By Ken Mondschein

By far, one of the most stressful things about the COVID-19 pandemic isn’t fear of falling ill, but the psychological toll—not just in terms of isolation from “social distancing,” but simply feeling a lack of control over the situation.

Medieval people differed from us in their ways of coping with a pandemic, but they felt similar helplessness. Of course, they did not have the advantage of Pasteur’s germ theory, so they did not practice social distancing—though they did know that disease spread from person-to-person contact and practiced quarantines. In fact, the word “quarantine” comes from the early fifteenth-century Venetian law that required ships from plague-affected cities to wait off the coast of Venice for forty days (quaranta giorni) before discharging passengers and cargo. In this, the Venetians were following the example of their former colony of Ragusa (modern Dubrovnik in Croatia), which was a major power in the eastern Mediterranean.


Such quarantines tended to be communal in nature—for instance, shutting off a city from outsiders (though Milan escaped much of the devastation of the Black Death when the Visconti dukes walled victims up into their homes—a sort of internal exile). So, too, did methods of psychological coping tend to be communal. Foremost amongst these were liturgical rituals such as processions and prayer—particularly to saints who were said to have power over disease. Of course, today, we have our own personal Coronavirus rituals, such as hand-washing, checking in on friends and family, and incessantly posting on Facebook. These, however, are highly individualistic responses, and differ from the medieval tendency towards collective action.

Processions are a great example of this medieval communal tendency. Pope Gregory the Great (c. 540–605) famously held a “seven pronged procession,” or letania septiformis, during the plague of 590, sometimes called the First Plague Pandemic or Justinian’s Plague. Seven groups of Romans, organized by clerical or lay status, marital status, and gender, met at different churches to come together in one statement of community solidarity at Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore. The contemporary chronicler Gregory of Tours relates that eighty people died during the march; supposedly, the Archangel Michael appeared on top of Hadrian’s tomb and sheathed his sword, signalling the end of the plague. The building has since been known as Castel Sant’Angelo.

Plague processions were also popular during the Second Plague Pandemic of the mid-fourteenth century, otherwise known as the Black Death. Flagellants were only the most spectacular example of this: Such processions became both a regular part of late medieval liturgical practice and another aspect of this anti-Plague “popular culture.” The liturgy placed heavy emphasis on praying to and carrying the relics of saints, and certain saints were held to be particularly efficacious in interceding on behalf of those threatened by plagues.


One of the most popular of these saints was St. Edmund the Martyr, who became the patron saint of pandemics. He was king of East Anglia in England, but was murdered by Vikings on November 20, 869. By tradition, the Norsemen, led by Ivar the Boneless and his brother Ubba, demanded Edmund renounce Christianity and, when he refused, shot him full of arrows and cut his head off with an ax. A cult developed around him, which was encouraged by later Anglo-Saxon kings. St. Edmund’s veneration declined slightly after the Norman conquest, only to pick up again in the following centuries; his shrine at Bury St. Edmunds was one of the most popular pilgrimage sites in England until its destruction in 1539 during the Reformation. A parallel cult existed in Toulouse in southern France.

The fourteen Holy Helpers were saints whose veneration as a group began in the Rhineland during the Black Death. First were three virgin martyrs—St. Margaret (who was the patron saint of childbirth, cured backaches, and drove off devils), St. Catherine (who was the patron of anything having to do with not only wheels, but also eloquence, including diseases of the tongue), and St. Barbara (who was not just the patron saint of fireworks and gunners but also effective against fever). St. Christopher and St. Giles were effective against the plague, while St. Christopher was also proof against sudden death and St. Giles could ensure confession. St. Denis could intercede against headaches, St. Blaise against sore throats, St. Elmo against gastrointestinal disease, and St. Vitus against epilepsy and convulsions. St. Eustace, meanwhile, could solve family troubles, while St. Pantaleon was the patron saint of physicians. Added to the mix were St. George (since disease also affected animals), St. Denis (against headache and possession), Cyriacus (against temptation on one’s deathbed), and Agathius (also against headache).

Another local saint, primarily venerated in what is now modern Austria, was Coloman of Stockerau. He was actually Irish, but arrested as a spy in Stockerau, near Vienna, in the year 1012 while on his way to the Holy Land as a pilgrim. There was a war going on, and, since Coloman did not speak any German, he could not tell his interrogators why he was crossing their lands and so was hanged as a spy. His body remained incorruptible, the scaffolding on which he was hanged was held to have taken root and sprouted, and miraculous healings followed. He was held to be proof against plague, to heal sick horses, and also provide aid to those who are themselves to be hanged.


Though many plague saints, like Coloman, could be local, some were universal. Perhaps the most universal was the aforementioned St. Christopher. He is well known today as the patron saint of travelers, but he was also thought to keep those who prayed to him from being “struck down,” including by plague. He was often depicted in churches, often in a place where he was easily visible so that parishioners could “check in” for a full day of protection.

Another widely late medieval plague saint with widespread devotion was St. Roch of Montpellier, who is the patron saint of plague victims, as well as dogs, bachelors, and the falsely accused. Roch (Rocco in Italian) was a real person who is held to have been born in the mid-fourteenth century into a noble family in the south of France. Devout from a young age and disdaining worldly riches, he set out for Rome as a pilgrim. Unfortunately, he arrived during a plague, and, caring for the afflicted, fell ill himself. Quarantined outside human civilization, he built a shelter for himself in the forest, where he was cared for by a nobleman’s dog; the nobleman, following his hound, became Roch’s disciple. Unfortunately, when he tried to return to Montpellier, Roch was thrown into prison by his uncle and died there, refusing to reveal his true identity. Roch’s cult wasn’t officially recognized by the popes with a feast-day until the sixteenth century, but he was the subject of widespread popular and clerical devotion.

All of these practices highlight a very important psychological aspect of how medieval people dealt with pandemic: Medieval people, like our grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ generations, had an acceptance of sickness that is quite foreign to us today. It wasn’t very long ago that it was usual for children to be quarantined for diseases such as measles, mumps, rubella, whooping cough, and typhus. Polio took an awful toll until the Salk vaccine in 1955. If we go back in time, cholera was endemic in the nineteenth century, particularly in large cities, and was spread by inland waterways such as the Erie Canal. Some 20,000 people died of yellow fever in the Mississippi Valley in 1878. People were used to pandemics, and life expectancy was shorter. Supplicating the supernatural helped to give not just individuals, but also communities, a sense of control over what was happening.


It is only in the last sixty years or so that widespread mortality and morbidity from common diseases has become unacceptable. However, even if we develop a vaccine to COVID-19, if the virus mutates and becomes as common as the flu or the common cold (another coronavirus), the world we live with may be closer to the past than we are comfortable with. If this is so, we will need new psychological mechanisms for coping with this reality. Likewise, even though we have a modern understanding of germ theory, we will need, like our medieval forebears, to take collective action to mitigate the threat of this new plague. The best way to do this is to develop new communal rituals and practices—this time, however, based in science, not faith.

See also: The Coronavirus is not the Black Death

Ken Mondschein is a history professor at UMass-Mt. Ida College, Anna Maria College, and Boston University, as well as a fencing master and jouster. Click here to visit his website.

Top Image: Flagellants in procession in the Low Countries in the mid-14th century, just after the Black Death.