A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages; volume II

by Henry Charles Lea

In 1292 we hear of persecutions in the Val Perosa, and again in 1312 there were burnings of obstinate heretics in the valleys, but these efforts effected little, for in 1332 a brief of John XXII. describes the Waldensian church of the diocese of Turin as being in a most flourishing condition. The heretics were so numerous that they disdained concealment, holding assemblies in public in which as many as five hundred would be gathered together. When Frà Giovanni Alberto, the Inquisitor of Turin, had recently made an effort to repress them, they boldly rose in arms. On the public square of Angrogna they slew the parish priest Guillelmo, whom they suspected of furnishing information, and Alberto himself they besieged in a castle where he had taken refuge, so that he was glad to escape with his life, leaving the land abandoned to heresy. For twenty years and more one of their principal chiefs had been a man named Pier Martino, known also as Giuliano or Martino Pastrae, who chanced in his wandering missions to fall into the hands of Jean de Bades, the Inquisitor of Provence. The pope thereupon orders the latter to deliver his prisoner to Frà Alberto, who will be able to extract from him information of the utmost value in tracking and seizing his fellow-religionists—information, as the pope suggests, which will justify the use of torture. Doubtless this lucky capture enabled Frà Alberto to lay hands on a number of outlying heretics, though he probably did not again venture his person in the populous communities which had shown so sturdy a readiness in self-protection.[293]

Persecution continued, and in 1354 we chance to hear of an order issued by Giacomo, Prince of Piedmont, to the Counts of Luserna, to imprison a number of Waldenses recently discovered in Luserna and the neighboring valleys. The order was issued at the instance of Pietro di Ruffia, Inquisitor of Piedmont, who paid for his zeal with his life, being shortly afterwards slain at Susa. In 1363 and 1364 Urban V. made another attempt to reduce the heretics to obedience. The infected district was exposed to attack on both sides, for the jurisdiction of the Inquisitor of Provence extended over the Tarantaise. Frère Jean Richard of Marseilles was directed to assail them from the west, while the inquisitor and the Bishop of Turin were busy on the east. Amadeo of Savoy was requested to co-operate with the Seneschal of Provence, and this combined assault resulted in a number of captures and trials. It was doubtless the mingled despair and thirst for revenge excited by this that led to many Waldenses joining in the rising of the Jacquerie in Savoy in 1365—a rising which was suppressed with the customary merciless cruelty by the King of Navarre and Wenzel of Brabant. In spite of these efforts at repression a letter written by them in 1368, to their German brethren, would seem to show that they were still regarded as the leaders of the sect.[294]

Gregory XI. was especially zealous in the warfare with heresy, and we have already seen how earnest were his efforts in 1375 to suppress the Waldenses of Provence and Dauphiné. Those of Piedmont had rendered themselves peculiarly obnoxious. Frà Antonio Pavo had recently gone to “Bricarax,” a place deeply infected with heresy, to preach against them—his sermon, of course, including a summons before his tribunal—when in place of humbly submitting, a dozen of them, incited by the Evil One, had set upon him as he left the church and had slain him. Another inquisitor, probably Pietro di Ruffia, had met the same fate in the Dominican cloister at Susa, on the day of the Purification of the Virgin (February 2). Such misdeeds demanded exemplary chastisement, and Gregory’s exhortations to Charles V. of France were accompanied with the strongest urgency on Amadeo VI. of Savoy to clear his land of brambles. We have seen how successful were the labors of the Nuncio, Antonio Bishop of Massa, and the Inquisitor of Provence, François Borel. They did not confine their energies to the French valleys. The Waldenses of the Val di Susa were exposed to the most pitiless persecution; on a Christmas night Borel with an armed force attacked Pragelato, putting to the sword all whom he could reach. The wretches who escaped perished of hunger and cold, including, it is said, fifty women with children at the breast.[295]

It may be hoped that this holocaust satisfied the manes of the murdered inquisitors, for they seem to have received no other satisfaction. A succession of inquisitors—Piero di Castelmonte, Ruffino di Terdona, Tommaso da Casacho, and Michele Grassi, undaunted by the fate of their predecessors, wasted their energies on the Piedmontese Waldenses without reducing them to subjection. The pitiless forays of Borel drove the poor wretches from their native valleys, and they poured over into Piedmont. Amadeo VII., who succeeded his father in 1383, seems to have given the Inquisition but slender support, and it had little encouragement in its efforts to subdue the stubborn mountaineers. The fragmentary records of Frà Antonio Secco, who undertook the work in the spring of 1387, show how fruitless was the endeavor to co-operate with the ruthless proselytism of Borel. It is true that he caught Isabel Ferreria, the wife of Giovanni Gabriele, one of the murderers of Antonio Pavo, and had the satisfaction of torturing her, but he could get no evidence against her, and could only learn that her husband had died in 1386. Some other suspects he tortured and penanced with crosses: apparently he had no prisons at his disposal in which to incarcerate them. Accusations and denunciations poured in to him by the hundred, showing that the land was alive with heretics, but he was powerless to inflict on them punishment that would make an impression. One of his first cases had been a certain Lorenzo Bandoria, who had abjured before Antonio Pavo, and who under torture confessed to continued heresy. Here was a clear case of relapse, and accordingly, on March 31, he was abandoned to the secular arm and all his property declared confiscated to the Inquisition. This proved a mere brutum fulmen, for on May 6 Frà Antonio was obliged to issue a mandate to Ugonetto Bruno, Lord of Ozasco, ordering him, under pain of a hundred marks, to capture Lorenzo and present him before the tribunal the next day, while the treasurer of Ozasco was required, under threat of excommunication, to appear at the same time with an inventory of all the convict’s property. As Lorenzo had been handed over to the Castellan of Pignerol for execution, it is evident that the officials refused to carry out the sentences of the inquisitor, nor does this new effort appear to have had any better result. Many of his citations were disregarded, and when, on May 19, he ordered the lords of Ozasco to arrest three heretics under penalty of a hundred marks, no attention seems to have been paid to the command. This insubordination increased, and as the season advanced we observe that when an accused refuses to confess, the dread entry “the lord inquisitor is not content” is not followed by the customary torture, but that the culprit is mercifully dismissed under bail. One case gave Frà Antonio infinite disgust. On June 27 he cited Giacomo Do and Sanzio Margarit of Sangano; they did not appear, but on August 6 he found them in Turin and seized them. For fifteen days he kept them in chains, when they broke jail, but by the help of God he caught them again and carried them to the castle of Avegliana, where they remained ten days. He had been unable to get them tortured, and they would not confess without it; the magistrates of Avegliana appealed to Count Amadeo, who ordered them released, and Frà Antonio records the unwillingness with which he obeyed the command. He endeavored to turn his stay in Avegliana to account by publishing the customary monition for all persons to come forward and confess their own heresy or denounce those who were suspect. For nine days he waited, but not a soul appeared to accuse himself or his neighbors, and he departed, grieved at heart over the obduracy of the people, for it was common fame that there were many heretics there and in the neighborhood, especially at Coazze and Valgione. The final blow came when in December he issued a summons to all the officials of Val Perosa, one of the recognized Waldensian valleys, reciting that their land was full of heretics and that they must appear before him in Pignerol to purge themselves and their communities of this infamy. They did not obey, but through the intervention of the Piedmontese Chancellor, Giovanni di Brayda, and other courtiers, they agreed to pay Count Amadeo five hundred florins a year, for which he was to prevent the inquisitor from visiting Val Perosa, and they were to be exempted from obeying his citations. This was too much to endure, and Frà Antonio shook the dust of Pignerol from his feet for the more promising chase of the Cathari near Turin, first denouncing the officials of Val Perosa as having incurred excommunication and the penalties of contumacy, the only result of which was to draw upon his head the wrath of Count Amadeo. It does not appear that he had any better success in endeavoring to obtain for his Inquisition the confiscations of the people of Pragelato condemned by the Provençal inquisitor, François Borel. By a special privilege of Clement VII. the latter’s jurisdiction had been extended over some of the Piedmontese valleys, and though Frà Antonio might abandon the persons of the heretics to his Franciscan rival, he was resolved, if he could, to retain their property. These mishaps of Frà Antonio have an interest, not only as a rare instance of difficulties thrown into the path of the Inquisition, but as explaining why the fierce persecutions of Borel had so little effect in diminishing Waldensianism.[296] Pragelato, however, suffered more severely in 1400 when, about Christmas, it was attacked by an armed force from Susa. The inhabitants who escaped death or capture took refuge on the mountain-tops of the Val San Martino, where many perished from exposure in the inclement season; and the survivors, on returning after the departure of the troops, found their dwellings dismantled. This cold-blooded cruelty shocked even Boniface IX., who ordered the inquisitor in charge of the foray to moderate his zeal in future.[297]

Vicente Ferrer’s visit of 1403 was of a more peaceful nature, but it is not likely that the conversions of which he boasted were more permanent than those which his eloquence effected with the Moors and Jews of his native land, where they eagerly clamored for baptism under the persuasion of massacre.[298]

During the Great Schism persecution slackened, but already, in 1416, fresh decrees were issued against the Waldenses. Our knowledge of details is but fragmentary at best, and it is impossible to construct a complete history of the conflict between them and the Inquisition, but we may fairly infer that the latter was at least spasmodically active. A petition addressed to the Duke of Savoy by the lords of Luserna recites that the inhabitants of the valley were in full rebellion, owing to repeated persecution; the document is without date, but must be posterior to 1417, when Sigismund erected the county into a duchy. Again, we know that, between 1440 and 1450, Frà Bertrando Piero, vicar of the inquisitor, in one raid burned at Coni twenty-two relapsed heretics, and confiscated their property. This happens to be alluded to in a memorial addressed in 1457 to Calixtus III., by the people of the neighboring village of Bernez, who proceed to relate that after this exploit Frà Bertrando visited their town in company with his principal, Frà Ludovico da Soncino, and commenced an inquisition there, but abandoned it, to the scandal of the people, without concluding the trials. Then Felix V. (Amadeo of Savoy) sent the Abbot of San-Piero of Savigliano to complete the unfinished business, who acquitted a number of the accused. Then recently there had come a new inquisitor who took up the cases again and molested those who had been discharged, whereupon they petitioned the pope that he be restrained from further proceedings until two experts in theology be appointed as assessors by the Bishop of Mondovi and the Abbot of Savigliano. The presentation of such a request shows how much the Inquisition had lost of its power of inspiring awe, and this is emphasized by the action of Calixtus in ordering the Bishop of Turin and the inquisitor to associate with themselves two experts and proceed with the cases. It indicates, moreover, that little rest was allowed to the Waldenses. While this affair was dragging its slow length along, Nicholas V., in 1453, addressed to the Bishops of Turin and Nice and to the Inquisitor Giacomo di Buronzo, a bull reciting that Giacomo had found in the Valley of Luserna a majority of the inhabitants infected with heresy, many of them having relapsed repeatedly. Unable to convert them, he had placed an interdict on the valley; the people had repented and begged for readmission to the Church, wherefore Nicholas orders the removal of the interdict, and that penitents, whether relapsed or not, be pardoned and restored to all their civil rights—a degree of lenity which indicates that sterner measures at the time were clearly inexpedient.[299]

In 1475 a more serious war of extermination was commenced against them under the Duchess Yolande, Regent of Savoy, in conjunction with the simultaneous action of the Inquisition in Dauphiné. By an edict of January 23, 1476, all the officials in the infected districts were placed at the disposition of the Inquisition, and the podestà of Luserna was cited to appear on February 10, to answer for his conduct, in refusing, at the instance of the Inquisitor Andrea di Aquapendente, to make proclamation that none of the converts of Giacomo di Buronzo should be permitted to effect sales greater in amount than one florin, and that all sales which had been made by them were void, for they had relapsed, were endeavoring to emigrate, and to dispose of their property, which was legally confiscated. Louis XI., who stopped the persecution, as we have seen, so unceremoniously in his own dominions, felt interest enough in the matter to extend protection over the unfortunates in his sister’s territories, and his word had power sufficient to dampen the zeal of the duchess, who was wholly dependent on him after the misfortunes of Charles the Bold. Sixtus IV. was much scandalized by this. He had sent a special papal commissioner to speed the holy work, and he wrote pressingly to Louis, assuming that the royal letters of protection must have been surreptitiously obtained. He instructed the Bishop of Turin to go, if possible, in person to Louis and to make every effort to exterminate the heretics, who dared openly to propagate their doctrines and make converts, to the ruin of immortal souls. The death of Louis, in 1483, deprived the Waldenses of their protector, and persecution recommenced. An order of Duke Carlo I., in 1484, to inquire into the violences committed by the people of Angrogna, Villaro, and Bobbio because their lords endeavored to suppress their heresies, shows how soon and how bitterly the struggle broke out afresh. The heretics scattered through the towns of Piedmont were mercilessly dealt with by the inquisitors, but those who inhabited the mountain valleys were safe, except from assault by overwhelming forces. In April, 1487, Innocent VIII. recites how the inquisitor-general, Frà Blasio di Monreale, had gone to the infected district, and had vainly sought by earnest exhortations to induce the heretics to abandon their errors; how they had contemptuously defied his censures, had continued openly to preach and make converts, had attacked his house, slain his familiar, and pillaged his goods. More strenuous efforts were evidently requisite, and Innocent appointed Alberto de’’ Capitanei, Archdeacon of Cremona, as papal nuncio and commissioner to Piedmont and Dauphiné, with instructions to coerce the people to receive Frà Blasio, and permit the free exercise of his office, and to crush the heretics like venomous serpents. To this end Alberto was empowered to preach a crusade with plenary indulgences, and to deprive of their office and dignities all, whether ecclesiastics or laymen, who refused to obey his commands. From February to May, 1488, he duly issued his citations to the heretics, and as they were contumacious, he condemned them accordingly and abandoned them in mass to the secular arm. Meanwhile a force estimated at eighteen thousand crusaders had been raised in France and Piedmont, which advanced in four columns so as to block every avenue of escape. The slaughter in Val Louise has already been alluded to. The Val d’Angrogna was more fortunate, and in the attack upon it the crusading army was virtually annihilated. This victory earned for the Waldenses a respite, and in 1490 Carlo I. invited them to a conference at Pignerol, where he granted them peace and confirmed their privileges. In 1498 they were visited by Lucas of Prague and Thomas Germanus, envoys of the Unitas Fratrum of Bohemia. Through these they addressed a letter to the Bohemian King Ladislas and his nobles, boasting that they did not frequent the Catholic churches, fiercely denouncing the vices of the priesthood, and arguing that the benediction of such men was rather a malediction. Evidently the spirit of the persecuted saints was unbroken, and it was soon after put to the test in the valley of the Po, where whole villages were found to consist of Waldenses. Marguerite de Foix, Marchioness of Saluces, put troops at the command of the Inquisitor Angelo Ricciardino, who had found his ordinary machinery baffled. The villages of Pravillelm, Beitoneto, and Oncino were raided; most of the inhabitants succeeded in escaping to Luserna, but some were captured, and five were sentenced to be burned, March 24, 1510. A heavy snow-storm delayed the execution, and during the ensuing night the prisoners broke jail and joined their comrades. The inquisitor, however, was not to be balked of his exhibition, and replaced the fugitives with three prisoners to whom he had promised pardon in consideration of the fulness of their confessions, and who were duly burned. The deserted villages were confiscated and made over to good Catholics, but the refugees at intervals descended on them, slaying and spoiling without mercy, till no one dared to dwell there. Finally the bigoted marchioness yielded, and for a round sum of money, in 1512, permitted the exiles to return and dwell in peace. The triumph of toleration thus won by the sword was but local and temporary. In Savoy, the statutes published in 1513 contain all the time-honored provisions for the suppression of heresy, with instructions to all public officials to aid in every way the Inquisition, whose expenses are to be defrayed out of the confiscations. Continued persecution was thus provided for, nor was it averted when, in 1530, the Waldenses opened negotiations with the Protestants of Switzerland, resulting in their final incorporation with the Calvinists.[300]

These incessant ravages naturally led to emigration on an extended scale, which, as we have seen, mostly turned itself to Calabria and Apulia, where the brethren had dwelt in comparative peace for nearly two centuries. A large portion of the population of Freyssinières, for instance, expatriated themselves and settled in the valley of Volturara. The Inquisition was virtually extinct in the kingdom of Naples during the fifteenth century, and the heretics had earned toleration by a decent reserve. They attended mass occasionally, allowed their children to be baptized by the priests, and, what was more important, they paid their tithes with exemplary regularity—tithes which grew satisfactorily under the incessant industry of the God-fearing husbandmen. The mountain valleys which had been almost a desert became smiling with corn-fields and pastures, orchards and vine-yards. The nobles on whose lands they had settled under formal agreements gave willing protection to those who contributed so greatly to their revenues. When the independence of the feudatories was lost under the growing royal power of the House of Aragon, the heretics sought and obtained, in 1497, from King Frederic, the confirmation by the crown of the agreements with the nobles, and thus felt assured of continued toleration. They were visited every two years by the travelling pastors, or barbes, who came in pairs, an elder, known as the reggitore, and a younger, the coadiutore, journeying with some pretence of occupation, finding in every city the secret band of believers whom it was their mission to comfort and keep steadfast in the faith, and from whom they made collections which they reported to the General Assembly or Council. Between Pignerol and Calabria they counted twenty-five days’’ journey along the western coast, returning by the eastern to Venice. Everywhere they met friends acquainted with their secret passwords, and in spite of ecclesiastical vigilance there existed throughout Italy a subterranean network of heresy disguised under outward conformity. In 1497 the envoys from the Bohemian Brethren, Lucas and Thomas, found in Rome itself one of their faith, whom they bitterly reproached for concealing his belief. In Calabria, in 1530, it was estimated that they numbered ten thousand souls, in Venetia, six thousand. The fate of these poor creatures, after generations of peaceful existence which might well seem destined to be perpetual, belongs to a period beyond our present limits, but the fact that they could thus prosper and increase shows how rusty had grown the machinery of the Inquisition, and how incapable had become its officials.[301]

It only remains for us to note cursorily such indications as have reached us of the activity and condition of the Inquisition in the several provinces of Italy during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In Savoy, as we have seen, the bitter contest with the Waldenses kept it in fair working condition, while it was gradually falling into desuetude elsewhere, although in Lombardy it still, for a while, maintained its terrors. We have a somewhat vague description of its sleepless vigilance in 1318, in pursuing certain heretics who are described as Lollards—whether Begghards or Waldenses does not appear, but probably the latter, as we are told that when concealment became impossible the men escaped to Bohemia, leaving some women with children at the breast, whereupon the women were burned, and the children given to good Catholics to be brought up in the faith. In 1344 we hear of a great popular excitement, caused by the belief that a number of victims of the Inquisition had suffered unjustly. Matters went so far that the Imperial Vicar, Lucchino Visconti, asked Clement VI. to order an investigation, which was duly held, though we do not know the result. It was possibly the feeling thus aroused which led, in 1346, to the murder in the Milanese of a Franciscan inquisitor conspicuous for his persecuting zeal. The perpetual troubles during the century between the Holy See and the Visconti cannot but have greatly interfered with the efficiency of persecution. In the collected statutes of the Dukes of Milan from 1343 to 1495 there is no allusion of any kind to the Inquisition, or to the punishment of heretics. There is, however, on record a decree of 1388 placing the civil officials at the service of the Inquisition, but it enforces the conditions of the Clementines, which require episcopal consent to the use of torture and harsh prison, and to the final sentence. It moreover threatens inquisitors with punishment for using their office to extort money or gratify malice; and it further significantly commands them not to abuse the privilege of armed familiars, or to unnecessarily multiply their officials. How the political passions of the time hindered the functions of the Holy Office is seen in the case of Frà Ubertino di Carleone, a bustling Franciscan, subsequently Bishop of Lipari, who, about 1360, was accused of heresy by the Inquisitor of Piacenza. He at once proclaimed that his Ghibellinism was the motive of the prosecution, and aroused the factions of the city to a tumult, under cover of which he escaped.[302]

Inquisitors, indeed, continued to be regularly appointed, and to perform such of their functions as they could, but the decline in their usefulness is shown by one of the earliest acts of Martin V., in 1417, before leaving Constance, in commissioning the Observantine Franciscan, Giovanni da Capistrano, as a special inquisitor against the heretics of Mantua. From this time, in fact, when any effective effort against heresy was called for, the regular machinery of the Inquisition was no longer relied upon. It seems to have been regarded as effete for all the purposes for which it had been instituted, and special appointments were necessary of men devoted to the work, such as Capistrano and his friend Giacomo della Marca. Just as the inquisitorial jurisdiction had superseded the episcopal, so now both were overslaughed as insufficient. Thus, in 1457, when a new heresy sprang up in Brescia and Bergamo concerning Christ, the Virgin, and the Church Militant, infecting both clergy and laity, and including suspicion of sorcery, Calixtus III. ordered his nuncio in those parts, Master Bernardo del Bosco, to seize the heretics and try them, with even more than the privileges of an inquisitor, for he was empowered to proceed to final judgment and execution without appeal, leaving it to his discretion whether he should call for advice upon the inquisitors and episcopal ordinaries. Two years later, in the case of Zanino da Solcia, to which I shall recur hereafter, the sentence was rendered by the Lombard inquisitor, Frà Jacopo da Brescia, but the examination took place in the presence of Master Bernardo del Bosco, who moreover received the abjuration of Zanino, and the sentence was sent to Pius II. and was modified by him. The diminution of popular respect for the Inquisition was still further manifested in 1459, by the doubts publicly expressed of the validity of the bulls of Innocent IV. and Alexander IV. authorizing inquisitors to preach crusades against heretics and to prosecute for heresy all persons and communities impeding them, so that Calixtus III. was obliged to reissue the authorization.[303]