HISTORY of the CHRISTIAN CHURCH*
CHAPTER X.
HERESY AND ITS SUPPRESSION.
§ 78. Literature for the Entire Chapter.
General Works: Flacius Illyricus: Catalogus testium veritatis qui ante nostram aetatem reclamarunt papae, Basel, 1556.—Du Plessis d’argentré: Coll. judiciorum de novis erroribus qui ab initio XII. saec. usque ad 1632 in ecclesia postscripti sunt et notati, 3 vols. Paris, 1728.—*Döllinger: Beiträge zur Sektengesch. des Mittelalters, Munich, 1890. A most valuable work. Part II., pp. 736, contains original documents, in the collection of which Döllinger spent many years and made many journeys.—Paul Fredericq: Corpus documentorum haer. pravitatis Neerlandicae, 5 vols. Ghent, 1889 sqq.—Caesar of Heisterbach: Dialogus.—Etienne De Bourbon: Anecdotes Historiques, ed. by Lecoy de la Marche, Paris, 1877.—Map: De nugis curialium, Wright’s ed. Epp. Innocentii III., Migne, 214–216.—Jacques de Vitry: Hist. orientalis, Douai, 1672, and in Martene and Durand, Thes. anecd., 5 vols. Paris, 1717.—Arnold: Unpartheiische Kirchen- und Ketzerhistorie, Frankf., 1729.—Füsslin: Kirchen- und Ketzergesch. der mittleren Zeit, 3 vols. Leipzig, 1770–1774.—Mosheim: Versuch einer unparthei. Ketzergesch., Helmstädt, 1746.—Hahn: Gesch. der Ketzer im Mittelalter, 3 vols. Stuttg., 1845–1847.—A. Jundt: Hist. du panthéisme pop. au moyen âge, Paris, 1876.—*LEA: Hist. of the Inquisition, 3 vols. N. Y., 1888. On the sects, I. 67–208.—M. F. Tocco: L’eresia net medio evo, Florence, 1884.—P. Alphandéry: Les idées morales chez les Hetérédoxes Latins au début du XIII siècle, Paris, 1903.—Hefele-Knöpfler, vol. V.—A. H. Newman: Recent Researches concerning Med. Sects in Papers of Amer. Soc. of Ch. Hist. 1892, IV. 167–221.
For The Cathari, § 80 — Bonacursus (at first a Catharan teacher): Vita haereticorum seu contra Catharos (1190?), Migne, 204. 775–792.—Ecbertus (canon of Cologne about 1150): Sermones XIII. adv. Catharorum errores, Migne, 195. —- Ermengaudus: Contra haeret., Migne, 204, 1235–1275.—Moneta Cremonensis (1240): Adv. Catharos et Valdenses, Rome, 1763.—Rainerius Sacchone (d. about 1263, was a leader among the Cathari for seventeen years, then became a Dominican and an active inquisitor): De Catharibus et Leonistis seu pauperibus de Lugduno in Martène-Durand, Thes. Anecd., V. 1759–1776.—Bernardus Guidonis: Practica inquisitionis hereticae pravitatis, ed. by Douais, Paris, 1886.—C. Douais, bp. of Beauvais: Documents pour servir à l’Hist. de l’inquis. dans le Languedoc, 2 vols. Paris, 1900. Trans. and Reprints, by Univ. of Phila., III. No. 6.—*C. Schmidt: Hist. et Doctr. de la secte des Cathares ou Albigeois, 2 vols. Paris, 1849.
For The Petrobrusians, etc.,
For The Beguines And Beghards, § 83: Bernardus Guy: pp. 141 sqq., 264–268.—Fredericq, II. 9 sqq., 72 sqq.—Döllinger, II. 378–416, 702 sqq.—*J. L. Mosheim: De Beghardis et Beguinabus, Leipzig, 1790.—G. Uhlhorn: D. christl. Liebesthätigkeit im Mittelalter, pp. 376–394.—H. Delacroix: Le Mysticisme speculatif en Allemagne au 14e siècle, Paris, 1900, pp. 52–134.—Ullmann: Reformers before the Reformation. — LEA: II. 350 sqq.—*Haupt, art. Beguinen und Begharden in Herzog, II. 516–526, and art. Beguinen in Wetzer-Welte, II. 204 sqq.
For The Waldenses, § 84, the works of Rainerius, Moneta, Bernardus Guy.—Döllinger: Beiträge.—Bernardus, Abbas Fontis Calidi (d. about 1193): Adv. Waldensium sectam, Migne, 204. 793–840.—Alanus ab Insulis (d. about 1202): Adv. haeret. Waldenses, Judaeos et Paganos, Migne, 210. 377–399;—Rescriptum haeresiarcharum Lombardiae ad Leonistas in Alemannia, by the so-called "Anonymous of Passau" (about 1315), ed. by Preger in Beiträge zur Gesch. der Waldesier im Mittelalter, Munich, 1876. Gieseler, in his De Rainerii Sacchone, Götting., 1834, recognized this as a distinct work.—Etienne de Bourbon, pp. 290–296, etc.—David of Augsburg: Tractatus de inquis. haereticorum, ed. by Preger, Munich, 1878. Döllinger gives parts of Bernard Guy’s Practica, II. 6–17, etc., the Rescriptum, II. 42–52, and David of Augsburg, II. 351–319.—Also Fredericq, vols. I., II.
Mod. Works, § 84: Perrin: Hist. des Vaudois, Geneva, 1619, in three parts,—the Waldenses, the Albigenses, and the Ten Persecutions of the Vaudois. The Phila. ed. (1847) contains an introd. by Professor Samuel Miller of Princeton.—Gilles: Hist. Eccles. des églises réf. en quelques vallées de Piémont, Geneva, 1648.—Morland: Hist. of the evang. Churches of the Valleys of Piedmont, London, 1658. —- Leger: Hist. générale des églises evang. des Vallées, etc., Leyden, 1669, with large maps of the three Waldensian valleys and pictures of the martyrdoms. Leger, a leading Waldensian pastor, took refuge in Leyden from persecution.—Peyran: Hist. Defence of the Waldenses, London, 1826.—Gilly (canon of Durham): Waldensian Researches, London, 1831.—Muston: Hist. des Vaudois, Paris, 1834; L’Israel des Alpes, Paris, 1851, Engl. trans., 2 vols. London, 1857, — Blair: Hist. of the Waldenses, 2 vols. Edinb., 1833.—Monastier: Hist. de l’église vaudoise, 2 vols. Lausanne, 1847.—*A. W. Dieckhoff: Die Waldenser im Mittelalter, Götting. 1861.—*J. J. Herzog: Die romanischen Waldenser, Halle, 1853.—Maitland: Facts and Documents of the Waldenses, London, 1862.—F. Palacky: Die Beziehungen der Waldenser zu den ehemaligen Sekten in Böhmen, Prague, 1869.—*Jaroslav Goll: Quellen und Untersuchungen zur Gesch. der Böhmischen Brüder, Prague, 1878–1882.—*H. Haupt: Die relig. Sekten in Franken vor der Reformation, Würz b. 1882; Die deutsche Bibelübersetzung der mittelalterlichen Waldenser in dem Codex Teplensis, Würzb., 1885; Waldenserhtum und Inquisition im südöstlichen Deutschland, Freib., 1890; Der Waldensische Ursprung d. Codex Teplensis, Würzb., 1886.—Montet: Hist. litt. des Vaudois du Piémont, Paris, 1885.—*L. Keller: Die Waldenser und die deutschen Bibelübersetzungen, Leipzig, 1886.—*F. Jostes: Die Waldenser und die vorluth. deutsche Bibelübersetzung, Munich, 1885; Die Tepler Bibelübersetzung, Münster, 1886.—*Preger: Das Verhältniss der Taboriten zu den Waldesiern des 14ten Jahrhunderts, Munich, 1887; Die Verfassung der französ. Waldesier, etc., Munich, 1890.—*K. Muller. Die Waldenser und ihre einzelnen Gruppen bis zum Anfang des 14ten Jahrhunderts, Gotha, 1886.—*E. COMBA: Hist. des Vaudois d’Italie avant la Réforme, Paris, 1887, new ed. 1901, Engl. trans., London, 1889.—Sofia Bompiani A Short Hist. of the Ital. Waldenses, N. Y. 1897. See also Lea: Inquis., vol. II.—E. E. Hale: In his Name, Boston, 1887, a chaste tale of the early Waldenses in Lyons.—H. C. Vedder: Origin and Early Teachings of the Waldenses in "Am. Jour. of Theol.," 1900, pp. 465–489.
For The Crusades Against The Albigenses, § 85: Innocent III.’s Letters, Migne, 214–216. The Abbot Pierre de Vaux de Cernay in Rec. Hist. de France, XXI. 7 sqq.—Hurter: Inn. III. vol. II. 257–349, 379–389, 413–432.—Hefele-Knöpfler: V. 827–861, etc.—Lea: I. 114–209.—A. Luchaire: Inn. III. et la croisade des Albigeois, Paris, 1905. —Mandell Creighton: Simon de Montfort, in Hist. Biog.
For The Inquisition, §§ 86, 87, see Douais, Bernard Guy, and other sources and the works of Döllinger, Schmidt, Lea, Hurter (II. 257–269), Hefele, etc., as cited above.—Mirbt: Quellen zur Gesch. des Papstthums, 2d ed., pp. 126–146; — Doct. de modo proced. c. haeret., in Martene-Durand, Thes. anecd., V. 1795–1822.—Nic. Eymericus (inquis. general of Spain, d. 1399): Directorium inquisitorum, ed. F. Pegna, Rome, 1578. For MSS. of Eymericus, see Denifle: Archiv, 1886, pp. 143 sqq.—P. Fredericq: Corpus documentorum inquis. haer. prav. Neerlandicae, 5 vols. Ghent, 1889–1902. Vol. I. opens with the year 1025.—Lud. A Paramo (a Sicilian inquisitor): De orig. et progressu officii s. inguis., Madrid, 1698.—P. Limborch: Hist. inquis., Amster., 1692, includes the important liber sententiarum inquis. Tolosonae, Engl. trans., 2 vols. London, 1731.—J. A. Llorente (secretary of the Madrid Inquis. 1789–1791): Hist. critique de l’inquis. d’Espagne (to Ferdinand VII.), 4 vols. Paris, 1817. Condens. Engl. trans., Phil. 1843.—Rule: Hist. of the Inquis., 2 vols. London, 1874.—F. Hoffmann: Gesch. der Inquis. (down to the last cent.), 2 vols. Bonn, 1878.—C. Molinier: L’Inquis. dans le midi de la France au 13e et 14e siècle, Paris, 1881.—Ficker: Die gesetzl. Einführung der Todesstrafe für Ketzerei in Mittheilungen für Oester. Geschichtsforschung, 1880, pp. 188 sqq.—J. Havet: L’hérésie et le bras séculier aut moyen âge, Paris, 1881.—Tamburini: Storia generale dell’ Inquisizione, 4 vols.—L. Tanon: L’Hist. des tribunaux de l’Inquis. en France, Paris, 1893.—HENNER: Beiträge zur Organization und Kompetenz der päpstlichen Ketzergerichte, . Leipzig, 1893.—Graf von Hoensbroech: Das Papstthum, etc., Leipzig, 1900; 4th ed., 1901. Chap. on the Papacy and the Inquis., I. 1–206.—P. Flade: Das römische Inquisitionsverfahren in Deutschland bis zu den Hexenprocessen, Leipzig, 1902.—Hurter: art. Inquisition in Wetzer-Welte, VI. 765 sqq., and Herzog, IX. 152–167.—E. L. Th. Henke: Konrad von Marburg, Marb., 1861.—B. Kaltner: Konrad v. Marburg u. d. Inquis. in Deutschland, Prague, 1882.—R. Schmidt: Die Herkunft des Inquisitionsprocesses, Freib. i. Breig. 1902.—C. H. Haskins: Robert le Bougre and the Beginnings of the Inquis. in Northern France in "Amer. Hist. Rev.," 1902, pp. 421–437, 631–653.—The works on canon law by Hinschius, Friedberg, and Ph. Hergenröther (R. C.), pp. 126, 601–610.—E. Vacandard: L’inquisition, Etude Hist. et crit. sur le pouvoir coercitif de l’église, Paris, 1907, pp. 340.
§ 79. The Mediaeval Dissenters.
The centralization of ecclesiastical authority in the papacy was met by a widespread counter-movement of religious individualism and dissent. It was when the theocratic programme of Gregory VII. and Innocent III. was being pressed most vigorously that an ominous spiritual revolt showed itself in communities of dissenters. While the crusading armaments were battling against the infidel abroad, heretical depravity, to use the official term, arose in the Church at home to disturb its peace.
For nearly five hundred years heresy had been unknown in Western Europe. When Gregory the Great converted the Arians of Spain and Lombardy in the latter part of the sixth century, it was supposed that the last sparks of heresy were extinguished. In the second half of the eleventh century here and there, in Milan, Orleans, Strassburg, Cologne, and Mainz, little flames of heresy shot forth; but they were quickly put out and the Church went on its way again in peace. In the twelfth century, heresy again broke out simultaneously in different parts of Europe, from Hungary to the Pyrenees and northwards to Bremen. The two burning centres of the infection were Milan in Northern Italy and Toulouse in Southern France. The Church authorities looked on with alarm, and, led by the pope, proceeded to employ vigorous measures to stamp out the threatening evil. Jacques of Vitry, after visiting Milan, called it a pit of heretics, fovea haereticorum, and declared that there was hardly a person left to resist the spiritual rebels, so numerous were they in that city.941 At different points in Lombardy the clergy were actually driven out and Piacenza remained three years without a priest. In Viterbo, in the very vicinity of Rome, the Patarenes were in the majority in 1205, as Innocent III. testified. But it was in Languedoc that the situation was most alarming, and there papal armies were marshalled to crush out the contagion.
The dissenting movement started with the people and not with the schools or princes, much provocation as the princes had for showing their resentment at the avarice and worldliness of the clergy and their invasion of the realm of civil authority. The vast majority of those who suffered punishment as heretics were of the common people. Their ignorance was a constant subject of gibe and derision as they stood for trial before the ecclesiastical tribunals. The heresy of a later period, the fifteenth century, differs in this regard, having scholars among its advocates.
Our knowledge of the mediaeval sectaries and their practices is drawn almost wholly from the testimonies of those who were arrayed against them. These testimonies are found in tracts, manuals for the treatment of heresy, occasional notices of ecclesiastical writers like Salimbene, Vitry, Etienne de Bourbon, Caesar of Heisterbach, or Matthew Paris, in the decrees of synods and in the records of the heresy trials themselves. These last records, written down by Catholic hands, have come down to us in large numbers.942 Interesting as they are, they must be accepted with caution as the statements of enemies. As for Catharan literature, a single piece has survived943 and it is a painful recollection that, where so many suffered the loss of goods, imprisonments, and death for their religious convictions, only a few lines remain in their own handwriting to depict their faith and hopes.
The exciting cause of this religious revolt is to be looked for in the worldliness and arrogance of the clergy, the formalism of the Church’s ritual, and the worldly ambitions of the papal policy. In their depositions before the Church inquisitors, the accused called attention to the pride, cupidity, and immorality of the priests. Tanchelm, Henry of Lausanne, and other leaders directed their invectives against the priests and bishops who sought power and ease rather than the good of the people.
Underneath all this discontent was the spiritual hunger of the masses. The Bible was not an altogether forgotten book. The people remembered it. Popular preachers like Bernard of Thiron, Robert of Abrissel and Vitalis of Savigny quoted its precepts and relied upon its authority. There was a hankering after the Gospel which the Church did not set forth. The people wanted to get behind the clergy and the ritual of the sacraments to Christ himself, and, in doing so, a large body of the sectaries went to the extreme of abandoning the outward celebration of the sacraments, and withdrew themselves altogether from priestly offices. The aim of all the sects was moral and religious reformation. The Cathari, it is true, differed in a philosophical question and were Manichaeans, but it was not a question of philosophy they were concerned about. Their chief purpose was to get away from the worldly aims of the established church, and this explains their rapid diffusion in Lombardy and Southern France.944
A prominent charge made against the dissenters was that they put their own interpretations upon the Gospels and Epistles and employed these interpretations to establish their own systems and rebuke the Catholic hierarchy. Special honor was given by the Cathari to the Gospel of John, and the Waldensian movement started with an attempt to make known the Scriptures through the vulgar tongue. The humbler classes knew enough about clerical abuses from their own observation; but the complaints of the best men of the times were in the air, and these must also have reached their ears and increased the general restlessness. St. Bernard rebuked the clergy for ambition, pride, and lust. Grosseteste called clerics antichrists and devils. Walter von der Vogelweide, among the poets, spoke of priests as those —
"Who make a traffic of each sacrament
The mass’ holy sacrifice included."
These men did not mean to condemn the priestly office, but it should occasion no surprise that the people made no distinction between the office and the priest who abused the office.
The voices of the prophets were also heard beyond the walls of the convent,—Joachim of Flore and Hildegard. Of an independent ecclesiastical movement they had no thought. But they cried out for clerical reform, and the people, after long waiting, seeing no signs of a reform, found hope of relief only in separatistic societies and groups of believers. The prophetess on the Rhine, having in mind the Cathari, called upon all kings and Christians to put down the Sadducees and heretics who indulged in lust, and, in the face of the early command to the race to go forth and multiply, rejected marriage. But to her credit, it is to be said, that at a time when heretics were being burnt at Bonn and Cologne, she remonstrated against the death penalty for the heretic on the ground that in spite of his heresy he bore the image of God.945 She would have limited the punishment to the sequestration of goods.
It is also most probable that the elements of heresy were introduced into Central and Western Europe from the East. In the Byzantine empire the germs of early heresies continued to sprout, and from there they seem to have been carried to the West, where they were adopted by the Manichaean Cathari and Albigenses. Travelling merchants and mercenaries from Germany, Denmark, France, and Flanders, who had travelled in the East or served in the Byzantine armies, may have brought them with them on their return to their homes.
The matters in which the heretical sects differed from the Catholic Church concerned doctrine, ritual, and the organization of the Church. Among the dogmas repudiated were transubstantiation and the sacerdotal theory of the priesthood. The validity of infant baptism was also quite widely denied, and the Cathari abandoned water baptism altogether. The worship of the cross and other images was regarded as idolatry. Oaths and even military service were renounced. Bernard Guy, inquisitor-general of Toulouse and our chief authority for the heretical beliefs current in Southern France in the fourteenth century, says946 that the doctrine of transubstantiation was denied on the ground that, if Christ’s body had been as large as the largest mountain, it would have been consumed long before that time. As for adoring the cross, thorns and spears might with equal propriety be worshipped, for Christ’s body was wounded by a crown of thorns and a lance. The depositions of the victims of the Inquisition are the simple statements of unlettered men. In the thousands of reports of judicial cases, which are preserved, charges of immoral conduct are rare.
A heretic, that is, one who dissented from the dogmatic belief of the Catholic Church, was regarded as worse than a Saracen and worse than a person of depraved morals. In a sermon, issued by Werner of St. Blasius about 1125, the statement is made that the "holy Catholic Church patiently tolerates those who live ill, male viventes, but casts out from itself those who believe erroneously, male credentes."947 The mediaeval Church, following the Fathers, did not hesitate to apply the most opprobrious epithets to heretics. The synod of Toulouse, 1163, refering to the heretics in Gascony, compared them to serpents which, just for the very reason that they conceal themselves, are all the more destructive to the simpleminded in the Lord’s vineyard. Perhaps the most frequent comparison was that which likened them to Solomon’s little foxes which destroy the vines.948 Peter Damiani949 and others liken them to the foxes whose tails Samson bound together and drove forth on their destructive mission. Innocent III. showed a preference for the comparison to foxes, but also called heretics scorpions, wounding with the sting of damnation, locusts like the locusts of Joel hid in the dust with vermin and countless in numbers, demons who offer the poison of serpents in the golden chalice of Babylon, and he called heresy the black horse of the Apocalypse on which the devil rides, holding the balances. Heresy is a cancer which moves like a serpent.950
The Fourth Lateran also used the figure of Samson’s foxes, whose faces had different aspects, but whose tails were bound together for one and the same fell purpose.951 Gregory IX.,952 speaking of France, declared that it was filled with a multitude of venomous reptiles and the poison of the heresies. Etienne de Bourbon, writing in the last years of the twelfth century, said that, heretics are dregs and depravity, and for that reason cannot return to their former faith except by a divine miracle, even as cinders, which cannot be made into silver, or dregs into wine."953 St. Bernard likened heretics to dogs that bite and foxes that deceive.954 Free use was made of the withered branch of John 15:6, which was to be cast out and burnt, and of the historical examples of the destruction of the Canaanites and of Korah, Dothan, and Abiram. Thomas Aquinas put heretics in the same category with coin clippers who were felons before the civil tribunal. Earthquakes, like the great earthquake in Lombardy of 1222, and other natural calamities were ascribed by the orthodox to God’s anger against heresy.955
The principle of toleration was unknown, or at best only here and there a voice was raised against the death penalty, as in the case of Hildegard, Rupert of Deutz,956 and Peter Cantor, bishop of Paris.957 Bernard went farther and admonished Eugenius III. against the use of force in the treatment of heretics958 and in commenting upon Cant. II. 15, "take me the foxes that spoil the vines," he said, that they should be caught not by arms but by arguments, and be reconciled to the Church in accordance with the purpose of Him who wills all men to be saved. He added that a false Catholic does more harm than an open heretic.959 The opinion came to prevail, that what disease is to the body that heresy is to the Church, and the most merciful procedure was to cut off the heretic. No distinction was made between the man and the error. The popes were chiefly responsible for the policy which acted upon this view. The civil codes adopted and pronounced death as the heretic’s "merited reward," poena debita.960 Thomas Aquinas and the theologians established it by arguments. Bernard Guy expressed the opinion of his age when he declared that heresy can be destroyed only when its advocates are converted or burnt. To extirpate religious dissent, the fierce tribunal of the Inquisition was established. The last measure to be resorted to was an organized crusade, waged under the banner of the pope, which shed the blood of the mediaeval dissenters without pity and with as little compunction as the blood of Saracens in the East.
The confusion, which reigned among the Church authorities concerning the sectaries, and also the differences which existed among the sectaries themselves, appear from the many names by which they were known. The most elaborate list is given in the code of Frederick II. 1238,961 and enumerates nineteen different sects, among which the most familiar are Cathari, Patarenes, Beguines, Arnoldists, and Waldenses. But the code did not regard this enumeration as exhaustive, and adds to the names "all heretics of both sexes, whatever be the term used to designate them." And in fact the list is not exhaustive, for it does not include the respectable group of Northern Italy known as the Humiliati, or the Ortlibenses of Strassburg, or the Apostolicals of Belgium. One document speaks of no less than seventy-two, and Salimbene of one hundred and thirty different sects.962 The council of Verona, 1183, condemned, "first of all the Cathari and Patarenes and those who falsely called themselves Humiliati or Poor Men of Lyons, also the Passagini, Josephini, and Arnoldists, whom we put under perpetual Anathema." The lack of compact organization explains in part the number of these names, some of which were taken from localities or towns and did not indicate any differences of belief or practice from other sectaries. The numbers of the heretics must be largely a matter of conjecture. A panic took hold of the Church authorities, and some of the statements, like those of Innocent III., must be regarded as exaggerations, as are often the rumors about a hostile army in a panic-stricken country, awaiting its arrival. Innocent pronounced the number of heretics in Southern France innumerable.963 According to the statement of Neumeister, a heretical bishop who was burnt, the number of Waldensian heretics in Austria about 1300 was eighty thousand.964 The writer, usually designated "the Passau Anonymous," writing about 1315, said there was scarcely a land in which the Waldenses had not spread. The Cathari in Southern France mustered large armies and were massacred by the thousands. Of all these sects, the only one which has survived is the very honorable body, still known as the Waldenses.
The mediaeval dissenters have sometimes been classed with the Protestants. The classification is true only on the broad ground of their common refusal to be bound by the yoke of the Catholic hierarchy. Some of the tenets of the dissenters and some of their practices the Protestant Reformation repudiated, fully as much as did the established Church of the Middle Ages. Interesting as they are in themselves and by reason of the terrible ordeals they were forced to undergo, the sects were side currents compared with the great stream of the Catholic Church, to which, with all its abuses and persecuting enormities, the credit belongs of Christianizing the barbarians, developing learning, building cathedrals, cultivating art, furnishing hymns, constructing theological systems, and in other ways contributing to the progress of mankind. That which makes them most interesting to us is their revolt against the priesthood, in which they all agreed, and the emphasis they laid upon purity of speech and purity of life. Their history shows many good men, but no great personality. Peter Waldo is the most notable among their leaders.
A clear classification of the mediaeval heretics is made difficult if not impossible by the uncertainty concerning the opinions held by some of them and also by the apparent confusion of one sect with another by mediaeval writers.
The Cathari, or Manichaean heretics, form a class by themselves. The Waldenses, Humiliati, and probably the Arnoldists, represent the group of evangelical dissenters. The Amauricians and probably the Ortlibenses were pantheistic. he isolated leaders, Peter de Bruys, Henry of Lausanne, Eudo, and Tanchelm, were preachers and iconoclasts—using the term in a good sense—rather than founders of sects. The Beguines and Beghards represented a reform movement within the Church, one wing going off into paths of doctrinal heresy and lawlessness, and incurring thereby the anathemas of the ecclesiastical authorities.
§ 80. The Cathari.
The most widely distributed of the heretical sects were the Cathari. The term comes from the Greek katharos, meaning pure, and has given to the German its word for heretic, Ketzer. It was first used by the Cathari themselves.965 A grotesque derivation, invented by their enemies, associated the sect with the cat, whose form it was the pleasure of the devil to assume.966 From their dualistic tenets they were called New Manichaeans. From the quarter they inhabited in Milan, called Pataria, or the abode of the junk dealers, they received the name Patarenes.967
In Southern France they were called Albigenses, from the town of Albi, one of the centres of their strength. From the territory in Eastern Europe, whence their theological tenets were drawn, they were known as Bulgari, Bugares, or Bugres.968 Other titles were given to them in France, such as Tessarants, Textores, from their strength among the weavers and industrial classes, or Publicani and Poplicani, a corruption of Paulicians.969
It was the general belief of the age that the Cathari derived their doctrinal views from heretical sects of Eastern Europe and the Orient, such as the Paulicians and Bogomili. This was brought out in the testimony of members of the sect at their trials, and it has in its favor the official recognition which leaders from Eastern Europe, Bosnia, and Constantinople gave to the Western heretics. The Paulicians had existed since the fifth century in Asia Minor, and had pushed their way to Constantinople.970 The Bogomili, who were of later origin, had a position of some prominence in Constantinople in the early part of the twelfth century.971 It is also possible that seeds of Manichaean and Arian heresy were left in Italy and Southern France after these systems were supposed to be stamped out in those regions.
The Paulicians rejected the Old Testament and taught a strict dualism. The Bogomili held to the Sabellian Trinity, rejected the eucharist, and substituted for baptism with water a ritual of prayer and the imposition of hands. Marriage they pronounced an unclean relationship. The worship of images and the use of the cross were discarded.
It was in the early years of the eleventh century, that the first reports of the appearance of heresy were bruited about here and there in Italy and Southern France. About the year 1000 a certain Leuthard, claiming to be inspired, appeared in the diocese of Châlons, destroying crosses and denouncing tithes. In 1012 Manichaean separatists appeared for the first time in Germany, at Mainz,972 and in 1022 at Orleans, where King Robert and his consort Constance were present at their trial. Fifteen were tried, and thirteen remained steadfast and perished in the flames. Constance is said to have struck one of them, her former confessor, with a staff and to have put out one of his eyes.973 Heretics appeared at Liège in 1025. About the same time a group was discovered in Treves who denied transubstantiation and rejected infant baptism.974 The castle of Monteforte near Turin became a stronghold for them, and in 1034 Heribert, archbishop of Milan, seized some of their number, including their leader Gerard. They all accepted death in the flames rather than adore a cross. In 1052 they appeared at Goslar, where the guilty were discerned by their refusal to kill a chicken. With these notices, and a few more like them, the rumor of heresy is exhausted for nearly a century.
About the middle of the twelfth century, heresy suddenly appeared again at Liége, and prosecutions were begun. In 1145 eight men and three women were burnt at Cologne. The firmness of the victims was exemplified in the case of a young woman, who was held back for a time with the promise of marriage, but, on seeing her coreligionists burnt, broke from her keepers and, hiding her face in her dress, threw herself into the flames. And so, Caesar of Heisterbach goes on to say, she descended with her fellow-heretics to hell.975 At Rheims, 1157, and again at Cologne in 1163 we hear of trials and burnings, but thereafter the Cathari are no more heard of in Germany.
Their only appearance in England was at Oxford, 1161, when more than thirty illiterate Germans, men and women, strove to propagate their errors. They were reported as "detesting" marriage, the eucharist, baptism, and the Catholic Church, and as having quoted Matt. 5:10, "Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." A council of bishops ordered them branded on the forehead and flogged.976 Henry II. would not allow heretics to be burnt to death, though offences in his reign against the forest laws were punished with blinding and castration.977
In France the Cathari were strong enough in 1167 to hold a council at St. Felix de Caraman near Toulouse. It was attended by Nicetas of Constantinople, to whom the title of pope was given. He was accompanied by a Catharan bishop, Marcus of Lombardy.978 Contemporary reports represent the number of heretics as very large. They were compared by William of Newburgh to the sand of the sea, and were said by Walter Map to be infinite in number in Aquitaine and Burgundy.979 By the end of the twelfth century they were reported to have followers in nearly 1000 cities.980 The Dominican Rainerius gave 4,000,000 as a safe estimate of their number and declared this was according to a census made by the Cathari themselves.981 Joachim of Flore stated that they were sending out their emissaries like locusts.982 Such statements are not to be taken too seriously, but they indicate a widespread religious unrest. Men did not know whereunto heresy might grow. In Southern France the priests were the objects of ridicule. In that region, as well as in many of the cities of Lombardy, the Cathari had schools for girls and boys.
Agreed as the Cathari were in opposing many customs and doctrines of the established Church, they were divided among themselves and broken up into sects,—seventy-two, according to one document.983 Chief among them were the Albanenses and Concorrezzi, deriving their names from two Lombard towns, Alba and Concorreggio, near Monza.984 A position intermediate between them was occupied by the Bagnolenses, so called from the Italian town of Bagnolo, near Lodi. This third party had a bishop whose authority was acknowledged by the Cathari in Mantua, Brescia, and Bergamo.985
The differences between the Albanenses and Concorrezzi were of a theological character and concerned the nature of God and the origin of matter. The Albanenses were strict dualists. Matter is eternal and the product of the evil god. Paul speaks of the things, which are seen, as dung. The Concorrezzi seem to have rejected dualism and to have regarded evil as the creation of Lucifer, the highest of the angels.
In matters of ritual and practical conduct, and in antagonism to the Church establishment, all groups of the Cathari were agreed. Since Schmidt wrote his History of the Cathari, it has been common to represent Catharism as a philosophical system,986 but it is difficult to understand the movement from this standpoint. How could an unlettered folk, as they were, be concerned primarily or chiefly with a metaphysical construction? Theirs was not a philosophy, but a daily faith and practice. This view alone makes it possible to understand how the movement gained such rapid and widespread acceptance in the well-ordered and prosperous territory of Southern France, a territory in which Cluny had exercised its influence and was located.
The Cathari agreed—to use the expression of their opponents—in vituperating the established Church and in calling its adherents Romanists. There are two Churches, they held,—one of the wicked and one of the righteous. They themselves constituted the Church of the righteous, outside of which there is no salvation,987 having received the imposition of hands and done penance according to the teaching of Christ and the Apostles. Its fruits proved that the established Church was not the true Church. The true Church endures persecution, does not prescribe it. The Roman Church sits in the place of rule and is clothed in purple and fine linen. The true Church teaches first. The Roman Church baptizes first. The true Church has no dignitaries, prelates, cardinals, archdeacons, or monks. The Roman Church is the woman of the Apocalypse, a harlot, and the pope anti-Christ.
The depositions at their trials indicate that the Cathari made much use of the Scriptures. The treatises of Bonacursus, Ermengaudus, and other writers in refutation of Catharan teachings abound in quotations of Scripture, a fact indicating the regard the heretics had for them. They put spiritual interpretations upon the miracles and freely allegorized parables. In the parable of the Good Samaritan, the man who fell among the thieves was Adam, whose spirit, at God’s command, descended from heaven to earth and fell among thieves in this lower world.988 The priest and the Levite were Melchizedek and Aaron, who went the "same way," that is, could not help him. The Old Testament they discredited, pronouncing it the work of the devil. Its God is an evil god.989
The Catharan doctrine seems to have highly exalted Christ, though it denied the full reality of his human nature. He was created in heaven and was not born on the earth, but passed through Mary as through a pipe. He neither ate material food nor drank material drink. As for John the Baptist, he was one of the major demons and was damned for doubting when he sent to Christ the question, "Art thou he that should come or do we look for another?"990
A strange account of the fall of the angels was current in Southern France. Satan ascended to heaven and waited in vain thirty-two years for admittance. He was then noticed and admitted by the porter. Hidden from the Father, he remained among the angels a year before he began to use his art to deceive. He asked them whether they had no other glory or pleasure besides what he saw. When they replied they had not, he asked whether they would not like to descend to his world and kingdom, promising to give them gifts, fields, vineyards, springs, meadows, fruits, gold, silver, and women. Then he began to praise woman and the pleasures of the flesh. When they inquired more particularly about the women, the devil said he would descend and bring one back with him. This he did. The woman was decked in jewels and gold and beautiful of form. The angels were inflamed with passion, and Satan seeing this, took her and left heaven. The angels followed. The exodus continued for nine days and nights, when God closed up the fissure which had been made.991
The Cathari divided themselves into two classes, the Perfecti and the Credentes, or Believers. The Perfect were those who had received the rite of the consolamentum , and were also called bons hommes,992 good men, or good Christians, or the Girded, vestiti ,993 from the fact that after receiving the consolamentum they bound themselves with a cord. The number of the Good Men, Rainerius, about 1250, gave as four thousand. The Credentes corresponded, in a general way, to the catechumens of the early Church, and placed all their hope in the consolamentum, which they looked forward to receiving. By a contract, called the convenenza , the Catharan officials pledged themselves to administer the consolamentum to the Credentes in their last hours.
The consolamentum took the place of baptism and meant more. Its administration was treated by the Catholic authorities as equivalent to an initiation into heresy — haereticatio, as it was called. The usual form in which the court stated the charge of heresy was, "He has submitted to heretication."994 The rite, which women also were allowed to administer, was performed with the laying on of hands and the use of the Gospel of John, which was imposed upon the head or placed at the candidate’s breast.995 The candidate made a confession of all his sins of thought, word, work, and vision, and placed his faith and hope in God and the consolamentum which he was about to receive. The kiss of peace followed.996
The Perfect had a monopoly of salvation. Those not receiving the consolamentum were considered lost or passed at death into another body and returned to the earth. The rite involved not only the absolution of all previous sins but of sins that might be committed thereafter. However, relapse was possible and sometimes occurred.997 At death, the spirit was reunited with the soul, which had been left behind in heaven. There is no resurrection of the body. The administration of the consolamentum seems to have been confined to adults until the fourteenth century, when it was administered to sick children. Those who submitted to it were said to have, made a good ending."998
The consolamentum involved the renunciation of the seven sacraments. Baptism with water was pronounced a material and corruptible thing, the work of the evil god. Even little children were not saved who received absolution and imposition of bands.999 The baptism of the established Church was the baptism of John the Baptist, and John’s baptism was an invention of the devil.1000 Christ made a clear distinction between baptism with water and the baptism of power, Acts 1:5. The latter he promised to the Church.
As for the eucharist, the Cathari held that God would not appoint the consecrated host as a medium of grace, nor can God be in the host, for it passes through the belly, and the vilest part of the body.1001 For the mass was substituted consecrated bread before the common meal. This bread was often kept for months. There was also, in some quarters, a more solemn celebration twelve times a year, called the apparellamentum, and the charge was very frequently made that the accused had attended this feast.1002 Some deposed that they were eating Christ’s body and drinking his blood while they were listening to the words of Scripture. Among the requirements made of those who received the consolamentum were that they should not touch women, eat animal food, kill animals, take oaths, or favor war and capital punishment.
The marriage bed was renounced as contrary to God’s law, and some went so far as to say openly that the human body was made by the devil. The love of husband and wife should be like the love of Christ for the Church, without carnal desire. The command to avoid looking on a woman, Matt. 5:27, 28, was taken literally, and the command to leave husband and wife was interpreted to mean the renunciation of sexual cohabitation. Witnesses condemned marriage absolutely,1003 and no man or woman living in sexual relations could be saved. The opinion prevailed, at least among some Catharan groups, that the eating of the forbidden fruit in Eden meant carnal cohabitation.1004
As for animal nourishment, not only were all meats forbidden, but also eggs and cheese. The reason given was that these were the product of carnal intercourse.1005 The words of Peter on the housetop, Acts 10:14, were also quoted. The Cathari, however, allowed themselves fish, in view of Christ’s example in feeding the multitude and his example after his resurrection, when he gave fish to his disciples. The killing of animals, birds, and insects, except frogs and serpents, was also forbidden.1006 The ultimate ground for this refusal to kill animal life was stated by one of the Inquisitorial manuals to be a belief in metempsychosis, the return of the souls of the dead in the bodies of animals.
The condemnation of capital punishment was based on such passages as: "Give place unto wrath, vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord," Rom. 12:19; and the judicial execution of heretics and criminals was pronounced homicide, a survival from the Old Testament and the influence of its evil god. The Cathari quoted Christ’s words, "Ye have heard how it hath been said an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth."1007 One of the charges made against the established Church was that it countenanced war and marshalled armies.
The interdiction of oaths was in obedience to the words of Christ, and was in the interest of strict integrity of speech.1008
The Cathari also renounced priestly vestments, altars, and crosses as idolatrous. They called the cross the mark of the beast, and declared it had no more virtue than a ribbon for binding the hair. It was the instrument of Christ’s shame and death, and therefore not to be used.1009 Thorns or a spear would be as appropriate for religious symbols as the cross.
They also rejected, as might have been expected, the doctrines of purgatory and indulgences.1010
In addition to the consolamentum, the Cathari practised two rites called the melioramentum and the endura.1011 The melioramentum, which is adduced again and again in the judicial sentences, was a veneration of the officials administering the consolamentum, and consisted of a threefold salutation. The Catholics regarded it as a travesty of the adoration of the host.1012
The endura, which has been called the most cruel practice the history of asceticism has to show, was a voluntary starvation unto death by those who had received the consolamentum. Sometimes these rigorous religionists waited for thirteen days for the end to come,1013 and parents are said even to have left their sick children without food, and mothers to have withdrawn the breast from nursing infants in executing the rite. The reports of such voluntary suicide are quite numerous.
Our knowledge of the form of Church government practised by the Cathari is scant. Some of the groups of Italy and Languedoc had bishops. The bishop had as assistants a "major" and a "minor" son and a deacon, the two former taking the bishop’s place in his absence.1014 Assemblies were held, as in 1241, on the banks of the Larneta, under the presidency of the heretical bishop of Albi, Aymeri de Collet. A more compact organization would probably have been adopted but for the measures of repression everywhere put in force against the sect.
The steadfast endurance of the Catharan dissenters before hostile tribunals and in the face of death belong to the annals of heroism and must call forth our admiration as it called forth the wonder of contemporaries like Bernard.1015 We live, said Everwin of Steinfeld,1016 —
"A hard and wandering life. We flee from city to city like sheep in the midst of wolves. We suffer persecution like the Apostles and the martyrs because our life to holy and austere. It is passed amidst prayers, abstinence, and labors, but everything is easy for us because we are not of this world."
Dr. Lea, the eminent authority on the Inquisition, has said (I. 104) that no religion can show a more unbroken roll of victims who unshrinkingly and joyfully sought death in its most abhorrent form in preference to apostasy than the Cathari. Serious as some of the errors were which they held, nevertheless their effort to cultivate piety by other methods than the Church was offering calls for sympathy. Their rupture with the established organization can be to a Protestant no reason for condemnation; and their dependence upon the Scriptures and their moral tendencies must awaken within him a feeling of kinship. He cannot follow them in their rejection of baptism and the eucharist. In the repudiation of judicial oaths and war, they anticipated some of the later Christian bodies, such as the Quakers and Mennonites.
§ 81. Peter de Bruys and Other Independent Leaders.
Independent of the Cathari and yet sharing some of their views and uniting with them in protest against the abuses of the established Church, were Peter de Bruys, Henry of Lausanne, and other leaders. Peter and Henry exercised their influence in Southern France. Tanchelm and Eudo preached in Flanders and Brittany. At least three of them died in prison or otherwise suffered death by violence. Bernard of Clairvaux, Peter the Venerable, Otto of Freising, and other contemporary Catholic writers are very severe upon them and speak contemptuously of their followers as drawn from the ignorant classes.
Tanchelm, a layman, preached in the diocese of Cologne and westwards to Antwerp and Utrecht. There was at the time only a single priest in Antwerp, and he living in concubinage. Tanchelm pronounced the sacraments of no avail when performed by a priest of immoral life and is said to have turned "very many from the faith and the sacraments."1017 He surrounded himself with an armed retinue and went through the country carrying a sword and preceded by a flag. Success turned his head. According to his contemporary, Abaelard, he gave himself out to be the Son of God.1018 He went through the public ceremony of marrying the Virgin Mary, with her portrait before him. The people are said by Norbert’s biographer to have drunk the water Tanchelm washed in. He was imprisoned by the archbishop of Cologne, made his escape, and was killed by a priest, 1115. His preaching provoked the settlement of twelve Premonstrants in Antwerp, and Norbert himself preached in the Netherlands, 1124.
The movement in Brittany was led by Eudo de l’Etoile, who also pretended to be the Son of God. He was one of the sect of the Apostolicals, a name given to heretical groups in France and Belgium whose members refused flesh and repudiated marriage and other sacraments.1019 Eudo died in prison about 1148.
The movement led by Peter de Bruys and Henry of Lausanne was far more substantial. Both leaders were men of sound sense and ability. Of the personal fortunes of Peter, nothing more is known than that he was a priest, appeared as a reformer about 1105 in Southern France, and was burnt to death, 1126. Peter the Venerable has given us a tolerably satisfactory account of his teachings and their effect.1020
Of Henry of Lausanne, Peter’s successor, we know more.1021 He was a Benedictine monk, endowed with an unusual gift of eloquence. His name is associated with Lausanne because, as Bernard tells us, he at one time lived there. The place of his birth is not known. Abandoning the convent, he preached in the diocese of Le Mans during the absence of its bishop, Hildebert, in Rome, and by his permission. Henry won the people, but drew upon himself the hostility of the clergy whose vices he denounced. The bishop, on his return, expelled Henry from his diocese. The evangelist then went to Lausanne and from there to Southern France, joining in the spiritual crusade opened by Peter de Bruys. He practised poverty and preached it to the laity. One of the results of his preaching was that women of loose morals repented and young men were persuaded to marry them. Cardinal Alberic, sent to stamp out the Henrician heresy, called to his aid St. Bernard, the bishop of Chartres and other prelates. According to Bernard’s biographer, miracles attended Bernard’s activity.1022 Henry was seized and imprisoned. What his end was, is not known.
Peter the Venerable, at the outset of his treatise, laid down five errors of the Petrobrusians which he proposed to show the falseness and wickedness of. (1) The baptism of persons before they have reached the years of discretion is invalid. Believers’ baptism was based upon Mark 16:16, and children, growing up, were rebaptized. (2) Church edifices and consecrated altars are useless. (3) Crosses should be broken up and burnt. (4) The mass is nothing in the world. (5) Prayers, alms, and other good works are unavailing for the dead. These heresies the good abbot of Cluny called the five poisonous bushes, quinque vigulta venenata, which Peter de Bruys had planted. He gives half of his space to the refutation of the heresy about baptism.
Peter and Henry revived the Donatistic view that piety is essential to a legitimate priesthood. The word "Church" signifies the congregation of the faithful and consists in the unity of the assembled believers and not in the stones of the building.1023 God may be worshipped as acceptably in the marketplace or a stable as in a consecrated edifice. They preached on the streets and in the open places. As for the cross, as well might a halter or a sword be adored. Peter is said to have cooked meat in the fire made by the crosses he piled up and burnt at St. Gilles, near the mouth of the Rhone. Song, they said, was fit for the tavern, but not for the worship of God. God is to be worshipped with the affections of the heart and cannot be moved by vocal notes or wood by musical modulations.1024
The doctrine of transubstantiation was distinctly renounced, and perhaps the Lord’s Supper, on the ground that Christ gave up his body on the night of the betrayal once for all.1025 Peter not only called upon the priests to marry, but according to Peter the Venerable, he forced unwilling monks to take wives.
St. Bernard and Peter the Venerable,1026 opposing the heretical view about infant baptism, laid stress upon Christ’s invitation to little children and his desire to have them with him in heaven. Peter argued that for nearly five hundred years Europe had had no Christian not baptized in infancy, and hence according to the sectaries had no Christians at all. If it had no Christians, then it had no Church; if no Church, then no Christ. And if this were the case, then all our fathers perished; for, being baptized in infancy, they were not baptized at all. Peter and Henry laid chief stress upon the four Gospels, but it does not appear that they set aside any part of the Scriptures.1027
The synod of Toulouse, 1119, in condemning as heretics those who rejected the Lord’s Supper, infant baptism, and priestly ordination, condemned the Petrobrusians, though Peter de Bruys is not mentioned by name. Those who hung upon the preaching of Peter de Bruys and Henry of Lausanne were soon lost among the Cathari and other sects.1028 Bernard’s description of the religious conditions in Southern France is no doubt rhetorical, but shows the widespread disaffection which prevailed at that time against the Church. He says that churches were without worshippers, the people without priests, and Christians without Christ. The sanctuary of the Lord was no longer regarded as sacred or the sacraments as holy. The festival days were deprived of their solemnities. The children were debarred from life by the denial of baptism, and souls were hurried to the last tribunal, unreconciled by penance and unfortified by the communion.
§ 82. The Amaurians and Other Isolated Sects.
Occupying a distinct place of their own were the pantheistic coteries of dissenters, the Amaurians and Ortlibenses, and perhaps other groups, like the Passagians and Speronistae, of which we know scarcely more than the names.
The Amaurians, or Amauricians,1029 derived their origin from the speculations of the Paris professor, Amaury of Bena, a town in the diocese of Chartres. Innocent III. cited him to appear at Rome and condemned his views. On his return to Paris, the university obliged him to publicly confess his errors. He died about 1204. His followers were condemned by a synod, held in Paris, 1209.
From the detailed account given by Caesar of Heisterbach, we learn that a number of Amaury’s followers were seized and examined by the bishops. Eight priests and William the Goldsmith, called also one of the seven apostles, were burnt. Four other priests were condemned to lifelong imprisonment. Amaury’s bones were exhumed and thrown into a field.1030
The Amaurians seem to have relied for their pantheistic views upon John Scotus Erigena, whose work, De divisione naturae, was also condemned at the synod of Paris, 1209. Amaury’s system was also condemned by the Fourth Lateran, which represented him as holding that God was all things, deus erat omnia. To this he added the two doctrines that every Christian must believe that he is a member of Christ’s body, this faith being as necessary to salvation as the faith in Christ’s birth and death; and that to him who abides in love, sin is not reckoned. God becomes incarnate in believers who are members of Christ’s body, as He became incarnate in the body of Jesus. God was as much in the body of Ovid as He was in the body of Augustine. Christ is no more in the consecrated bread than in any other bread or object. The Amaurians denied the resurrection of the body, and said that heaven and hell are states of the soul. The sinner carries hell in himself, even as a mouth holds a bad tooth.1031 The believer can no more sin than can the Holy Spirit who dwells in him. The pope is antichrist and the Roman Church, Babylon. The relics of the martyrs are nothing but dust.
From these statements the conclusion is to be drawn that Amaury and his followers insisted upon the liberty of the Spirit working independently of outer rites and dwelling in the heart. The Fourth Lateran, in its second canon, declared that the father of lies had so blinded Amaury’s mind that his doctrine was the raving of an insane man rather than a heresy. Amaury absorbed Joachism, for he speaks of three ages, the ages of the Father and the Son, and the age of the Spirit, which was the last age, had begun in Amaury’s time, and would continue to the consummation of all things. Amaury’s followers seem to have become merged with the Brethren of the Free Spirit.1032
The synod of Paris, which condemned the Amaurians, also condemned David of Dinant, and ordered one of his works, the Quarternuli, burnt. His writings were also forbidden by the statutes of the University of Paris of 1215, which forbade the reading of some of the works of Aristotle, Amaury the heretic, and Maurice of Spain.1033 David seems to have been a professor at Paris and died after 1215. He shared the pantheism of Amaury, was quoted by Albertus Magnus, and his speculations have been compared with the system of Spinoza.1034
Belonging to the same class were the followers of Ortlieb of Strassburg, called Ortlibenses, Ortilibarii, Oriliwenses, Ortoleni,1035 and by other similar names. Some of their number were probably among the many heretics burnt in Strassburg, 1212. They were charged with holding that the world is eternal and God is immanent in all things. He did not have a Son, till Jesus was born of Joseph and Mary. They denied the resurrection of the body. The death and resurrection of Christ had only a symbolic import. The body of Christ is no more in the eucharistic bread than in any other bread. The established Church was the courtesan of the Apocalypse. The four Gospels are the chief parts of the Scriptures. They allowed marriage but condemned carnal cohabitation. The Ortlibenses were, like the Amaurians, spiritualists, and said that a man must follow the guidance of the Spirit who dwells in him.1036 They were a part of that extensive group designated by the general name of the Brethren of the Free Spirit, who fill so large a place as late as the fifteenth century.
The Passagii, or Passageni, a sect whose name is first mentioned in the acts of the synod of Verona, seem to have been unique in that they required the literal observance of the Mosaic law, including the Jewish Sabbath and circumcision. It is possible they are identical with the Circumcisi spoken of in the code of Frederick II. As late as 1267 and 1274 papal bulls call for the punishment of heretics who had gone back to Jewish rites, and the Passagii1037 may be referred to.
The Luciferans1038 were so called on account of the prominence they gave Lucifer as the prince of the lost angels and the maker of the material world and the body, and not because they worshipped Lucifer. It is doubtful whether they were a distinct sect. The name was applied without precision to Cathari and others who held that Lucifer was unjustly cast out of heaven. Heretics of this name were burnt in Passau and Saltzburg, 1312–1315 and 1338, and as late as 1395 in other parts of Austria.
As for the Warini, Speronistae, and Josephini, who are also mentioned in the Frederican code, we know nothing more than the names.1039
§ 83. The Beguines and Beghards.
While the Cathari and Waldenses were engaging the attention of the Church authorities in Southern Europe, communities, called Beguines and Beghards, were being formed along the lower Rhine and in the territories adjacent to it. They were lay associations intended at first to foster a warmer type of piety than they found in the Church.1040 Their aims were closely allied to the aims of the Tertiaries of St. Francis, and at a later period they were merged with them. Long before the close of the thirteenth century, some of these communities developed immoral practices and heretical tenets, which called forth the condemnation of pope and synods.
The Beguines, who were chiefly women, seem to have derived their origin and their name from Lambert le Bègue, a priest of Liége, who died about 1177.1041 In a document of that year he is said to have preached to women and girls the value of chastity by word and example.1042 It was a time when priestly concubinage in Holland was general. Like Peter Valdez, Lambert gave up his goods, sought to make known the Scriptures to the people, and founded in Liége the hospital of St. Christopher and a house for women which in derision was called the beguinage. The women renounced their goods and lived a semi-conventual life, but took no vows and followed none of the approved monastic Rules. Houses were established in Flanders, France, and especially in Germany, as for example at Valenciennes, 1212, Douai, 1219, Antwerp, 1230, Ghent, 1233, Frankfurt, 1242. In 1264 St. Louis built a beguinage in Paris which he remembered in his will. The beguinage of Ghent was a small town in itself, with walls, infirmary, church, cemetery, and conventual dwellings. According to Matthew Paris, writing of the year 1250, their number in Germany, especially in the vicinity of Cologne, was countless.1043 Their houses were often named after their founders, as the Schelenhaus in Cologne, after Herman Schele, the Burgenhaus in Strassburg (1292), after a widow by the name of Burga. Other secular names were given, such as the Golden Frog, zum goldenen Frosch, the Wolf, zum Wolf, the Eagle, zum Adler.1044
The communities supported themselves by spinning, weaving, caring for the sick, and other occupations. Some of the houses forbade begging. Some of them, as those in Cologne, were afterwards turned into hospitals. As a rule they practised mendicancy and went about in the streets crying Brod durch Gott, "Bread for the sake of God." They wore a distinctive dress.1045
The earliest community of Beghards known to us is the community of Löwen, 1220. The Beghards practised mendicancy and they spread as far as Poland and Switzerland. It was not long till they were charged with loose tendencies, a disregard of the hierarchy, and heresy. Neither the Beguines as a body nor the Beghards ever received distinct papal sanction.1046
Both associations were the objects of synodal enactment as early as the middle of the thirteenth century. The synod of Mainz, 1259, warned the Beghards against going through the streets, crying, "Bread for God’s sake," and admonished them to put aside offensive peculiarities and not to mingle with Beguines. Another synod of Mainz, 1261, referred to scandals among the Beguines. A synod of Cologne, a year later, condemned their unchurchly independence and bade them confess to priests on pain of excommunication. In 1310 synods, held at Treves and Mainz, forbade clerics entering beguinages on any pretext whatever and forbade Beghards explaining the Bible to the ignorant.1047
The communities became more and more the objects of suspicion, and a sharp blow was struck at them in 1312 by Clement V. and the council of Vienne. The council forbade their communal mode of life, and accused them of heresies.1048 They were accused of refusing to adore the host and of holding that it is possible to reach a state of perfection in this world. A person reaching this state is under no obligation to fast and pray, but may yield himself without sin to all the appetites of the body.1049
Clement’s bull erred by its failure to discriminate between heretical and orthodox communities, a defect which was corrected by John XXII. This pope expressly gave protection to the orthodox communities. In the fourteenth century, the number of houses increased very rapidly in Germany and by 1400 there was scarcely a German town which had not its beguinage. Up to that date, fifty-seven had been organized in Frankfurt, and in the middle of the fifteenth century there were one hundred and six such houses in Cologne and sixty in Strassburg. In 1368 Erfurt had four hundred Beguines and Beghards.1050
In the earlier part of the fourteenth century, the Beguines appeared in Southern France, where the Inquisition associated them closely with the Tertiaries of St. Francis and accused them of adopting the views of John Peter Olivi.1051
In the latter part of the fourteenth century, the Inquisition broke up many of the houses in Germany, their effects being equally divided between itself, the poor, and the municipality. Gregory XI., 1377, recognized that many of the Beghards were leading good lives. Boniface IX., 1394, made a sharp distinction between the communities and classed the heterodox Beghards with Lollards and Swestriones.1052 But to other "Beghards and Beguines, who practised voluntary poverty"1053 and devoted themselves to the good of the people, he gave papal recognition. To avoid persecution, many of them took refuge with the Franciscans and enrolled themselves as Tertiaries of the Franciscan order. With the Reformation the Beghards and Beguines for the most part disappear as separate communities.1054
These sectaries were in part forerunners and contemporaries of other communities with a pious and benevolent design developed in Holland in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and with which German mysticism is closely associated.
§ 84. The Waldenses.
"O lady fair, I have yet a gem which a purer lustre flings
Than the diamond flash of the jewelled crown on the lofty brow of kings;
A wonderful pearl of exceeding price, whose virtue shall not decay,
Whose light shall be as a spell to thee and a blessing on thy way!"
Whittier, The Vaudois Teacher.
Distinct from the Cathari and other sects in origin and doctrine, but sharing with them the condemnation of the established Church, were the Waldenses. The Cathari lived completely apart from the Catholic Church. The Waldenses, leaning upon the Scriptures, sought to revive the simple precepts of the Apostolic age. They were the strictly biblical sect of the Middle Ages. This fact, and the pitiless and protracted persecutions to which they were subjected, long ago won the sympathies of the Protestant churches. They present a rare spectacle of the survival of a body of believers which has come up out of great tribulation.
Southern France was their first home, but they were a small party as compared with the Albigenses in those parts. From France they spread into Piedmont, and also into Austria and Germany, as recent investigations have clearly brought out. In Italy, they continue to this day in their ancestral valleys and, since 1870, endowed with full rights of citizenship. In Austria, they kept their light burning as in a dark place for centuries, had a close historic connection with the Hussites and Bohemian Brethren, and prepared, in some measure, the way for the Anabaptists in the time of the Reformation.
The Waldenses derive their origin and name from Peter Waldus or Valdez,1055 who died before 1218, as all the contemporary writers agree. They were also called Poor Men of Lyons, from the city on the Rhone where they originated, and the Sandalati or Sandalled, from the coarse shoes they wore.1056
The name by which they were known among themselves was Brethren or the Poor of Christ,1057 based probably upon Matt. 5:3, "Blessed are the poor in spirit." According to the Anonymous writer of Passau, writing in the early years of the fourteenth century, some already in his day carried the origin of the sect back to the Apostles. Until recently all Waldensian writers have claimed for it Apostolic origin or gone at least as far back as the seventh century. Professor Comba, of the Waldensian school in Florence, has definitely given up this theory in deference to the investigations of Dieckhoff, Herzog, and other German scholars.
Of Waldo’s life little is known. A prosperous merchant of Lyons, he was aroused to religious zeal by the sudden death of a leading citizen of the city, of which he was a witness, and by a ballad he heard sung by a minstrel on the public square. The song was about St. Alexis, the son of wealthy parents who no sooner returned from the marriage altar than, impressed by the claims of celibacy, he left his bride, to start on a pilgrimage to the East. On his return he called on his relatives and begged them to give him shelter, but they did not recognize who he was till they found him dead. The moral drawn from the tale was: life is short, the times are evil, prepare for heaven.
Waldo sought counsel from a priest, who told him there were many ways to heaven, but if he would be perfect, he must obey Christ’s precepts, and go and sell all that he had and give to the poor, and follow him. It was the text that had moved Anthony of Egypt to flee from society. Waldo renounced his property, sent his two daughters to the convent of Fontevrault, gave his wife a portion of his goods, and distributed the remainder to the poor. This was about 1170.
His rule of life, Waldo drew from the plain precepts of the Bible. He employed Bernard Ydros and Stephen of Ansa to translate into the vernacular the Gospels and other parts of the Scriptures, together with sayings of the Fathers. He preached, and his followers, imitating his example, preached in the streets and villages, going about two by two.1058 When the archbishop of Lyons attempted to stop them, they replied that "they ought to obey God, rather than men."
Very unexpectedly the Waldenses made their appearance at the Third Lateran council, 1179, at least two of their number being present. They besought Alexander III. to give his sanction to their mode of life and to allow them to go on preaching. They presented him with a copy of their Bible translation. The pope appointed a commission to examine them. Its chairman, Walter Map, an Englishman of Welsh descent and the representative of the English king, has left us a curious account of the examination. He ridicules their manners and lack of learning.1059 They fell an easy prey to his questionings, like birds, as he says, who do not see the trap or net, but think they have a safe path. He commenced with the simplest of questions, being well aware, as he said, that a donkey which can eat much oats does not disdain milk diet. On asking them whether they believed in the persons of the Trinity they answered, "Yes." And "in the Mother of Christ?" To this they also replied "Yes." At that the committee burst out laughing at their ignorance, for it was not proper to believe in, but to believe on, Mary. "Being poor themselves, they follow Christ who was poor,—nudi nudum Christum sequentes. Certainly it is not possible for them to take a more humble place, for they have scarcely learned to walk. If we admit them, we ourselves ought to be turned out." This vivacious committee-man, who delighted so much in chit-chat, as the title of his book indicates, further says that the Waldenses went about barefooted, clad in sheep-skins, and had all things common like the Apostles.
Without calling the Waldenses by name, the council forbade them to preach. The synod of Verona, 1184, designated them as "Humiliati, or Poor Men of Lyons," and anathematized them, putting them into the same category with the Cathari and Patarines. Their offence was preaching without the consent of the bishops.
Although they were expelled from Lyons and excommunicated by the highest authority of the Church, the Waldenses ceased not to teach and preach. They were called to take part in disputations at Narbonne (1190) and other places. They were charged with being in rebellion against the ecclesiastical authorities and with daring to preach, though they were only laymen. Durandus of Huesca, who had belonged to their company, withdrew in 1207 and took up a propaganda against them. He went to Rome and secured the pope’s sanction for a new order under the name of the "Catholic Poor" who were bound to poverty; the name, as is probable, being derived from the sect he had abandoned.
Spreading into Lombardy, they met a party already organized and like-minded. This party was known as the Humiliati. Its adherents were plain in dress and abstained from oaths and falsehood and from lawsuits. The language, used by the Third Oecumenical council and the synod of Verona, identified them with the Poor Men of Lyons.1060 Originally, as we know from other sources, the two groups were closely affiliated. It is probable that Waldo and his followers on their visits in Lombardy won so much favor with the older sect that it accepted Waldo’s leadership. At a later date, a portion of the Humiliati associated themselves in convents, and received the sanction of Innocent III. It seems probable that they furnished the model for the third order of St. Francis.1061 One portion of the Humiliati early became known as the Poor Men of Lombardy and had among their leaders, John of Roncho. A portion of them, if not all, were treated by contemporaries as his followers and called Runcarii.1062 Contemporary writers treat the two groups as parts of the same body and distinguish them as the Ultramontane and the Lombard Poor Men or as the Ultramontane and Italic Brethren.1063
A dispute arose between the Humiliati and the Poor Men of Lyons as to their relation to one another and to Peter Waldo, which led to a conference, in 1218, at Bergamo. Each party had six representatives.1064 The two points of discord were the eucharist and whether Waldo was then in paradise. The Lombards contended that the validity of the sacrament depended upon the good character of the celebrant. The question about Waldo and a certain Vivetus was, whether they had gone to heaven without having made satisfaction before their deaths for all their sins.1065 The Lyonnese claimed that Waldo was in paradise and made the recognition of this fact a condition of union with the Lombard party. The controversy at Bergamo points to a definite rejection of Waldo’s leadership by the Lombard Waldenses. Salve Burce, 1235, who ridiculed the Waldensians on the ground of their recent origin, small number, and lack of learning, compared the Poor Men of Lombardy and the Poor Men of Lyons with the two Catharan sects, the Albanenses and the Concorrezzi, and declared the four were as hostile, one to the other, as fire and water.1066 This is an isolated testimony and not to be accepted. But it is the charge, so often repeated since by the Catholic Church, that Protestantism means division and strife.
In the crusades against heretics, in Southern France, the Waldenses were included, but their sufferings were small compared with those endured by the Albigenses. Nor do they seem to have furnished many victims to the Inquisition in the fourteenth century. Although Bernard Guy opened his trials in 1308, it was not till 1316 that a Waldensian was sentenced to perpetual imprisonment and another to death by burning. Three years later, twenty-six were condemned to perpetual imprisonment, and three to death in the flames.1067 In 1498, Louis XII. granted them limited toleration. During the Reformation period, in 1545, twenty-two villages inhabited by the French Waldenses were pillaged and burnt by order of the parliament of Provence.
It was in Italy and Austria that the Waldenses furnished their glorious spectacle of unyielding martyrdom. From France they overflowed into Piedmont, partly to find a refuge in its high valleys, seamed by the mountain streams of the Perouse, the Luserne, and the Angrogne. There, in the Cottian Alps, they dwelt for some time without molestation. They had colonies as far south as Calabria, and the emigration continued in that direction till the fifteenth century.1068 But the time of persecution came. In 1209, Otto IV. issued an edict of banishment and in 1220 Thomas, count of Savoy, threatened with fines all showing them hospitality. But their hardy industry made them valuable subjects and for a hundred years there was no persecution in the valleys unto death. The first victim at the stake perished, 1312.
Innocent VIII., notorious for his official recognition of witchcraft, was the first papal persecutor to resort to rigorous measures. In 1487, he announced a crusade, and called upon Charles VIII. of France and the duke of Savoy to execute the decree. Everything the Waldenses had endured before, as Leger says, was as "roses and flowers" compared with what they were now called upon to suffer. Innocent furnished an army of eighteen-thousand. The Piedmontese Waldenses were forced to crouch up higher into the valleys, and were subject to almost incredible hardship. The most bitter sufferings of this Israel of the Alps were reserved for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, after they had accepted the Reformation.1069 It was of the atrocious massacres perpetrated at that time that Milton exclaimed,
"Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints,
Whose bones he scattered on the Alpine mountains cold."
The history of the Waldensian movement in different parts of Germany and Austria has scarcely less interest than the Franco-Italian movement. It had a more extensive influence by preparing the way for other separatist and evangelical movements. It is supposed that a translation of parts of the Scriptures belonging to the Waldenses was in circulation in Metz at the end of the twelfth century. Copies were committed to the flames. It is also supposed that Waldenses were among the heretics ferreted out in Strassburg in 1212, eighty of whom were burnt, twelve priests and twenty-three women being of the number. The Waldenses spread as far north as Königsberg and Stettin and were found in Swabia, Poland, Bavaria, and especially in Bohemia and the Austrian diocese of Passau.1070
They were subjected to persecution as early as in 1260. Fifty years later there were at least forty-two Waldensian communities in Austria and a number of Waldensian schools. Neumeister, a bishop of the Austrian heretics, who suffered death with many others in 1315, testified that in the diocese of Passau alone the sect had over eighty thousand adherents.1071 In 1318 Dominican and Franciscan inquisitors were despatched to Bohemia and Poland to help the authorities in putting the heresy down. Bohemia had become the most important centre of Waldensianism. With these Austrian heretics the Poor Men of Lombardy kept up a correspondence1072 and they received from them contributions.
In spite of persecutions, the German Waldenses continued to maintain themselves to the fifteenth century.
The Austrian dissenters were active in the distribution of the Scriptures. And Whittier has based his poem of the Vaudois Teacher upon the account of the so-called Anonymous writer of Passau of the fourteenth century. He speaks of the Waldenses as going about as peddlers to the houses of the noble families and offering first gems and other goods and then the richest gem of all, the Word of God. This writer praised their honesty, industry, and sobriety. Their speech, he said, was free from oaths and falsehoods.
We have thus three types of Waldenses: the Poor Men of Lyons, the Poor Men of Lombardy, and the Austrian Waldensians.1073 As for their dissent from the established Church, it underwent in some particulars, in their later periods, a development, and on the other hand there was developed a tendency to again approach closer to the Church.1074
In their earliest period the Waldenses were not heretics, although the charge was made against them that they claimed to be "the only imitators of Christ." Closely as they and the Cathari were associated geographically and by the acts of councils, papal decrees, and in literary refutations of heresy, the Waldenses differ radically from the Cathari. They never adopted Manichaean elements. Nor did they repudiate the sacramental system of the established Church and invent strange rites of their own. They were also far removed from mysticism and have no connection with the German mystics as some of the other sectaries had. They were likewise not Protestants, for we seek in vain among them for a statement of the doctrine of justification by faith. It is possible, they held to the universal priesthood of believers. According to de Bourbon and others, they declared all good men to be priests. They placed the stress upon following the practice of the Apostles and obeying the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount, and they did not know the definition which Luther put on the word "justification." They approached more closely to an opinion now current among Protestants when they said, righteousness is found only in good men and good women.1075
The first distinguishing principle of the Waldenses bore on daily conduct and was summed up in the words of the Apostles, "we ought to obey God rather than men." This the Catholics interpreted to mean a refusal to submit to the authority of the pope and prelates. All the early attacks against them contain this charge.1076 Alanus sought to refute the principle by adducing Christ’s submission to the authority of Pilate, John 19:11, and by arguing that the powers that be are ordained of God. This was, perhaps, the first positive affirmation of a Scriptural ground for religious independence made by the dissenting sects of the Middle Ages. It contains in it, as in a germ, the principle of full liberty of conscience as it was avowed by Luther at Worms.
The second distinguishing principle was the authority and popular use of the Scriptures. Here again the Waldenses anticipated the Protestant Reformation without realizing, as is probable, the full meaning of their demand. The reading of the Bible, it is true, had not yet been forbidden, but Waldo made it a living book and the vernacular translation was diligently taught. The Anonymous writer of Passau said he had seen laymen who knew almost the entire Gospels of Matthew and Luke by heart, so that it was hardly possible to quote a word without their being able to continue the text from memory.
The third principle was the importance of preaching and the right of laymen to exercise that function. Peter Waldo and his associates were lay evangelists. All the early documents refer to their practice of preaching as one of the worst heresies of the Waldenses and an evident proof of their arrogance and insubordination. Alanus calls them false preachers, pseudo-praedicatores. Innocent III., writing, in 1199, of the heretics of Metz, declared their desire to understand the Scriptures a laudable one but their meeting in secret and usurping the function of the priesthood in preaching as only evil. Alanus, in a long passage, brought against the Waldenses that Christ was sent by the Father and that Jonah, Jeremiah, and others received authority from above before they undertook to preach, for "how shall they preach unless they be sent." The Waldenses were without commission. To this charge, the Waldenses, as at the disputation of Narbonne, answered that all Christians are in duty bound to spread the Gospel in obedience to Christ’s last command and to James 4:17, "to him that knoweth to do good and doeth it not, to him it is sin."1077 The denial of their request by Alexander III., 1179, did not discourage them from continuing to preach in the highway and house and, as they had opportunity, in the churches.1078
The Waldenses went still further in shocking old-time custom and claimed the right to preach for women as well as for men, and when Paul’s words enjoining silence upon the women were quoted, they replied that it was with them more a question of teaching than of formal preaching and quoted back Titus 2:3, "the aged women should be teachers of good things." The abbot Bernard of Fontis Calidi, in contesting the right of laics of both sexes to preach, quoted the Lord’s words commanding the evil spirit to hold his peace who had said, "Thou art the Holy One of God," Mark 1:25. If Christ did not allow the devil to use his mouth, how could he intend to preach through a Waldensian?1079 In one of the lists of errors, ascribed to the Waldenses, is their rejection of the universities of Paris, Prague, and Vienna and of all university study as a waste of time.1080
It was an equally far-reaching principle when the Waldenses declared that it was spiritual endowment, or merit, and not the Church’s ordination which gave the right to bind and loose, to consecrate and bless.1081 This was recognized by their opponents as striking at the very root of the sacerdotal system. They charged against them the definite affirmation of the right of laymen to baptize and to administer the Lord’s Supper. No priest, continuing in sin, could administer the eucharist, but any good layman might.1082 The charge was likewise made that women were allowed the function also, and Rainerius says that no one rose up to deny the charge. It was also charged that the Waldenses allowed laymen to receive confessions and absolve.1083 Differences on this point among the Waldenses were brought out at the conference at Bergamo.
As for the administration of baptism, there were also differences of view between the Waldenses of Italy and those of France. There was a disposition, in some quarters at least, to deny infant baptism and to some extent the opinion seems to have prevailed that infants were saved without baptism.1084 Whatever the views of the early Waldenses were at the time of the Reformation, according to the statement of Morel, they left the administration of the sacraments to the priests. The early documents speak of the secrecy observed by the Waldenses, and it is possible more was charged against them than they would have openly acknowledged.
To the affirmation of these fundamental principles the Waldenses, on the basis of the Sermon on the Mount, added the rejection of oaths,1085 the condemnation of the death penalty,1086 and some of them purgatory and prayers for the dead.1087 There are but two ways after death, the Waldenses declared, the way to heaven and the way to hell.1088
The Waldenses regarded themselves, as Professor Comba has said, as a church within the Church, a select circle. They probably went no further, though they were charged with pronouncing the Roman Church the Babylonian harlot, and calling it a house of lies.1089 As early as the thirteenth century, the Waldenses were said, as by de Bourbon, to be divided like the Cathari into the Perfect and Believers, but this may be a mistake. In the beginning of the fourteenth century, in Southern France they elected a superintendent, called Majoralis omnium, whom, according to Bernard Guy, they obeyed as the Catholics did the pope, and they also had presbyters and deacons. In other parts they had a threefold ministry, under the name of priests, teachers, and rectors.1090
From the first, the Lyonnese branch had a literature of its own and in this again a marked contrast is presented to the Cathari. Of the early Waldensian translation of the Bible in Romaunt, there are extant the New Testament complete and the Psalms, Proverbs, Song of Solomon, and Ecclesiastes. A translation in French had preceded this Waldensian version.1091 The German translation of the Bible found at Tepl, Bohemia, may have been of Waldensian origin.1092
The Nobla Leyczon,1093 dating from the early part of the thirteenth century and the oldest extant piece of Waldensian literature next to the version of the Bible, is a religious poem of four hundred and seventy-nine lines. It has a strictly practical purpose. The end of the world is near, man fell, Noah was spared, Abraham left his own country, Israel went down to Egypt and was delivered by Moses. Christ preached a better law, he trod the path of poverty, was crucified, and rose again. The first line ran "10 brothers, listen to a noble teaching." The poem closes with the scene of the Last Judgment and an exhortation to repent.
Through one channel the Waldenses exercised an influence over the Catholic Church. It was through the Waldensian choice of poverty. They made the, "profession of poverty," as Etienne de Bourbon calls it, or "the false profession of poverty," as Bernard Guy pronounced it. By preaching and by poverty they strove after evangelical perfection, as was distinctly charged by these and other writers. Francis d’Assisi took up with this ideal and was perhaps more immediately the disciple of the obscure Waldensians of Northern Italy than can be proved in so many words. The ideal of Apostolic poverty and practice was in the air and it would not detract from the services of St. Francis, if his followers would recognize that these dissenters of Lyons and Italy were actuated by his spirit, and thus antedated his propaganda by nearly half a century.1094
Note: Lit. bearing on the early Waldenses. For the titles, see § 79.—A new era in the study of the history and tenets of the Waldenses was opened by Dieckhoff, 1851, who was followed by Herzog, 1853. More recently, Preger, Karl Müller, Haupt, and Keller have added much to our knowledge in details, and in clearing up disputed points. Comba, professor in the Waldensian college at Florence, accepts the conclusions of modern research and gives up the claim of ancient origin, even Apostolic origin being claimed by the older Waldensian writers. The chief sources for the early history of the sect are the abbot Bernard of Fontis Calidi, d. 1193; the theologian Alanus de Insulis, d. about 1200; Salve Burce (whose work is given by Döllinger), 1235; Etienne de Bourbon, d. 1261, whose work is of an encyclopedic character, a kind of ready-reference book; the Rescriptum haeresiarcharum written by an unknown priest, about 1316, called the Anonymous of Passau; an Austrian divine, David of Augsburg, d. 1271; and the Inquisitor in Southern France, Bernard Guy, d. 1331. Other valuable documents are given by Döllinger, in his Beiträge, vol. II. These writers represent a period of more than a hundred years. In most of their characterizations they agree, and upon the main heresies of the Waldenses the earliest writers are as insistent as the later.
The Waldensian MSS., some of which date back to the thirteenth century, are found chiefly in the libraries of Cambridge, Dublin (Trinity College), Paris, Geneva, Grenoble, and Lyons. The Dublin Collection was made by Abp. Ussher who purchased in 1634 a number of valuable volumes from a French layman for five hundred and fifty francs. The Cambridge MSS. were procured by Sir Samuel Morland, Cromwell’s special envoy sent to Turin to check the persecutions of the Waldenses.
§ 85. The Crusades against the Albigenses.
The mediaeval measures against heretics assumed an organized form in the crusades against the Albigenses, before the institution of the Inquisition received its full development. To the papacy belongs the whole responsibility of these merciless wars. Toulouse paid a bitter penalty for being the head centre of heresy.1095 According to Innocent III., the larger part of its nobility was infected with heretical depravity, so that heresy was entrenched in castles as well as professed in the villages.1096 The count of Toulouse, the first lay peer of France,—owing fealty to it for Provence and Languedoc,—brought upon himself the full wrath and punishments of the Apostolic see for his unwillingness to join in the wars against his own subjects. A member of the house led one of the most splendid of the armies of the first Crusade to Jerusalem. At the opening of the Albigensian crusades the court of Toulouse was one of the gayest in Europe. At their close it was a spectacle of desolation.
Councils, beginning with the synod of Toulouse, 1119, issued articles against heresy and called upon the secular power to punish it. Mild measures were tried and proved ineffectual, whether they were the preaching and miracles of St. Bernard, 1147, or the diplomatic address of papal legates. Sixty years after Bernard, St. Dominic entered upon a tour of evangelism in the vicinity of Toulouse, and some heretics were won; but in spite of Dominic, and synodal decrees, heresy spread and continued to defy the Church authorities.
It remained for Innocent III. to direct the full force of his native vigor against the spreading contagion and to execute the principles already solemnly announced by oecumenical and local councils. To him heretics were worse than the infidel who had never made profession of Christianity. While Christendom was sending armaments against the Saracens, why should it not send an armament to crush the spiritual treason at home? In response to papal appeals, at least four distinct crusades were set on foot against the sectaries in Southern France. These religious wars continued thirty years. Priests and abbots went at the head of the armies and, in the name of religion, commanded or justified the most atrocious barbarities. One of the fairest portions of Europe was laid waste and the counts of Toulouse were stripped by the pope of their authority and territory.
The long conflict was fully opened when Innocent called upon Louis VII. to take the field, that "it might be shown that the Lord had not given him the sword in vain," and promised him the lands of nobles shielding heresy.1097 Raymund VI., who was averse to a policy of repression against his Catharan subjects, was excommunicated by Innocent’s legate, Peter of Castelnau, and his lands put under interdict. Innocent called him a noxious man, vir pestilens,1098 and threatened him with all the punishments of the future world. He threatened to call upon the princes to proceed against him with arms and take his lands. "The hand of the Lord will descend upon thee more severely, and show thee that it is hard for one who seeks to flee from the face of His wrath which thou hast provoked."
A crisis was precipitated in 1208 by the murder of Peter of Castelnau by two unknown assassins.1099 Again, the supreme pontiff fulminated the sentence of excommunication against the Tolosan count, and made the expulsion of all heretics from his dominions the condition of withdrawing suspicion against him as the possible murderer of Peter.1100 Nowhere else was the intrepid energy of Innocent more signally displayed! A crusade was announced. The connections of Raymund with France through his uncle, Louis VII., and with Aragon through Pedro, whose sister he had married, interposed difficulties. And the crusade went on. The Cistercians, at their General Chapter, decided to preach it. Princes and people from France, Flanders, and even Germany swelled the ranks. The same reward was promised to those who took the cross against the Cathari and Waldenses, as to those who went across the seas to fight the intruder upon the Holy Sepulchre.
In a general epistle to the faithful, Innocent wrote: —
"O most mighty soldiers of Christ, most brave warriors; Ye oppose the agents of anti-Christ, and ye fight against the servants of the old serpent. Perchance up to this time ye have fought for transitory glory, now fight for the glory which is everlasting. Ye have fought for the body, fight now for the soul. Ye have fought for the world, now do ye fight for God. For we have not exhorted you to the service of God for a worldly prize, but for the heavenly kingdom, which for this reason we promise to you with all confidence."1101
Awed by the sound of the coming storm, Raymund offered his submission and promised to crush out heresy. The humiliating spectacle of Raymund’s penance was then enacted in the convent church of St. Gilles. In the vestibule, naked to the waist, he professed compliance with all the papal conditions. Sixteen of the count’s vassals took oath to see the hard vow was kept and pledged themselves to renew the oath every year, upon pain of being classed with heretics. Then holding the ends of a stole, wrapped around the penitent’s neck like a halter, the papal legate led Raymund before the altar, the count being flagellated as he proceeded.1102
Raymund’s submission, however, did not check the muster of troops which were gathering in large numbers at Lyons.1103 In the ranks were seen the archbishops of Rheims, Sens, and Rouen; the bishops of Autun, Clermont, Nevers, Baseur, Lisieux, and Chartres; with many abbots and other clergy. At their side were the duke of Burgundy, the counts of Nevers, St. Pol, Auxerre, Geneva, and Poitiers, and other princes. The soldier, chosen to be the leader, was Simon de Montfort. Simon had been one of the prominent leaders of the Fourth Crusade, and was a zealous supporter of the papacy. He neglected not to hear mass every day, even after the most bloody massacres in the campaigns in Southern France. His contemporaries hailed him as another Judas Maccabaeus and even compared him to Charlemagne.1104
In spite of the remonstrance of Raymund, who had joined the army, the papal legate, Arnold of Citeaux, refused to check its march. Béziers was stormed and horrible scenes followed. The wild soldiery heeded well the legate’s command, "Fell all to the ground. The Lord knows His own."1105 Neither age nor sex was spared. Church walls interposed no protection and seven thousand were put to death in St. Magdalen’s church alone. Nearly twenty thousand were put to the sword. According to the reports of the papal legates, Milo and Arnold, the "divine vengeance raged wonderfully against the city.1106 …Ours spared neither sex nor condition. The whole city was sacked, and the slaughter was very great."
At Carcassonne the inhabitants were allowed to depart, the men in their shirts, the women in their chemises, carrying with them, as the chronicler writes, nothing else except their sins, nihil secum praeter peccata portantes. Dread had taken hold of the country, and village after village was abandoned by the fleeing inhabitants. Raymund was again put under excommunication at a council held at Avignon.1107 The conquered lands were given to Montfort. The war continued, and its atrocities, if possible, increased. New recruits appeared in response to fresh papal appeals, among them six thousand Germans.1108 At the stronghold of Minerve, one hundred and forty of the Albigensian Perfect were put to death in the flames. The ears, noses, and lips of prisoners were cut off.
Again, in 1211, the count of Toulouse sought to come to an agreement with the legates. But the terms, which included the razing to the ground of all his castles, were too humiliating. The crusade was preached again. All the territory of Toulouse had been overrun and it only remained for the crusaders to capture the city itself.
Pedro of Aragon, fresh from his crushing victory over the Moors at Novas de Tolosa, now interceded with the pope for his brother-in-law. The synod of Lavaur, 1213, appointed referee by Innocent, rejected the king’s propositions. Pedro then joined Raymund, but fell at the disastrous defeat of Muret the same year, 1213. It was a strange combination whereby the king of Aragon, who had won the highest distinction a year before as a hero of the Catholic faith, was killed in the ranks of those who were rebels to the papal authority.1109 The day after, the victor, Montfort, barefoot, went to church, and ordered Pedro’s battle-horse an armorial trappings sold and the proceeds distributed to the poor.1110 By the council of Montpellier, 1215, the whole land, including Toulouse, was granted to Montfort, and the titles conferred on him of count of Toulouse, viscount of Béziers and Carcassonne, and duke of Narbonne.1111
The complications in Southern France were one of the chief questions brought before the Fourth Lateran Council, 1215. Raymund was present and demanded back his lands, inasmuch as he had submitted to the Church; but by an overwhelming majority, the synod voted against him and Montfort was confirmed in the possession of his conquests.1112 When Raymund’s son made a personal appeal to Innocent for his father, the pope bade him "love God above all things and serve Him faithfully, and not stretch forth his hand against others’ territory" and gave him the cold promise that his complaints against Montfort would be heard at a future council.1113
The further progress of the Albigensian campaigns requires only brief notice here, for they were converted into a war of territorial plunder. In 1218, Montfort fell dead under the walls of Toulouse, his head crushed by a stone. In the reign of Honorius, whose supreme concern was a crusade in the East, the sectaries reasserted themselves, and Raymund regained most of his territory. But the pope was relentless, and again the sentence of excommunication was launched against the house of Toulouse.
In 1226, Louis VIII. took the cross, supported by the French parliament as well as by the Church. Thus the final chapter in the crusades was begun, a war of the king of France for the possession of Toulouse. Louis died a few months later. Arnold of Citeaux, for nearly twenty years their energetic and iron-hearted promoter, had preceded him to the grave. Louis IX. took up the plans of his royal predecessor, and in 1229 the hostilities were brought to a close by Raymund’s accepting the conditions proposed by the papal legate.
Raymund renounced two-thirds of his paternal lands in favor of France. The other third was to go at his death to his daughter who subsequently married Louis IX.’s brother, and, in case there was no issue to the marriage, it was to pass to the French crown, and so it did at the death of Jeanne, the last heir of the house of Toulouse. Thus the domain of France was extended to the Pyrenees.
Further measures of repression were directed against the remnants of the Albigensian heresy, for Raymund VII. had promised to cleanse the land of it. The machinery of the Inquisition was put into full action as it was perfected by the great inquisitorial council of Toulouse, 1229. The University of Toulouse received papal sanction, and one of its chief objects was announced to be "to bring the Catholic faith in those regions into a flourishing state."1114 In 1244, the stronghold of Montségur was taken, the last refuge of the Albigenses. Two hundred of the Perfect were burned.
The papal policy had met with complete but blighting success and, after the thirteenth century, heresy in Southern France was almost like a noiseless underground stream. Languedoc at the opening of the wars had been one of the most prosperous and cultured parts of Europe. At their close its villages and vineyards were in ruins, its industries shattered, its population impoverished and decimated. The country that had given promise of leading Europe in a renaissance of intellectual culture fell behind her neighbors in the race of progress. Protestant generations, that have been since sitting in judgment upon the barbarous measures, conceived and pushed by the papacy, have wondered whether another movement, stirred by the power of the Gospel, will not yet arise in the old domain that responded to the religious dissent and received the warm blood of the Albigenses, the Waldenses, and of Peter de Bruys and his followers.
The Stedinger. While the wars against the Albigenses were going on, another people, the Stedinger, living in the vicinity of Bremen and Oldenburg, were also being reduced by a papal crusade. They represented the spirit of national independence rather than doctrinal dissent and had shown an unwillingness to pay tithes to the archbishop of Bremen. When a husband put a priest to death for an indignity to his wife, the archbishop Hartwig II. announced penalty after penalty but in vain. Under his successor, Gerhard (1219–1258), the refractory peasants were reduced to submission. A synod of Bremen, in 1230, pronounced them heretics, and Gregory IX., accepting the decision, called upon a number of German bishops to join in preaching and prosecuting a crusade. The same indulgence was offered to the crusaders in the North as to those who went on the Church’s business to Palestine. The first campaign in 1233 was unsuccessful, but a second carried all the horrors of war into the eastern section of the Stedingers’ territory. In 1231 another army led by a number of princes completely defeated this brave people at Altenesch. Their lands were divided between the archbishop of Bremen and the count of Oldenburg.
§ 86. The Inquisition. Its Origin and Purpose.
The measures for the repression and extermination of heresy culminated in the organized system, known as the Inquisition. Its history presents what is probably the most revolting spectacle in the annals of civilized Europe.1115 The representatives of the Church appear, sitting as arbiters over human destiny in this world, and in the name of religion applying torture to countless helpless victims, heretics, and reputed witches, and pronouncing upon them a sentence which, they knew, involved perpetual imprisonment or death in the flames. The cold heartlessness, with which the fate of the heretic was regarded, finds some excuse in the pitiless penalties which the civil tribunals of the Middle Ages meted out for civil crimes, such as the breaking of the victim on the wheel, burning in caldrons of oil, quartering with horses, and flaying alive, or the merciless treatment of princes upon refractory subjects, as when William the Conqueror at Alençon punished the rebels by chopping off the hands and feet of thirty-two of the citizens and throwing them over the walls. It is nevertheless an astounding fact that for the mercy of Christ the Church authorities, who should have represented him, substituted relentless cruelties. In this respect the dissenting sectaries were infinitely more Christian than they.
It has been argued in extenuation of the Church that she stopped with the decree of excommunication and the sentence to lifelong imprisonment and did not pronounce the sentence of death. And the old maxim is quoted as true of her in all times, that the Church abhors blood—ecclesia non sitit sanguinem. The argument is based upon a pure technicality. The Church, after sitting in judgment, turned the heretics over to the civil authorities, knowing full well that, as night follows day, the sentence of death would follow her sentence of excommunication.1116 Yea, the Church, through popes and synodal decrees, again and again threatened, with her disfavor and fell spiritual punishments, princes and municipalities not punishing heresy. The Fourth Lateran forbade priests pronouncing judgments of blood and being present at executions, but at the very same moment, and at the pope’s persistent instigation, crusading armies were drenching the soil of Southern France with the blood of the Albigenses. A writer of the thirteenth century says in part truly, in part speciously, "our pope does not kill nor condemn any one to death, but the law puts to death those whom the pope allows to be put to death, and they kill themselves who do those things which make them guilty of death."1117
The official designation of the Inquisitorial process was the Inquisition of heretical depravity.1118 Its history during the Middle Ages has three main chapters: the persecution of doctrinal heretics down to 1480, the persecution of witches in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and the Spanish Inquisition organized in 1480.1119 The Inquisition with its penalties had among its ardent advocates the best and most enlightened men of their times, Innocent III., Frederick II., Louis IX., Bonaventura, Thomas Aquinas. A parallel is found in the best Roman emperors, who lent themselves to the bloody repression of the early Church. The good king, St. Louis, declared that when a layman heard the faith spoken against, he should draw his sword and thrust it into the offender’s body up to the hilt.1120
The Inquisition was a thoroughly papal institution, wrought out in all its details by the popes of the thirteenth century, beginning with Innocent III. and not ending with Boniface VIII. In his famous manual for the treatment of heresy the Inquisitor, Bernard Guy, a man who in spite of his office elicits our respect,1121 declares that the "office of the Inquisition has its dignity from its origin for it is derived, commissioned, and known to have been instituted by the Apostolic see itself." This was the feeling of the age.
Precedent enough there was for severe temporal measures. Constantine banished the Arians and burned their books. Theodosius the Great fixed death as the punishment for heresy. The Priscillianists were executed in 385. The great authority of Augustine was appealed to and his fatal interpretation of the words of the parable "Compel them to come in,"1122 justifying force in the treatment of the Donatists, was made to do service far beyond what that father probably ever intended. From the latter part of the twelfth century, councils advocated the death penalty, popes insisted upon it, and Thomas Aquinas elaborately defended it. Heresy, so the theory and the definitions ran, was a crime the Church could not tolerate. It was Satan’s worst blow.
Innocent III. wrote that as treason was punished with death and confiscation of goods, how much more should these punishments be meted out to those who blaspheme God and God’s Son. A crime against God, so he reasoned, is surely a much graver misdemeanor than a crime against the secular power.1123
The calm discussion, to which the eminent theologian, Thomas Aquinas, subjects the treatment due heretics, was made at least a quarter of a century after the Inquisition was put into full force. Leaning back upon Augustine and his interpretation of "compel them to come in," he declared in clearest terms that heretics deserved not only to be separated from the Church by excommunication, but to be excluded from the earth by judicial death.1124 Errors in geometry do not constitute mortal guilt, but errors in matters of faith do. As falsifiers of coin are put to death, much more may they justly be put to death who perform the more wicked act of corrupting the faith. The heretic of whose reclamation the Church despairs, it delivers over to the secular tribunal to be executed out of the world. The principle was that those who were baptized were under the immediate jurisdiction of the Church and the Church might deal with them as it saw fit. It was not till the fourteenth century, that the jurisdiction of the Church and the pope was extended to the heathen by Augustinus Triumphus, d. 1328,1125 and other papal writers. Sovereigns were forbidden by the council of Vienne, 1312, to allow their Mohammedan subjects to practise the rites of their religion.1126
The legislation, fixing the Inquisition as a Church institution and elaborating its powers, began with the synod of Tours in 1163 and the oecumenical council of 1179. A large step in advance was made by the council of Verona, 1184. The Fourth Lateran, 1215, and the council of Toulouse, 1229, formally established the Inquisition and perfected the organization. Gregory IX., Innocent IV., and Alexander IV. enforced its regulations and added to them. From first to last the popes were its chief promoters.
The synod of Tours, 1163, called upon the bishops and clergy to forbid the Catholics from mingling with the Albigenses and from having commercial dealings with them and giving them refuge. Princes were instructed to imprison them and confiscate their goods. The Third Lateran, 1179, extended the punishments to the defenders of heretics and their friends. It gave permission to princes to reduce heretics to slavery and shortened the time of penance by two years for those taking up arms against them. At the council of Verona, 1184, pope Lucius III. and the emperor, Frederick Barbarossa, joined in making common cause in the sacred undertaking and announced their attitude in the cathedral. Frederick had the law of the empire against heretics recited and threw his glove down upon the floor as a token that he would enforce it. Then Lucius announced the decree of the council, which enjoined bishops to visit, at least once a year, all parts of their sees, to try all suspects, and to turn them, if guilty, over to the civil authorities. Princes were ordered to take an oath to support the Church against heresy upon pain of forfeiting their dignities. Cities, refusing to punish offenders, were to be cut off from other cities and, if episcopal seats, were to be deprived of that honor.
Innocent III., the most vigorous of persecutors, was no sooner on the throne than he began to wage war against heretical infection. In one letter after another, he struck at it and commended military armaments for its destruction. The Fourth Lateran gave formal and final expression to Innocent’s views. The third canon opens with an anathematization of heretics of all names. It again enjoined princes to swear to protect the faith on pain of losing their lands. To all taking part in the extermination of heretics—ad haereticorum exterminium — was offered the indulgence extended to the Crusaders in Palestine. All "believers" and also the entertainers, defenders, and friends of heretics were to be excommunicated and excluded from receiving their natural inheritance.1127 Bishops were instructed to go through their dioceses once or twice a year in person or through representatives for the purpose of detecting heresy, and in case of neglect, they were to be deposed.
For more than a century after Innocent, the enforcement of the rules for the detection and punishment of heretics form the continual subject of bulls issued by the Apostolic see and of synodal action especially in Southern France and Spain. Innocent IV. and Alexander IV. alone issued more than one hundred such bulls.1128
The regulations for the episcopal supervision of the Inquisition were completed at the synod of Toulouse, 1229. Bishops were commanded to appoint a priest and laymen to ferret out heretics—inquirant haereticos—in houses and rooms. They were authorized to go outside their sees and princes outside of their realms to do this work. But no heretic was to be punished till he had been tried before the bishop’s tribunal. Princes were ordered to destroy the domiciles and refuges of heretics, even if they were underground. If heretics were found to reside on their lands without their knowledge, such princes were to be punished. Men above fourteen and women above twelve were obliged to swear to inform on heretics. And all, wishing to avoid the charge of heresy, were bound to present themselves at the confessional at least once a year. As a protection against heretical infection, boys above the age of seven were obliged to go to church every Sabbath and on festival days that they might learn the credo, the pater noster, and the ave Maria.
The legislation of the state showed its full sympathy with the rules of the Church. Peter of Aragon, 1197, banished heretics from his dominions or threatened them with death by fire. In 1226, Don Jayme I. of Aragon forbade all heretics entering his kingdom. He was the first prince to prohibit the Bible in the vernacular Romancia, 1234. From another source, whence we might have expected better things, came a series of severe edicts. At his coronation, 1220, Frederick II. spoke of heretics as the viperous sons of perfidy, and placed them under the ban of the empire.1129 This law was renewed at Ravenna, 1232, and later in 1238, 1239. The goods of heretics were to be confiscated and to be diverted from their children, on the ground that it was a far graver thing to offend against the spiritual realm than to offend a temporal prince. Four years later, 1224, the emperor condemned them to the penalty of being burned, or having their tongues torn out at the discretion of the judge.1130 The Sicilian Constitutions of 1231 made burning alive in the sight of the people the punishment for heretics previously condemned by the Church.1131
The princes and cities of Italy followed Frederick’s example. In Rome, after 1231, and at the demand of Gregory IX., the senator took oath to seize heretics pointed out by the Inquisition, and to put them to death within eight days of the ecclesiastical sentence. In Venice, beginning with 1249, the doge included in his oath the pledge to burn heretics. In France, the rules of the Inquisition were fully recognized in Louis IX.’s laws of 1228. The two great codes of Germany, the Sachsenspiegel and the Schwabenspiegel, ordered heretics burned to death.1132 A prince not burning heretics was himself to be treated as a heretic. In England, the act for the burning of heretics—de comburendo haeretico— was not passed till a century later, 1401.
That the Church fully accepted Frederick’s severe legislation, is attested by the action of Honorius III. who sent the emperor’s edict of 1220 to Bologna with instructions that it be taught as part of the canon law. Frederick’s subsequent legislation was commended by popes and bishops,1133 and ordered to be inscribed in municipal statute books.
To more efficiently carry out the purpose of the Inquisition, the trial and punishment of heresy were taken out of the hands of the bishops and put into the hands of the monastic orders by Gregory IX. As early as 1227, this pope appointed a Dominican of Florence to proceed against the heretical bishop, Philip Paternon. In 1232, the first Dominicans were appointed inquisitors in Germany and Aragon.1134 In 1233, Gregory took the decisive step of substituting the Dominicans for the bishops as agents of the Inquisition, giving as his reason, the multitude of cares by which the bishops were burdened.1135 The Inquisitors were thus made a distinct clan, disassociated from the pastoral care of souls. The friars were empowered to deprive suspected priests of their benefices, and to call to their aid the secular arm in suppressing heresy. From their judgment there was no appeal except to the papal court. The Franciscans were afterwards joined with the Dominicans in this work in parts of Italy, in France, and later in Sardinia and Syria and Palestine. Complaint was made by bishops of this interference with their prerogatives,1136 and, in 1254, Innocent IV. listened to the complaint so far as to decree that no death penalty should be pronounced without consulting with them. The council of Vienne ordered the prisons containing heretics to be guarded by two gaolers, one appointed by the Inquisitor and one by the bishop.
One more step remained to be taken. By the famous bull ad exstirpanda, of 1252, Innocent IV. authorized torture as a measure for extorting confessions. The merciless use of this weapon was one of the most atrocious features of the whole procedure.
The Inquisitors, in spite of papal authority, synodal action, and state legislation, did not always have an easy path. In 1235, the citizens of Narbonne drove them out of their city. In 1242, a number were murdered in Avignon, whom Pius IX., in 1866, sought to recompense by giving them the honor of canonization as he had done the year before to the bloodiest of Inquisitors, the Spaniard Arbues, d. 1485. Parma, according to Salimbene,1137 was placed, in 1279, under interdict for three years, the punishment for the act of "certain fools" who broke into the convent of the Dominicans and killed one or two friars in retribution for their having burned for heresy a certain noble lady and her maid. The distinguished Inquisitor, Peter of Verona, otherwise known as Peter Martyr, was murdered at Como, 1252. In Germany the resistance of the Inquisition was a frequent occurrence and more than one of its agents atoned for his activity by a violent death. Of these, Konrad of Marburg was the most notorious.
Down to the very close of the Middle Ages, the pages of history were disfigured by the decrees of popes and synods, confirming death as the penalty for heresy, and for persons supposed to be possessed with witchcraft. The great council of Constance, 1415, did not get away from this atmosphere, and ordered heretics punished even by the flames,—puniantur ad ignem. And the bull of Leo X., 1520, condemning Luther, cursed as heresy the Reformer’s liberal statement that the burning of heretics is contrary to the will of the Spirit.
To the great humiliation of the Protestant churches, religious intolerance and even persecution unto death were continued long after the Reformation. In Geneva, the pernicious theory was put into practice by state and church, even to the use of torture and the admission of the testimony of children against their parents, and with the sanction of Calvin. Bullinger, in the second Helvetic Confession, announced the principle that heresy should be punished like murder or treason. The treatment of the Anabaptists is a great blot on the page of the Reformation, Strassburg being the only centre that tolerated them. Cranmer persuaded Edward VI. to burn women. Elizabeth saw the death penalty executed upon Puritans. The spirit of intolerance was carried across the seas, and was as strong in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the American colonies, with some exceptions, as it was in Europe. The execution of Quakers in Boston, and of persons accused of witchcraft in Salem, together with the laws of Virginia and other colonies, were the unfortunate survivals of the vicious history of the Middle Ages, which forgot Christ’s example as he wept over Jerusalem, and the Apostle’s words, "vengeance is mine, I will repay," saith the Lord.
So far as we know, the Roman Catholic Church has never officially revoked the theory and practice of the mediaeval popes and councils, but on the contrary the utterances of Pius IX. and Leo XIII. show the same spirit of vicious reprobation for Protestants and their agencies.
§ 87. The Inquisition. Its Mode of Procedure and Penalties.
The Inquisition was called the Holy Office—sanctum officium— from the praiseworthy work it was regarded as being engaged in. Its chief officials, the Inquisitors, were exempted by Alexander IV., 1259, and Urban IV., 1262, from all ecclesiastical jurisdiction, whether bishops, archbishops, or papal legates, except the jurisdiction of the Apostolic1138 see, and from all interference by the secular power. They also enjoyed the right to excommunicate, lay the interdict, and to absolve their agents for acts of violence.1139 The methods of procedure offend against all our modern ideas of civil justice. The testimony of wives and children was valid or required1140 and also of persons known to be criminals. Suspicion and public rumor were sufficient grounds of complaint, seizure, and formal proceedings, a principle clearly stated by the council of Toulouse, 1229, in its eighteenth canon, and recognized by the state. The Sicilian Constitutions of 1231, ordered that heretics be diligently hunted out and, when there "was only the slightest suspicion of guilt," they were to be taken before the bishop.1141 The intention, as opposed to the outward commission, was made a sufficient ground of accusation. The Inquisitor might at the same time be police, prosecutor, and judge.
It is due to Innocent III. to say that he did not invent the inquisitorial mode of procedure, but drew it from the practice already in vogue in the state.1142
A party, not answering a citation within a year, was declared a heretic even when no proofs were advanced. Likewise, one who harbored a heretic forty days after a warning was served was treated as a heretic.1143 At the trials, the utmost secrecy was observed and names of the accusers were not divulged. In commending this measure of secrecy, Paramo declared that the example was set by God himself in carrying out the first inquisition, in the garden of Eden, to defeat the subtlety of Satan who otherwise might have communicated with Adam and Eve.
Penitent heretics, if there was any doubt of their sincerity, were obliged to change their places of abode and, according to the synod of Toulouse, if they belonged to the Perfect, had to do so in all cases. The penances imposed were fines, which were allowed by papal decree as early as 1237 and 1245, pilgrimages, and wearing of two crosses on the left and right side of the body called the poena confusibilis.
The pilgrimage to Jerusalem was forbidden by a synod of Narbonne, 1243, which referred to a recent papal deliverance prohibiting it, that the sacred places might be protected against the infection of heresy. Young women were often excused from wearing the crosses, as it might interfere with their prospects of marriage. According to French law, pregnant women condemned to death, were not executed till after the birth of the child.
Local synods in Southern France ordered heretics and their defenders excommunicated every Sunday and that sentence should be pronounced amidst the ringing of bells and with candles extinguished. And as a protection against heresy, the bells were to be rung every evening.
Imprisonment for life was ordered by Gregory IX., 1229, for all induced to return to the faith through fear of punishment.1144 The prisons in France were composed of small cells. The expenditures for their erection and enlargement were shared by the bishop and the Inquisitors. French synods spoke of the number sentenced to life-imprisonment as so great that hardly stones enough could be found for the prison buildings.1145 The secular authorities destroyed the heretic’s domicile, confiscated his goods,1146 and pronounced the death penalty.
The rules for the division of confiscated property differed in different localities. In Venice, after prolonged negotiations with the pope, it was decided that they should pass to the state.1147 In the rest of Italy they became, in equal parts, the property of the state, the Inquisition, and the curia; and in Southern France, of the state, the Inquisitors, and the bishop. Provision was made for the expenses of the Inquisition out of the spoils of confiscated property. The temptation to plunder became a fruitful ground for spying out alleged heretics. Once accused, they were all but helpless. Synods encouraged arrests by offering a fixed reward to diligent spies.
Not satisfied with seeing the death penalty executed upon the living, the Inquisition made war upon the dead, and exhumed the bodies of those found to have died in heresy and burned them.1148 This relentless barbarity reminds us of the words, perhaps improperly ascribed to Charles V. who, standing at Luther’s grave, is reported to have refused to touch the Reformer’s bones, saying, "I war with the living, not with the dead." The council of Verona, 1184, ordered relapsed heretics to be turned over forthwith to the secular authorities.1149
In the period before 1480 the Inquisition claimed most of its victims in Southern France. Douais has given us a list of seventeen Inquisitors-general who served from 1229 to 1329.1150 The sentences pronounced by Bernard de Caux, called the Hammer of the Heretics, 1244–1248 give the names of hundreds who were adjudged to the loss of goods or perpetual imprisonment, or both.1151
During the administration of Bernard Guy, as inquisitor of Toulouse, 1306–1323, forty-two persons were burnt to death, sixty-nine bodies were exhumed and burnt, three hundred and seven were imprisoned, and one hundred and forty-three were condemned to wear crosses.1152 A single instance may suffice of a day’s doings by the Inquisition. On May 12, 1234, six young men, twelve men, and eleven women were burnt at Toulouse.
In the other parts of France, the Inquisition was not so vigorously prosecuted. It included, as we have seen, the order of the Templars. In 1253 the Dominican provincial of Paris was made the supreme Inquisitor. Among the more grim Inquisitors of France was the Dominican Robert le Petit, known as Le Bougre from his having been a Patarene.1153 Gregory IX. appointed him inquisitor-general, 1233, and declared God had "given him such special grace that every hunter feared his horn."1154 The French king gave him his special aid and a royal bodyguard to attend him. He had hundreds of victims in Western Burgundy and the adjoining regions. In one term of two or three months, he burnt fifty of both sexes.1155 At Cambrai he burnt twenty, at Douai ten. His last deed was to burn at Mt. Aimé in 1239, twenty-seven, or according to another account more than one hundred and eighty—"a holocaust very great and pleasing to God" as the old chronicler put it.1156 In 1239 he was himself consigned to perpetual imprisonment for his misdeeds.
In the Spanish kingdom of Aragon, the number of heretics does not seem to have been large. In 1232 the archbishop of Tarragona was ordered by Gregory IX. to proceed against heretics in conjunction with the Dominicans.1157 One of the most famous of all Inquisitors, the Spanish Dominican, Eymericus, was appointed Inquisitor-general 1357, was deposed 1360, and reappointed 1366. He died in exile. His Directorium inquisitorum, written 1376, is the most famous treatise on the mode of treating heresy. Heretics, in his judgment, were justly offered the alternative of submission or the stake. The small number of the victims under the earlier Inquisition in Spain was fully made up in the series of holocausts begun under Ferdinand in 1480.
In Northern and Central Italy, the Inquisition was fully developed, the first papal commissioners being the bishops of Brescia and Modena, 1224. The cases of heresy in Southern Italy were few and isolated. In Rome, the first pyres were lighted in 1231, in front of St. Maria Maggiore. From that year on, and at the demand of Gregory IX., the Roman senator took an oath to execute heretics within eight days of their conviction by the ecclesiastical court. The houses sheltering them were to be pulled down. The sentence condemning heretics was read by the Inquisitor on the steps of the Capitol in the presence of the senator.1158 At a later period the special order of San Giovanni Decollato—John, the Beheaded—was formed in Rome, whose members accompanied the condemned to the place of death.
In Germany, the Inquisition did not take full hold till the crusade against witchcraft was started. The Dominicans were formally appointed to take charge of the business in 1248. Of sixty-three papal Inquisitors, known by name, ten were Franciscans, two Augustinians, one of the order of Coelestin, and the rest Dominicans.1159 The laws of Frederick II. were renewed or elaborated by Rudolf, 1292, and other emperors,1160 and the laws of the Church by many provincial councils.1161 The bishops of Treves, Mainz, and Cologne interfered at times with the persecution of the Beghards and Beguines, and appealed, as against the papal Inquisitors, to their rights, as recognized in the papal bulls of 1259 and 1320. After the murder of Konrad of Marburg, Gregory IX. called upon them in vain to prosecute heretics with vigor. In fact the Germans again and again showed their resentment and put Inquisitors to death.1162
The centres of heresy in Germany were Strassburg, as early as 1212, Cologne, and Erfurt. The number of victims is said to have been very large and at least five hundred can be accounted for definitely in reported burnings.1163 Banishment, hanging, and drowning were other forms of punishment practised. In 1368 the Inquisitor, Walter Kerlinger, banished two hundred families from Erfurt alone. The prisons to which the condemned were consigned were wretched places, the abode of filth, vermin, and snakes.1164
As Torquemada stands out as the incorporation of all that is inhuman in the Spanish Inquisition, so in the German does Konrad of Marburg.
This Dominican ecclesiastic, whom Gregory IX. called the "Lord’s watch-dog," first came into prominence at the court of Louis IV. of Thuringia on the Wartburg, the old castle which was the scene of the contests of the Minnesingers, and was destined to be made famous by Luther’s confinement after the diet of Worms, 1521. Konrad became confessor of Louis’ wife, the young and saintly Elizabeth. The daughter of King Andreas II. of Hungary, she was married to the Landgrave of Thuringia in 1221, at the age of fourteen. At his death at Brindisi, on his way to the Holy Land, in 1227, she came more completely under the power of Konrad. Scarcely any scene in Christian history exhibits such wanton and pitiless cruelty to a spiritual ward as he displayed to the tender woman who yielded him obedience. From the Wartburg, where she was adored for her charities and good works, she removed to Marburg. There Konrad subjected her to daily castigations and menial services, deprived her gradually of all her maids of honor, and separated her from her three children. On one occasion when she visited a convent of nuns at Oldenburg, a thing which was against their rigid rule, Konrad made Elizabeth and her attendant lie prostrate and receive a severe scourging from friar Gerhard while he himself looked on and repeated the Miserere. This, the most honored woman of mediaeval Germany, died of her castigations in 1231. Four years later she was canonized, and the St. Elizabeth church was begun which still stands to her memory in Marburg.
The year of Elizabeth’s death, Gregory IX. invested Konrad with a general inquisitorial authority and right to appoint his own assistants and call upon the secular power for aid. Luciferans, so called, and other heretics were freely burned. It was Konrad’s custom to burn the offenders the very day their sentences were pronounced.1165 A reign of terror broke out wherever he went. He was murdered in 1233, on his way back to Marburg from the diet of Mainz. After his death Gregory declared him to be a man of consummate virtue, a herald of the Christian faith. Konrad was buried at the side of Elizabeth, but the papal inquisition in Germany did not recover for many a year from the blow given to it by his merciless hardness of heart. And so, as the Annals of Worms remarked, "Germany was freed from the abominable and unheard-of tribunal of that man."1166
In the Lowlands, Antwerp, Brussels, and other cities were lively centres of heresy and afforded a fine opportunity for the Inquisitor. The lists of the accused and of those executed in the flames and by other means include Waldenses, Beguines, Beghards, Apostolicals, Lollards, and other sectaries. Their sufferings have been given a splendid memorial in the volumes of Fredericq. Holland’s baptism of blood on a grand scale was reserved for the days of Philip II. and the Duke of Alva in the sixteenth century.
In England, the methods of the Inquisition never had any foothold. When the papal agents arrived to prosecute the Templars, King Edward forbade the use of torture as contrary to the common law of the realm. The flogging of the Publicani, who are said to have made a single English convert, has already been referred to. In 1222 a deacon, who had turned Jew, was hanged.1167 The parliamentary act for burning heretics, passed in 1401, was directed against the followers of Wyclif and the Lollards. It was not till the days of Henry VIII. that the period of prosecutions and burnings in England for heresy fully began.
* Schaff, Philip, History of the Christian Church, (Oak Harbor, WA: Logos Research Systems, Inc.) 1997. The material has been carefully compared and corrected according to the Eerdmans reproduction of the 1907 edition by Charles Scribner's sons, with emendations by The Electronic Bible Society, Dallas, TX, 1998.
941 See the quotation at length in Alphandéry, p. 29.
942 Migne, 214. 537; 215. 654.
943 Published by Cunitz in Beiträge zu den Theol. Wissenschhaften, 1854, IV.
944 See Lempp’s criticism of Alphandéry’s work, Theol. Lit.-zeitung, 1905, p. 601 sq.
945 For quotation see Döllinger, I. 111.
946 So also Peter the Venerable in his c. Petrobrus, Migne, 189. 1185. Bernard Guy was born in Southem France, 1261. He entered the Dominican order and administered the office of inquisitor-general for sixteen years, prosecuting Cathari and other heretics. He was made bishop of Tuy, 1323. His Practica inquisitionis, a manual to be used by inquisitors, is a most interesting and valuable document.
947 Deflorationes SS. Patrum, Migne, 157. 1050.
948 Vulpeculae sunt heretici, quae demoliuntur vineas, Honorius of Autun, Migne, 172. 503; Etienne de Bourbon, p. 278, etc.
949 Migne, 145: 419.
950 Epp: I. 94; II. 99; IX. 208, etc., Migne, 214. 81, etc., Morbus iste qui serpit ut cancer, Ep. II. 1.
951 Facies quidem habentes diversas sed caudas ad invicem collegatas quia de varietate conveniunt in id ipsum, Mirbt, p. 133. The same expression in De Bourbon, p. 278
952 Venenatorum multitudo reptilium et haeresum sanies scaturire dicitur. Gregory’s bull, 1235, bearing on the inquisitor, Robert le Bougre, in Auvray, 2736, and Fredericq, I. 100.
953 p. 289.
954 De consid. III. 1.
955 Coulton’s Salimbene, p. 13.
956 See Döllinger, Akad. Vortäge, III. 280.
957 Gutjahr, Petrus Cantor Paris. sein Leben u. Schriften, Graetz, 1899.
958 De consid. III. 1.
959 Serm. in Cant., 64, 65, Migne, 183. 1086, 1091, plus nocet falsus catholicus quam verus hereticus.
960 This was the usual expression used by the Church and in legal documents. Flade, p. 114.
961 Catharos, Patarenos, Speronistas, Leonistas, Arnaldistas, Circumcisos, Passaginos, Josephinos, Garatenses, Albanenses, Franziscos, Bagnarolos, Commixtos, Waldenses, Roncarolos, Communellos, Warinos et Ortolinos cum illis de Aqua Nigra et omnes haereticos utriusque sexus, quocumque nomine censeantur. Bréholles, V. 280.
962 Döllinger, II. 300; Coulton’s Salimbene, p. 13.
963 Ep. I. 94, Migne, 214. 81.
964 Flade, p. 17.
965 Schmidt. II. 276; Döllinger, I. 127. The term "Cathari" occurs in the twelfth century in Ecbertus and the acts of the Third Lateran Council, 1179, which speak of the heretics in Southern France as Cathari, Patrini, Publicani, or as known by some other name. Quos alii Catharos, alii Patrinos, alii Publicanos, etc., alii aliis nominibus vocant. Innocent III. called them Cathari and Patarenes, Epp. I. 94; II. 228; VIII. 85, 105, etc.
966 Alanus de Insulis, Migne, 210. 266, says, "The Cathari are so called from the cat, whose posterior parts they are said to kiss and in whose form, as they say, Lucifer appears to them." Jacob de Voragine, in his Legenda aurea, refers to the use made of the cat by Satan in connection with heresy. He relates that on one occasion some ladies, who had been heretics, were kneeling at St. Dominic’s feet and suddenly cried out: "’Servant of God, help us.’’ Tarry awhile,’Dominic said, ’and ye shall see what ye have been serving.’ Suddenly a black cat sprang up in their midst, right horrible, with long tail standing upright and emitting from the after end a terrible stench. After a while the cat climbed up the bell rope to the steeple, and the ladies were converted."
967 Schmidt, who discusses the names in an elaborate note (II. 275-284), says that a portion of Milan was still called Contrada de’Patari in the eighteenth century. Frederick II., in his Sicilian code, derived the name Patarenes from patior, to suffer. Patarenos se nominant velut expositos passioni, Huillard-Bréholles, IV. 6. So also Walter Map, De nugis, Wright’s ed., p. 61, who says the devil persuaded the Patarenes that they would become perfect by suffering and doing what he commanded.
968 M. Paris, Luard’s ed., III. 520, speaks of "Bugares" as a common appellation for the "Paterini, Jovinians, Albigenses, and those stained with other heresies," and associates with them Robert Bugre, who from being a heretic became a Dominican and noted Inquisitor. The modern word "bugger" is derived from his name.
969 Döllinger, I. 129 sq.
970 Ibid., I. 1-51, gives an elaborate description of the Paulicians and the Bogomili. He regards the Paulicians as the bridge between the Gnostics of the ancient Church and the sectaries of the Middle Ages, p. 3.
971 Ibid., p. 114, says that the teachings of the Cathari and the Bogomili are so much alike that the "direct descent of the former from the latter must be regarded as beyond doubt." Our knowledge of the Bogomili is derived from Euthymus, whose Narratio de Bogomilis was edited by Gieseler, Göttingen, 1842.
972 Hauck, Kirchengesch., III. 431.
973 Schmidt, I. 31; Hefele, IV. 674 sqq.
974 Hauck, IV. 88.
975 Dial., V. 19.
976 William of Newburgh, Hamilton’s ed., pp. 121-123. Walter Map, De Nugis, p. 62, reduces the number to sixteen. They were called Publicani by the Oxford council, 1260
977 Stubbs, ed. of De Hoveden, II. p. liv. sq.
978 Döllinger, I. 121 sq., has no hesitation in declaring him a bishop of the Paulicians
979 . Superabundant jam ad omnem infinitatem.
980 Caesar of Heisterbach, quoted by Döllinger, I. 124.
981 p. 1768.
982 Döllinger, I. 125.
983 Döllinger, II. 300.
984 Ibid., I. 117; II. 82. Schmidt derived them from Albania and from Coriza in Dalmatia.
985 Rainerius is our chief authority for these statements. He makes the above threefold classification (Martène, V. 1761), and then proceeds to give the doctrinal and practical errors the sects had in common, and those which separated them. He also gives a list of the Catharan centres in Lombardy and other parts. See also the important document, the Supra stella, by Salvus Burce, 1235, published by Döllinger, II. 52-84. The title was chosen to distinguish it from a Catharan treatise entitled Stella, the Star.
986 See also Alphandéry, p. 35. Lempp, in a criticism of Alphandéry’s work, Lit.-zeitung, 1905, p. 601, takes the view which is presented in the text.
987 Döllinger, II. 322, etc.; Douais, II. 105, etc.; Bonacursus, Migne, 204. 777.
988 Bonacursus, p. 775.
989 Döllinger, II. 294, etc.; Ermengaudus, 1237. Lea, I. 563-567, gives a document, apparently dating from about 1300, in which a Catharan uses Scripture to prove that the God of the Old Testament is not the God of the New. He deposed, "God says in Genesis, ’Ye shall not eat the tree of life.’ But the God of the New Testament says in the Apocalypse ’to him that overcometh I will give to eat of the tree of life. ’That one prohibits, this one promises. Therefore they are antagonistic, one to the other." Again he deposed, "Genesis says I will place enmity between thee and the woman. The God of the Old Testament is thus the sower of discord and enmity. But the God of the New Testament is the giver of peace and the reconciler of all things. Hence they are antagonistic."
990 Bonacursus, p. 777; Ermengaud, p. 1234 sq.; Douais, II. 93, 96</cbr>, 103, etc.
991 Döllinger, II. 149-153.
992 Boni homines, Döllinger, II. 22, 27, etc.; Boni Christiani, II. 4, 17</cbr>, 25, etc. In Southern France one of the of the repeated charges was that the accused called the Cathari bons hommes, Douais, II. 9, 11, 14</cbr>, 25, etc. The Credentes are so called by French synods, by Innocent III., in letters written by papal legates, etc. See Hefele, V. 846, 850, etc.; Döllinger and Douais under Credentes in Index.
993 Synod of Toulouse, 1229, etc. See Schmidt, II. 127.
994 Haereticationi interfuit, Douais, II. 17, 19</cbr>, 22, etc.
995 Ante pectus, Rainerius, p. 1764. An elaborate description is given in an Appendix to Rainerius, Martène, V. 1776.
996 Ermengaud, Migne, 204, 1362; Rainerius, p. 1764; Döllinger, II. 41.
997 Among those who recanted was the rich citizen Morand of Toulouse, who did penance by standing naked to the waist at the altar of St. Saturninus and allowing himself to be scourged in the presence of the papal legate. He went on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, but on his return went back to the Cathari and died as one of the Perfect. Schmidt, I. 77 sqq.
998 Döllinger, II. 30.
999 Ibid., II. 5, 322.
1000 Ibid., II. 21, 34, 65, 90</cbr>, 283, etc.
1001 In latrinam ventris et per turpissimum locum, quae non possunt fieri, si esset ibi deus. Döllinger, II. 5.
1002 Douais, II. 17, 22, 27</cbr>, 45, etc.
1003 Moneta, p. 315; jacere cum uxore sua sicut cum meretrice, Döllinger, II. 30; matrimonium est meretricium, Douais, II. 93; Döllinger, II. 18, 21, 23, 25, 28, 40, 156</cbr>, 300, etc. omnem carnalem concubitum dampnabilem dicunt, Douais, II. 93, 96, etc.
1004 Bonacursus, p. 776 Douais, II. 93, 103, etc.
1005 Ibid., p. 777; Rainerius, p. 1762; Döllinger, II. 294, 300.
1006 Döllinger, II. 5, 152, 181, 248</cbr>, 294.
1007 Salve Burce, in Döllinger, II. 71, a remarkable passage; Douais, II. 94 Rainerius, p. 1762.
1008 Bonacursus, p. 777; Ermengaud, p. 1269. See Alphandéry, p. 83 sq.
1009 Döllinger, under Kreuz in Index II. 730; Bonacursus, p. 777 Douais, II. 94.
1010 Rainerius, 1762. See Alphandéry, p. 44.
1011 See Döllinger in Index under these two words and Schmidt, II. 71-103.
1012 Döllinger, I. 193, 210; II. 4, 25</cbr>, 30, etc.; Douais, II. 23, etc.
1013 Alphandéry, p. 51; Döllinger, II. 205.
1014 Rainerius, p. 1766; Döllinger, II. 82, 278, 295</cbr>, 324. At the time of Nicetas’visit, Bernard Raymund was ordained bishop of Toulouse, Guiraud Mercier, bishop of Carcassonne, and Raymund of Casalis, bishop of Val d’Aran.
1015 Sermon, 65, Migne, 183. 1091.
1016 Quoted by Schmidt, II. 94.
1017 Fredericq, Corpus Inq., I. 6. For Tanchelm, see Fredericq, vols. I. and II., and Life of Norbert in Mon. Germ., ch. 16.
1018 Introd. ad Theol., in Migne, 178. 1056, and Fredericq, I. 26.
1019 Döllinger, I. 98-104. Otto of Freising, De gestis Frid., 54, says he called himself Eudo or Eon, from the liturgical formula, per eum qui venturus est judicare, etc. He is also mentioned by Abaelard in his Introd. ad Theol.
1020 Adv. Petrobrusianos, Migne, 189. 719-850. Abaelard gives a few lines to him. Migne, 178. 1056. Peter speaks of Peter de Bruys and Henry of Lausanne as duo homuncios, p. 728. See Döllinger, I. 75-98.
1021 See Peter the Venerable, Adv. Petrobrus., Bernard, Ep., 241, in Migne, 182. 435. Döllinger, I. 79 sqq.; J. von Walter, Die ersten Wanderprediger Frankreichs, II. 130-140; Hauck, in Herzog, VIII. 606 sqq.
1022 Vita S. Bernardi, Migne, 185, 312 sqq. See the Lives of Bernard by Neander-Deutsch, II. 191-231; Vacandard, II. 200 sqq.; Morison, p. 302 sqq., 404 sq.
1023 Nomen ecclesiae congregationem fidelium signat, etc., Pet. Ven., p. 762. Peter goes back as far as Noah’s altar to prove the sacredness of localities.
1024 Pet. Ven., pp. 765, 847 sq.
1025 Peter of Cluny’s meaning is not clear at this point, pp. 722, 765, 787.
1026 Bernard, Migne, 182. 434; Peter, pp. 729, 761 sq.
1027 Döllinger, I. 83, makes the charge that they renounced the Old Testament. But Peter of Cluny does not say so and, had it been so, he certainly would have emphasized that heresy.
1028 Döllinger, I. 75 sqq., makes an elaborate attempt to prove that Peter and Henry were Cathari, but the differences in their teachings and practices seem to make this impossible. So Newman (Papers of Am. Soc. of Ch. Hist., IV. 184-189), Hauck, and Walter, p. 130. Peter and Henry are nowhere called Manichaeans or dualists by Peter the Venerable and Bernard, who would scarcely have omitted this charge had there been just ground for it. They commended marriage; the Cathari rejected it. They insisted upon adult baptism; the Cathari repudiated all baptism. None of the rites peculiar to the Cathari were associated with Peter and Henry.
1029 Mansi, XXII. 801-809; Denifle, Chartul. Un. Paris, I. 70, 71, 72, 79</cbr>, 107, etc.; Caesar of Heisterbach, Strange ed., II., 304 sqq.; Martène-Durand, Thes. anec., IV. 166 sq.; Jundt, Hist. du pantheisme, etc., p. 20 sq.; Preger, Gesch. der deutschen Mystik, I. 173-184; Delacroix, Le mysticisme speculatif, etc., 32-51; Alpbandéry, pp. 141-154. For other sources, see Delacroix, p. 39 sq.
1030 Chartularium, p. 70. Here, also, are given the names of the priests who were burnt or imprisoned.
1031 Putridus dens in ore, synod of Paris, 1209.
1032 So Preger, I. 212, on the basis of the "Anonymous of Passau." For the ninety-seven errors ascribed to the Brethren of the Free Spirit, see Preger, I. 461-469, and Hauck, in Herzog, I. 431.
1033 Chartul., pp. 70, 79.
1034 Preger, I. 184-191.
1035 This name, given in the code of Frederick II., would seem to refer to the same sect. The "Anonymous of Passau," writing about 1316, is our chief authority. See Müller, Die Waldenser, pp. 147 sqq.; Döllinger, Beiträge, II. 301, 703, etc.; Preger, II. 191-196; Delacroix, 52-76; Alphandéry, 154-167; Deutsch, art. Ortlieb, in Herzog, XIV. 499-501. Alphandéry urges the affiliation of the Ortlibenses with the Vaudois, chiefly because of their frequent juxtaposition in mediaeval writings.
1036 Delacroix, p. 73, insists upon the identity of the Amaurians and Ortlibenses in all essential matters.
1037 See Döllinger, II. 327; Alphandéry, 168 sqq.
1038 The notices are scattered. See under diabolus and Lucifer in Döllinger and Alphandéry, pp. 174 sqq. M. Paris, writing of 1226 and Frederick’s march through Northern Italy, speaks of Milan being a refuge and receptacle of all sorts of heretics, Patarines, Luciferi, Publicani, Albigenses, and usurers.
1039 The Josephini are mentioned by the synod of Verona, 1184, and the bull of Gregory IX., June 25, 1231, and the Speronistae by Salve Burce, Döllinger, II. 62, and in the bulls of Gregory IX., Aug. 20, 1229, June 25, 1231. See Fredericq, I. 75 sq.
1040 Hase, Karl Müller, Kirchengesch. I. 570, Alphandéry, p. 2 sqq., and others treat the subject under the head of lay-activity.
1041 The Beguines are called a sect, secta Beguinarum, in Guy’s Practica, p.264, etc. The term Beguines, or Bequini, is also derived from beggan, to beg, by Jundt, or from bègue, to stammer. See Haupt, in Herzog, II. 517. Lea, p. 351, seems inclined to advocate the old opinion which derived the name from St. Begga, d. 694, the mother of Pepin of Heristal and the reputed founder of a convent.
1042 Premium castitatis verbo et exemplo predicavit, Fredericq, II. 33.
1043 Multitudo innumerabilis, Luard’s ed., V. 194. In another place, IV. 278, he gives the number as 2,000. He also states that they were governed by no Church Rule, nullius sancti regula coarctatae.
1044 Uhlhorn, p. 380.
1045 The brief of Boniface IX. mentions "gray and other colors," Döllinger, Beiträge, II. 383.
1046 A synod of Béziers, p. 299, forbade both male and female societies on the ground that there was no papal sanction. Wetzer-Welte, II. 204, calls them ordensähnliche Gesellschaften, and Alphandéry, p. 2, extra-ecclésiastiques.
1047 Hefele, VI. 490, 600.
1048 Hefele, VI. 543, 544.
1049 The actus carnis is no sin, for it is an impulse of nature. Döllinger, II. 384-407, 702 sqq. They were also accused with denying a hell.
1050 Haupt, in Herzog, II. 519.
1051 Bernard Guy, 264 sqq. See also the letter of the bishop of Utrecht, Oct. 6, 1318, in Fredericq, II. 74.
1052 "Sisters," a popular name for the Beguines.
1053 Willige Armen, see Döllinger, II. 381-383. Gregory XII., Eugene IV., and Sixtus IV. also commended the orthodox societies.
1054 There are still religious houses in Belgium and Holland called beguinages. In 1896 there were fifteen in Belgium and in Holland, one in Breda, and one in Amsterdam. For the Brethren of the Free Spirit, who are often associated with the Beghards but had a different origin, see part II. of this volume.
1055 Valdesius, Valdensius, or Waldunus. The name is given in these and other forms by writers of the thirteenth century. De Bourbon, p. 290; Guy, p. 244; Döllinger, II. 6, 300, etc. Bernard, abbot of Fontis Calidi, Migne, 204. 793, allegorizes when he says they were called "Valdenses, as though they came from a dense valley and are involved in its deep thick darkness of errors." Alanus de insulis, Migne, 210, p. 377 sqq., says the "Waldenses are so called from their heresiarch Waldus, the founder of the new sect who presumed to preach without authority of prelate, without divine inspiration, knowledge, or letters. A philosopher without head, a prophet without vision, an apostle without mission, a teacher without instructor, whose disciples, or rather musciples (discipuli imo muscipuli), seduce the unwary in different parts of the world."
1056 Pauperes de Lugduno, Leonistae, etc. Zabatati, or Insobbalati, because the shoe was cut in the shape of a shield. Guy, 245; Döllinger, II. 92, 233, etc.
1057 Inter se vocant Fratres seu Pauperes Christi. Guy, p. 256.
1058 Per vicos et plateas evangelium praedicare et Valdesius multos homines utriusque sexus viros et mulieres complices sibi fecit ad similem praesumptionem, etc. Guy, p. 244.
1059 de nugis, Wright’s ed., p. 64 sq. Map, who felt highly honored by his appointment, called them simple and illiterate, idiotae et illiterati, terms used also by de Bourbon, p. 292, and Guy, p. 244.
1060 The exact relation of the Poor Men of Lyons to the Humiliati is still a matter of discussion. Müller, in his Anfänge des Minoritenordens, etc., has done much to change our knowledge of the Humiliati. The view taken above may account for the language of the Verona council, Humiliati vel Pauperes de Lugduno, which was probably chosen for the very purpose of indicating that the resemblance between the two parties was so close as to make it uncertain whether there were two sects or only one. This view seems to be borne out by the two statements of Salve Burce. Döllinger, II. 64, 74.
1061 See p. 411. Sabatier, Regula Antiqua, p. 15, expresses the opinion that Francis may have been more indebted to them than we have supposed.
1062 Salve Burce, who was acquainted with Roncho, called him "a simple man, without education,"idiota absque literis. Döllinger, II. 64.
1063 Rainerius, Martène, p. 1775, Rescriptum, p. 57; Guy, p. 247; Döllinger, II. 320, etc. Rainerius is in substantial agreement with Burce who says that the Poor Men of Lombardy derived their existence from the Ultramontane Poor.
1064 The account is given in the Rescriptum. See Preger, Döllinger, II. 42-52, and Müller, Die Waldenser, p. 22. The separation between the Lombard and the Lyonnese parties is referred to in the list of inquisitorial questions to be put to them. Döllinger, II. 320 sq.
1065 Rescriptum, Döllinger, II. 46.
1066 Döllinger, II. 73.
1067 Summing up all the cases under Guy, Lea, II. 149, says that there was no very active persecution against the Lyonnese Waldenses.
1068 Comba, p. 103 sq.; Lea, II. 259 sqq.
1069 In 1530 the mediaeval period of their history closes. At that date two of their number, Morel and Peter Masson, were sent to consult with Bucer, Oecolampadius, and other Reformers. Morel was beheaded on his return journey. His letter to Oecolampadius and the Reformer’s reply are given by Dieckhoff, pp. 364-373. The Waldenses adopted the Reformation, 1532.
1070 See Comba, 74 sqq. A number of the documents given by Döllinger are interrogatories for use against the Waldenses of Germany and Austria, or accounts of their trials. One of them, in German, belongs as late as the sixteenth century, Döllinger, II. 701 sq. Haupt, Keller, Preger, and Goll have extended our knowledge of the Austrian Waldenses.
1071 Haupt, Waldenserthum, p. 21.
1072 Comba, in the French trans. of his work, and Müller, Die Waldenser, p. 103, print a consolatory letter from them to their suffering Bohemian friends.
1073 The earliest writers, as the abbot Bernard and Alanus, make no distinctions. Rainerius, 1260, does, as do also the Rescriptum which has an eye to the Waldenses of Passau and Salve Burce in his Supra Stella, 1235, who refers more particularly to the Poor Men of Lombardy. David of Augsburg, 1256, an inquisitor of high repute, has in mind the Waldensians, as a body. Bernard Guy, 1320, treats of the Lyonnese Waldensians. The documents given by Döllinger extend to the sixteenth century, many of them bearing upon the Waldenses of Austria.
1074 At the time of the Reformation, according to Morel, dancing and all sports were forbidden, except the practice of the bow and other arms. Comba, p. 263, recognizes this opposite tendency, the Waldenses approaching closer to the established Church in their practice of the sacraments.
1075 De Bourbon, p. 297.
1076 The abbot Bernard, Migne, 204. 796, sqq., 817 sqq.; Alanus, Migne, 210. 380 sqq.; de Bourbon, p. 292; Döllinger, II. 6, 51.
1077 Comba, pp. 47-52, gives a translation of the disputation at Narbonne. The abbot Bernard, Migne, 204. 805, also quotes James 4 as a passage upon which the Waldenses relied.
1078 De Bourbon, p. 291; Guy, p. 292, etc.
1079 Migne, 204. 806 sq., 825;II. 300, etc.
1080 Döllinger, II. 340.
1081 Magis operatur meritum ad consecrandum vel benedictionem, ligandum vel solvendum, quam ordo vel officium, Alanus, Migne, 204, 385. Alphandéry, p. 129, justly lays stress upon this charge.
1082 Consecratio corporis et sanguinis Christi potest fieri a quolibet justo, quamvis sit laycus, Guy, p. 246. Also Rainerius, p. 1775, David of Augsburg, and Döllinger, II. 7.
1083 Alanus, Migne, 210, 386.
1084 Rainerius declares without qualification that the Poor Men of Lombardy hold to the salvation of infants not baptized, but the Rescriptum declares that baptism was regarded as necessary for all. So also David of Augsburg. See Döllinger, II. 45.
1085 Alanus, 210, 392; de Bourbon, pp. 292, 296; Guy, p. 246; Döllinger, II. 85 (Salve Burce), 107, 126, etc.
1086 Alanus, 210, 394; Guy, p. 246; Döllinger, II. 76, 107, 143, etc.
1087 The abbot Bemard, Migne, 204, 828, 833; De Bourbon, p. 295; Döllinger, II. 93, 107, 143, etc. The story of creation ascribed to the négro, according to which God, in making man, made an image of clay and set it up against the fence to dry, is as old as Etienne de Bourbon (d. 1261) and the earliest Waldenses. Bourbon says, p. 294, that he had heard of a Waldensian who, in his testimony, had stated that God made a form of soft clay as boys do in their play, and set it up under the sun to dry, and that the cracks made by the sun were veins through which the blood began to run, and then God breathed His spirit upon the face of the image.
1088 The Waldensian teaching of the two ways has been regarded by Harnack and Keller as a reminiscence of the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles. Comba, p. 341, with more probability refers it to the Sermon on the Mount. The reference was, not so-much to the two ways in this life, but to the denial of purgatory, Döllinger, II. 252, 287, 300, etc.
1089 Rainerius, p. 1775; Guy, p. 247. Also, the abbot Bernard, Migne, 204, 795 sqq., and Alanus, Migne, 210, 379 sqq.
1090 Döllinger, II. 92. At a later date the minister among the Italian Waldenses was called barba, uncle. Comba, p. 147. Morel, in his letter to Oecolampadius, declared that these distinctions were not maintained by the Waldenses. See Dieckhoff, p. 259 sq.
1091 Berger, La Bible française au moyen âge, Paris, 1884. There are marked differences in the MSS. of the Romaunt version, in language, etc. Comba, pp. 182-185, gives paragraphs from different MSS.
1092 So Haupt and Keller, Die Reform. und die aelteren Reformparteien, Leipzig, 1886, pp. 257-260. Jostes ascribed the Version to Catholic sources, an opinion Dr. Philip Schaff was inclined to adopt. Independent, Oct. 8, 1885. Nestle, art."German Versions," in Herzog, III. 66, pronounces the question an open one.
1093 The title is from lectio, reading. The text is given by Herzog, pp. 445-457, and an English translation by Perrin, pp. 263-271.
1094 Felder, the Roman Catholic author of the able Gesch. der wissenschaftlichen Studien im Franziskanerorden, 1904, approaches this view very closely, recognizes the effort of the Waldenses to realize the ideal of Apostolic poverty, and says, p. 1 sq., that Francis of Assisi in his work was moved by "the idea deeply rooted in his age, eine tief gewurzelte Zeitidee."
1095 The Fourth Lateran spoke of the city as quae magis haeretica labes corrupta.
1096 Ep. II. 99; Migne, 214, 647.
1097 Epp., VII. 186, 212; Migne, 215, pp. 503, 527. In the second letter Innocent compares heretics to Samson’s foxes and to beasts, belluas.
1098 Ep., X. 69; Migne, 215. 1165 sqq.
1099 For another version of the murder, see Lea, I. 146. It has been compared to Becket’s taking-off.
1100 Ep., XI. 26, 32; Migne, 215. 1354, 1361.
1101 Ep., XI. 230; Migne, 215. 1546. Innocent wrote repeatedly and at length, encouraging the enterprise. Epp., XI. 33, 229, etc.; Migne, 215. 1361, etc.
1102 See full description in Hurter, II. 317 sq., and Lea, I. 150 sq.
1103 Hurter, II. 322, always careful, speaks of the army as a zahllose Menge, and then of 50,000. Lea, I. 152, is inclined to accept a much larger number, 20,000 knights and 200,000 footmen.
1104 Hurter, II. 325 sqq., dwells upon his virtues, including the virtues of humanity and fidelity. Hefele, also a Roman Catholic, V. 843, calls him cruel, grausam. The council of Lavaur pronounced him the "brave soldier of Christ and the invincible warrior of the Lord’s battles,"intrepidum, Christi athletam et invictum dominici praelii bellatorem, Mansi, xxii. 887. The Fourth Lateran honored his services as having exceeded those of all others in fidelity and courage. By his mother, Alice, he inherited the earldom of Leicester which passed to his son Simon. See Stephen, Dict. Nat. Biogr.
1105 Caedite eos, novit enim dominus qui sunt ejus, Caesar of Heisterbach, V. 21; Strange ed., I. 302. And so Caesar adds, "an innumerable multitude were killed in that city." Hurter speaks of the "unbridled frenzy" of the troops, zügellose Wuth, II. 331. Describing other scenes of carnage during the crusade he uses such expressions as "horrible butchery,"furchtbarer Gemetzel, "heartrending barbarities,"empoerende Graeuel, pp. 420, 423, 427, etc. He expresses the charitable hope that the abbot of Citeaux did not say what was ascribed to him by so good and churchly a witness as Caesarof Heisterbach. Brischar, in Wetzer-Welte, I. 434, speaks with horror of the barbarities of Simon’s troops.
1106 Epp. Inn., XII. 108, 109; Migne, 216. 137-142. Ultione divina in eam mirabiliter saeviente
1107 Hefele, V. 846 sqq.
1108 Hurter, II. 383, 416.
1109 Pedro’s son, Jayme, ascribed his father’s defeat to his moral laxity. The Albigensian nobles had placed their wives and daughters at his disposal and, it is reported, he was so weakened the morning of the engagement that he could not stand at the celebration of the mass. Lea, I. 177.
1110 Hurter, II. 567.
1111 As an illustration of how the best of friends may fall out, Montfort’s right to the title, duke of Narbonne, was vehemently contested by Arnold of Citeaux, who claimed it as archbishop of Narbonne, an office to which he had been appointed.
1112 Harter, II. 567 sqq.; Hefele, V. 881 sq., 902 sq.; Potthast, Regesta, I. 439.
1113 In a passage recapitulating Innocent’s relations to the war, Hurter, II. 709-711, says that, although it was in part carried on without regard to the principles of humanity and right, and beginning as a religious war, it was turned into a war of aggrandizement, yet Innocent was guiltless, his sole purpose being to purify the land of heresy.
1114 Potthast, 9173.
1115 Such a calm Church historian as Karl Müller, an expert in mediaeval history, pronounces a similar judgment, "Die Thätigkeit der Inquisition ist vielleicht das entsetzlichste was die Geschichte der Menschheit kennt."Kirchengesch., I. 590.
1116 The usual expression for turning heretics over to the civil tribunal was saeculari judiciore relinquere, and for perpetual imprisonment, in perpetuum carcerem retrudi orperpetuo commorari.
1117 Martène, Thes., V. 1741.
1118 Inquis. haereticae pravitatis. The first case, so far as I know, of the use of the expression "inquisition of heretics,"inquis. haereticorum, was by the synod of Toulouse, 1229. Heretical depravity was the usual expression for heresy, Inn. Ep., II., 142, etc.; Migne, 214. 698. The term "inquirare" was a judicial term in use before. See Schmidt.
1119 This is the date given by Lea, Span. Inq., I. 161. Sixtus IV. authorized the Spanish Inquisition, Nov. 1, 1478.
1120 De-Joinville, Bohn’s ed., p. 362.
1121 Practica, p. 176, habet excellentiamaltitudinis ex sua origine, quia immediate a sede apostolica dirivatur, committitur et noscitur institutum.
1122 Cogite intrare. Ep., 93, ad Vincent, contra Gaudent., I. 1. On the other hand he expressed himself against putting upon them the sufferings they deserved. Ep., 100, ad Donat., etc.; Migne, 33. 360.
1123 Ep., II. 1. Hurter, II. 264, thus describes Innocent’s attitude to incorrigible heretics. They are fallen under the power of Satan, should be deprived of all their possessions, and the bodies of the dead dug up from consecrated ground. Secular princes were to draw the sword against them, for the Lord has confided it to the mighty for the protection of the pious and the dismay of evil-doers and nowhere could it be put to better use than upon those who were seeking to lure others away from the true faith and rob them of eternal life.
1124 Meruerunt non solum ab ecclesia per excommunicationem separari sed etiam per mortem a mundo excludi. Summa, II. Pt. II. 11; Migne’s ed., III. 109.
1125 This is the interpretation Hefele puts upon the passage, V. 716.
1126 Pagani jure sunt sub papae obedientia, 23, art. I.
1127 Credentes, praeterea receptores, defensores et fautores haereticorum. Frederick II., in his Constitution of 1220, uses these terms, and they became the accepted, legal form of statement. See Bernard Guy, pp. 176, 194, etc. The term "fautor" became the usual term, in the subsequent history of the Inquisition, for the abettors of heresy. The term "believers" is the technical term used for the Cathari, etc.
1128 Between 1255-1258, Alexander IV., according to Flade, p. 1, issued no less than thirty-eight bulls against heretics.
1129 Vipereos perfidiae filios. Frederick’s oath ran Catharos, Patarenos, Speronistas, Leonistias, Arnaldistas, Circumcisos et omnes haereticos utriusque sexus quocumque nomine censeantur perpetua damnamus infamia, diffidamus atque bannimus. See Bréholles, II. 6, 7, and Mirbt, p. 137. Hefele says Torquemada himself could not have used more vigorous language than Frederick used on this occasion. V. 993.
1130 Ignis judicio concremandus, ut vel ultricibus flammis pereat aut cum linguae plectro deprivent. Bréholles, II. 422; Mirbt, 138. Flade, p. 9, is wrong in saying that the first express mention of burning as the punishment for heretics in Frederick’s laws was in 1238.
1131 The terms Frederick used at this time drew heavily upon the dictionary. He calls heretics fierce wolves, most wicked angels, children of depravity, serpents deceiving the doves, serpents vomiting out poison. Bréholles, IV. 5. Gregorovius, V. 162, says Frederick issued decrees against heretics every time he made peace with the pope. "His laws against heresy form the harshest contrast to his otherwise enlightened legislation."
1132 For the Sachsenspiegel, see Mirbt, 139. The act of the Schwabenspiegel runs "where persons are believed to be heretics, they shall be accused before the spiritual court. When convicted, they shall be taken in hand by the secular court, which shall sentence them as is right, that is, they shall be burnt at the stake." Wackernagel’s ed., p. 241, sqq.
1133 Thus the Archbishop of Milan reënforced it at a provincial council, 1287. Hefele, VI. 253, and Lea, I. 322 sq. The synod of Mainz, 1233, instructed bishops to scrupulously observe the imperial and papal edicts. Hefele, V. 1027.
1134 Frederick II. united in appointing the Dominicans inquisitors of Germany. Bréholles, IV. 298-301.
1135 Potthast, 8932, 9126, 9143, 9152, 9153, 9235. From the appointment of the Dominicans grew up the false notion that Dominic was the founder of the Inquisition. So Limborch (I. ch. X.) who calls him a "cruel and bloody man." Lacordaire, I. 197 sqq. shows Limborch’s authorities to be unreliable. But the eloquent French Dominican, in his zeal, goes too far when he declares Philip II. the author of the Inquisition. Philip II. had enough sins to bear without this one being added to the heap.
1136 See Lea, I. 348 sq.
1137 Coulton, p. 203.
1138 See the presentation of Bernard Guy, pp. 209-211.
1139 Ad exstirpanda, 1252, two bulls of Alexander IV., 1257, 1260, council of Vienne, 1312, etc.
1140 Eymericus II., 110, 199, etc., as quoted by Flade, p. 54.
1141 Bréholles, IV. 5 sqq.
1142 Schmidt, in his Herkunft d. Inquisitionsprocesses, finds the beginnings of the inquisitorial mode of procedure in the legislation of Charlemagne. The element of inquisitio came to dominate in the legal procedure of all Western Europe, except England. Its leading feature was that public fame or suspicion—publica fama, mala fama, clamor publicus, infamia, etc.,—justifies magistrates in seizing the suspect and instituting trial. The Normans attempted in vain to introduce it into England, where the Magna Charta established a different principle. The Normans, however, carried the inquisition with them to Southern Italy, where Frederick II. found it in vogue. Innocent, a student of canon law, found it exactly to his purpose to adopt the inquisitorial mode of procedure.
1143 Physicians were forbidden to practise medicine on persons suspected of heresy and were forced to take oath not to defend it. Synods of Toulouse, 1229; Béziers, 1246; Albi, 1254.
1144 Potthast, 8445. The council of Toulouse, Canon XI., prescribed that the expense of incarceration be met by the bishop, provided the culprit had no goods of his own.
1145 Synod of Narbonne, 1243, etc.; Hefele, V. 1104. There were two forms of imprisonment, the murus largus, giving the freedom of the prison and the murus strictus, or solitary imprisonment.
1146 Synods of Toulouse, 1229; Albi, 1254.
1147 Lea, I. 512.
1148 This was often done. The most famous case was that of Wyclif whose bones were exhumed and burnt by the order of the council of Constance. One of the notable instances of prosecution after death was that of Roger, count of Foix, surnamed the Good. His wife and a sister were Waldenses, and another sister a Catharan. In 1263, years after the count’s death, proceedings were begun against him. See Lea, II. 53 sqq.
1149 Lea, I. 533, in closing a long treatment says, "We are perfectly safe in asserting that but for the gains to be made out of fines and confiscations, the work of the Inquisition would have been much less thorough, and it would have sunk into comparative insignificance as soon as the first frantic zeal of bigotry had exhausted itself." The synods of Béziers, 1233; Albi, 1254, etc., made a silver mark the reward of ferreting heretics out. Hefele, V. 1035; VI. 50.
1150 Documents, etc., I. CXXIX-CCVI.
1151 Douais, II. 1-89. Molinier, as quoted by Lea, II. 46, estimates the number of persons tried under this Inquisitor in two years at 8000 to 10,000.
1152 Douais, I. CCV, where a table is given of the sentences passed under Guy.
1153 Lea, II. 115 sqq., and especially Haskins.
1154 Bull, Aug. 22, 1235, Portland, 9994.
1155 According to M. Paris he also buried victims alive. Luard’s ed., iii. 361.
1156 Haskins, p. 635, adopts the larger number. "And so," said Albericus, as the story runs, that dogs once came from all directions and tore themselves to pieces in battle at this same place, as a sort of prophecy of what was to be, so these Bugres, worse than dogs, were exterminated in one day to the triumph of Holy Church." Quoted by Haskins.
1157 Potthast, 8932.
1158 Gregorovius, V. 156-161. The assertion has often been made, by the Spaniard Balmes in 1842, the Abbé Coeur, 1846, a writer in the Dublin Review, 1850, and others, that Rome never witnessed an execution for heresy. Döllinger and Reusch in their edition of Bellarmin, Bonn, 1887, p. 233, have paid their respects to this mistake and give a list of more than twenty persons, Waldenses, Lutherans, and Jews, burnt in the papal city as late as1553-1635.
1159 Flade, p. 37 sq.
1160 Henry VII., 1312 and Charles IV., 1369, 1871, 1373, etc.; Flade, p. 10. According to Charles’law the confiscated property of heretics was divided into three parts which went respectively for alms, to the Inquisitors, and to municipalities for the repair of streets and walls.
1161 Flade, p. 24, gives a list of seventy-one between 1227-1452.
1162 For names see Flade, pp. 6, 7.
1163 Flade, p. 116. The pages of this author must be read to gain any adequate idea of the horrors of the Inquisition in Germany. He pronounces it even more bloody than the Inquisition in Southern France.
1164 Flade, p. 87.
1165 Roman Catholic writers have recently tried to remove the impression that Konrad’s victims were numerous. See Benrath’s reply, art. Konrad of Marburg, Herzog, X. 749 sqq.
1166 Quoted by Wagenmann, Herzog, 2d, VIII. 192.
1167 See Stubbs, Const. Hist., II. 353 (note) sqq., who says that if there was any persecution for heresy before 1382, it must have taken the ordinary form of prosecution in the spiritual court. See Prof. Maitland, Can. Law in the Church of England, p. 158 sq.