Bosnia.
The strength and persistence of the Catharan heresy determined Innocent III to convert the nominal allegiance of the Slav race in the south-east of Europe into a definite submission to the rule of Rome. Driven from the Adriatic shore, the Cathari of Italy went to Bosnia, where a considerable number of their faith already flourished. Although the sword supplemented the love of God, the efforts of the Church resulted in only a temporary obedience. Under the relentless pressure of Rome, Dominican Inquisitors arrived in Bosnia by instalments during the thirteenth century, and the martyrdom of some of them only inflamed the zeal of the rest. Holy crusaders ravaged the country, repeating the horrors of the Albigensian wars. Time after time heresy was to all appearance extirpated, but it raised its head again as soon as the pressure was removed. More than a century of hopeless confusion and strife between Dominicans and Franciscans, as well as between them and heretics, followed, and in 1331 it was found that the worship of trees and fountains still prevailed among the “Christian� population. The progress of heresy may be estimated from the fact that early in the fifteenth century Catharism became the State religion of Bosnia. Matters were complicated by the invasion of the Turks, to whose Sultan, Mohammed II, the King rendered allegiance on the fall of Constantinople in 1453, not because of any admiration for Islam, but because he could obtain military assistance from Christendom only on terms of complete submission to Rome, which meant a free hand for the Inquisition. Under another King, who refused payment of the agreed tribute to the Turkish Sultan, the country was conquered, almost without a struggle, by the Ottomans. Most of the Cathari embraced the Moslem faith, and thus a sect which had existed for more than a thousand years became extinct. The majority of the orthodox left the country rather than practise their religion under Moslem tolerance.
Germany.
It was discovered in 1209 that the diocese of Strassburg was gravely infected with heresy, and a large number of unfortunate persons perished at the stake. On one day in that city the episcopal authorities caused to be burnt eighty persons who had failed to pass successfully through the ordeal of the red-hot iron. Catharism was little known in Germany, and the heretics were mainly Waldenses. A body allied to them, known as the Ortlibenses, or Brethren of the Free Spirit, founded by one Ortlieb, of Strassburg, held that God was the essence of all creatures, and invisible except through them. From this it followed, or was believed to follow, that man, being an embodiment of the spirit of God, was incapable of sin. This doctrine swept away, not merely the entire apparatus of theology, but the whole system of observances which constituted the religion of the Church and the source of its wealth. And as it was broad enough to include the Prince of Darkness himself in the possibility of redemption, its advocates became known as Luciferans, a designation which gave rise to many scandalous reports. The tenets of the Ortlibenses were doubtless capable of being abused, though there is little evidence to show that they were so to any serious extent. Spurred on by Gregory, the cruel fanatic, Conrad of Marburg—whom he had appointed first Inquisitor of Germany—carried on the work of persecution to the utmost of his power, but his success failed to satisfy the merciless Pontiff. Transparently-invented confessions, detailing hideous and absurd orgies of devil-worship, which Conrad extracted from the Luciferans and forwarded to the Pope, drove him almost insane with wrath, and persecution was carried on with such frantic intensity that even the Bishops protested against its excesses. Conrad was greatly mortified by the acquittal of a powerful noble, Count Sayn, who had been accused of the deadly crime of riding on a crab! During this reign of terror the Ortlibenses were suppressed, with the burning of ten of their leaders, who met their fate with calmness; and a few years afterwards, on July 31, 1233, Conrad was murdered. In this case, also, a singular leniency on the part of the Church towards serious crime was observed, the guilty parties being punished merely with excommunication. Strangely enough, the Church has not manufactured a saint out of Conrad of Marburg, whether because of his brutal treatment of St. Elizabeth of Thuringia, or because of the unpopularity caused by his excessive zeal, history does not record. It is to the credit of the German Bishops that they declined to give any public approval of his actions. Another persecuting Conrad, who had much to do with the troubles, was slain, and his assistant hanged. The number of these men’s victims is not known, but that it must have been large is shown by the profound impression produced in Germany by the persecution. It should be mentioned that the secular code and episcopal laws of Germany made ample provision for the suppression of heresy without reference to the Inquisition.
The doctrines of the Ortlibenses embodied a mixture of ascetic and pantheistic tendencies which, though at first pure, were afterwards so developed as to be made a cloak for immoral practices. The original ideal seems to have been fairly well maintained, and it is doubtful whether there was any foundation for the charges made by some Italian ecclesiastics, that the ideas of sinlessness and of bodily nakedness as a state of grace were deliberately employed for the corruption of women. Another notorious sect, calling themselves the Friends of God, held the daring conception that it was possible for Jews and Moslems to obtain salvation, and refused to denounce heretics as long as God tolerated them.
The episcopal Inquisition was not organized in Germany until 1317, and was directed mainly against the Beghards (known also as the Lollards), who originated in the Netherlands and taught that poverty was the greatest virtue. Upon these inoffensive people the Archbishop of Cologne had opened war a few years earlier. The female heretics, known as Beguines, were severely persecuted, though not to death; and it is said that on his death-bed Pope Clement V bitterly regretted authorizing the proceedings against them. Walter the Lollard, the most dangerous heretic of the Rhine provinces, was terribly tortured in 1322, and, on the special instructions of the Pope, he and many of his followers perished in the flames, meeting their fate with undaunted cheerfulness. In 1353 renewed attempts were made to establish the Inquisition in Germany, but without success. The well-known mania of the Flagellants was persecuted as heresy, and many people were burnt, while many others were left to rot in underground dungeons. Another sect, called the “Friends of God,� furnished more victims, and during the great plague the murder of Jews was thought to be pleasing to God. In 1369 the Emperor Charles IV took the Inquisition under State protection, and it was organized for work, five Inquisitors being appointed, though it still lacked houses and prisons. The unfortunate Beghards and Beguines were turned out of their houses, which were appropriated by the Inquisitors, of course without paying compensation, and not without opposition from the Bishops, who saw their own prerogatives threatened. The Beghards had been allowed to make their opinions public by means of tracts written in the vernacular; the censorship vested in the Holy Office rectified the oversight. Both the Bishops and the civil authorities objected to indiscriminate persecution, and even succeeded in obtaining from Gregory XI authority to restrict the Inquisitors’ activity in regard to the Beghards and Beguines. Being almost unmolested for a time, the Waldensian heretics again came into prominence, and from 1393 to 1397 suffered severely from persecution. At Steyer, in the latter year, more than a hundred Waldenses of both sexes were burnt. Of the followers of Conrad Schmidt, of Thuringia, many were discovered in 1414, and ninety-one were burnt in one town, forty-four in another, and many more in the villages of that province. A still more horrible case occurred two years later, when 300 of the Flagellants, penitent as well as impenitent, suffered at the stake in one day.
The superiority of the episcopate over the Inquisition was asserted by a Bull of Eugenius IV in 1431, which had the novel effect of rendering the Inquisitors liable to excommunication if they interfered with the Bishops. Persecution went on, however, until, in the time of the Reformation, most of the heretical bodies lost their identity in the spread of Lutheranism. One of the precursors of that great movement was Gregory of Heimburg, who for twenty-five years boldly wrote and preached against the Papacy and the abuse by the Church of its power. A similar campaign was carried on by Hans of Niklaushausen, who proclaimed that the wickedness of the clergy was bringing about the destruction of the world. He was seized by the episcopal tribunal of Wurzburg, and silenced in the customary manner. In spite of intermittent activity and a large number of burnings in Germany, the Inquisition never obtained a firm foothold in that country; while in Bavaria it was not formally established till 1599, and did not retain power for long. Had it been as strong and efficient as it proved in Spain, the career of Martin Luther would have been a brief one, and the Reformation would have been postponed indefinitely.
Bohemia.
In 1257, owing to a request by the King of Bohemia for aid in suppressing heresy, the Inquisition was, under episcopal sanction, established in his dominions, and two Inquisitors were appointed. The people evidently thought them more than sufficient, for when, in 1341, another ecclesiastic was empowered to act he was speedily slain by the angry populace. Bohemia was in the fourteenth century one of the most prosperous countries in Europe; but the state of its morals was far from satisfactory, the clergy in particular being worldly and depraved, and almost universally practising concubinage. The privileges of the Church were habitually sold for cash, and the land was full of vagrants, whose clerical immunities enabled them to gamble, brawl, drink, and rob at their pleasure. The demand of Innocent VI in 1354 for a tenth of the ecclesiastical revenues of the Empire to enable him to carry on his Italian wars threw Germany into an uproar. The scandalous moral laxity of the clergy passed almost unreproved, but an attack on the Church’s money bags was a much more serious matter. The clergy sheared their flocks without mercy, but they had the strongest objection to being shorn. Eighteen years elapsed before the Papal Inquisition was set up in Bohemia by Bull of Gregory XI, and it was then confined to five of the more important provinces, Prague being omitted. Many forerunners of the reformer John Huss appeared in Bohemia, and the general dissatisfaction with the Church had given rise to a powerful movement on behalf of liberty—a movement stimulated by the influence of John Wycliffe, whose writings were greatly esteemed in Prague. Wycliffe and his followers boldly taught that the Pope was Antichrist, and that excommunications might be disregarded. The clergy were vicars of Satan, their churches dens of thieves and habitations of fiends. It is curious that the Inquisition, relentless in its persecution of the Waldenses, appears to have seen nothing specially objectionable in the doctrines of Huss. At any rate, it took no official part in his trial, which, however, was modelled on the familiar Inquisitorial procedure. The controversy between orthodoxy and heresy now centred on points of doctrine rather than on the purification of the Church. The reformers contended that the Papal claim to the power of the keys was either essential to salvation or a cunning lie to gratify power and self-interest. Huss was excommunicated; and, although victorious in argument, his injudicious reliance on the Emperor’s honour led to his terrible end in 1415. Sigismund’s violation of his safe conduct was expressly recommended and defended by the clergy, on the ground that, under the law, a heretic could neither expect nor receive protection, and that the word of a king could not be allowed to prejudice the Catholic faith. Technically the contention was sound, for the law was largely an ecclesiastical creation, which reversed the accepted ideas of morality, and a word from Rome could absolve men from the most sacred obligations. The Council of Constance, having rid the world of John Huss and Jerome of Prague, began to apply the methods of the Inquisition to the whole kingdom of Bohemia, while making no attempt to check the corruption which had been the chief cause of the growth of heresy. A Bull of Martin V in 1418 urged prelates and Inquisitors to track out the heretics and deliver them to justice, and all secular rulers were commanded to aid the work. In the following year rebellion broke out, and the hardy zealots rivalled the persecutors in atrocities of cruelty. After ten years of struggle peace was restored. The more moderate among the reformers accepted the dogmas of the Church, while the extremists held firmly to their anti-sacerdotal opinions. They were met by another revival of bigotry. An energetic Inquisitor appointed by the Pope in 1436 persecuted throughout Hungary and Austria with extreme severity, but no detailed record of his victims remains. From the rude and miserably poor Hussites arose the sect of Moravian Brethren, which has existed for 400 years to the present day, preserving amid sore trials and persecutions the simplicity and purity of its faith.