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

by Henry Charles Lea

In 1235 the crusaders were unlucky. Bishop John lost all hope of recovering his see and asked Gregory to relieve him of it, as the labors of war were too severe for him; but Gregory reproved his faintheartedness, telling him that if he disliked war the love of God should urge him on.[330] In 1236 the aspect of affairs improved, probably because Bela IV. had replaced Andreas on the throne of Hungary, and because the crusaders were energetically aided by Sebislav, Duke of Usora, the son of the former Ban Stephen, who hoped to recover the succession. He was rewarded by Gregory calling him a lily among thorns and the sole representative of orthodoxy among the Bosnian chiefs, who were all heretics. At last, in 1237, Coloman triumphed, but heresy was not eradicated, in spite of his efforts through the following years. In fulfilment of his request, Gregory ordered the consecration of the Dominican Ponsa as Bishop of Bosnia, and soon afterwards appointed Ponsa as legate for three years in order that he might exterminate the remnant of heresy. It must have been a tolerably large remnant, for in the same breath he promised the protection of the Holy See to all who would take the cross to extirpate it. In 1239 the Provincial Prior of Hungary was ordered to send to the heretic districts a number of friars, powerful in speech and action, to consummate the work. Ponsa, though bishop and legate, had no revenues and no resources, so Gregory ordered paid over to him the moneys collected from crusaders in redemption of vows, and the sum which Ninoslav, during his interval of orthodoxy, had given to found a cathedral. By the end of 1239 heresy seemed to be exterminated, but scarce had Coloman and his crusaders left the land when his work was undone and heresy was as vigorous as ever. In 1240 Ninoslav appears again as Ban, visiting Ragusa with a splendid retinue to renew the old treaty of trade and alliance. King Bela’s energies, in fact, were just then turned in another direction, for Assan, the Bulgarian prince, had declared in favor of the Greeks; his people therefore were denounced as heretics and schismatics, and Bela was stimulated to undertake a crusade against him, for which, as usual, Holy Land indulgences were promised. It was hard to make head at once against so many enemies of the faith, and in the confusion the Cathari of Bosnia had a respite. Still more important for them as a preventive of persecution was the Tartar invasion which, in 1241, reduced Hungary to a desert. In the bloody day of Flusse Sajo the Hungarian army was destroyed, Bela barely escaped with his life, and Coloman was slain. The respite was but temporary, however, for in 1244 Bela again overran Bosnia. Ninoslav made his peace and the heretics were persecuted, until 1246, when Hungary was involved in war with Austria, and promptly they rose again with Ninoslav at their head.[331]

All these endeavors to diffuse the blessings of Christianity had not been made without bloodshed. We have few details of these obscure struggles in a land little removed from barbarism, but there is one document extant which shows that the Albigensian crusades, with all their horrors, had been repeated to no purpose. In 1247 Innocent IV., in making over the see of Bosnia to the Archbishop of Kalocsa, alludes to the labors performed by him and his predecessors in the effort to redeem it from heresy. They had meritoriously devastated the greater part of the land; they had carried away into captivity many thousands of heretics, with great effusion of blood, and no little slaughter of their own men and waste of their substance. In spite of these sacrifices, as the churches and castles which they had built were not strong enough to resist siege, the land could not be retained in the faith; it had wholly relapsed into heresy, and there was no hope of its voluntary redemption. The church of Kalocsa had been thoroughly exhausted, and it was now rewarded by placing the recalcitrant region under its jurisdiction, in the expectation that some future crusade might be more fortunate. Innocent IV. had, a few months earlier, ordered Bela to undertake a decisive struggle with the Cathari, but Ninoslav appealed to him, protesting that he had been since his conversion a faithful son of the Church, and had only accepted the aid of the heretics because it was necessary to preserve the independence of the Banate. Moved by this, Innocent instructed the Archbishop of Kalocsa to abstain from further persecution. He ordered an investigation into the faith and actions of Ninoslav, and gave permission to use the Glagolitic writing and the Slavic tongue in the celebration of Catholic service, recognizing that this would remove an obstacle to the propagation of the faith. Ninoslav’s last years were peaceful, but after his death, about 1250, there were civil wars stimulated by the antagonism between Catharan and Catholic. He was succeeded by Prijesda, who had remained Catholic since his conversion in 1233. Under pretence of supporting Prijesda, Bela intervened, and by 1254 he had again reduced Bosnia to subjection, leading, doubtless, to active persecution of heresy, although the transfer of the see of Bosnia to Kalocsa was not carried into effect.[332]

It was about this time that Rainerio Saccone gives us his computation of the Perfects in many of the Catharan churches. In Constantinople there were two churches, a Latin and a Greek, the former comprising fifty Perfects. The latter, together with those of Bulgaria, Roumania, Slavonia, and Dalmatia, he estimates at about five hundred. This would indicate a very large number of believers, and shows how unfruitful had been the labors and the wars which had continued for more than a generation. In fact, although Bela’s long reign lasted until 1270, he failed utterly in his efforts to extirpate heresy. On the contrary, the Cathari grew ever stronger and the Church sank lower and lower. Even the Bosnian bishops dared no longer to remain in their see, but resided in Djakovar. So little reverence was there felt in those regions for the Holy See that so near as Trieste, when, in 1264, two Dominicans commissioned to preach the crusade against the Turks endeavored to perform their duty, the dean and canons hustled them violently out of the church, and would not even allow them to address the crowd in the public square, while the archdeacon publicly declared that any one who listened to them was excommunicate.[333]

Things grew worse with the accession, in 1272, of Bela’s grandson, Ladislas IV., known as the Cuman, from his mother Elizabeth, a member of that pagan tribe. Ladislas lived with the Cumans and shared their religion until his contempt for the Holy See manifested itself in the most offensive manner. The papal legate, Filippo, Bishop of Fermo, had called a council to meet at Buda, when Ladislas ordered the magistrates of the city not to permit the entrance of any prelates, or the supplying of any food to the legate, who was thus forced to depart ignominiously. This called down upon him the anger of Rodolph of Hapsburg and of Charles of Anjou, and he was fain, in 1280, to make reparation, not only by a humble apology and a grant of one hundred marks per annum for the founding of a hospital, but by adopting and publishing as the law of the land all the papal statutes against heresy, and swearing to enforce them vigorously, while his mother Elizabeth did the same as Duchess of Bosnia. Something was gained by this, and still more, when, in 1282, Ladislas appointed as ruler of Bosnia his brother-in-law, Stephen Dragutin, the exiled King of Servia. The latter, although a Greek, persecuted the Cathari; and when, about 1290, he was converted to Catholicism, his zeal increased, He sent to Rome Marino, Bishop of Antivari, to report the predominance of heresy and to ask for aid. Nicholas IV. promptly responded by commissioning a legate to Andreas III., the new King of Hungary, to preach a crusade, and the Emperor Rodolph was ordered to assist, but the effort was bootless. Equally vain was his command to the Franciscan Minister of Slavonia to select two friars acquainted with the language, and send them to Bosnia to extirpate heresy. The request at the same time made to Stephen to support them with the secular arm shows that the missionaries were in fact inquisitors. Unluckily, Nicholas in his zeal also employed Dominicans in the business. Inspired by the traditional hatred between the Orders, the inquisitors, or missionaries, employed all their energies in quarrelling with each other, and became objects of ridicule instead of terror to the heretics.[334]

In 1298 Boniface VIII. undertook finally to organize the Inquisition in the Franciscan province of Slavonia, which comprised all the territory south of Hungary, from the Danube to Macedonia. The provincial minister was ordered to appoint two friars as inquisitors for this immense region, and was intrusted as usual with the power of removing and replacing them. This slender organization he endeavored to supplement by ordering the Archbishop of Kalocsa to preach a crusade, but there was no response, and the proposed Inquisition effected nothing. When Stephen Dragutin died, in 1314, Bosnia was conquered by Mladen Subić, son of the Ban of Croatia, under whom it was virtually independent of Hungary. Mladen made some show of persecuting heresy—at least when he had a request to make at Avignon—but as the vast majority of his subjects were Cathari, whose support was absolutely necessary to him, it is safe to say that he made no serious effort. In 1319 John XXII. describes the condition of Bosnia as deplorable. There were no Catholic ecclesiastics, no reverence for the sacraments; communion was not administered, and in many places the rite of baptism was not even known or understood. When such a pontiff as John felt obliged to appeal to Mladen himself to put an end to this reproach, it shows that he had no means of effective coercion at hand.[335]

Mladen was overthrown by Stephen Kostromanić, and when he fled to Hungary, Charles Robert cast him in prison, leaving undisturbed possession to Stephen, who styled himself Ban by the grace of God. Stephen, in 1322, seems to have abandoned Catholicism, joining either the Greeks or the Cathari, but in spite of this affairs commenced to look more favorable. Hungary began to emerge from the disorders and disasters which had so long crippled it, and King Charles Robert was inclined to listen to exhortations as to his duty towards the Bosnian heretics. In 1323, therefore, John XXII. made another attempt, sending Frà Fabiano thither and ordering Charles Robert and Stephen to give him effective support. The latter was obdurate, though the former seems to have manifested some zeal, if one may believe the praises bestowed on him in 1327 by John. Fabiano was indefatigable, but his duty proved no easy one. At the very outset he met with unexpected resistance in a city so near at hand as Trieste. When he endeavored there to enforce the decrees against heresy, and to arouse the people to a sense of their duty, the bells were rung, a mob was assembled, he was dragged from the pulpit and beaten, the leaders in the disturbance being two canons of the Cathedral, Michele da Padua, and Raimondo da Cremona, who were promptly ordered by the pope to be prosecuted as suspects of heresy. Hardly had he settled this question when he was involved in a controversy with the rival Dominicans, whom he found to be poaching on his preserves. A zealous Dominican, Matteo of Agram, by suppressing the fact that Slavonia was Franciscan territory, had obtained from John letters authorizing the Dominican provincial to appoint inquisitors, commissioned to preach a crusade with Holy Land indulgences, and these inquisitors had been urgently recommended by the pope to the King of Hungary and other potentates. It was impossible that the Orders could co-operate in harmony, and Fabiano made haste to represent to John the trap into which he had been led. The pope was now at the height of his controversy with the greater part of the Franciscans over the question of poverty, and it was impolitic to give just grounds of complaint to those who remained faithful; he therefore promptly recalled the letters given to the Dominicans, and scolded them roundly for deceiving him. Even yet it seemed impossible for Fabiano to penetrate beyond the borders of his district, or to work without impediment, for in 1329 he was occupied with prosecuting for heresy the Abbot of SS. Cosmas and Damiani of Zara and one of his monks, when John, the Archbishop of Zara, intervened forcibly and stopped the proceedings. The difficulties thrown in Fabiano’s way must have been great, for he felt compelled to visit Avignon for their removal, but his usual ill-luck accompanied him. The contest between the papacy on the one side, and the Visconti and Louis of Bavaria on the other, rendered parts of Lombardy unsafe for papalists, and a son of Belial named Franceschino da Pavia had no scruple in laying hands on the inquisitor and despoiling him of his horses, books, and papers. During all this time the Inquisition must have been at a standstill, but at last Fabiano overcame all obstacles. In 1330 he returned to the scene of action; Charles Robert and Stephen lent him their assistance, and the work of suppressing the Cathari commenced under favorable auspices, and by the methods which we have seen so successful elsewhere. The condition of the Bosnian Church may be guessed from the fear felt by John XXII. that the bishops would be heretics, leading him, in 1331, to reserve their appointment to the Holy See. Yet on the death of Bishop Peter, in 1334, the chapter elected a successor, and Charles Robert endeavored to force a layman on the Church, causing a disgraceful quarrel which was not settled until Benedict XII., in 1336, pronounced in favor of the candidate of the chapter.[336]

The spiritual condition of the Slavs at this period is indicated by an occurrence in 1331 nearer home. The Venetian inquisitor, Frà Francesco Chioggia, in visiting his district, found in the province of Aquileia innumerable Slavs who worshipped a tree and fountain. Apparently they were impervious to his exhortations, and he had no means at the moment to enforce obedience. He was obliged to preach against them, in Friuli, a crusade with Holy Land indulgences. He thus raised an armed force with which he cut down the tree and choked up the fountain; unfortunately, we have no record of the fate of the nature-worshippers.[337]

Benedict XII. was as earnest as his predecessor. Yet even Dalmatia was still full of heresy, for in 1335 be felt obliged to write to the Archbishop of Zara and the Bishops of Trau and Zegna, ordering them to use every means for the extermination of heretics, and to give efficient support to the inquisitors. The Dalmatian prelates, it is true, prevailed upon the magistrates of Spalatro and Trau to enact laws against heresy, but these were not enforced. A century had passed since the Inquisition was founded, and yet the duties of persecution had not even then been learned on the shores of the Adriatic. The work seemed further than ever from accomplishment. The Cathari continued to multiply under the avowed protection of Stephen and his magnates. A gleam of light appeared, however, when, in 1337, the Croatian Count Nelipić, a bitter enemy of Stephen, offered his services to Benedict, who joyfully accepted them, and summoned all the Croatian barons to range themselves under his banner in aid of the pious labors of Fabiano and his colleagues. War ensued between Bosnia and Croatia, of the details of which we know little, except that it brought no advantage to the faith, until it threatened to spread.[338]

Stephen’s position, in fact, was becoming precarious. To the east was Stephen Dusan the Great, who styled himself Emperor of Servia, Greece, and Bulgaria, and who had shown himself unfriendly since the union of Herzegovina with Bosnia. To the north was Charles Robert, who was preparing to take part in the war. It is true that the Venetians, desirous to keep Hungary away from their Adriatic possessions, were ready to form an alliance with Stephen, but the odds against him were too great. He probably intimated a readiness to submit, for when, in 1339, Benedict sent the Franciscan General Gherardo as legate to Hungary, Charles Robert convoyed him to the Bosnian frontier, where Stephen received him with all honor, and said that he was not averse to extirpating the Cathari, but feared that in case of persecution they would call in Stephen Dusan. If liberally supported by the pope and King of Hungary he would run the risk. In 1340 Benedict promised him the help of all Catholics, and he allowed himself to be converted, an example followed by many of the magnates. It was quite time, for Catholicism had virtually disappeared from Bosnia, where the churches were mostly abandoned and torn down. Gherardo hastened to follow up his advantage by sending missionaries and inquisitors into Bosnia. That there was no place there, however, for the methods of the Inquisition, and that persuasion, not force, was required, is seen by the legends which recount how one of these inquisitors, Fray Juan de Aragon, made numerous converts, after a long and bitter disputation in an heretical assembly, by standing unhurt on a blazing pyre; and how one of his disciples, John, repeated the experience, remaining in the flames while one might chant the Miserere. These miracles, we are told, were very effective, and the stories show that nothing else could have been so. Stephen remained true to his promises, and the Catholic Church commenced to revive. A bull of Clement VI., in 1344, recites that, deceived by the falsehoods of the Franciscan General Gherardo, he had ordered the Bosnian tithes paid over to the friars on the pretext of rebuilding the churches, but on the representation of Laurence, Bishop of Bosnia, that they belonged to him and that he had no other source of support, he is in future to receive them. At the instance of Clement, in 1345, Stephen consented to allow the return of Valentine, Bishop of Makarska, who for twenty years had been an exile from his see, and the next year a third bishopric, that of Duvno, was erected. The Catharan magnates were restless, however, and when Dusan the Great, in 1350, invaded Bosnia many of them joined him, but their prospects became worse when peace followed in 1351, and when, in 1353, shortly before his death, Stephen married his only child to Louis of Hungary, a zealous Catholic who had succeeded his father, Charles Robert, in 1342.[339]

Stephen Kostromanić was succeeded by his young nephew, Stephen Tvrtko, under the regency of his mother, Helena. Under such circumstances, dissatisfied and insubordinate Catharan magnates had ample opportunity to produce confusion. Of this full advantage was taken by Louis of Hungary as soon as the death of Dusan the Great, in 1355, relieved him from that formidable antagonist. The Dominicans hastened, in 1356, to obtain from Innocent VI. a confirmation of the letters of John XXII., of 1327, authorizing them to preach a crusade against the heretics with Holy Land indulgences. Louis seized Herzegovina as a dower for his wife Elisabeth, reduced Stephen Tvrtko to the position of a vassal, and forced him to swear to extirpate the Cathari. Not content with this he proceeded to stir up rebellion among the magnates, producing great confusion, during which the Cathari regained their position. Then, in 1360, Innocent VI. conferred on Peter, Bishop of Bosnia, full powers as papal inquisitor, and also ordered a new crusade, which served as a pretext to Louis for a fresh invasion. Nothing was accomplished by this; but in 1365 the Cathari, irritated at Tvrtko’s efforts to suppress them, drove him and his mother from Bosnia. Louis furnished him with troops, and asked Urban V. to send two thousand Franciscans to convert the heretics. After a desperate struggle Tvrtko regained the throne. His brother, Stephen Vuk, who had aided the rebels, fled to Ragusa and embraced Catholicism, after which, in 1368, he appealed for aid to Urban V., representing that his heretic brother had disinherited him on account of his persecuting heretics. Urban accordingly urged Louis to protect the orthodox Vuk, and to force Tvrtko to abandon his errors, but nothing came of it. Whether Tvrtko was Catharan or Catholic does not clearly appear. Probably he was indifferent to all but his personal interests, and was ready to follow whatever policy promised to serve his ambition, and his success shows that he must have had the support of his subjects, who were nearly all Cathari. Although, in 1368, Urban V. congratulated Louis of Hungary on the success of his arms, aided by the friars, in bringing into the fold many thousand heretics and schismatics, Louis himself, in 1372, reported that Christianity was established in but few places; in some the two faiths were commingled, but for the most part all the inhabitants were Cathari. It was in vain that Gregory XI. endeavored to found Franciscan houses as missionary centres; the Bosnians would not be weaned from their creed. Had Tvrtko followed a policy of persecution he could not have accomplished the conquests which, for a brief period, shed lustre on the Bosnian name. He extended his sway over a large part of Servia and over Croatia and Dalmatia, and when, in 1376, he assumed the title of king, there was no one to dispute it. After his death, in 1391, the magnates asserted virtual independence under a succession of royal puppets—Stephen Dabisa, his young son, under the regency of his widow, Helena, and then Stephen Ostoja. The most powerful man in Bosnia was the Vojvode Hrvoje Vukcić, who ruled the north, and next to him was his kinsman Sandalj Hranić who dominated the south. Both of these men were Cathari, and so was the king, Stephen, Ostoja, and all his family. Catholicism almost disappeared, and Catharism was the religion of the State. It was organized under a Djed (grandfather), or chief, with twelve Ucitelji, or teachers, of whom the first was the Gost, or visitor, the deputy and successor of the Djed, and the second was known as the Starac, or elder.[340]