Then followed the
flagellants of 1310 and 1334, and then the great pilgrimage without
encouraging in the year 1349, which Corio has recorded. It is not
impossible that the Jubilees were founded partly in order to regulate
and render harmless this sinister passion for vagabondage which seized
on the whole populations at times of religious excitement. The great
sanctuaries of Italy, such as Loreto and others, had meantime become
famous, and no doubt diverted a certain part of this enthusiasm.
But terrible crises had still at a much later time the power to
reawaken the glow of mediaeval penitence, and the conscience - stricken
people, often still further appalled by signs and wonders, sought to
move the pity of Heaven by wailings and scourgings. So it was at
Bologna when the plague came in 1457, and so in 1496 at a time of
internal discord at Siena) to mention two only out of countless
instances. No more moving scene can be imagined than that which we read
of at Milan in 1529) when famine, plague, and war conspired with
Spanish extortion to reduce the city to the lowest depths of despair.
It chanced that the monk who had the ear of the people, Fra Tomasso
Nieto, was himself a Spaniard. The Host was borne along in a novel
fashion, amid barefooted crowds of old and young. It was placed on a
decorated bier, which rested on the shoulders of four priests in linen
garments--an imitation of the Ark of the Covenant which the children of
Israel once carried round the walls of Jericho.
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