Inter sollicitudines (letter against the flagellants)

The letter is dated at Avignon on the thirteenth day before the kalends of November in the eighth year of Clement VI, 20 October 1349. The pope writes that in Germany and neighbouring lands a crowd of simple people calling themselves Flagellants has been deceived by men who claim that Christ appeared to the patriarch of Jerusalem; that they travel in companies, wear a black habit marked with the cross, make statutes of their own and despise the church’s power of the keys; that some friars preach in their support; and that many of them shed the blood of Jews, whom, he says, Christian piety receives and sustains, and of Christians, and plunder clergy and laity.

He orders the bishops to declare these practices unlawful, to make those involved desist by church censure and, where they have temporal power, by temporal penalties, and to arrest clergy who preach for them. The annalist notes that the register lists the same order to bishops in Germany, Poland, Sweden, England and France. See the Black Death.