In May 1349, a procession of about two hundred men entered the city of Frankfurt walking in two columns, stripped to the waist, each man carrying a leather scourge with three knotted thongs ending in small iron studs. They walked into the cathedral square, formed a circle, and began to flog themselves rhythmically, in time, while singing a German-language hymn that ran (in approximate translation):
“Now strike your blows Pour out your tears For God’s pure love Spill your own blood So God will spare us From the great death.”
The “great death” was the Black Death, which had reached Frankfurt the previous winter and was killing between a third and half of the city’s population. The men were a chapter of the Brethren of the Cross — the Flagellanti, or Geisslerbrüder — a penitential movement that had appeared, almost out of nowhere, in central Europe over the previous six months and was, by the summer of 1349, the largest organized non-military movement on the continent.
The Brethren marched. A typical chapter consisted of between fifty and three hundred men (women were not admitted), organized under an elected “Master” and two lieutenants, traveling on foot from city to city. The procession ritual was performed twice a day, in public, with the public invited to watch. The flogging was real — contemporary accounts describe blood pooling on the cobblestones, men collapsing mid-rite, the iron studs of the scourges sometimes catching in flesh and having to be cut out. A complete penitential journey lasted exactly thirty-three days and eight hours, in commemoration of the years and hours of Christ’s life. At the end of the journey, the penitent was supposed to have purged the sins of his community and earned divine intercession against the plague.
In May 1349 there were Brethren chapters operating across what is now Germany, the Low Countries, Bohemia, Hungary, Poland, and northern France. The largest assembly recorded that summer, at Tournai in early August, included approximately 2,500 marching penitents. Smaller chapters were continuously crossing one another’s paths, performing the rituals in the same town squares, sleeping in the same town fields.
Why it ended badly
The Brethren’s theology was hostile to the institutional church. The Master of each chapter heard confessions; the ritual flogging was held to confer absolution; the priesthood — visibly unable to stop the plague — was depicted in Brethren sermons as corrupt and irrelevant. By midsummer 1349 the movement was being denounced by bishops across Germany. Reports reached Avignon, where Pope Clement VI sat in the papal palace fielding letters from his own remaining clergy.
The Brethren’s politics were also, by midsummer, increasingly violent. Many chapters had picked up — or contained from the outset — significant numbers of men interested less in penance than in opportunity. Brethren processions were repeatedly associated with anti-Jewish riots: a chapter arriving in a town would deliver a sermon blaming Jewish “well-poisoners” for the plague, and the local population, already inflamed by plague fear, would attack the local Jewish community. The pattern is well documented in Frankfurt, Mainz, Cologne, and most catastrophically in Strasbourg, where on Saint Valentine’s Day 1349 — before the Brethren reached the city, but in an atmosphere they had helped create — the Jewish community of approximately 2,000 was rounded up, marched to the cemetery, and burned alive.
Pope Clement VI issued his bull Inter Sollicitudines on 20 October 1349, condemning the Flagellants by name and ordering all bishops to suppress them. The bull called the Brethren a foolish new sect and forbade Christians to join or assist them. Local rulers, following the pope’s lead, began imprisoning and executing Brethren leaders. By the spring of 1350 the movement had been broken up across most of Europe; the surviving chapters either disbanded or went underground.
A small underground continued for several centuries. A flagellant heretic named Konrad Schmid, claiming to be the resurrected Frederick II, was captured and burned in Nordhausen in 1369. Sporadic Brethren chapters reappeared during plague outbreaks in 1399 and 1416. The last documented public flagellant procession in Europe was in northern Italy in the 1480s.
What it left
Three things survived the movement.
The first is a body of folk songs. The German-language hymns the Brethren sang in 1349, with their thumping repetitive rhythm and stark theology, were the first vernacular religious songs to circulate widely outside monastic walls in central Europe. Fragments of them entered the folk repertoire and influenced the development of Protestant German hymnody two centuries later. The opening line of Martin Luther’s Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott (A mighty fortress is our God), written in the 1520s, uses the same metrical pattern.
The second is a small set of pictorial records. Several illuminated chronicles of the period — the Chronicon Hugonis Reutlingensis, the chronicles of Heinrich of Herford — include miniature paintings of Brethren processions. The most detailed shows a column of about fifty men in profile, bare-backed, scourges raised, blood drawn in tiny red dots along their shoulders. The illustrator is unnamed.
The third is a small church in Sangerhausen, in eastern Germany, called the Geißlerkapelle — the Flagellants’ Chapel — built around 1360 by surviving members of a local chapter as a sanctioned alternative to public processions. The chapel still stands. It has been used continuously since its construction, most recently as a Lutheran parish chapel. The Lutheran congregation does not, as a rule, mention the building’s name.