The public flagellant movement of 1349 — the Brethren of the Cross who marched across plague-stricken Europe whipping themselves twice a day in organised public ceremonies — had been banned by Pope Clement VI in October 1349. The papal bull Inter sollicitudines threatened excommunication for any subsequent participants. The public movement collapsed across most of western Europe within six months of the ban. Its leaders were either reabsorbed into the institutional Catholic Church under penance, or driven into underground heretical movements.
One of the most consequential of the underground successor movements was the Thuringian flagellant heresy under Konrad Schmid, which operated in central Germany from approximately 1360 until at least 1369 and produced heresy trials, book-burnings, and the eventual execution of approximately 168 of its members by the Archdiocese of Mainz during the 1369 enforcement campaign.
Schmid’s doctrine
The reconstruction of Konrad Schmid’s actual teachings is difficult, because the primary documentary source for his movement is the inquisitorial proceedings of the 1369 enforcement campaign — hostile testimony recorded by educated clerical examiners who were uninterested in accurate doctrinal reconstruction. The reconstructed core teachings, by the standard 20th-century scholarly work of Norman Cohn:
Schmid claimed to be the reincarnation of the prophet Enoch — the Old Testament patriarch who, by Jewish-Christian tradition, had been taken up to heaven without dying and would return at the end of the world. Schmid’s claim of Enochic identity was the foundational doctrinal claim of his movement; his followers acknowledged him as the human-divine figure whose return would inaugurate the millennial kingdom.
The flagellation that the movement practiced was understood as the means by which Schmid’s followers could participate in the messianic mission. The 1349 public flagellants had treated their self-whipping as substitutionary penance for the sins of Christian society; Schmid’s post-1349 followers treated it as direct participation in the inauguration of the Last Days.
The Catholic Church was identified as the Whore of Babylon of the Book of Revelation. The pope, the bishops, the parish priests were identified as agents of Antichrist. The regular sacraments (baptism, the Eucharist, confession, marriage) were diabolical inventions designed to deceive the Christian faithful and prevent their salvation. The only true sacrament was the flagellant ceremony.
The world would end in 1369 — a date Schmid had predicted by some calculation that has not survived but that corresponded to several Catholic numerological traditions about significant millennial dates.
The followers
The documentary evidence about the size of the Schmid movement is limited. The standard reconstruction places the followers at approximately 300-500 in central Germany at peak around 1365, with concentration in Erfurt, Sangerhausen, Nordhausen, and Mühlhausen in Thuringia and the smaller towns of the Harz region. The social composition was mixed — craftsmen, small merchants, agricultural labourers, small numbers of minor clergy who had doctrinal disagreements with the institutional hierarchy.
The movement was clandestine. The 1349 papal ban had made public processions impossible. Schmid followers met in private homes, cellar rooms, and wooded clearings outside the towns; they conducted flagellant ceremonies in small groups; they identified each other through coded language and recognition signs.
The 1369 enforcement
The enforcement campaign against the Schmid movement was conducted by the Archbishopric of Mainz under Archbishop Gerlach von Nassau. The trigger was the denunciation of several Schmid followers by neighbours in Sangerhausen in late 1368; the subsequent inquisitorial proceedings produced confessions implicating additional members across the Thuringian region.
The Catholic chronicler Heinrich von Herford — the Dominican friar whose Liber de rebus memorabilibus (c. 1370) is the primary documentary source for the 1369 events — records details of the enforcement campaign. Approximately 168 Schmid followers were burned at the stake across the Thuringian dioceses during the 1369 enforcement period. The mass executions occurred at Erfurt (the archiepiscopal seat), Nordhausen, Mühlhausen, and Sangerhausen.
The fate of Konrad Schmid himself is uncertain. The standard reconstruction has him dying in the 1369 enforcement — either burned at Erfurt with the majority of his followers, or escaping to a subsequent fate the documentary record has not preserved. Heinrich von Herford’s account does not distinguish Schmid by name in the enforcement narrative, suggesting either that his death was taken for granted by readers or that he had escaped and the chronicler did not know it. The subsequent generation’s heresiological literature refers to Schmid as dead without specifying circumstances.
The movement did not entirely die with the 1369 enforcement. Secret flagellant communities continued in central Germany through the 15th century and were the subject of further inquisitorial enforcement under Pope Urban V in the 1370s and Pope Boniface IX in the 1390s. The last documented executions of Thuringian secret flagellants on heretical charges were in the 1480s — more than a century after Schmid’s death.
The wider context
The Schmid movement is the best-documented of approximately a dozen post-1349 secret flagellant movements that operated across central and northern Europe in the second half of the 14th century. Parallel movements were documented in Saxony (the Magdeburg flagellants of 1366), Bohemia (the Žatec flagellants of 1373), Holland and Flanders (the Brabantine flagellants of 1380), and smaller groups across northern Italy, southern France, and Bohemia.
The common pattern across these movements was millennial doctrine — the conviction that the Black Death had inaugurated the Last Days and that flagellation was necessary participation in the messianic mission; anti-institutional Catholic doctrine — the identification of the Catholic Church as a diabolical institution; and clandestine organisation — the response to the 1349 papal ban that had made public movements impossible.
The historical significance of the Schmid movement is the documentation it provides of the sustained late-medieval heretical-religious response to the Black Death. The institutional Catholic Church had survived the pandemic with its structure intact. The cultural-religious response of substantial portions of the surviving lay population was less institutionally orthodox, and the enforcement effort required to manage the post-Black Death heretical movements occupied the Catholic ecclesiastical authorities for the remainder of the 14th century.
The wider intellectual-religious tradition that the Schmid movement represents — the late-medieval European apocalyptic-millennialist underground — continued through the Wycliffite movements of the late 14th century, the Hussite revolt of the early 15th, the Anabaptist movements of the Reformation period, and the various Pietist and Anabaptist successor traditions that continued through the 17th and 18th centuries into early American religious history. The substrate of European popular apocalyptic-religious tradition that the Black Death had activated did not go away.