well to be on good terms with God, ordained that processions should be made every third day in Ferrara, with the whole clergy, and about 4,000 children or more from twelve years of age upwards, dressed in white, and each holding a banner with a painted Jesus.  His lordship, and his sons and brothers, followed this procession, namely the Duke on horseback, because he could not then walk, and all the rest on foot, behind the Bishop.’[3] A certain amount of irony transpires in this quotation, which would make one fancy that the chronicler suspected the Duke of ulterior, and perhaps political, motives.

    [1] See Muratori, vol. xxiii. p. 839.

    [2] Annales Bononienses. Mur. xxiii. 890.

    [3] Diario Ferrarese. Mur. xxiv. pp. 17-386.

It sometimes happened that the contagion of such devotion spread from city to city; on one occasion, in 1399, it traveled from Piedmont through the whole of Italy.  The epidemic of flagellants, of which Giovanni Villani speaks in 1310 (lib. viii. cap. 121), began also in Piedmont, and spread along the Genoese Riviera.  The Florentine authorities refused entrance to these fanatics into their territory.  In 1334, Villani mentions another outburst of the same devotion (lib xi. cap. 23), which was excited by the preaching of Fra Venturino da Bergamo.  The penitents on this occasion wore for badge a dove with the olive-branch.  They staid fifteen days in Florence, scourging themselves before the altars of the Dominican churches, and feasting, five hundred at a time, in the Piazzi di S. M. Novella.  Corio, in the Storia di Milano (p. 281), gives an interesting account of these ’white penitents,’ as they were called, in the year 1399:  ’Multitudes of men, women, girls, boys, small and great, townspeople and countryfolk, nobles and burghers, laity and clergy, with bare feet and dressed in white sheets from head to foot,’ visited the towns and villages of every district in succession.  ’On their journey, when they came to a cross-road or to crosses, they threw themselves on the ground, crying Misericordia three times; then they recited the Lord’s Prayer and the Ave Maria.  On their entrance into a city, they walked singing Stabat Mater dolorosa and other litanies and prayers.  The population of the places to which they came were divided:  for some went forth and told those who staid that they should assume the same habit, so that at one time there were as many as 10,000, and at another as many as 15,000 of them.’  After admitting that the fruit of this devotion was in many cases penitence, amity, and alms-giving, Corio goes on to observe:  ’However, men returned to a worse life than ever after it was over.’  It is noticeable that Italy was devastated in 1400 by a horrible plague; and it is impossible not to believe that the crowding of so many penitents together on the highways and in the cities led to this result.