HistoryBrief — Issue 002

The Dancing Plague of Strasbourg

July 1518

One historical event. One page. Every day.

Sometime in mid-July 1518, a woman named Frau Troffea walked into a narrow street in Strasbourg and began to dance. No music. No festival. No reason anyone could see.

She danced for four to six days straight.

Within a week, she had company. Not willing company. People who joined looked terrified — weeping, bleeding from their feet, begging someone to make them stop. But they could not stop.

Within a month, between three and four hundred people were convulsing in the streets of Strasbourg. People were collapsing from heart failure, stroke, and sheer physical exhaustion. At its peak, roughly fifteen people were dying per day. Dancing themselves to death in a medieval city.

The city council convened. Their solution tells you everything about the gap between the medieval mind and the modern one: they concluded the afflicted needed to dance it out. They hired professional musicians. They cleared spaces and built stages. They brought in drummers and pipers. The theory was that "hot blood" — a medical concept of the era — needed to be burned off through vigorous movement.

It didn't work. The music drew crowds. The crowds fed the hysteria.

By early August, the council reversed course entirely. Now they decided it was divine punishment — a curse from Saint Vitus, patron saint of dancers and epileptics. The afflicted were loaded onto wagons and transported forty kilometres to Saint Vitus's shrine at Saverne, where priests performed exorcisms and gave the dancers red shoes.

Remarkably, it appeared to work. Over the following weeks, the epidemic subsided. The last cases were recorded in September 1518. The death toll remains uncertain — estimates range from dozens to over a hundred.

The leading modern explanation is mass psychogenic illness. Strasbourg in 1518 was a pressure cooker: failed harvests, tripled grain prices, plague, syphilis, and volcanic religious tension. The people were starving, terrified, and waiting for God to punish them. Historian John Waller argues the extreme psychological stress created conditions where the body found its own violent release — and the pre-existing cultural belief in Saint Vitus's dancing curse gave it a script to follow.

The hysteria was real. The suffering was real. The deaths were real. The cause was a society on the edge of collapse — and one woman who broke first.

🔑 Three Key Facts

1. Frau Troffea's first name was never recorded. History preserved the plague she started but not her identity. We know nothing about her except that she danced, and others followed.

2. The Strasbourg city council's "dance it out" prescription — hiring musicians and building stages — actively worsened the outbreak by creating spectacle that drew crowds and spread the contagion of hysteria.

3. The ergot theory (contaminated rye grain causing hallucinations and convulsions) is popular but flawed: ergot causes muscle rigidity, not sustained rhythmic movement, and doesn't explain the social contagion pattern.

🤔 What If?

What if the council had quarantined the dancers instead of providing music? Mass psychogenic illness spreads through observation and social reinforcement. If authorities had isolated the afflicted rather than creating a public spectacle, the epidemic might have burned out at thirty cases instead of four hundred. Would fewer people have died — or would the underlying pressure have found an even more destructive outlet?

📺 Watch the full story: The Dancing Plague of 1518 — xDocs on YouTube

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Sources: xDocs Dancing Plague script (2026-03-27); John Waller, "A Time to Dance, A Time to Die" (2008); Sebastian Brant chronicle; Strasbourg city council records (July–September 1518).