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By Root 1602 0

were preserved. Galeazzo on his part, fearing that Bernabò’s policies would lead to destruction, was equally ready to separate from his brother. Bernabò was said to have been so enraged by the reconciliation with Savoy that he attempted to assassinate his sister-in-law Blanche as its agent. Forced to make peace with the Pope for the time being, he secured favorable terms in a treaty of June 1374 by bribing papal councillors. Nothing had been accomplished by either side in the war because no combatant but the Pope—who could not make his will effective—had fought for anything fundamental, and war is too unpleasant and costly a business to be sustained successfully without a cause.

For Gian Galeazzo his second discomfiture was enough. He never again took command of troops in battle. A skillful statesman who was to bring the Visconti empire to the peak of its power, Gian Galeazzo remained a melancholy man, oppressed perhaps by the inability to govern without trickery and violence, and saddened by family tragedies. After the loss of his wife and infant son, his eldest son died at the age of ten and his second son at thirteen, leaving him with an adored only daughter who was not to escape an unhappy fate.

With the third advent of the plague, contagion was more strictly controlled if no better understood. While it raged in Milan, Bernabò ordered every victim to be taken out of the city and left to die or recover in the fields. Any person who nursed a plague patient was to be strictly quarantined for ten days; priests were to examine their parishioners for symptoms and report to a special commission under pain of death for failure; anyone who brought the disease into the city was subject to the death penalty and confiscation of property. Venice denied entry to all ships suspected of carrying infection, but with the flea and rat not yet implicated, the precautions, though groping in the right direction, failed to stop the carrier. At Piacenza, where Coucy’s war effort ended, half the population died, and at Pisa, where the plague lasted two years, it was said to have wiped out four fifths of the children. The most famous death of 1374 was Petrarch’s at age seventy, not of plague but peacefully in a chair with his head and arms resting on a pile of books. His old friend Boccaccio, soured and ill, followed a year later.

In the Rhineland, unconnected with the plague, a new hysteria appeared in the form of a dancing mania. Whether it sprang from misery and homelessness caused by heavy spring floods of the Rhine that year, or whether it was the spontaneous symptom of a disturbed time, history does not know, but the participants were in no doubt. They were convinced that they were possessed by demons. Forming circles in streets and churches, they danced for hours with leaps and screams, calling on demons by name to cease tormenting them or crying that they saw visions of Christ or the Virgin or the heavens opening. When exhausted they fell to the ground rolling and groaning as if in the grip of agonies. As the mania spread to Holland and Flanders, the dancers appeared with garlands in their hair and moved in groups from place to place like the flagellants. They were chiefly the poor—peasants, artisans, servants, and beggars, with a large proportion of women, especially the unmarried. Sexual revels often followed the dancing, but the dominant preoccupation was exorcism of devils. In the agony of the times, people felt a demonic presence, and in their minds nothing pointed more surely to. Satan’s handiwork in society than the fashion for wearing pointed shoes, which they had so often heard denounced in sermons. Something slightly insane about this crippling frivolity made it in the common mind the mark of the Devil.

Hostility to the clergy marked the dancers as it had the flagellants. In their anxiety to suppress a craze which menaced them, priests performed as many exorcisms as they could while the public watched, sharing in the presence of demons. Processions and masses were held to pray for the sufferers. The frenzy died out within