There are no proper materials for estimating the mortality which this plague pro duced, for it occurred before the value of statistics was appreciated. But in China, 13,000,000 111T said to have died, and in the rest of the east nearly 24,000.000. These numbers appal the imagination. Coming to Europe, the horror is increased by the greater exactnessof the details. London alone lost over 100,000 souls; 15 European cities lost among them about 80000: Germany is calculated to have lost 1,244,484; Italy, one half of Its pc iflation. On a moderate calculation, it may be assumed that there periAted in Europe 25.000.Q00 lunnan beings. Africa suffered with the rest of the known world. Everywhere WOS death. MI animal lite Was. threatened. IZiVers were consecrated to receive corpses, for which none dared perform the rites of burial, and which in other places were cast in thousands into huge pits made for their reception. Death was on the sea, too, as well as on the land, and the imagination is quickened to the realization of the terrible mortality by accounts of ships without crews—the crews dead and putrefying on the decks of the aimless hulls—drifting through the 'Mediterranean, the Black and the North seas, and cursing with the contagion the shores on which winds or the tide chanced to cast them.
The mortality caused by the plague was, however, only one of the evils to which it gave rise. Its moral effects on the survivors and the frame of society were no less momentous. Many died of fear, which among the living dissolved the tics of kindred; mothers forsook their plague-stricken children; the worldly became quickened to a mad dening sense of sin; the religious fixed their eyes more steadily on futurity; all rushed to saclike their means to the church, while the ecclesiastics drew back from the gold showered over their walls, as being tainted with death. Superstition finally handed mul titudes together by common means to work out the common safety. In Hungary, and afterwards in Germany, rose the brotherhood of the Flagellants, who undertook to expiate the sins of the people, and avert the pestilence by self-imposed sufferings. Originally of the lower classes, they gathered to their order, as it extended, crowds of the highest, both men and women, and marched from city to city, robed La sombergarments, with red crosses on the breast, hack, and cap, and with their heads covered as far as the eyes; they went chanting in solemn processions with banners, with down-turned faces, and bearing triple scourges with points of iron, with which, at stated times, they lacerated their bodies. 'they at last pervaded nearly all Europe; Germany, Hungary, Poland,
Bohemia, Silesia, and Flanders did them homage. This. however. is not the place to give their history, for which the reader will refer to the article under the head FLAGELLANTS. Stance it that the order was not suppressed till the pope, at the instigation of several crowned heads, prohibited throughout Christendom their pilgrimages. on pain of excom munication. While the wanderings of the Flagellants threw society into confusion, and helped to spread the plague, the horrors of the time were further heightened by the fear ful persecutions to \Quell the Jews were subjected, from a popular belief that the pestilence was owing to their poisoning the public wells. The people rose to exterminate the Hebrew race, of whom, in 3Iayence alone, 1:2,000 were cruelly nun They were killed by fire and by torture wherever they could be found, and for thein, to the terrors of the plague were added those of a populace everywhere infuriated against them. In some places, the Jewish people immolated themselves in masses; in others, not a soul of them survived the assaults of their enemies. No adequate notion can conveyed of these horrors. To aggravate the pestilence, the poisou-panic made the people shut up their wells. "With terror of poison and of plague in a state of society rude at the best, but now disorganized, what means were available to mitigate or prevent the Sufferings of the people were rendered altogether nugatory.
It would be useless to attempt to give any notion of the effects on society of this plague; how during it some, like people in sieges, came to be callous, and some, like thieves under the gallows, to regard the desolation only as it afforded opportunities for plunder and indulgence. The whole phenomena would form a tine study for the social philosopher and psycholog,ist. We must content ourselves here with referring the reader to the D:camecon of Boccaccio for a description of the plague at Florence, vt)tich, for vividness and particularity of observation, almost equals Thucytlides' account of the plague at Athens. In Btilwer's Rienzi. also, an account of the plague will he fpund. The reader should also consult Hecker's Epidemics of the Middle Ales. translated for the Svdenhain society. Accounts of the plague have been left us by the physicians Guy de Chauliac and Chalia de Vinarin. But perhaps I3occaccio's is the best of the whole. The B. D. afterwards more than ouce appeared in Europe, but never with the same virulence or duration.