The Flagellants

Medieval Christians understood sin as a debt that had to be paid, either in this life or in purgatory. Fasting, pilgrimage and almsgiving were common ways of paying it. From the eleventh century some monastic reformers, among them Peter Damian, praised a harsher penance: the disciplina, a voluntary scourging with a small whip, performed in imitation of the scourging of Christ before the crucifixion. For two centuries it remained mostly a private devotion behind monastery walls.

That changed in 1260. In Perugia, the sources say, a hermit named Raniero Fasani began to lead processions of men who walked through the streets stripped to the waist, singing hymns and striking their backs. The year carried a heavy charge, since followers of the abbot Joachim of Fiore had predicted that 1260 would open a new age of the world. Northern Italy was also exhausted by war between cities and factions. Within weeks processions moved from town to town, and chroniclers describe enemies reconciling, debts forgiven and prisoners released. Within a year the movement had crossed the Alps into the German lands and reached as far as Bohemia and Poland, before fading as quickly as it had arisen.

The second and better-known wave came with the Black Death. As plague spread through Europe in 1348, killing perhaps a third or more of the population, bands of penitents appeared first in Austria and Hungary, then across the German lands and the Low Countries in 1349. They moved in organised companies under a master, wearing hooded robes marked with red crosses. Each member promised to walk for thirty-three and a half days, one day for every year of Christ’s life, and twice a day the company performed a public scourging in the town square, often before large crowds.

The chronicles and town records show that the 1349 processions were far from chaotic. Members needed permission from their wives, had to pay their own way, were forbidden to speak to women, wash or change their clothes during the pilgrimage, and owed obedience to the master. At each halt they read out a ‘heavenly letter’, which they claimed had been delivered by an angel, warning that God would destroy humanity unless people repented. Townspeople often welcomed them, rang the church bells and offered lodging, hoping their penance would protect the town.

Church leaders grew uneasy. The masters were laymen who heard confessions and preached, roles reserved to clergy, and some bands mocked priests or disrupted church services. In 1349 Philip VI of France forbade the processions in his kingdom. At Avignon, after hearing a report from the Flemish theologian Jean du Fayt, Pope Clement VI issued the bull Inter sollicitudines on 20 October 1349, condemning the unauthorised companies and asking bishops and princes to suppress them. Within months most had dispersed, and those who persisted were treated as heretics.

The darkest question concerns the Jews. During the Black Death, rumours that Jews had poisoned wells led to massacres in many towns, and some chroniclers record flagellant arrivals before attacks, notably in Frankfurt. Historians generally agree that the flagellants were sometimes involved, but they stress that many of the worst killings, such as the burning of Strasbourg’s Jewish community in February 1349, came before any flagellants arrived and were driven by local authorities and crowds. The accusation of well-poisoning was false. Clement VI had already condemned it in 1348, pointing out that Jews were dying of the plague like everyone else, and he offered Jews protection in Avignon.

The flagellants left a vivid image that later centuries enlarged. In the nineteenth century, historians of the Middle Ages often used them as a symbol of an age of superstition and hysteria. Twentieth-century writers such as Norman Cohn placed them within a broader history of end-time movements, emphasising the heavenly letter and their hostility to the clergy, while later scholars have stressed their orderliness and their roots in ordinary lay piety.

Cinema made the image famous. Ingmar Bergman’s film The Seventh Seal of 1957 shows a procession of penitents crossing a plague-stricken land, and countless later works copied the scene. Such portrayals tend to compress a phenomenon that, in each wave, lasted little more than a year, and to forget that the participants were often respected townspeople and craftsmen rather than outcasts.

Modern writers have also read the practice in psychological terms. The historian Niklaus Largier traces how scourging moved between religious devotion, medical theory and later literature, and warns against projecting modern assumptions back onto medieval penitents. For the people of 1260 and 1349, the meaning was primarily communal: a town’s suffering offered to God in the hope of mercy.

After the papal ban, the public mass movement did not return on the same scale, although small groups of so-called secret flagellants survived for a time in Thuringia and were prosecuted as heretics in the fifteenth century. More lasting were the penitential confraternities that grew up in Italian cities, known as disciplinati or battuti. Under the supervision of clergy, their members met to pray, care for the sick, bury the dead and, on certain days, practise discipline, often privately and with their faces covered. Similar brotherhoods spread in Spain and France; King Henry III of France himself joined penitent confraternities in the 1580s.

Spanish and Portuguese missionaries and settlers carried the brotherhoods to the Americas and Asia. In New Mexico and southern Colorado, the lay brotherhood known as the Penitentes kept Holy Week rites that once included scourging, and in the Philippines some devotees scourge themselves on Good Friday as a personal vow. In the small town of San Vicente de la Sonsierra in La Rioja, Spain, hooded members of a brotherhood still perform a public penance with a whip during Holy Week.

Most famous Spanish Holy Week processions today involve no scourging at all; the hooded robes of Seville and Málaga are a memory of the old penitential brotherhoods rather than a continuation of their discipline. The Catholic Church permits private acts of penance but has long discouraged bloody public displays, and bishops in the Philippines regularly urge devotees to choose prayer and charity instead. What remains is a reminder of how deeply medieval Christians felt that sin, suffering and community were bound together.