If this was a newspaper headline, you might laugh at it. But in 1321, the notorious inquisitor Bernard Gui revealed a fiendish plot by lepers to overthrow Christian Europe. This was in the aftermath of the crushing of the Knights Templar when the church saw heretical plots everywhere. Unfortunately, those suffering from leprosy came under the spotlight.
Gui announced that ‘an evil plan of lepers’ had been to infect ‘the health persons in the kingdom of France’.
“Indeed, plotting against the safety of the people, these persons, unhealthy in body and insane in mind, had arranged to infect the waters of the rivers and fountains and wells everywhere, by placing poison and infected matter in them and by mixing (into the water) prepared powders, so that healthy men drinking from them or using the water thus infected, would become lepers, die, or almost die, and thus the number of lepers would be increased and the healthy decreased”.
And there was worse…these conspiratorial lepers had already divided up the royal estates and aristocratic houses of the realm between them – deciding who would get what once the population had succumbed to the illness. A new leper kingdom would arise where the healthy would be second class citizens. They had even ‘given themselves the name of potentate, count, or baron in various lands’.
During the summer of 1321, this hysteria gripped parts of France as they waited for a leper uprising. There could be no doubt that this was a concerted attempt to overthrow Christian Euorpe and establish a leper empire.
In June 1321, King Philip V was at Poitiers where he received reports that lepers had been arrested in Aquitaine caught in the act of trying to infect wells and fountains. They had confessed and been burned to death. If they had succeeded, monks told the king, the whole of France and Germany had been at risk of being affected.
DISCOVER: The many Crusades fought in medieval Europe
The treatment of lepers in medieval society was harsh at the best of times – cast out of the community for life – but this was a new low. It reflects not only on the fear of the disease, which was untreatable, but also the heightened anxiety in the 14th century around perceived plots to destroy Christendom. It was in this climate that the Templars were hunted down and annihilated just a few years before.
To find out more about the Knights Templar, read my latest book: The Knights Templar – History & Mystery – published by Pen & Sword – available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstones, and WHSmith.
