Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 13, 1902.djvu/139

 Rh a Cardinal! Roger of Wendover prints this Letter also under the year 1229, and takes it very seriously.

This time also the prophecy is doomed to failure. The Cardinal did not prove more reliable than the older astrologer. But what did it matter? No sooner do new occurrences again cause great excitement than the Letter reappears with almost mathematical regularity. The writer of the fresh Letter does not invent anything new, just as little as did the Apocalyptic writer in ancient times; but he applies old imagery to suit the new requirements. About one hundred years pass away, and in the years 1322-29, during the period of the great commotions in Italy and Central Europe, when great floods sweep the Continent and famine ravages many cities, the Letter is circulated again, still ascribed to Magister Johannes of Toledo. The great storm which raged in Naples in 1343, graphically described by Petrarch, had, according to the latter, been foretold by a bishop living close to Naples who was very much addicted to the study of astrology, who, however, had prophesied an earthquake, and not a storm. Grauert sees in this prophecy the reflex of the same Letter.

The year 1345 was considered by the astrologers as one full of evil portents. In it many conjunctions took place; notably one on the 8th of February, when Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, and Mercury were all standing in the same sign. Villani, in his Florentine Chronicle, testifies to the profound impression which these astrological conjunctions produced, and how much they were believed to have caused all the troubles which then visited Italy. The medical faculty of Paris declared these conjunctions to be one of the causes of the plague (the Black Death), and they repeat in their report almost the very words of the Toledo Letter, without mentioning it by name.

The centre of learning had meanwhile been shifted from Toledo to Paris. The old school of necromancers had disappeared, and new authorities occupied the place