The earnest efforts of Savonarola to purify the Church and the freedom of his preaching induced the Papacy to proceed against him, though, as usual, political considerations also were influential. He was tried under a Papal commission and in accordance with the formulas of the Inquisition, though it does not appear that the proceedings were officially held by that body. At any rate, he was burnt in 1498, and after his death it was discovered that his writings contained no definitely heretical opinions.
The Templars.
A very important case in the fourteenth century was the trial of the Templars, which dragged on for over six years. Some of the accusations were of a trivial and ridiculous character, others implied traces of the Catharist heresy and dark practices at the initiation of neophytes, none of which could be proved, and the whole proceedings were a mockery of justice. The real motive was the desire of the King of France to seize the immense wealth of the Order, and grossly exaggerated charges were made with a view of giving a suitable colour to the course of “justice.â€� The Inquisition set to work, and secured many confessions, of course by the liberal use of torture; and that it was of a rigorous kind is shown by the fact that in Paris alone thirty-six Templars perished under their torments, at Sens twenty-five, and many more elsewhere. So untrustworthy and contradictory is the recorded evidence that there is little reason to doubt the innocence of the accused. Special Inquisitors were appointed all over Europe; the slow process of ecclesiastical law, which then sanctioned abuses from which the secular power shrank, was expedited by the Pope, the bishops were compliant, the State was greedy. The king and the Pope entered into an agreement defining the disposition of the victims’ property. In the clutches of the Inquisition the Order of the Temple was doomed. After a prolonged series of trials it was condemned, and its property confiscated. On May 12, 1310, fifty-four Templars were burnt in Paris, four more a few days later, and about twenty at other places. In Lorraine many of the Order suffered at the stake, while in Germany the victims were comparatively few, some in the diocese of Maintz being fortunate enough to secure an acquittal—a verdict highly displeasing to the Pope. In England the prosecution was greatly hampered by that peculiarity of English law which made torture illegal. The difficulty was got over by the express instructions of the Pope; but, in spite of a certain temporary success in that method of extracting evidence, no Templars were put to death, and the Inquisition failed to establish itself in this country. Results hardly more satisfactory attended its operations in Italy. The Templars were few; they strenuously avouched their innocence, and produced evidence highly favourable to their plea. They were, nevertheless, imprisoned, their property was confiscated, and the Pope in 1311 gave urgent instructions to have them tortured, but with what result is not known. In Castile and Aragon the Templars, notwithstanding another Papal command for their torture and the presence of special Inquisitors sent for the purpose, were declared innocent of the crimes attributed to them; but their Order was dissolved, and its property in Aragon handed over to the Hospitallers, who were burdened with their support. All over Europe repeated and urgent orders were received from Rome that the Templars were to be tortured, and the historian justly remarks that these Papal Bulls were “perhaps the most disgraceful that ever proceeded from a vicegerent of God.â€�[37]
The magnitude of the proceedings against the Templars may be estimated from the fact that when the Papal archives were by order of Napoleon transferred to Paris in 1810 the boxes of documents relating to the trial numbered 3,239; and many further records were, it is said, sold by Papal agents to grocers as waste paper. At the Council of Vienne convened in 1312, mainly to consider the case of the Templars, the Pope did his utmost to get them condemned without a hearing; and, though unsuccessful in this, the Order was formally abolished at his instigation, and the bulk of its property, as in Aragon, transferred to the Hospitallers, who did not relish the duty of supporting their unfortunate rivals. The rest of the booty was divided among the royal and other thieves who had long lusted for it. Many of the principal Templars were sentenced to perpetual imprisonment, in the course of which they rotted to death. The two chiefs, De Molay and De Charny, were slowly burned to death in Paris in March, 1314, as relapsed heretics, on the day after their declaration that they had confessed merely to save their lives. It would have been impossible thus to destroy the wealthiest and most powerful Order in Europe without the agency of the Holy Office.
Joan of Arc.
When Joan of Arc was captured by John of Luxemburg in May, 1430, she was sold by him for 10,000 livres to the English, who desired to have her tried before the Inquisition. She was bitterly hated by them, and the University of Paris heartily joined in their ferocious pursuit of the heroic maid. Pierre Cauchon, the Bishop of Beauvais, another of her opponents, presided at the trial, which opened in February, 1431; and, as it was assumed that the proceedings would be invalid without the presence of an Inquisitor, though Cauchon himself was nominally one, Jean le Maitre, Vicar for Rouen, acted (reluctantly, be it said to his credit) as representative of the Inquisitor for France. The trial was a monstrously unjust one; evidence in Joan’s favour was suppressed, and a number of skilled lawyers and theologians worked hard to entrap her into confession. It is one of the marvels of history that this untaught peasant girl time after time baffled her persecutors by her simple and truthful answers to their cunningly framed questions. Worn out at last by their tireless persistence, she abjured, and received the customary sentence of perpetual imprisonment. The English were furious, and made desperate efforts to secure her death. It was not easy to find a pretext, but one was discovered in her change of clothing. Joan was tempted by having her usual man’s dress placed within her reach. She donned it; advantage was taken of her imprudence to treat it as a formal relapse into heresy, and two days later the noble and innocent deliverer of her country was burnt alive in the market place of Rouen, to the everlasting shame of France and England.
Sorcery and Magic.
It is impossible to understand the life of the Middle Ages unless it is borne in mind that men and women everywhere held an implicit belief in the reality of the supernatural and of evil spirits, who were for ever tempting them to wrong. The idea of natural law being unknown, it was not perceived that this belief conflicted with the notion of an intelligible cosmos, or that it violated the idea of human responsibility by assuming that man’s actions are attributable, not to himself, but to either good spirits or demons. It was man, however, who received the punishment. The air was believed to be thick with spirits; they might be seen as dust, as motes in the sunbeam, or in the falling rain. The sounds of the wind, of any clashing objects, of running streams and roaring cataracts, were the voices of spirits. From Scriptural texts, such as Genesis vi, 5, Luke iv, 7, and others, the logical deduction was drawn that intercourse between angelic and human beings was not merely possible, but continually took place.
At first the Inquisition neither had nor claimed jurisdiction over dealings with evil spirits. The Church, indeed, was sometimes more rational than the people, for in 1279 an Alsatian nun would have been burnt by the peasantry for sorcery had she not been rescued by some friars. The question of repressing this crime had been raised in 1257, and before many years elapsed it was generally recognized that the Inquisition had some sort of jurisdiction over it. Astrology soon attracted its attention, and was ranked as heresy. Peter of Abano seems to have been the first to be prosecuted, and he would have been burnt as a relapsed heretic had he not taken the precaution to die in the ordinary way first. In 1324 the astrologer, Cecco d’Ascoli, was forced to abjure, but, being imprudent enough to relapse, was burnt three years later. Several people were excommunicated for sorcery early in the fourteenth century, and the growing belief in the reality and gravity of the offence was greatly stimulated by Pope John XXII.
In Ireland a zealous Franciscan worked up a case against Lady Alice Kyteler, alleged to be one of the most powerful sorcerers in the world; and, though the lady escaped to England, her maid was mercilessly scourged until she confessed a tissue of absurdities, after which she was burnt. Persecution diminished when, in 1330, the Pope withdrew sorcery from the jurisdiction of the Holy Office, but the popular belief continued and extended, and the secular courts were sufficiently rigorous in their treatment of offenders. In 1390 two women, after being severely tortured two or three times without result, finally confessed to a charge of making a love-philtre, and were burnt. The early trials for sorcery in England were held in the civil courts, the leniency of which was disapproved by the Church; in 1407, therefore, Henry IV placed the offence under ecclesiastical jurisdiction, which naturally made the most of it, and prepared a congenial soil for the witchcraft delusion.