And so it went.
The king of Bulgaria, who invariably murdered his Greek prisoners of war, and was not above torturing an occasional Byzantine emperor, who therefore was not the sort of person one might expect to take a deep interest in religious matters, traveled all the way to Rome and humbly asked that he be recognized as vassal of His Holiness. While in England, certain barons who had undertaken to discipline their sovereign master were rudely informed that their charter was null and void because “it had been obtained by force” and next found themselves excommunicated for having given unto this world the famous document known as Magna Charta.
From all this it will appear that Innocent III was not the sort of person who would deal lightly with the pretensions of a few simple linen-weavers and illiterate shepherds who undertook to question the laws of his Church.
And yet, some there were found who had the courage to do this very thing as we shall now see.
The subject of all heresies is extremely difficult.
Heretics, almost invariably, are poor people who have small gift for publicity. The occasional clumsy little pamphlets they write to explain their ideas and to defend themselves against their enemies fall an easy prey to the ever watchful detectives of whatever inquisition happens to be in force at that particular moment and are promptly destroyed. Hence we depend for our knowledge of most heresies upon such information as we are able to glean from the records of their trials and upon such articles as have been written by the enemies of the false doctrines for the express purpose of exposing the new “conspiracy of Satan” to the truly faithful that all the world may be duly scandalized and warned against doing likewise.
As a result we usually get a composite picture of a long-haired individual in a dirty shirt, who lives in an empty cellar somewhere in the lowest part of the slums, who refuses to touch decent Christian food but subsists entirely upon vegetables, who drinks naught but water, who keeps away from the company of women and mumbles strange prophecies about the second coming of the Messiah, who reproves the clergy for their worldliness and wickedness and generally disgusts his more respectable neighbors by his ill-guided attacks upon the established order of things.
Undoubtedly a great many heretics have succeeded in making a nuisance of themselves, for that seems to be the fate of people who take themselves too seriously.
Undoubtedly a great many of them, driven by their almost unholy zeal for a holy life, were dirty, looked like the devil and did not smell pleasantly and generally upset the quiet routine of their home town by their strange ideas anent a truly Christian existence.