The events to which we are now about to allude, demonstrate, by their surprising course, that the fate of nations is at times far more dependent on the laws of physical life than on the will of potentates or the collective efforts of human action, and that these prove utterly impotent when opposed to the unfettered powers of nature. These powers, inscrutable in their dominion, destructive in their effects, stay the course of events, baffle the grandest plans, paralyse the boldest flights of the mind, and when victory seemed within their grasp, have often annihilated embattled hosts with the flaming sword of the angel of death.
To obliterate the disgrace of Pavia[145], Francis I. in league with England, Switzerland, Rome, Genoa and Venice against the too powerful Emperor of Germany, sent a fine army into Italy. The emperor’s troops gave way wherever the French plumes appeared, and victory seemed faithful only to the banners of France and to the military experience of a tried leader[146]. Every thing promised a glorious issue; Naples alone, weakly defended by German lansquenets and Spaniards[147], remained still to be vanquished. The siege was opened on the 1st of May, 1528, and the general confidently pledged his honour for the conquest of this strong city, which had once been so destructive to the French[148]. It was easy with an army of 30,000 veteran warriors[149] to overpower the imperialists; and a small body of English[150] seemed to have come merely to partake in the festivals after the expected victory. The city too suffered from a scarcity, for it was blockaded by Doria, with his Genoese galleys; and water, fit to drink, failed after Lautrec had turned off the aqueducts of Poggio reale; so that the plague, which had never entirely ceased among the Germans since the sacking of Rome[151], began to spread.
But amidst this confidence in the success of the French arms, the means for ensuring it were gradually neglected. The valour of the intrepid and prudent commander was doubtless equal to the minor vicissitudes of war, but whilst the length of the delay paralysed his activity, nature herself suddenly proved fatal to this hitherto victorious army: pestilences began to rage among the troops, and human courage could no longer withstand the “far-shooting arrows of the god of day.” The consequence was, that within the space of seven weeks, out of the whole host which up to that period had been eager for combat, a mere handful remained, consisting of a few thousands of cadaverous figures, who were almost incapable of bearing arms or of following the commands of their sick leaders. On the 29th of August the siege was raised, fifteen days after the heroic Lautrec, bowed down by chagrin and disease, had resigned his breath; the wreck of the army retreated amid thunder and heavy rain[152], and were soon captured by the imperialists, so that but few of them ever saw their native land again.
This siege brought still greater misery upon France than even the fatal battle of Pavia, for about 5000 of the French nobility, some from the most distinguished families, had perished under the walls of Naples; its remoter consequences too were humiliating to the king, and the people; since owing to its failure all those hitherto feasible schemes were blighted, which had for their object the establishment of French dominion beyond the Alps. It behoves us, therefore, to pay so much the more attention to those essential causes of this event, which fall within the province of medical research.
The mortality which occurred in the camp, began probably as early as June, after the usual calamities which surround an army in an enemy’s country. The French and Swiss were insatiable in their indulgence in fruit, which the gardens and fields furnished them in abundance, whilst there was a scarcity of bread and of other proper food[153]. Hence fevers soon broke out, which increased in malignity the longer they existed, accompanied no doubt by debilitating diarrhœas, which never fail to make their appearance under circumstances of this kind, and are in themselves among the most pernicious of camp diseases, since they not only destroy in the individual case by the exhaustion which they occasion, but likewise by infecting the air, prepare the way for the worst pestilences.
These diseases were, however, little noticed, and there was consequently no attempt made to diminish their causes. It became daily more and more apparent, that the cutting off of the sources near Poggio reale, which Lautrec had commanded, in order to compel the besieged to a more speedy surrender, was in the highest degree injurious to the besiegers themselves; for the water, having now no outlet, spread over the plain where the camp was situated, which it converted into a swamp, whence it rose, morning and evening, in the form of thick fogs. From this cause, and while a southerly wind continued to prevail, the sickness soon became general. Those soldiers, who were not already confined to bed in their tents, were seen with pallid visages, swelled legs, and bloated bellies, scarcely able to crawl; so that, weary of nightly watching, they were often plundered by the marauding Neapolitans. The great mortality did not commence until about the 15th of July, but so dreadful was its ravages, that about three weeks were sufficient to complete the almost entire destruction of the army[154]. Around and within the tents vacated by the death of their inmates, noxious weeds sprang up. Thousands perished without help, either in a state of stupor, or in the raving delirium of fever[155]. In the entrenchments, in the tents, and wherever death had overtaken his victims, there unburied corpses lay, and the dead that were interred, swollen with putridity, burst their shallow graves, and spread a poisonous stench far and wide over the camp. There was no longer any thought of order or military discipline, and many of the commanders and captains were either sick themselves, or had fled to the neighbouring towns, in order to avoid the contagion[156].
The glory of the French arms was departed, and her proud banners cowered beneath an unhallowed spectre. Meanwhile the pestilence broke out among the Venetian galleys under Pietro Lando. Doria had already gone over to the Emperor[157], and thus was this expedition, begun under the most favourable auspices, frustrated on every side by the malignant influence of the season.
No medical contemporary has described the nature of this violent disease, and historians have on this point preserved only general outlines, which do not afford sufficient materials to ground an investigation. Certain it is, that in the year 1528, a very malignant petechial fever extended throughout Italy, and in the proper sense of the word prevailed so decidedly, that it even followed the Italians abroad in the same way as the Sweating Sickness did the English, as is proved by the case of the learned Venetian Naugerio, who, being dispatched on an embassy to Francis the 1st, died at Blois on the Loire, of this very disease, with which the French had yet no acquaintance[158]. Contemporaries assure us, that this epidemic committed great ravages in the country, already distracted by wars and feuds, and it is therefore hardly to be doubted, that, occurring as it did in those same years, it was the disease of which we have been treating, the malignity of which was increased on extraordinary occasions. A pestilence which, just before the siege of Naples, destroyed one-third of the inhabitants of Cremona, was in all probability the petechial fever[159]. Yet, here and there, the old bubo plague made its appearance. This it was which in the year 1524 carried off 50,000 people in Milan[160], and this appears likewise to have been the disease which, after the sacking of Rome, broke out among the German lansquenets, and in a short time annihilated two-thirds of these troops. Contemporaries saw therein God’s just punishment of their desecration of the Holy See, for in the succeeding years, all the remaining participators in the storming of the eternal city, also met with an end worthy of their crimes[161]. They did not take into account, however, the beastly intemperance and excesses of the soldiery, whose eagerness after plunder led them to encounter the plague poison in the most secret holes and corners; nor did they reflect, that the plague penetrated the Castle of St. Angelo itself, and destroyed some of the courtiers almost under the eyes of the Pope[162]. Of these lansquenets, many went to Naples in the following year under the Prince of Orange, and it may with good ground be supposed, that they took with them to that city fresh germs of plague; to which may be added, the by no means incredible story, that the besieged sent infected and sick soldiers to the French, in order to cause poisonous pestilences to break out among them[163]. This very circumstance tells in favour of bubo plague, for the decided certainty of its contagious nature was known, and seemed beyond all comparison greater than the more conditional communicability of the new disease[164]. Moreover, the same attempt at impestation had been already often made in earlier times.
It is, however, also to be considered, on the other side, that the French army was more exposed to the epidemic influence of the air, the water, and the general powers of nature, than any other assemblage of men, and, that this influence was probably more powerful in the year 1529, than at any other time during the sixteenth century. The formation of fog in the heat of summer is at all times an extraordinary phenomenon[165], which decidedly indicates a disproportion in the mutual action of the components and powers of the lower strata of the atmosphere. This was not dependent merely on the local peculiarities of Naples, for during the summer of 1528, grey fogs were observed throughout Italy, which rendered the unwholesome quality of the air visible to the eye[166]. This was increased by the prevalence of southerly winds, which are always, in Italy, prejudicial to health, as also by the thousand privations of a camp, so that a disease which was already prevalent all over Italy,—we allude to the petechial fever,—might well break out on the damp soil of Poggio reale. In the history of national diseases, we find a moral proof of the predominance of epidemic influence which plainly and intelligibly manifests itself under the greatest variety of circumstances. This is a belief, that the water, and even the air is poisoned[167]. Nor is this proof wanting in the deplorable history of the French army before Naples, for it was generally believed, that some Spaniards of Moorish descent, to whom was attributed an especial degree of skill in the management of poison, and some Jews from Germany, who, for the sake of gain, had followed the lansquenets to truckle for their booty, had stolen out of the city under cover of the night, in order to poison the water in the neighbourhood of the camp[168]. It was also surmised, that an Italian apothecary had administered to the French knights poison in their medicine[169]. We will not anticipate on this occasion the researches of naturalists, whose experiments on air and water, during important epidemics, have not yet led to any results; it is, however, not improbable that pond and spring water, under such circumstances as are here described to have occurred, might become impregnated with a noxious quality not inherent in it, which would very naturally give rise to the belief that a poison had been thrown into it. On the whole, this accusation may certainly be judged according to the same views which have been stated in our treatise on the Black Death.
From all these circumstances, the notion is highly probable that it was the petechial fever which raged in the French camp; and if we may attach any importance to the incidental accounts of historians, it may perhaps be to the purpose to state that Prudencio de Sandoval, who has written from authentic materials, calls the disease “las bubas.”[170] This name, it is true, presupposes a rather strange confusion of petechial fever with lues; and, indeed, the diseases among the French troops from 1495 to 1528, have been oddly jumbled together by Sandoval. It shews, however, that there still existed a recollection of the prevalent eruptions which occurred in the pestilence of 1528; and, therefore, this whole account might perhaps be the more justly applied to petechial fever, as this same historian states, that the French called the disease after the village of Poggio reale “les Poches,”[171] by which name the well known bubo plague would hardly have been designated. If, however, we choose to suppose that at one and the same time different diseases prevailed in the French army, this notion is not only supported by the express testimony of a contemporary[172], but also by many observations ancient and modern[173], that have been made in cases where the circumstances have been similar to those which then prevailed. It is ever to be regretted that there was no intelligent Machaon to be found in the camp before Naples; such a one would undoubtedly have left us some pithy observations on the combination and affinity of petechial fever and bubo plague.
Deeply as the irreparable loss of such an army was felt by the French, yet were they destined to suffer still greater misfortunes at home. The dark power which threatened all Europe regarded neither distance nor limits. It seized on the French nation in their own country whilst their military youth were destroyed before Naples. The cold spring and wet summer of 1528 destroyed the growing corn[174], and a famine was thus produced throughout France, even more grievous, on account of its duration, than the period of scarcity in the time of Louis the XIth[175], for the failure of the harvest continued for five years in succession, during which all order of the seasons seemed to have ceased. A damp summer heat prevailed in autumn and winter, a frost of a single day only occasionally intervening. The summer, on the other hand, was cloudy, damp, and ungenial. The length of the days alone distinguished one month from another. It appears plainly from detached accounts how much the usual course of vegetation was disturbed. Scarcely had the fruit trees shed their leaves in the autumn when they began to bud again, and to bear fruitless blossoms. No returns rewarded the toil of the husbandman, and the longed-for harvest again and again deceived the hopes of the people. Thus, even during the first of these calamitous years, the distress became general, and the increasing indigence was no longer to be checked by human aid. Bands of beggars wandered over the country in lamentable procession. The bonds of civil order became more and more relaxed, and people soon had to fear not only robbery and plunder on the part of these unfortunate beings, but the contagion of a pestilence, the offspring of their distress, which followed in their train.
This disease was a new production of the French soil, and when it spread generally throughout the country, was the more sensibly felt, as it especially carried off young and robust men; on which account it was designated by the very significant name of Trousse-Galant[176]. It consisted of a highly inflammatory fever, which destroyed its victims in a very short time, even within the space of a few hours; or, if they escaped with their lives, deprived them of their hair and nails, and from a long-continued disinclination for all animal food, left behind it, as sequelæ, a protracted debility and diseases which endangered the recovery of the sick, whose constitutions were already so much shaken. Hence it appears that this fever was combined with a great decomposition of the fluids, and a very morbid condition of the functions of the bowels, not to mention the effects produced by continued hunger, which contemporaries paint in the most dreadful colours.
The stock of provisions was already so far consumed in the first year that people made bread of acorns, and sought with avidity all kinds of harmless roots, merely to appease hunger. These miserable sufferers wandered about, houseless and more like corpses than living beings, and finally, failing even to excite commiseration, perished on dunghills or in out-houses. The larger towns shut their gates against them, and the various charitable institutions proved, of necessity, insufficient to afford relief in this frightful extremity! It was the lot of very few to obtain the tender care and attendance of the Sisters of Charity. In most of those affected their livid swollen countenances, and the dropsical swelling of their limbs, betrayed the sickly condition in which they dragged on their languishing existence. Every one fled from these pestiferous spectres, for they were saturated with the poison of this deadly disease, and the remark was no doubt made a thousand times over, that this poison might be conveyed to persons in health without affecting the carrier, since want and ill health occasionally afford a miserable protection against disease of this kind[177].
The necessary data for furnishing a complete account of the Trousse-galant of 1528 do not exist, for physicians passed over this epidemic with the same coolness and indifference which unfortunately they may be justly accused of having shewn with respect to other important phenomena. But it returned once again in 1545–46, appearing in Savoy and over a great part of France; and we possess from Paré[178], and from Sander, a Flemish physician[179], though still a defective, yet a more satisfactory description of its symptoms on this occasion. Its course was, as before, very rapid, so that it destroyed the patient in two or three days; again it attacked the strong rather than the weak, as if in justification of its old name, and those who recovered remained for a long time distinguishable by the loss of their hair and their wretched appearance. Patients felt at the commencement an insufferable weight in the body, with extremely violent headache, which soon deprived them of all consciousness and passed into a profound stupor, even the sphincter muscles losing their power. In other cases a continued state of sleeplessness was followed by feverish delirium, so violent that it was necessary to have recourse to means of restraint. Such opposite states are usual in all typhous fevers. Sander expressly mentions that in most of those affected, eruptions made their appearance. He does not, however, state their nature or describe the course and crisis of the disease otherwise than that it terminated about the fourth or the eleventh day. Even the eruptions that did appear, which were probably petechiæ, and perhaps also (rother friesel) red miliary vesicles, came at an indefinite period; either at the commencement, when they afforded an unfavourable prognosis, or later, when they betokened a favourable crisis. Thread-worms, in great numbers, were evacuated alive under great torment, and generally increased the sufferings of the patient. The disease was scarcely less contagious than plague, and with respect to its treatment, bleeding, copious and even ad deliquium, was decidedly successful, which coupled with the attacks on the head just described[180], leads to the conclusion that there existed a fulness of blood and an inflammatory state of circulation, together, perhaps, with inflammation of the brain. We must not omit to observe that, during the pestilence of 1546, the bubo plague made its appearance here and there, especially in the Netherlands[181]; and in the following year, broke out and spread to a greater extent in France[182], whence it seems to follow, with respect to the malady of which we are now treating, that its nature resembled the petechial fever, since that disease usually precedes the occurrence of pestilences[183].
The assertion of historians, that in 1528, and the following years, France lost a fourth part of her inhabitants by famine and pestilence, seems, according to our representation, not to be by any means exaggerated. The consequences, as regarded the future destinies of that country, were likewise very important. For Francis the 1st saw that no new sacrifices could be borne by his people, who were already so sorely afflicted; and therefore abandoned his schemes of greatness and foreign power, consenting, on the 5th of August, 1529, to the disadvantageous treaty of Cambray.
Whoever, following the above facts, will represent to himself the state of Europe in 1528, will readily believe, that a poisonous atmosphere enveloped this quarter of the globe, and continually brought destruction and death over its nations. Ruin broke in upon them in a thousand forms, destroying their bodies and benighting their minds, and if to this we add the discord and the deadly party hatred which at that time prevailed in the world, it seems as if every circumstance that could affect mankind was implicated in this gigantic conflict, which threatened in its fatal result to annihilate all traces of the times that were past.
A heavier affliction than has yet been described was in store for England: for in the latter end of May, the Sweating Fever broke out there in the midst of the most populous part of the capital, spreading rapidly over the whole kingdom; and fourteen months later, brought a scene of horror upon all the nations of northern Europe, scarcely equalled during any other epidemic. It appeared at once with the same intensity as it had shewn eleven years before, was ushered in by no previous indications, and between health and death there lay but a brief term of five or six hours. Public business was postponed: the courts were closed, and four weeks after the pestilence broke out, the festival of St. John[184] was stopped, to the great sorrow of the people, who certainly would not have dispensed with its celebration had they recovered from the consternation arising from the great mortality. The king’s court was again deserted, and to the various passions and mental emotions which had been clashing there since the year 1517, as, for instance, those arising from the theological zeal which had been excited by Henry VIIIth’s defence of the faith, was added once more the old alarm and distress, which seemed to be justified by the death of some favoured courtiers; particularly of two chamberlains[185], and of Sir Francis Poynes, who had just returned from an embassy to Spain. The king left London immediately, and endeavoured to avoid the epidemic by continually travelling, until at last he grew tired of so unsettled a life, and determined to await his destiny at Tytynhangar. Here, with his first wife and a few confidents, he resided quietly, apart from the world, surrounded by fires for the purification of the air, and guarded by the precautions of his physician, who had the satisfaction to find that the pestilence kept aloof from this lonely residence[186].
How many lives were lost in this, which some historians have called the great mortality, can be estimated only by the facts which have been stated, and which betoken an uncommonly violent degree of agitation in men’s minds. Accurate data are altogether wanting, yet it is quite evident that the whole English nation, from the monarch to the meanest peasant, was impressed with a feeling of alarm at the uncertainty of life, to which neither the rude state of society, nor a constant familiarity with the effects of laws written in blood[187], had blunted their sensibility. Such a state does not exist without very numerous cases of mortality which bring the danger home to every individual, so that it is to be presumed that the churchyards were everywhere abundantly filled. Nor did this destructive epidemic come alone. Provisions were scarce and dear, and whilst hundreds of thousands lay stretched upon the bed of death, many perished with hunger[188], and the same scenes would have been experienced as in France, had not the corn trade afforded some relief[189].
As soon as the occurrences of this unfortunate year could be more closely surveyed, a conviction was at once felt, that it was one and the same general cause of disease which called forth the poisonous pestilence in the French camp before Naples, the putrid fever among the youth in France, and the sweating sickness in England, and that the varying nature of these diseases depended only on the conditions of the soil and the qualities of the atmosphere in the countries which were visited[190]. If, in opposition to these notions, a narrow view of human life in the aggregate should raise a doubt, this would be strikingly refuted by the wonderful coincidence, in point of time, of all these phenomena, occurring in such various parts of Europe; for while the French army, after an exposure of four weeks to the miseries and poisonous vapours of its camp before Naples, perceived the first forebodings of its destruction, the great famine with the Trousse-galant in its train was in full advance on the other side the Alps, and almost on the same day the Sweating Sickness broke out upon the Thames.
The chronicles of all the nations of Europe are full of remarkable notices respecting the commotions of nature in these particular years, which were so utterly hostile to the animal and vegetable kingdoms. In England the period of distress was already approaching; towards the end of the year 1527. Throughout the whole winter, (November and December, 1527, and January, 1528,) heavy rains deluged the country, the rivers overflowed their banks, and the winter seed was thus rotted. The weather then remained dry until April; but scarcely was the summer seed sown, when the rain again set in, and continued day and night for full eight weeks, so that the last hope of a harvest was now destroyed[191], and the soaked earth, in the thick mists that arose from its surface, hatched the well known demon of the Sweating Disease. It was now of no avail that the torrents of rain ceased, for the softened soil gave the pestilence constant nourishment, and the damp warmth which, alternating with unseasonable cold, remained prevalent during the following years all over Europe, rendered men’s bodies more and more susceptible to severe diseases.
The historians of that time were too much occupied with the intricate affairs of the court and of the church to devote any attention to nature, and on this account they have left us no satisfactory information of the state of the weather and the course of the seasons of those years in England, yet there is no reason to suppose that they were essentially different from those of the rest of Europe. This may be proved by the following collection of important natural occurrences, when taken in conjunction with the circumstances already stated respecting France and Italy.
In Upper Italy such considerable floods occurred in all the river districts, in the year 1527, that the astrologers announced a new Deluge. There was a repetition of them to an equal extent, and with equal damage, in the following year, so that it may have been concluded, not without some ground, that there was an accumulation of snow on the highest mountain ranges of Europe. On the 3rd of July, 1529, there followed a violent earthquake in Upper Italy, and immediately afterwards a blood-rain, as it was called, in Cremona[192].
In October, 1530, the Tiber rose so much above its banks that in Rome and its neighbourhood about 12,000 people were drowned. A month later, in the Netherlands, the sea broke through the dykes, and Holland, Zealand, and Brabant suffered very considerably from the overflow of the waters, which again took place two years afterwards[193].
In 1528 there appeared in the March of Brandenburg, during the prevalence of a south-east wind and a great drought[194], (the rains did not commence in Germany before 1529,) swarms of locusts[195], as if this prognostic too of great epidemics was not to be wanting. Of fiery meteors, which also frequently appeared in the following years, and in the aggregate plainly indicated an unusual condition of the atmosphere, much notice, after the manner of the times, is occasionally taken[196]. Particular attention was excited by a long fiery train which was seen on the 7th of January, 1529, at seven o’clock in the morning, throughout Mecklenburg and Pomerania[197]. Another fiery sign (chasma) was seen in the March on the 9th of January, at ten o’clock at night[198], as likewise similar atmospherical phenomena in other localities.
Comets appeared in the course of this year in unusual number[199]. The first on the 11th of August, 1527, before daybreak; it was seen throughout Europe, and it has often been confounded by more recent writers with an atmospherical phenomenon resembling a comet which appeared on the 11th of October[200]. The second was seen in July and August, 1529, in Germany, France, and Italy. Four other comets are also said to have made their appearance this year at the same time; but it is probable that these were only fiery meteors of an unknown kind[201]. The third was in 1531, and was visible in Europe from the 1st of August till the 3rd of September. This was the great comet of Halley, which returned in the year 1835[202]. The fourth was in 1532, visible from the 2nd of October to the 8th of November; it appeared again in 1661[203]. Lastly, the fifth, in 1533, seen from the middle of June till August[204].
Contemporaries agree remarkably in their accounts of the insufferable state of the weather in the eventful year 1529. The winter was particularly mild, and the vegetation was far too early, so that all the world was rejoicing at the mildness and beauty of the spring. The people wore violets, at Erfurt, on St. Matthew’s day, (the 24th of February,) little expecting that this friendly omen was to precede so severe a calamity[205]. Throughout the spring and summer wet weather continued to prevail. Constant torrents of rain overflowed the fields, the rivers passed their banks; all hopes of the cultivation were entirely frustrated[206], and misery and famine spread in all directions. A heavy rain of four days’ continuance, which took place in the south of Germany in the middle of June, and was called the St. Vitus’s Torrent, is still remembered in modern times as an unheard-of event. Whole districts of country were completely laid under water, and many persons perished who had not time to save their lives[207]. A similar, very widely extended, and perhaps universal, storm again occurred on the 10th of August, and occasioned great floods, especially in Thuringia and Saxony[208]. Upon the whole, the sun rarely broke through the heavy dark clouds. The latter part of the summer and the whole of the autumn, with the exception of a series of hot days which commenced the 24th of August[209], remained gloomy, cold, and wet. People fancied they were breathing the foggy air of Britain[210].
We ought not to omit here to notice that in the north of Germany, and especially in the March of Brandenburg, eating fish, which were caught in great abundance, was generally esteemed detrimental. Malignant and contagious diseases were said to have been traced to this cause, and it was a matter of surprise that the only food which nature bounteously bestowed was so decidedly injurious[211]. It might be difficult now to discover the cause of this phenomenon, of which we possess only isolated notices, yet, passing over all other conjectures, it is quite credible either that an actual fish poison was developed[212], or, if this notion be rejected, that a disordered condition of life, such as must be supposed to have existed in a great famine, rendered fish prejudicial to health, in the same way as sometimes occurs after protracted intermittent fevers, when the functions of the bowels are disturbed in a manner peculiar to this disease.
But it was not the inhabitants of the water alone which were affected by hidden causes of excitement in collective organic life; the fowls of the air likewise sickened, who, in their delicate and irritable organs of respiration, feel the injurious influence of the atmosphere much earlier and more sensitively than any of the unfeathered tribes, and have often been the harbingers of great danger, ere man was aware of its approach. In the neighbourhood of Freyburg in the Breisgau, dead birds were found scattered under the trees, with boils as large as peas under their wings, which indicated among them a disease, that in all probability extended far beyond the southern districts of the Rhine[213].
The famine in Germany, during this year, is described by respectable authorities in a tone of deep sympathy. Swabia, Lorraine, Alsace, and the other southern countries bordering on the Rhine, were especially visited, so that misery there reached the same frightful height as in France. The poor emigrated and roved over the country, solely to prolong their wretched existence. Above a thousand of these half-starved mendicants came to Strasburg out of Swabia. They obtained shelter in a monastery, and attempts were made to revive them, yet many were unable to bear the food that was placed before them. Attention and nourishment did but hasten their death. Another body of more than eight hundred came in the autumn from Lorraine. These unfortunate people were kept in the city, and fed during the whole winter[214], yet it is easy to conceive that this benevolence, which was no doubt likewise exercised in other cities[215]—for when was humanity ever found wanting in Germany?—could only occasionally alleviate this deeply rooted calamity. In the Venetian territories, many hundreds are said to have perished with hunger, and a like distress probably prevailed all over Upper Italy.
In the north of Germany, including the extensive sandy plains, on which wet weather is not so injurious in its effect as on a heavy clayey soil, the state of the country was upon the whole more tolerable[216]; yet, independently of the innumerable evils to which a scarcity gives rise, suicide was more frequent[217], which was certainly a rarity in the sixteenth century, and only explicable by supposing, that the powers of the mind became exhausted by the many and various passions, which in every individual locality, excited a spirit of hatred and party feeling. The consequence of such a state of turmoil is a cold disgust of life, which finds, in the first adverse event that may occur, a pretext for self-destruction, that want alone would seldom if ever occasion: for man, if his spirit be unbroken, runs the chance of starvation in times of famine, and trusts to the faintest gleam of hope, rather than, of his own accord, abandon the enjoyment of life.
It is no less in point here to notice a kind of faint lassitude, which, to the great astonishment of the people, was felt, especially in Pomerania, in June and July[218], up to the very period when the Sweating Sickness broke out. In the midst of their work, and without any conceivable cause, people became palsied in their hands and feet, so that even if their lives had depended upon it, they were incapable of the slightest exertion[219]. The treatment which was found successful, was to cover the patients warmly, and to supply them with nourishing food, of which they ate plentifully, and thus recovered again, in three or four days. Phenomena of this kind, which in the present instance evidently depended on atmospherical influence, are but the extreme gradations of a generally morbid dullness of vital feeling, which might easily pass into an actual disgust of life, such as would lead to suicide.
The following years were by no means all marked by a complete failure in produce. The year 1530 was, on the contrary, plentiful, there being only some partial failures, as, for example, that which arose from a great flood in the district of the Saal, which occurred in the midst of the harvest time[220]. A very cold spring and a wet cold summer followed in 1531, with only occasional fine days; yet the ground was not altogether unproductive, and the great distress which would otherwise have been felt in Thuringia and Saxony, was checked by the establishment of granaries, so that the people were not obliged, as they often were in Swabia, to mow the green corn that they might dry the ears in ovens, and support life upon the yet unripe grain.
The years 1532 and 1533, were again very sterile, as also 1534, in consequence of the great heat and dryness of the summer. Finally, in the year 1535, the regular change of the seasons, and with it a prosperous state of cultivation, seemed to be restored, and the scarcity ceased[221]. The reports from different localities in Germany vary much, but the scarcity prevailed for full seven years[222], (from 1528 to 1534,) and since its causes were not discoverable, because it was only seen by each observer in his own narrow circle, the old German adage was often called to mind: “If there is to be a scarcity, it is of no avail even should all the mountains be made of flour.”[223]
These facts are sufficient for a preliminary sketch of the background on which moved the spectre of England, to which we now return. How long the sweating sickness may have raged there after Henry the VIIIth quitted his secluded place of refuge in order to return to his capital, no one has left any written account to show. That it spread very rapidly over the whole kingdom is decidedly to be presumed, and might probably still be easily ascertainable from the written records of different places. The notion that it did not rage violently in any town more than a few weeks, is justified by corresponding phenomena of more recent occurrence, yet no doubt it continued to exist among the people, though in a mitigated degree, till the mild winter season. But there are not even the slightest data by which it can be made out that it was still in England during the summer of 1529. As an epidemic it certainly existed no longer, yet on a consideration of the state of the air in that year, it is not to be denied that isolated cases of Sweating Fever may have appeared; for in pestilences of this kind, provided their original causes continue, there always occur some straggling cases[224]. The Sweating Sickness did not advance westward to Ireland, nor did it pass the Scottish border; the historians, who would certainly have recorded so calamitous an event, are entirely silent respecting such an occurrence. The tragedy was, however, destined to be enacted elsewhere; other nations were to play their part in it.
Hamburgh was the first place on the continent in which the Sweating Sickness broke out. Men’s minds were still in great excitement there in consequence of the events of the few preceding months. The Protestants had, after long and stormy contests, at length vanquished the Papists. Under the wise direction of Bugenhagen the great work of Reformation was just completed. The monasteries were abolished, the monks dismissed, schools were established, and peace again returned with the enjoyment of ecclesiastical freedom. Just at this moment[225] the dreaded pestilence, of which wonderful accounts had been so long and so often heard, unexpectedly made its appearance. It immediately excited, as it had ever done in England, general dismay, and before any instructions as to its treatment could be obtained, either from the English or from Germans who had been in England, it destroyed daily from forty to sixty, and altogether, within the space of twenty-two days[226], about 1100 inhabitants, for such was the number of coffins which were at this time manufactured by the undertakers. The duration of the great mortality, for thus we would designate the more violent raging of this pestilence, was, however, much shorter, and may be roughly estimated at about nine days, for from the fragment of a letter received from Hamburgh, which was dispatched to Wittenberg on the 8th of August, by a person who was at that time burgomaster, it appears that, for some days past, no one had died of the Sweating Fever, excepting one or two drunkards, and that the citizens were then beginning to take breath again. We may thus judge, from the unauthenticated account here mentioned, that the disease lasted about a fortnight longer, and that the loss of lives amounted to 2000. At all events, however, the pestilence manifested itself on the continent with the same malignity which was peculiar to it from the first, and if the assertion made at a distance respecting the mortality in Hamburgh, were overcharged[227], yet there certainly existed sufficient foundation for exaggerations of this sort, which are never wanting in times of such great danger. The historians of this, even at that time, powerful and civilized commercial town, have on the whole said but little regarding this important event—a circumstance easily explicable from the constant occupation of men’s minds in religious affairs, and from the well known short visitation of the epidemic, which, like a transient meteor, needed quick and cautious observation if any valuable information respecting the occurrence was to be transmitted to posterity. Some particulars of its first origin have, however, been preserved amid a mass of general assertions which convey no information. Thus it appears that the Sweating Sickness did not show itself in the town until a Captain Hermann Evers, just about the time mentioned, (the 25th of July,) returned from England, bringing on board with him a number of young people, (probably travellers as well as sailors,) of whom at least twelve died of this disease within two days[228]. According to another account, those who died were not taken ill in England, but on the voyage, and the pestilence broke out after the rest of the crew had disembarked. On this point we have further a most respectable testimony to the fact, that in the night after the landing of Hermann Evers, four men died in Hamburgh of the Sweating Sickness[229].
If we examine a little more closely these very valuable accounts, the credibility of which there is no reason to doubt, it must especially be taken into account, that at this time the Sweating Sickness had ceased to exist as an epidemic in England for at least half a year, that its appearance in single cases, although not contradictory to general views, is nevertheless by no means borne out by proof from historical evidence, and that thus it is a gratuitous and unsupported assumption that the return of Hermann Evers’ crew was connected with any Sweating Sickness at all in England. If we consider, on the other hand, that the North Sea, even in ordinary years, is very foggy, so that, owing to the prevalence of north-west winds, it precipitates very heavy rain clouds over Germany; and if we bear in mind, that in the year 1529 it produced far heavier fogs than usual, we shall perceive in its waters the principal cause why the English Sweating Sickness was then developed in its greatest violence, and we may thence assume, with a greater degree of probability, that this pestilence broke out among the crew of Hermann Evers spontaneously, and without any connexion with England, in the same way, perhaps, as it did formerly on board Henry the VIIth’s fleet. This supposition is strengthened by the circumstance that the ships of those times were excessively filthy, and the kind of life spent on board them was, independently of the wretched provision, uncomfortable in the highest degree, nay, almost insupportable, so that even in short voyages, the scurvy, which was the dread of sailors in those days, was of very common occurrence. Finally, we still possess the most distinct accounts, that unusual occurrences took place in the North Seas. Thus during Lent it was observed with astonishment at Stettin, that porpoises came in numbers up the frische Haff as far as the bridge, and that the Baltic cast on its shores many dead animals of this kind[230], so that we are fully justified in concluding that there existed at that time a more intense development than usual of morbific influences in the marine atmosphere.
With respect, however, to the influence which the companions of Hermann Evers, impregnated as they were with the odour of the Sweating Sickness, had on the inhabitants of Hamburgh, it cannot be denied, that their intercourse with those inhabitants, in the filthy and narrow lanes of that commercial city, may have given an impulse to the eruption of the pestilence, so far as to make the already existing fuel more inflammable, or to furnish the first sparks for its ignition: yet it is equally undeniable that, under the existing circumstances, the epidemic Sweating Sickness would have broken out in Germany even without the presence of Captain Evers, although it might, perhaps, have been some weeks later, and not have made its first appearance in Hamburgh, whose inhabitants, owing to the constant prevalence of the North Sea fog, were, to all appearance, already prepared for the first reception of this fatal disease.
To determine to a day when epidemics which have been long in preparation have broken out, is, even for an observer who is present, exceedingly difficult, nay, sometimes, under the most favourable circumstances, impossible; for there occur in these visitations, certain transitions into the epidemic form, of diseases which are allied to it, as well as a gradual conversion into it of morbid phenomena, which have usually begun some time before. Unless we are greatly mistaken, such was the case in the pestilence of which we are now treating; although it must be confessed, that we can obtain no precise information on this point from the physicians of those times. The following statements, for the absolute precision of which we cannot pledge ourselves after a lapse of 300 years, must therefore be judged according to this general experience; and though singly they may prove little, yet taken altogether, they are capable of demonstrating the peculiar and almost wonderful manner in which the Sweating Fever spread over Germany.
In Lübeck, the next city in the Baltic, the Sweating Sickness appeared about the same time; for so early as the Friday before St. Peter in vinculis (30th of July), it was known, that on the preceding night a woman had died of it[231]. On the following days cases of death fearfully increased, and the disorder soon raged so violently, that people were again reminded of the Black Death of 1349. The inhabitants died without number, as well in the city as in the environs, and the consternation was equal to that felt in Hamburgh[232]. In general, as was everywhere the case, robust young people of the better classes were affected, while, on the other hand, children and poor people living in cellars and garrets almost all of them escaped[233].
Now one might, either on the supposition of a progressive alteration in the atmosphere, such as occurs in the influenza, or on that of a communication of the disease from man to man, which, however, cannot be considered as a principal cause of this epidemic, have expected a gradual extension of the Sweating Sickness from Hamburgh and Lübeck to the surrounding country. This did not, however, in fact, take place; for the disease next broke out at Twickau, at the foot of the Erzgebirge, distant from Hamburgh fifty German miles, and without having previously visited the rich commercial city of Leipzig. By the 14th of August, nineteen persons who had died of it, were buried at Twickau; and on one of the following nights above a hundred[234] sickened, whence it is to be deduced that the pestilence was severe at that place.
Possibly the great storm on the 10th of August may have given an impulse to the development of this very remarkable epidemic; for an highly electrical state of the atmosphere increases the susceptibility for diseases. It is likewise not to be overlooked, that on the 24th of August, while the sky was overcast, there came on an insufferable heat[235], which must have debilitated the body after such long-continued cold wet weather. At all events, in the beginning of September, we find that the Sweating Fever broke out at the same time at Stettin, Dantzig, and other Prussian cities; at Augsburg, far to the south on the other side of the Danube, at Cologne on the Rhine, at Strasbourg, at Frankfort on the Maine, at Marburg[236], at Göttingen, and at Hanover[237]. The position of these cities gives an impressive notion of the extent of country of which the English Sweating Sickness took possession, as it were by a magic stroke. It was like a violent conflagration, which spread in all directions; the flames, however, did not issue from one focus, but rose up everywhere, as if self-ignited; and whilst all this occurred in Germany and Prussia, the inhabitants of the other northern countries, Denmark, Norway and Sweden, perhaps also Lithuania, Poland and Russia, were likewise visited by this violent disease.
The malady appeared in Stettin on the 31st of August, among the servants of the Duke[238]. On the 1st of September, the Duchess herself sickened, in common with many people about the court, and burgesses in the city. A few days afterwards several thousands were affected by the disease, so that there was not a street from which some corpses were not daily carried out. This dreadful period of terror, however, did not last much longer than a week, for about the 8th of September the pestilence abated in its violence, so as no longer to be regarded with terror; and after this time only a few isolated cases occurred[239].
On the same day, namely, the 1st of September, the disease appeared in Dantzig, fifty German miles further to the eastward, and was here also so destructive, that it carried off in a short time 3000 inhabitants[240], some say even 6000—but this seems certainly too high an estimate for Dantzig, and probably includes the greater part of Prussia. If we were to give credence to an anonymous reporter[241], this plague abated in five days, and relieved the inhabitants from the mortal anxiety which, until they recovered their senses, led them everywhere to commit acts of injustice and injury to avert the danger.
In Augsburg we find the Sweating Sickness on the 6th of September. It lasted there also only six days, affected about 1500 of the inhabitants, and destroyed more than half that number, or, as it is said, about 800[242].
At Cologne it appeared precisely at the same time, as we learn from the expressions of the Count von Newenar, a prelate of that place, who finished his account of this disorder on the 7th of September[243]. At Strasburg it broke out some ten or twelve days earlier, namely, on the 24th of August. In this place about 3000 people sickened in one week, but very few of them died[244]. At Frankfort on the Maine they were holding the autumn fair (which began on the 7th of September) just at the time when the Sweating Sickness prevailed[245], whence arose the opinion, which has been broached again in more modern times[246], that the traders on their return carried the disease thence throughout the whole of Germany, and that in the intercourse by means of this fair, the main cause of the spread of the epidemic was to be found. After the facts which have been brought forward, such a narrow view needs no refutation. The Sweating Sickness was fleeter than the conveyances of goods and people, which at that time made their way along the pathless and unbeaten roads; for “no sooner did a rumour of the approach of the disease reach anyplace than the disease itself accompanied it.”[247]
Between the boundaries which have been indicated, only a few isolated towns and villages escaped, and there are probably few of the chronicles of that age, so prolific of great events, in which the dreadful scourge of the year 1529 is not expressly mentioned; yet the sweating fever, like other great epidemics, spread, doubtless, very unequally, and it is ascertained that the further south it extended, the milder it was upon the whole; and also that all those places where it broke out late suffered beyond comparison less than those which were visited early in September and in the latter part of August; for not to lay much stress on the sultry heat from the 24th of August, which probably did not last long, the chief cause of its great malignity at first was the violent method resorted to in the treatment of the sick, the inapplicability of which was fortunately soon perceived. Only one citizen was affected with the Sweating Sickness in Marburg, and even he recovered[248], whilst at Leipzig, the pestilence either never broke out at all, or very much later, perhaps in October or November; for the physicians of that place gave it clearly to be understood in their pamphlets, that they knew nothing of the disease from their own observations[249], and no sooner did the report get abroad that the dreaded enemy had not penetrated within the walls of this commercial city, than crowds of fugitives came thither from far and near in order to seek protection and security, although the place in itself was by no means fitted for a place of refuge, for the swampy atmosphere which rose from the city ditches begot, even in those days, in the narrow and dark streets, many lingering diseases[250].
It is remarkable that the Netherlands were visited by the Sweating Fever[251] full four weeks later, although the commercial intercourse with England, if we were to attach any especial importance to this circumstance, was far more considerable than that of the German cities in the North Sea. It appeared for the first time in Amsterdam on the 27th of September in the forenoon, whilst the city was enveloped in a thick fog[252], and just at the same time, perhaps a day earlier, in Antwerp, where, on the 29th of September, they made a solemn procession in order by prayer to avert greater harm from the city; for in the last days of September 400 to 500 people died of the English Sweating Sickness at that place[253]. It might have been supposed that the damp soil of Holland, and its impenetrable fogs, would invite the pestilence much earlier than the high and serene country between the Alps and the Danube, or the far distant land of Prussia, but the development of epidemics follows no human calculation or medical views! In the towns around Amsterdam the Sweating Fever appears not to have broken out until the mortality had ceased in that city, that is to say, five days after the 27th of September, so that we cannot be far wrong in assuming that in the latter end of that month, and the commencement of October, it had spread over the whole territory of the Netherlands including Belgium[254]. Alkmaar and Waterland remained free[255], as doubtless had been the case with particular places both in England and Germany.
The exceedingly short time that the Sweating Sickness lasted in the different places that it visited, was as astonishing as its original appearance. For since it raged in Amsterdam for only five days, and not much longer, as we have shewn, in Antwerp and many German towns, it could hardly have continued more than fifteen days in any other places; thus displaying the same peculiarity on this occasion by which it had already been marked in its former visitations. This short period, however, must not be understood to include the sporadic occurrence of the disease, otherwise, as a contemporary of credit assures us, that the sweating fever attacked some persons twice and others three or even four times[256], we might thence conclude, that, although perhaps in some places the pestilence did, after raging for a certain number of days, suddenly cease, so that no isolated cases afterwards occurred, yet that the general duration of its prevalence was longer than has been stated.
The eruption of the Sweating Fever in Denmark[257], took place at the latter end of September, for on the 29th of that month, four hundred of the inhabitants died of it at Copenhagen[258]. Elsinore was likewise severely visited[259], and probably, about the same time, most of the towns and villages in that kingdom. But the accounts on this subject in the Danish Chronicles are extremely defective[260], as owing to the extraordinary rapidity of this mortal malady, contemporary writers neglected to record, for the information of posterity, the details of a phenomenon, which there, as in other countries, must certainly have been striking from its general prevalence. Even from the imperfect notices that were given respecting it, thus much, however, is clearly perceptible, that it was the same well-known disease as elsewhere, which was now observed to pass through Denmark. In proof of this, it was principally young and strong people, as had been originally the case in England, who sickened, the old and infirm being less affected, and in the course of four and twenty hours, or at most, within two days (?) the life or death of the patient was decided.