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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Fenris-77" data-source="post: 8285050" data-attributes="member: 6993955">Part 3, an excerpt from a text dated 1856An excerpt from A Complete History of Eastern Europe, Benjamin Burke, 1856, University of OxfordIt came to pass in the years 1294 and 1295 that a great madness was visited on the lands we now call Bulgaria and Hungary. After exhaustive research through local archives in the Balkan States, I have managed to piece together an account of this phenomenon, unbelievable as it might be. One thing that all the accounts agree on is that the madness was always preceded by the appearance of a mad monk clothed in black feathers. He would preach on street corners and in marketplaces, filth and madness falling from his lips like poison. Many accounts from Clerical sources cite a strange inability to deal with this lone madman. Soldiers would go astray, or be savaged by mobs, or suddenly join the mob themselves. The villagers and worthies who listened to this monk almost immediately fell into the most horrendous barbarism, and accounts of murder, sacrifice and all manner of foulness are common across the available sources.This madness spread like a wildfire through the spring of 1294. Not just localized barbarism, but wholesale warfare and slaughter visited by previously friendly cities and principalities upon unsuspecting neighbours. Essentially the whole region fell into the worst kind of slaughter and bloodshed in the space of perhaps three or four months, if accounts are to be believed. In one account, the Bishop of Wieselburg lead a force of mercenaries against a neighbouring town and had a thousand innocents impaled, still living, on stakes, their heads then smashed with a hammer. Through the winter and into 1295 this plague of madness and bloodshed spread into open warfare between principalities. Amazingly, in the spring of 1295 the whole affair seems to have come to a complete halt, for reasons that are not obvious to this researcher.There is one account that in the late winter of 1294 the mad monk was slain by a Papal Inquisitor, but as this isn’t confirmed by other accounts I cannot but think it may be apocryphal, as is the whole mad monk story in general. Even more unbelievable are the stories of magic that seem to weave in and out of the whole series of accounts. Reasonable historiography all of a sudden interrupted by accounts of magical madness. Men turning into swarms of insects, or visiting biblical plagues upon whole towns, or even in one case incinerating a whole company of mercenaries with fire conjured from the depths of hell. A colleague has suggested that Bergamot poisoning might be the cause of these hallucinatory fantasies.</blockquote>

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