The Flagellants: Beating the Sin from Skin on Mosher Mag

The year is 1349.

The world is rotting. Bubonic plague sweeps across Europe like a black tide. Cities reek of corpses. Clergy lie dead in the streets. The Church can’t save you. God won’t answer. And somewhere, in a rain-soaked square, you hear them before you see them.

The chants. The drums. The crack of leather on bare, open flesh.

They come barefoot, faces veiled, torsos bare and already bloodied. Dozens, hundreds, sometimes thousands. Whipping themselves in perfect rhythm. Striking until the skin peels back. Until the streets run red. Until sin, they hope, is bled out like pus from a wound.

They are the Flagellants.

And this is their gospel: Pain is prayer.

Self-flagellation as a form of penance predates the Flagellants, from ancient Roman cults like that of Cybele to Islamic Shia rituals of Ashura.

But the medieval European Flagellants were something else. They were a movement. A plague-born, panic-fed phenomenon that exploded in times of catastrophe.

The Flagellant movement gained prominence in 13th-century Italy, particularly in Perugia around 1259. But they truly surged into the blood-soaked spotlight during the Black Death. As bodies piled up and mass graves overflowed, the Flagellants interpreted the plague as divine punishment.

God's wrath had been earned, and must be answered.

Not with prayer. Not with offerings. But with wounds.

These groups, often comprising laypeople, believed that their public displays of penance could halt the plague. Their processions were both a spiritual plea and a form of social protest against the perceived failures of the Church.

They gathered in towns, traveling from city to city like bleeding processions of doom. Chanting hymns, forming crosses in the street, and whipping themselves to the bone.

Thirty-three days of ritual. Thirty-three days of pain. Then on to the next town.

They were revival and riot. Religion and revolt.

The Flagellants weren’t aimless masochists. Their self-torture was meticulously choreographed.

Upon entering a town, they would proceed to the local church, where bells announced their arrival. After reciting liturgies, they moved to an open space, forming a circle

Each member would strip to the waist, kneel, confess his sins, and take up the scourge: a whip with metal tips or bone shards designed to shred the flesh. They would strike themselves, over and over, in processions that could last hours.

This cycle of confession, whipping, and chanting repeated multiple times daily over a 33-day period, symbolising the years of Christ's life.

Blood was a form of currency. A visible sign of repentance.

Some carried banners of Christ, dressed as penitents in sackcloth and hoods. Others sang hymns that sounded like dirges, Latin chants built around suffering, death, and redemption through torment.

They believed Christ was watching. And that he wanted a show.

The Flagellants' processions attracted massive crowds. Their fervent displays resonated with a populace desperate for meaning amidst the chaos. However, their growing influence and deviation from Church doctrines alarmed ecclesiastical authorities.

To witness the Flagellants was to witness mass psychosis.

In city after city, crowds gathered, not to stop them, but to join them. People threw themselves into the ranks mid-procession. Children wept. Women tore at their hair. Some towns banned the clergy from intervening, believing that the Church had failed, while these bloodied zealots might succeed.

The flagellations became carnivals of dread. Meat markets of human misery.

They claimed the Pope had failed. That priests were corrupt. That only pain could save the soul now. In some places, Flagellant leaders issued their own edicts, offered absolution, took confessions. All openly defying the Church.

Their movements occasionally incited violence, including attacks on Jewish communities, whom they scapegoated for the plague.

It wasn’t long before Rome realised what it had on its hands. Not a penitential movement.

But a heretical uprising.

At first, the Church tolerated them. Pain, after all, was sacred; look at the Passion, the martyrs, the monks who slept on stone.

But by the late 14th century, the Flagellants had become too powerful. Too radical. Too anti-institution. They had begun to spread across France, Germany, Poland, and the Low Countries.

Pope Clement VI officially denounced them in 1349. Bishops were ordered to suppress the processions. Some were excommunicated. Others executed.

But they didn’t vanish. Not really. They simply melted back into the margins, ready to emerge whenever the world cracked again.

And crack it did.

The Flagellant impulse never really died. It transformed. It found other vessels, within the 15th century, as flagellation became a more private act of devotion, emphasising personal identification with Christ's suffering.

Confraternities dedicated to self-flagellation emerged, particularly in Italy, where entire communities participated in such practices.

Medieval saints wore spiked chains beneath their robes, using hidden wounds as a test of faith. Early modern penitents marched barefoot in Spanish processions, hoods hiding their identities as they beat themselves with sticks. Extremist cults inflicted ritual pain for purification from medieval sects to modern doomsday groups.

Even today, self-flagellation survives in Shia Muslim rituals, in Christian Holy Week parades in the Philippines and Mexico, and in private, cloistered acts of mortification performed by monks.

But it also lives in something deeper: The idea that pain cleanses. That pain proves something. That the body must be punished to free the soul.

In that sense, we’ve all inherited the Flagellant logic.

We starve ourselves, cut ourselves, overwork, overstimulate, push until collapse, all in search of meaning, of control, of worth.

Modern life has its own whips. They just leave different scars.

They were whipping the flesh, yes.

But also: shame. Madness. Sin. Guilt. Fear.

The Flagellants were trying to outrun apocalypse. They were trying to drown out the silence of a God who had nothing to say about the Black Death. They were trying to make pain sacred because nothing else made sense.

And isn’t that… familiar?

In times of crisis, when systems fail, when the institutions built to protect you collapse under rot and corruption, some people organise. Some people pray.

And others? Bleed. Loudly. Publicly. Ritually.

Because if suffering is the only language the universe listens to, you may as well scream in it.

The Flagellants' story is a testament to the extremes of human behavior during crises. Their bloodied processions were both a cry for divine intervention and a challenge to established authority. They embodied the tension between institutional religion and personal spirituality, between order and chaos.

In remembering the Flagellants, we confront the darker facets of faith and the lengths to which people will go to find solace amidst suffering.

For the freaks, by the freaks.

Thanks for reading. Stay strange.

✦ moshermag.com