In those days it was discovered that Arragon was infested with heresy; and the king's confessor proposed that the Holy See be applied to for means of active suppression. With that object, in 1230 he was sent to Rome. The envoy's name was Raymond, and his home was on the coast of Catalonia in the town of Pennaforte. He was a Bolognese jurist, a Dominican, and the author of the most celebrated treatise on morals made public in the generation preceding the scholastic theology. The five years of his abode in Rome changed the face of the Church. He won the confidence of Gregory, became penitentiary, and was employed to codify the acts of the popes militant since the publication of Gratian. Very soon after Saint Raymond appeared at the papal court, the use of the stake became law, the inquisitorial machinery had been devised, and the management given to the priors of the order. When he departed he left behind him instructions for the treatment of heresy, which the pope adopted and sent out where they were wanted. He refused a mitre, rose to be general, it is said in opposition to Albertus Magnus, and retired early, to become, in his own country, the oracle of councils on the watch for heterodoxy. Until he came, in spite of much violence and many laws, the popes had imagined no permanent security against religious error, and were not formally committed to death by burning. Gregory himself, excelling all the priesthood in vigour and experience, had for four years laboured, vaguely and in vain, with the transmitted implements. Of a sudden, in three successive measures, he finds his way, and builds up the institution which is to last for centuries. That this mighty change in the conditions of religious thought and life and in the functions of the order was suggested by Dominicans is probable. And it is reasonable to suppose that it was the work of the foremost Dominican then living, who at that very moment had risen to power and predominance at Rome.
No sane observer will allow himself to overdraw the influence of national character on events. Yet there was that in the energetic race that dwell with the Pyrenees above them and the Ebro below that suited a leading part in the business of organised persecution. They are among the nations that have been inventors in politics, and both the constitution of Arragon and that of the society of Jesus prove their constructive science. While people in other lands were feeling their way, doubtful and debonair, Arragon went straight to the end. Before the first persecuting pope was elected, before the Child of Apulia, who was to be the first persecuting emperor, was born, Alfonso proscribed the heretics. King and clergy were in such accord that three years later the council of Girona decreed that they might be beaten while they remained, and should be burnt if they came back. It was under this government, amid these surroundings, that Saint Dominic grew up, whom Sixtus V., speaking on authority which we do not possess, entitled the First Inquisitor. Saint Raymond, who had more to do with it than Saint Dominic, was his countryman. Eymerici, whose Directorium was the best authority until the Practica of Guidonis appeared, presided during forty years over the Arragonese tribunal; and his commentator Pegna, the Coke upon Littleton of inquisitorial jurisprudence, came from the same stern region.
The Histoire Générale de Languedoc in its new shape has supplied Mr. Lea with so good a basis that his obligations to the present editors bring him into something like dependence on French scholarship. He designates monarchs by the names they bear in France—Louis le Germanique, Charles le Sage, Philippe le Bon, and even Philippe; and this habit, with Foulques and Berenger of Tours, with Aretino for Arezzo, Oldenburg for Altenburg, Torgau for Zürich, imparts an exotic flavour which would be harmless but for a surviving preference for French books. Compared with Bouquet and Vaissète, he is unfamiliar with Böhmer and Pertz. For Matthew Paris he gets little or no help from Coxe, or Madden, or Luard, or Liebermann, or Huillard. In France few things of importance have escaped him. His account of Marguerite Porrette differs from that given by Hauréau in the Histoire Littéraire, and the difference is left unexplained. No man can write about Joan of Arc without suspicion who discards the publications of Quicherat, and even of Wallon, Beaucourt, and Luce. Etienne de Bourbon was an inquisitor of long experience, who knew the original comrade and assistant of Waldus. Fragments of him scattered up and down in the works of learned men have caught the author's eye; but it is uncertain how much he knows of the fifty pages from Stephanus printed in Echard's book on Saint Thomas, or of the volume in which Lecoy de la Marche has collected all, and more than all, that deserves to live of his writings. The "Historia Pontificalis," attributed to John of Salisbury, in the twentieth volume of the Monumenta, should affect the account of Arnold of Brescia. The analogy with the Waldenses, amongst whom his party seems to have merged, might be more strongly marked. "Hominum sectam fecit que adhuc dicitur heresis Lumbardorum.... Episcopis non parcebat ob avariciam et turpem questum, et plerumque propter maculam vite, et quia ecclesiam Dei in sanguinibus edificare nituntur." He was excommunicated and declared a heretic. He was reconciled and forgiven. Therefore, when he resumed his agitation his portion was with the obstinate and relapsed. "Ei populus Romanus vicissim auxilium et consilium contra omnes homines et nominatim contra domnum papam repromisit, eum namque excommunicaverat ecclesia Romana.... Post mortem domni Innocentii reversus est in Italiam, et promissa satisfactione et obediencia Romane ecclesie, a domno Eugenio receptus est apud Viterbum." And it is more likely that the fear of relics caused them to reduce his body to ashes than merely to throw the ashes into the Tiber.
The energy with which Mr. Lea beats up information is extraordinary even when imperfectly economised. He justly makes ample use of the Vitae Paparum Avenionensium, which he takes apparently from the papal volume of Muratori. These biographies were edited by Baluze, with notes and documents of such value that Avignon without him is like Athenæus without Casaubon, or the Theodosian Code without Godefroy. But if he neglects him in print, he constantly quotes a certain Paris manuscript in which I think I recognise the very one which Baluze employed. Together with Guidonis and Eymerici, the leading authority of the fourteenth century is Zanchini, who became an inquisitor at Rimini in 1300, and died in 1340. His book was published with a commentary by Campeggio, one of the Tridentine fathers; and Campeggio was further annotated by Simancas, who exposes the disparity between Italian and Spanish usage. It was reprinted, with other treatises of the same kind, in the eleventh volume of the Tractatus. Some of these treatises, and the notes of Campeggio and Simancas, are passed over by Mr. Lea without notice. But he appreciates Zanchini so well that he has had him copied from a manuscript in France. Very much against his habit, he prints one entire sentence, from which it appears that his copy does not agree to the letter with the published text. It is not clear in every case whether he is using print or manuscript. One of the most interesting directions for inquisitors, and one of the earliest, was written by Cardinal Fulcodius, better known as Clement IV. Mr. Lea cites him a dozen times, always accurately, always telling us scrupulously which of the fifteen chapters to consult. The treatise of Fulcodius occupies a few pages in Carena, De Officio S.S. Inquisitionis, in which, besides other valuable matter, there are notes by Carena himself, and a tract by Pegna, the perpetual commentator of the Inquisition. This is one of the first eight or ten books which occur to any one whose duty it is to lay in an inquisitor's library. Not only we are never told where to find Fulcodius, but when Carena is mentioned it is so done as to defy verification. Inartistic references are not, in this instance, a token of inadequate study. But a book designed only for readers who know at a glance where to lay their finger on S. Francis. Collat. Monasticae, Collat. 20, or Post constt. IV. XIX. Cod. I. v. will be slow in recovering outlay.
Not his acquaintance with rare books only, which might be the curiosity of an epicurean, but with the right and appropriate book, amazes the reader. Like most things attributed to Abbot Joachim, the Vaticinia Pontificum is a volume not in common use, and decent people may be found who never saw a copy. Mr. Lea says: "I have met with editions of Venice issued in 1589, 1600, 1605, and 1646, of Ferrara in 1591, of Frankfort in 1608, of Padua in 1625, and of Naples in 1660, and there are doubtless numerous others." This is the general level throughout; the rare failures disappear in the imposing supererogation of knowledge. It could not be exceeded by the pupils of the Göttingen seminary or the École des Chartes. They have sometimes a vicious practice of overtopping sufficient proof with irrelevant testimony: but they transcribe all deciding words in full, and for the rest, quicken and abridge our toil by sending us, not to chapter and verse, but to volume and page, of the physical and concrete book. We would gladly give Bluebeard and his wife—he had but one after all—in exchange for the best quotations from sources hard of access which Mr. Lea must have hoarded in the course of labours such as no man ever achieved before him, or will ever attempt hereafter. It would increase the usefulness of his volumes, and double their authority. There are indeed fifty pages of documentary matter not entirely new or very closely connected with the text. Portions of this, besides, are derived from manuscripts explored in France and Italy, but not it seems in Rome, and in this way much curious and valuable material underlies the pages; but it is buried without opportunity of display or scrutiny. Line upon line of references to the Neapolitan archives only bewilder and exasperate. Mr. Lea, who dealt more generously with the readers of Sacerdotal Celibacy, has refused himself in these overcrowded volumes that protection against overstatement. The want of verifiable indication of authorities is annoying, especially at first; and it may be possible to find one or two references to Saint Bonaventure or to Wattenbach which are incorrect. But he is exceedingly careful in rendering the sense of his informants, and neither strains the tether nor outsteps his guide. The original words in very many cases would add definiteness and a touch of surprise to his narrative.
If there is anywhere the least infidelity in the statement of an author's meaning, it is in the denial that Marsilius, the imperial theorist, and the creator with Ockam of the Ghibelline philosophy that has ruled the world, was a friend of religious liberty. Marsilius assuredly was not a Whig. Quite as much as any Guelph, he desired to concentrate power, not to limit or divide it. Of the sacred immunities of conscience he had no clearer vision than Dante. But he opposed persecution in the shape in which he knew it, and the patriarchs of European emancipation have not done more. He never says that there is no case in which a religion may be proscribed; but he speaks of none in which a religion may be imposed. He discusses, not intolerance, but the divine authority to persecute, and pleads for a secular law. It does not appear how he would deal with a Thug. "Nemo quantumcumque peccans contra disciplinas speculativas aut operativas quascumque punitur vel arcetur in hoc saeculo praecise in quantum huiusmodi, sed in quantum peccat contra praeceptum humanae legis.... Si humana lege prohibitum fuerit haereticum aut aliter infidelem in regione manere, qui talis in ipsa repertus fuerit, tanquam legis humanae transgressor, poena vel supplicio huic transgressioni eadem lege statutis, in hoc saeculo debet arceri." The difference is slight between the two readings. One asserts that Marsilius was tolerant in effect; the other denies that he was tolerant in principle.
Mr. Lea does not love to recognise the existence of much traditional toleration. Few lights are allowed to deepen his shadows. If a stream of tolerant thought descended from the early ages to the time when the companion of Vespucci brought his improbable tale from Utopia, then the views of Bacon, of Dante, of Gerson cannot be accounted for by the ascendency of a unanimous persuasion. It is because all men were born to the same inheritance of enforced conformity that we glide so easily towards the studied increase of pain. If some men were able to perceive what lay in the other scale, if they made a free choice, after deliberation, between well-defined and well-argued opinions, then what happened is not assignable to invincible causes, and history must turn from general and easy explanation to track the sinuosities of a tangled thread. In Mr. Lea's acceptation of ecclesiastical history intolerance was handed down as a rule of life from the days of St. Cyprian, and the few who shrank half-hearted from the gallows and the flames were exceptions, were men navigating craft of their own away from the track of St. Peter. Even in his own age he is not careful to show that the Waldenses opposed persecution, not in self-defence, but in the necessary sequence of thought. And when he describes Eutychius as an obscure man, who made a point at the fifth general council, for which he was rewarded with the patriarchate of Constantinople—Eutychius, who was already patriarch when the council assembled; and when he twice tears Formosus from his grave to parade him in his vestments about Rome,—we may suspect that the perfect grasp of documentary history from the twelfth century does not reach backwards in a like degree.
If Mr. Lea stands aloft, in his own domain, as an accumulator, his credit as a judge of testimony is nearly as high. The deciding test of his critical sagacity is the masterly treatment of the case against the Templars. They were condemned without mercy, by Church and State, by priest and jurist, and down to the present day cautious examiners of evidence, like Prutz and Lavocat, give a faltering verdict. In the face of many credulous forerunners and of much concurrent testimony Mr. Lea pronounces positively that the monster trial was a conspiracy to murder, and every adverse proof a lie. His immediate predecessor, Schottmüller, the first writer who ever knew the facts, has made this conclusion easy. But the American does not move in the retinue of the Prussian scholar. He searches and judges for himself; and in his estimate of the chief actor in the tragedy, Clement V., he judges differently. He rejects, as forgeries, a whole batch of unpublished confessions, and he points out that a bull disliked by inquisitors is not reproduced entire in the Bullarium Dominicanum. But he fails to give the collation, and is generally jealous about admitting readers to his confidence, taking them into consultation and producing the scales. In the case of Delicieux, which nearly closes the drama of Languedoc, he consults his own sources, independently of Hauréau, and in the end adopts the marginal statement in Limborch, that the pope aggravated the punishment. In other places, he puts his trust in the Historia Tribulationum, and he shows no reason for dismissing the different account there given of the death of Delicieux: "Ipsum fratrem Bernardum sibi dari a summo pontifice petierunt. Et videns summus pontifex quod secundum accusationes quas de eo fecerant fratres minores justitiam postularent, tradidit eis eum. Qui, quum suscepissent eum in sua potestate, sicut canes, cum vehementer furiunt, lacerant quam capiunt bestiam, ita ipsi diversis afflictionibus et cruciatibus laniaverunt eum. Et videntes quod neque inquisitionibus nec tormentis poterant pompam de eo facere in populo, quam quaerebant, in arctissimo carcere eum reduxerunt, ibidem eum taliter tractantes, quod infra paucos menses, quasi per ignem et aquam transiens, de carcere corporis et minorum et praedicatorum liberatus gloriose triumphans de mundi principe, migravit ad coelos."
We obtain only a general assurance that the fate of Cecco d' Ascoli is related on the strength of unpublished documents at Florence. It is not stated what they are. There is no mention of the epitaph pronounced by the pope who had made him his physician: "Cucullati Minores recentiorum Peripateticorum principem perdiderunt." We do not learn that Cecco reproached Dante with the same fatalistic leaning for which he himself was to die: "Non è fortuna cui ragion non vinca." Or how they disputed: "An ars natura fortior ac potentior existeret," and argument was supplanted by experiment: "Aligherius, qui opinionem oppositam mordicus tuebatur, felem domesticam Stabili objiciebat, quam ea arte instituerat, ut ungulis candelabrum teneret, dum is noctu legeret, vel coenaret. Cicchius igitur, ut in sententiam suam Aligherium pertraheret, scutula assumpta, ubi duo musculi asservabantur inclusi, illos in conspectum felis dimisit; quae naturae ingenio inemendabili obsequens, muribus vix inspectis, illico in terram candelabrum abjecit, et ultro citroque cursare ac vestigiis praedam persequi instituit." Either Appiani's defence of Cecco d' Ascoli has escaped Mr. Lea, who nowhere mentions Bernino's Historia di tutte l' Heresie where it is printed; or he may distrust Bernino for calling Dante a schismatic; or it may be that he rejects all this as legend, beneath the certainty of history. But he does not disdain the legendary narrative of the execution: "Tradition relates that he had learned by his art that he should die between Africa and Campo Fiore, and so sure was he of this that on the way to the stake he mocked and ridiculed his guards; but when the pile was about to be lighted he asked whether there was any place named Africa in the vicinage, and was told that that was the name of a neighbouring brook flowing from Fiesole to the Arno. Then he recognised that Florence was the Field of Flowers, and that he had been miserably deceived." The Florentine document before me, whether the same or another I know not, says nothing about untimely mockery or miserable deception: "Aveva inteso dal demonio dover lui morire di morte accidentale infra l'Affrica e campo di fiore; per lo che cercando di conservare la reputazione sua, ordinò di non andar mai nelle parti d'Affrica; e credendo tal fallacia è di potere sbeffare la gente, pubblicamente in Italia esecutava l'arte della negromanzia, et essendo per questo preso in Firenze e per la sua confessione essendo già giudicato al fuoco e legato al palo, nè vedendo alcun segno della sua liberazione, avendo prima fatto i soliti scongiuri, domandò alle persone che erano all'intorno, se quivi vicino era alcun luogo che si chiamasse Affrica, et essendogli risposto di si, cioè un fiumicello che correva ivi presso, il quale discende da Fiesole ed è chiamato Affrica, considerando che il demonio per lo campo de' fiori aveva inteso Fiorenza, e per l'Affrica quel fiumicello, ostinato nella sua perfidia, disse al manigoldo che quanto prima attaccasse il fuoco."
Mr. Lea thinks that the untenable conditions offered to the count of Toulouse by the council of Arles in 1211 are spurious. M. Paul Meyer has assigned reasons on the other side in his notes to the translation of the Chanson de la Croisade, pp. 75-77; and the editors of Vaissète (vi. 347) are of the same opinion as M. Paul Meyer. It happens that Mr. Lea reads the Chanson in the editio princeps of Fauriel; and in this particular place he cites the Histoire du Languedoc in the old and superseded edition. From a letter lately brought to light in the Archiv für Geschichte des Mittelalters, he infers that the decree of Clement V. affecting the privilege of inquisitors was tampered with before publication. A Franciscan writes from Avignon when the new canons were ready: "Inquisitores etiam heretice pravitatis restinguuntur et supponuntur episcopis"—which he thinks would argue something much more decisive than the regulations as they finally appeared. Ehrle, who publishes the letter, remarks that the writer exaggerated the import of the intended change; but he says it not of this sentence, but of the next preceding. Mr. Lea has acknowledged elsewhere the gravity of this Clementine reform. As it stands, it was considered injurious by inquisitors, and elicited repeated protests from Bernardus Guidonis: "Ex predicta autem ordinatione seu restrictione nonnulla inconvenientia consecuntur, que liberum et expeditum cursum officii inquisitoris tam in manibus dyocesanorum quam etiam inquisitorum diminuunt seu retardant.... Que apostolice sedis circumspecta provisione ac provida circumspectione indigent, ut remedientur, aut moderentur in melius, seu pocius totaliter suspendantur propter nonnulla inconvenientia que consecuntur ex ipsis circa liberum et expeditum cursum officii inquisitoris."