The Dancing Plague of Strasbourg (1518)

An illustrated history story from Wonder History — free to read, with narration.

The Dancing Plague of Strasbourg (1518) — a history story. 10 illustrated pages, narrated, free to read on Wonder History.

The Dancing Plague of Strasbourg (1518) — book cover — Wonder History — The Dancing Plague of Strasbourg (1518) — a history story. 10 illustrated pages, narrated, free to read on Wonder History.

Page 1

The heat in the square sat heavy as a lid, and Frau Troffea stood in the middle of it with her arms hanging loose. Without a word she kicked, hard, and one wooden clog spun off her foot in a clattering arc across the cobbles, skidding straight under the water-seller's shoulder yoke. The yoke jerked, both buckets tipped, and a sheet of water slapped across the hot stones in a hissing cloud of steam. Troffea laughed, high and cracked, and began to turn in the spreading puddle, barefoot, her skirts slapping wet against her shins. Katrin Schott, arms stacked to her chin with damp printed sheets fresh off the press, dropped the whole armful scattering across the ground and lunged, grabbing for the older woman's wrist. Troffea spun out of her grip, splashing her, eyes fixed somewhere past the spire. Katrin planted her feet and hauled again, shouting over the clatter of the overturned buckets, trying to drag her still before the whole square turned to watch.

Page 2

Troffea's bare feet slap onto the covered bridge timbers, each plank wide as a door laid flat, and she spins past the first squat watchtower without slowing. Her bound clog knocks against the rail. She barrels into the mooring post where the laundresses' raft sits tethered, and the rope jerks loose under her flailing arm. The raft, piled waist-high with wet linen, lurches free and slides into the green current. Katrin lunges, grabs the trailing rope with her ink-black hand, and hauls with her whole long body braced against the rail, boots skidding on wet boards, but the current wins and the linen sails off downstream in a white froth. Magister Kuhn arrives at a stooped run, robe flapping, breath ragged, and seizes Troffea's wrist, pressing two fingers to it while his brass flask swings and knocks against his chest. "Her pulse races like a hare's," he gasps. Katrin, still gripping the slack rope, shouts back, "Then catch her before she follows the linen in!"

Page 3

The council chamber smells of beeswax and old grain dust, its oak panels black with age, when Kuhn thumps his staff against the floorboards and orders it cleared. Clerks and aldermen grab the heavy benches, dragging them screeching across the boards toward the walls. Two men wrestle the great iron grain scale off its ceiling hook, lowering it hand over hand until it thuds to the floor, taller than a man's waist even lying down. A trestle table, piled with ledgers, buckles and splits under a shoved bench, spilling papers across the flagstones. Katrin hauls Troffea by both wrists into the cleared space, trying to keep her upright as she spins. The door bangs open and Jörg is shoved stumbling through it, his cockerel-painted drum, nearly as wide as his own body, smacking hard against the doorframe with a boom that rattles the leaded windows. Kuhn steadies himself on his staff, counting under his breath.

Page 4

Carpenters hammered a plank stage chest-high above the Rossmarkt mud, lashing beams between two cart axles while draught horses stamped in their traces. A hoisted roof-beam, thick as a man's thigh, slipped its rope with a crack and crashed down among the stacked barrels, splitting staves and scattering the gathering crowd screaming toward the Butchers' Hall wall. Frau Troffea never broke step, dancing straight through the falling splinters as Katrin Schott lunged, dragging a gawking carpenter's boy clear of the rolling beam by his collar. Jörg Bänkler planted his small bare feet in the wreckage and hammered his cockerel drum harder, driving the rhythm louder to cover the shouting, while forty townspeople kept dancing around the broken barrels, bleeding wine pooling at their ankles. Katrin swung her brass ladle from barrel to barrel, forcing water into gaping mouths as dancers spun past her reach. Magister Lorenz Kuhn braced against a cart wheel, flask swinging, shouting instructions nobody obeyed over the drum and the panic.

Page 5

The sack-stack went over like a felled tower, higher than a man standing on another man's shoulders, and burst its stitching against the flagstones. Rye poured out in a hissing brown flood, ankle-deep across the whole hall before anyone could shout a warning. The dancers skidded on it as if it were ice, arms wheeling, bodies dropping and tangling like skittles struck by a thrown ball. Frau Troffea went down hard on her hip and rose again without feeling it, grain sticking to her bloodied feet. Katrin lunged through the flood, seized a fallen woman under both armpits and heaved her bodily out of the churn of trampling legs, hauling her clear against a grain bin twice the woman's own height. Magister Kuhn waded in after, robe soaked black to the knee, holding his brass flask high above the dust and grain-chaff so the sample inside stayed clean. Jörg kept drumming from a mounting block, feet braced wide so the flood wouldn't take him down with the rest.

Page 6

Three hundred and thirty steps and Troffea climbed every one without slowing, her bloodied feet slapping the worn spiral stone while Katrin took the stairs two at a time behind her, lungs burning and braid whipping loose against her back. They burst out onto the gallery into open sky, and the watchman spun round so hard his brass horn clattered from its hook, bounced off the balustrade, and dropped the whole sixty-six metres, a glinting speck shrinking toward the red roofs below. Jörg, who had scrambled up last gasping, threw both arms around the stone rail and hung there, afraid to look down, his drum banging his knees. Katrin lunged and slammed Troffea bodily against the parapet, pinning her thick shoulders back from the drop with both forearms braced, feeling the older woman's heart hammer under her hands. Magister Kuhn arrived last, wheezing, robe dark with sweat, flask swinging wild on its chain; he grabbed the rail himself just to stay upright, then reached past Katrin to seize Troffea's wrist and press two fingers hard against it, counting aloud against the wind.

Page 7

The cellar vault presses low overhead, man-high casks racked three deep in the gloom, lantern light swimming across spilled sawdust. Collapsed dancers lie between the barrels, limbs still jerking even in sleep. A thrashing heel catches a brass tap square and knocks it clean out, and dark wine bursts across the flagstones in a hissing jet. Katrin flings herself down, scrambling across the wet stone on her knees, rolling her apron into a fist and ramming it into the hole, wine soaking black up her arm to the elbow. Jörg drags his drum from his hip and flips it over, lunging to catch what he can, the cockerel painted hide darkening with every splash as wine sloshes over the rim onto his boots. Kuhn drops to his knees in the spreading flood over a man gone silent and grey, pressing both long hands flat against the chest, pushing hard, counting under his breath. Frau Troffea thrashes on still, oblivious, one bare bloodied foot kicking again at the empty barrel, nearly striking Katrin's bent back as she hauls herself upright against the cask.

Page 8

The Metzgertor's portcullis hangs raised above the gate, its iron teeth taller than three men, and through the arch the oxcarts queue to roll out onto the dung-churned road. Katrin hauls Frau Troffea up by the armpits onto the straw bed of the nearest cart, binding her wrists to the rail with wet rope while the woman's bare feet kick at the slats. Jörg shoves his shoulder into the next cart's wheel, trying to help it over the stone sill, when the rim splits with a crack like a whip. The whole bed lurches sideways and two roped bodies slide off into the mud below the gate niche. Kuhn, already turned back toward the city, grabs Katrin's wrist and presses his pear-shaped brass flask into her ink-stained hand. "Take it — measure their pulses on the road, I'm needed here with the dying." Katrin tucks it into her apron and scrambles to drag the fallen dancers back up as the carts groan forward without the old magister, wheels churning deeper ruts into the filth.

Page 9

The rain had slicked the sandstone to glass, and the ox's hooves scrabbled and found nothing. The cart lurched backward, timber groaning, the whole weight of it swinging toward the drop where the pines fell away into grey mist. Jörg threw himself off the tailboard without thinking, rolling onto the road and snatching up a sandstone block as wide as his own chest, dragging it under the rear wheel just as it rolled over the lip of the track. The wheel bit stone and held. Katrin had already thrown herself across the yoke, hauling back with her whole long body, boots slipping, arms shaking as she fought the ox's panic. In the cart bed Frau Troffea's bound legs kicked free of the ropes, her body sliding half over the edge toward the drop, her swollen bare feet dangling over nothing until Katrin's free hand clamped around her ankle and wrenched her back inboard.

Page 10

The rock terrace spreads before the grotto chapel, waist-high votive wall running along its edge, hung thick with a hundred cast-off shoes. Frau Troffea's knees simply fold. She drops onto the stone ledge, barefoot, swollen feet finally still, chest heaving. Katrin scrambles to catch her shoulder before she slumps sideways, easing her down against the sun-warmed rock. Then Katrin straightens, unhooks her last wooden clog from the cord at Troffea's hip, and reaches up to hang it among the others on the wall, wedging it between two older, cracked pairs. Jörg hauls his cockerel drum off its strap, lifts it over his head with both arms, and slams it down against a boulder. The goat-skin splits with a dull crack. He sets the broken drum at the chapel threshold and steps back, breathing hard, rubbing his stinging palms on his breeches. Below them, the whole plain of Alsace lies flat and hazy, Strasbourg's spire a thin needle on the far horizon, impossibly small from this height.

About this story

Audience: general readers
Format: 10 illustrated pages, narrated, free to read on Wonder History

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