the sick was one cause why, during the greater plagues, they lost so
large a proportion of their numbers, we can not escape the conclusion
that their want of cleanliness had much to do with it. In France, during
the fourteenth century, Guy de Chauliac, the great physician of
his time, noted particularly that certain Carmelite monks suffered
especially from pestilence, and that they were especially filthy. During
the Black Death no less than nine hundred Carthusian monks fell victims
in one group of buildings.

Naturally, such an example set by the venerated leaders of thought
exercised great influence throughout society, and all the more because
it justified the carelessness and sloth to which ordinary humanity is
prone. In the principal towns of Europe, as well as in the country at
large, down to a recent period, the most ordinary sanitary precautions
were neglected, and pestilences continued to be attributed to the
wrath of God or the malice of Satan. As to the wrath of God, a new and
powerful impulse was given to this belief in the Church toward the
end of the sixth century by St. Gregory the Great. In 590, when he was
elected Pope, the city of Rome was suffering from a dreadful pestilence:
the people were dying by thousands; out of one procession imploring the
mercy of Heaven no less than eighty persons died within an hour:
what the heathen in an earlier epoch had attributed to Apollo was now
attributed to Jehovah, and chroniclers tell us that fiery darts were
seen flung from heaven into the devoted city. But finally, in the midst
of all this horror, Gregory, at the head of a penitential procession,
saw hovering over the mausoleum of Hadrian the figure of the archangel
Michael, who was just sheathing a flaming sword, while three angels
were heard chanting the Regina Coeli. The legend continues that the Pope
immediately broke forth into hallelujahs for this sign that the plague
was stayed, and, as it shortly afterward became less severe, a chapel
was built at the summit of the mausoleum and dedicated to St. Michael;
still later, above the whole was erected the colossal statue of the
archangel sheathing his sword, which still stands to perpetuate the
legend. Thus the greatest of Rome's ancient funeral monuments was made
to bear testimony to this medieval belief; the mausoleum of Hadrian
became the castle of St. Angelo. A legend like this, claiming to
date from the greatest of the early popes, and vouched for by such an