Flagellants, the name applied to those groups of fanatical enthusiasts who, at intervals from the 13th to the 16th century, made their appearance in various countries of Europe, proclaiming the wrath of God against the corruption of the times, inviting sinners to atone for sin by self-inflicted scourgings or flagellations, and publicly enforcing this exhortation by voluntarily scourging themselves, as well as by other forms of self-castigation. In large and disorderly bands—frequently headed by priests, and by fanatics in the costume of priests and monks, bearing banners and crucifixes aloft, their breasts and shoulders bare, and their faces concealed by a hood or mask, each armed with a heavy knotted scourge, loaded with lead or iron—they marched from town to town, chanting hymns full of denunciations of vengeance and of woe. In the most public place of each town which they entered they threw themselves upon the earth, and there inflicted upon themselves the discipline of scourging, frequently to blood, and even to mutilation. Each member enrolled himself for thirty-three days, in honour of the thirty-three years of the life of our Lord on earth; and all for the time professed entire poverty, subsisting only on alms or voluntary offerings. These fanatical movements recurred at frequent intervals; the most remarkable, however, are three in number. The first originated at Perugia in 1260, at a time when society in Italy was greatly disorganised by the long-continued struggles of the Guelph and Ghibelline factions. Numbers crowded to follow the new cry, until at last the body became so formidable as to draw upon itself the suspicions of Manfred, the son of Frederick II., by whom it was vigorously suppressed. Later offshoots of the party made their appearance in Bavaria, Austria, Moravia, Bohemia, Poland, and France; when to their extravagant practices they added still greater extravagances of doctrine. In virtue of a pretended revelation, they asserted that the blood shed in self-flagellation had a share with the blood of our Lord in atoning for sin; they mutually confessed and absolved one another, and declared their voluntary penances to be a substitute for all the sacraments of the church, and for all the ministrations of the clergy. The Jews were to them an object of special abhorrence, and suffered dreadfully from their fury in many towns of Germany and the Netherlands. In the second outbreak of Flagellantism, about 1349, the outrages against public decency were much more flagrant than on its first appearance. Men and women indiscriminately now appeared in public half naked, and ostentatiously underwent these self-inflicted scourgings. The immediate occasion of this new outburst of fanaticism was the terror which pervaded society during the dreadful plague known as the Black Death. The same extravagances were again repeated in Upper Germany, the provinces of the Rhine, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden, and even England. Although rigorously excluded from France, these fanatics effected an entrance into Avignon, then the residence of the popes, but were condemned by a bull of Clement VI. The mania gradually subsided, nor do we again find any permanent trace of it till the beginning of the next century. In the year 1414 a new troop of Flagellants, locally called Flegler, made their appearance in Thuringia and Lower Saxony, renewing and even exaggerating the wildest extravagances of their predecessors. These new fanatics appear to have rejected all the received religious usages, and indeed all external worship, placing their entire reliance on 'faith and flagellation.' Their leader was called Conrad Schmidt. They rejected not only the doctrines of the church upon the sacraments, but also purgatory and prayers for the dead. Their violence drew upon them the severest punishments of the Inquisition. Many of them were capitally condemned, and Schmidt himself was burned at Sangerhausen in 1414. Their doctrines, comprised in fifty articles, were condemned in the Council of Constance.
These strange extravagances are reprobated by the Roman Catholic Church in common with all other Christian communities; but Roman Catholics (relying on 1 Cor. ix. 27; Col. iii. 5) hold the lawfulness, and even the meritorious character, of voluntary self-chastisement, if undertaken with due dispositions, practised without ostentation or fanaticism, and animated by a lively faith and a firm hope in the merits of Christ. This is the self-castigation known under the name of 'the Discipline'—a form of mortification not unfrequent in the monastic state, and even practised by lay persons, and these sometimes of the highest rank, both in ancient and in modern times. See PENANCE.
See Wadding's Annales Minorum Fratrum; Raynaldi's Continuation of Baronius; Mosheim's Church History; Gieseler's Kirchengeschichte; and Milman's Latin Christianity. Also the following special treatises: Förstemann, Die Christlichen Geisslergesellschaften (1828); Schneegans, Die Geissler (1840); W. M. Cooper, Flagellation and the Flagellants (new ed. 1887); and Röhrich in the Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte for 1877.