hail, frogs, and rains of fire. On the other hand, the same authors offered an interpretation of plague—and the marvelous phenomena surrounding its appearance—as a completely natural phenomenon.
Unwilling definitively to announce that the world was about to end, fourteenth-century authors allowed their presentations to hover between dubbing the disease purely apocalyptic or purely natural. In their indecisive ambiguity, they refused to set the problem in the terms defined at century’s beginning, in which the apocalypse was to have nothing whatsoever to do with natural causes. In so doing, they left open the possibility that events might in fact be seen simultaneously as apocalyptic and resulting from natural causes, precisely the situation Roger Bacon had so confidently envisioned in the Opus maius. Doubtless these authors were terrified and sought to understand the overwhelming disaster around them in any and every way possible, even in ways deemed to be incompatible. In their very human reactions to plague, these writers reopened the door to naturalizing the apocalypse.