In ancient Europe, there was a group known as the "bards" who roamed around Europe with beloved musical instruments, exchanging moving music for bread and milk. A handsome young man with a poetic heart and a distant heart, a flute with an ancient appearance but a melodious tone, and a lyrical and romantic minor tune are most people's impressions of a bard.
However, in medieval Germany, there was another legend full of ominous meanings. This legend first comes from the Brothers Grimm's German Fairy Tales, who wrote that in 1284, a strange man dressed in a flower-clad man appeared in the city of Hameln, holding a flute in his hand, claiming to be able to use music to eliminate rat infestations.
The townspeople made an agreement with the man to pay him something if he could get rid of all the rats in the city. So the man played the flute and played a beautiful piece of music, and the rats heard the music, involuntarily came out of the hole, followed the man in flower clothes, and jumped into the river one by one.
However, the citizens of Hameln refused to pay, so the angry man in flower clothes blew the flute again. This time, a large group of children over the age of four ran out of the house and followed the man into the mountains, and since then, no one has seen the man in flower clothes, and the poor children have disappeared forever.
The story of this "flower-clad magic piper" is widely spread in Europe and can be described as a household name. But this is by no means just a fictional story, as the philosopher Leibniz once said: "There are certain real events hidden in this legend." ”
Historian Keiya Abe, who has been hailed as "the first person to study western social history in Japan," showed great interest in this legend, pointing out to us:
Whatever it was that happened in 1284, the sorrow and pain of the people of Hameln spanned time and space and reached our hearts. When we approach the life of the common people that produces this sadness and suffering, we go beyond the mere declassification of interest or curiosity and touch directly to a corner of European social history. ”
In order to reveal the truth behind the legend, Abe Also in his new work "The Magic Piper in Flower Clothes", Abe also takes this magical legend as the starting point, like a detective, tracking documents and historical materials, layer by layer reasoning, step by step, revealing the cruel truth behind the legend, and presenting the carnival and sorrow of the medieval common people.
Abe also went through a large number of documents and eventually found that on June 26, 1284, 130 children had indeed disappeared in the German city of Hameln. After that, like a hunting dog with a keen sense of smell, he meticulously tracked the four-hundred-year research history of the European region after the fact that this matter was turned into a legend.
Abe also found that there were as many as 25 conjectures about this legend by European scholars, with some believing that the children had been killed as sacrifices to Jewish rituals, others suggesting that the children had been abducted into monasteries by monks, and others believing that the missing children were probably captured and sent to the battlefield as cannon fodder.
But Abe also believes that these conjectures are not enough to fully explain this historical mystery, in order to find the historical truth, he found a different direction of exploration, that is, the civic class of Hameln at that time, and the medieval untouchable class represented by the "flower-clothed piper".
After a thorough investigation of the socio-economic situation of the 1620s, Abe also found that the status of women at the bottom, especially widows, who were in the lowest position legally and economically, was unimaginable to modern people, "these women were dressed in rags, and they were stubbornly passed through the gossip of women of their generation or showing off or complaining about their husbands, they endured the lustful eyes of men, and their lifelong expectations were only on the growth of their children." ”
However, in that tragic era, the future of the children at the bottom was also completely hopeless, as Abe also said, these children of lowly birth were already in danger of life at the moment of birth. At that time, a poor couple gave birth to 20 children, and often only one or two children could grow up.
Moreover, medieval Europe had many large-scale famines. The city of Hameln, located in the interior of North Germany, starved in the 13th century alone in the years 1205, 1217, 1218, 1225, 1226, 1227, 1271, and 1272. Many poor people eat tree roots, weeds, bark to survive, and in Hungary, hungry people even eat a hillside to the ground!
When hunger was unbearable, there was even a phenomenon of cannibalism in Central Europe, and many historical documents recorded that in Germany, Britain, Italy, bohemia, there have been cases of selling dead human flesh in the market.
In an era when they are starving, parents who let their children starve to death will probably never forget that kind of pain. They want someone to send their starving children to the underworld for them, so they play the role of the leader of the underworld as the "piper" of the bard.
In this way, the grief of the people at the bottom who lost their children was passed down through the times through the legend of the "Flower Dress Demon Flute Player". And future generations of people are also trying to interpret the cruel truth behind this legend in the society and state of mind of their respective times.
Perhaps, only when we look at the lives of the people at the bottom of the city and the abnormal disappearance of children, the living conditions of the common people in European society at that time, can we touch a corner of European social history through the ancient legend of the "flower-clothed magic piper". As Abe also said:
The emergence of legends often disguises some truths that cannot be declared in the mouth, and since they cannot be spoken, the only way to express it is to turn the legend into a story and pass it on cryptically!