Saint Anthony's fire: the Antonines, the order born of a disease

The fire that devours the limbs

It begins with tingling in the feet or hands, then a burning that nothing can soothe: the sick say that a fire is running under their skin. Then comes numbness, then blisters, then blackening. The fingers, the toes, sometimes the whole leg turn dry and black like burnt wood, and in the end fall off, almost without bleeding, of their own accord. Latin chroniclers call it ignis sacer, the sacred fire; the people of the kingdom call it the mal des ardents. The canon Flodoard, at Reims, records for the year 945 a “plague of fire” striking Paris: the wretched sufferers, he writes, felt their limbs burning, their flesh fell away in shreds, their bones broke. In 994 the scourge ravages the Limousin; at Limoges, Bishop Hilduin and Abbot Geoffroy have the body of Saint Martial raised from its tomb after three days of fasting and carry it outside the walls, and the texts of the time speak of thousands of cures — this is the origin of the ostensions, which have returned every seven years ever since. The sickness comes back in 1039 in Champagne, in 1070 in the Limousin, and in 1089 with a violence the chronicles call unheard of, recorded by Sigebert of Gembloux. Around 1129, according to the same chronicles, the Cambrésis counts twelve thousand dead. It is neither plague nor leprosy; it falls on whole villages, one year, and vanishes the next. No one, for seven centuries, would guess its cause.