The Spiritual Franciscans.
A section of the Mendicant Order founded by Francis of Assisi became known as the Spiritual Franciscans, whose adherence to their vows of poverty and purity was disapproved, as reflecting on the luxury and the moral apathy which prevailed in the Order generally. The Inquisition took up the task of showing the folly of being righteous overmuch, and in the fourteenth century the Spiritual Franciscans were very firmly handled. Twenty-five of them were severely tortured in 1318, and four were burnt at Marseilles for the criminal inconsistency of wearing flowing garments and having granaries and cellars. The lawfulness of possessing property was then one of the great questions that distracted the Church, and people ran the risk of being burnt whichever opinion they held. Encouraged by their success, the Inquisitors proceeded with increased vigour. At Narbonne the bishops tried to protect some accused persons, but were cowed by Inquisitorial threats. Three victims went to the stake in 1319, seventeen during the Lent of 1321, and several in the following year. At Lunel seventeen were burnt, at Beziers nine, and at Carcassonne 113 persons were executed between 1318 and 1350. All these fell victims to the Dominicans, but the orthodox Franciscans rivalled them in zeal, 114 persons being burnt by them in the year 1323. Having departed from their original moderation, the Franciscans had become energetic persecutors, who even went the length of burning a man for persistently refusing to break his vows of poverty and chastity.
In the latter part of the thirteenth century great unrest in religious matters prevailed throughout Europe, and credulity took strange forms. The expectation that the era of the Holy Ghost was about to begin was a common and harmless delusion which the orthodox felt in duty bound to extirpate. With little difficulty and by comparatively lenient methods and the use of a moderate amount of torture, the Inquisition put an end to a small sect called the Guillemites, named after a woman who was worshipped as an incarnation of the Holy Ghost, and whose resurrection after death was confidently looked for. Other eccentric modes of piety were suppressed with only a few burnings, but the episode of Dolcino in 1300 was a much more serious matter.
Apparently a man of commanding personality but holding a curious medley of religious opinions, Dolcino was soon recognized as the spiritual head of a community numbering several thousand persons, who called themselves the Apostles. The success of his mission being dangerous to the Church, the Pope Clement V proclaimed a crusade against him. He and his followers camped on a bleak mountain summit in the province of Vercelli, supporting themselves by raids for food into the neighbouring valleys. Three crusades failed, but a fourth was successful; and after terrible sufferings, cannibalism being resorted to by the besieged, the mountain was captured with merciless slaughter on both sides, the fanatics were broken up, and their leaders handed over to the secular arm and punished with the utmost barbarity. The beautiful Margarita, Dolcino’s “sister in Christ,� refusing pardon and offers of marriage, was slowly roasted alive before his eyes, and Dolcino himself was taken on a cart through the district on a hot summer day, and gradually torn to pieces with red-hot pincers. Such was the man’s resolution that he bore this frightful treatment without even a change of countenance. Strange as were some of the tenets of these enthusiasts, they were harmless enough in a moral sense, their chief crimes being their protests against the evil lives of the clergy, their success in making converts, and their contention that Christ had forsaken the Church of Rome because of its wickedness. Believing purity of life to be the first essential to salvation, they scorned the formalities of priestly religion, and dedicated themselves to poverty, chastity, and humility.
In the fourteenth century the great question which divided the Church was that of the poverty of its founder, and to this all other questions had to give way. The Franciscans ventured to say that Jesus was very poor in worldly goods. The Dominicans, on the other hand, were confident that he possessed some property, though they could not say exactly how much. On this momentous question the good old Church was rent almost in twain. Regardless of Scripture, the Dominicans even hung on the walls of their monasteries pictures representing Jesus on the Cross, with one hand nailed and the other putting money in his pouch. The latter Order was favoured by the Pope, who persecuted the Franciscans with great persistency, and men were burnt for holding heretical opinions on a subject of which no one possessed the smallest fragment of knowledge.
With the death of the chief defenders of comparative sanity in religion—Marsilio of Padua, William of Ockham, and others—the Spiritual Franciscans again underwent severe persecution, and controversy centred round the rights and privileges of the Church and the moral condition of the clergy. The well-known sect of the Fratricelli maintained that the real heretic was the Church, which by its evil conduct had created the heresies that it punished, and by its doctrines perverted the minds of simple believers. Popular sympathy in their favour was powerless to prevent punishment. The Popes commanded the Inquisitors to persecute, and about the middle of the century several persons were burnt in Italy and France, a number apparently in the presence of Pope Nicholas V. One of the leaders was burnt by instalments, and lingered for three days before death freed him from his torturers. Under this vigorous repression the Fratricelli became extinct towards the end of the fifteenth century.