Heinrich von Herford

Bewildered by the death and the fear surrounding them, the people of Europe searched for a cause for the Black Death. The members of the clergy, predisposed to seeing in all natural events the hand of God, understood the plague as a divine retribution. For churchmen and lay people alike, the Black Death could mean only one thing: God's punishment for mortal sin, believed by many in the fourteenth century to have reached a feverish pitch.

Like many others, Heinrich von Herford, a German monk of the Dominican order, believed the root cause of the plague to be the corruption and evil practices of the clergy. Herford was not alone, for example, in condemning the sale of clerical offices and privileges, a common practice throughout Europe. But in the chronicle that follows, written some years...