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

by Henry Charles Lea

On the fall of Constantinople, in May, 1453, Stephen Thomas promptly sent envoys to Mahomet II. to tender his allegiance. In the ever-deepening menace of the Turks persecution could hardly be resumed with activity, but the popes occasionally gave him a portion of the moneys raised for the crusade, and the Cathari were humiliated and proscribed as far as could be ventured upon, and constituted a discontented and dangerous element of the population. In 1459 we find the king protesting to Pius II. that he persecuted the Cathari roundly, and asking for more bishops; and one of his latest acts was to send the Bishop of Nona to the pope with three Catharan magnates—George Kucinić, Stojsav Tvrtković, and Radovan Viencinić—that they might be converted. It seems incredible that any one should covet a throne so precarious, and yet, in 1461, while Stephen Thomas was battling with the Croatian magnates, he was murdered by his son, Stephen Thomasević, and his brother Radivoj. The crown which Stephen Thomasević thus won by a parricide was a crown of thorns. To the north Matthias Corvinus of Hungary was estranged and unforgiving; to the west was Croatia, with which he was at war; in the south Stephen Vukcić was his enemy; while on the east lay Servia, now a Turkish pashalic, from which Mahomet II. only awaited the fitting moment to reduce Bosnia to a like condition. Thus surrounded by foes, the internal condition of the land was not reassuring, for it was full of secret or open Cathari, who longed for help or revenge, no matter whence it might come.[350]

The new king recognized that his only hope lay in obtaining aid from Christendom, to earn which he labored energetically to strengthen the Catholic Church in his dominions, but, in the fatal perverseness of the time, this only precipitated his downfall. From Pius II. he obtained only barren instructions to the legate, Lorenzo, Abbot of Spalatro, to collect money and crusaders. From Matthias Corvinus he purchased an alliance by a heavy payment, by surrendering some castles, and by breaking off relations with the Turks and ceasing to pay them tribute. In all this he estranged still further his heretic subjects and drew upon his head the vengeance of Mahomet II. Many Cathari, driven from Bosnia, had found refuge in Moslem territory; others, especially nobles, forced to pretend conversion, maintained constant relations with the Turks, kept them advised of all that occurred, and were eager to aid them, in hopes of revenge. The news of the treaty with Matthias Corvinus was speedily conveyed to Mahomet, who, to test its truth, sent an envoy to demand the tribute. King Stephen took him to the treasury, showed him the money, and refused to deliver it, saying that he needed it for self-defence, or that it would support him in exile if driven from the kingdom, and he paid no heed to the envoy’s warning that treasure withheld in defiance of pledges would bring him no luck.[351]

Defiance such as this left nothing to hope for from the Turk, but preoccupations in Wallachia kept Mahomet busy during 1462, and he postponed his revenge till the following year. It shows the blindness of Rome to the situation and the unflagging persistency of the determination to secure uniformity of faith, that during this respite Pius II. sent learned friars to Bosnia with instructions that the best mode of overcoming heresy was to promote study. The instructions were excellent, but sadly misplaced. Through the winter and spring of 1463 Mahomet was preparing the final blow by massing one hundred and fifty thousand men at Adrianople. To throw Stephen Thomasevic off of his guard, his request for a fifteen years’’ truce was granted, and his envoys, returning with this welcome news, were followed, after an interval of four days, by the Turkish host. The land was found defenceless, and no resistance was offered till the invaders reached the royal castle of Bobovac, a stronghold capable of prolonged defence. Its commandant, however, was Count Radak, a Catharan who had been forced to conversion, and on the third day he surrendered on a promise of reward. When he claimed this, Mahomet, reproaching him with his treason, had him promptly beheaded, and tradition still points out on the road to Sutiska the rock Radakovica, where the traitor met his end. The capitulation of Bobovac cast terror throughout the land. Resistance was no longer thought of, and the only alternatives were flight or submission. The king hurried towards the Croatian frontier, with Mahomet Pasha at his heels, and was compelled at Kljuć to surrender on promise of life and freedom, but, in spite of this, he was put to death, after being utilized to order all commandants of cities and castles to surrender them. Within eight days more than seventy towns fell into the hands of the Turks, and by the middle of June all Bosnia was in their possession. Then Mahomet turned southward to overrun the territories of Stephen Vukcić, but the mountains of Herzegovina were bravely defended by the Cathari, and by the end of June the Turkish host took its way homeward, carrying with it one hundred thousand prisoners and thirty thousand youths to be converted into Janissaries.[352]

Thus abandoned by Christendom, except to hasten the end through perpetually inflaming religious strife, Bosnia was conquered without a struggle, while Herzegovina held out for twenty years longer. How easily the catastrophe might have been averted is seen in the fact that before the year 1463 was out Matthias Corvinus had reconquered a large portion of the territory so easily won, which was held until the Hungarian power was broken on the disastrous field of Mohacs in 1526. In the Turkish lands the Cathari for the most part embraced Mahometanism, and the sect which had so stubbornly endured the vicissitudes of more than a thousand years disappeared in obscurity. The Christians had the resource of flight, which they embraced, commencing an emigration which continued until the middle of the eighteenth century. This was rather to escape oppression than persecution, for the Turks permitted them the exercise of their religion. When the blessed Angelo of Verbosa, the disciple of Giacomo della Marca, persuaded his fellow-believers to leave the country, Mahomet sent for him and menacingly asked him his reasons. “To worship God elsewhere,” he boldly replied, and so eloquently pleaded his cause that the Turk ordered the Christians to be unmolested, and gave Angelo permission to preach. Thenceforth the Franciscans were the refuge and support of the Christians up to modern times, though they had many cruelties to endure at the hands of the barbarous conquerors.[353]

CHAPTER VI.
GERMANY.

IN 1209 Henry of Veringen, Bishop of Strassburg, accompanied Otho IV. on his coronation expedition to Rome. We have seen (p. 192) how some of the ecclesiastics in the emperor’s train were scandalized by the almost open toleration of heretics in the papal city; possibly recriminations may have passed between the German and the Italian prelates, and the former may have been recommended to look more sharply after the orthodoxy of their own dioceses. Be this as it may, Bishop Henry is said to have carried home with him some theologians eager to punish aberrations from the faith, and a little investigation showed to his horror that his land was full of misbelievers. A searching inquest was organized, and he soon had five hundred prisoners representing all classes of society. He was a humane man, as the times went, and he sincerely sought their conversion, to which end he set on foot disputations, but his clergy were no match for the sectaries in knowledge of Scripture, and the faith gained little by the attempt. Recourse to stronger measures was evidently requisite, and he announced that all who were obstinate should be burned. This brought most of them to their senses; heretic books and writings were eagerly surrendered, and the converts abjured. About a hundred of them, however, under the persuasion of their leader, a priest of Strassburg named John, were obdurate, including twelve priests, twenty-three women, and a number of nobles. So ignorant were the episcopal officials of the method of proceeding against heretics that they were utterly at a loss how to convict these recusants; some form of trial seems to have been thought necessary, and resort was had to the old expedient of the red-hot iron ordeal. The heretics protested against it as a manifest tempting of God, but their objections were unavailing; those who denied their heresy were subjected to it, and naturally but few escaped. One of them, named Reinhold, appealed to Innocent III. against this form of trial, and the pope promptly responded by forbidding its further use in such matters, although we are told by contemporaries that its efficacy was abundantly proved by miracles. One of the heretics who repented at the last moment was divinely cured of his burn and was discharged. Returning home rejoicing, his wife upbraided him with his weakness, and under her reproof he relapsed. Immediately the burn reappeared, and a similar one was developed on the hand of the wife, inflicting such agony that neither could restrain their screams. Fearing to betray themselves, they rushed to the woods, where they yelled like wild beasts; this led to their speedy discovery, and before the ashes of their confederates were yet cold they both shared the same fate. More fortunate was one of a number of heretics convicted in this manner at Cambrai about the same time. On his way to the stake he listened to the exhortations of a priest and commenced to repent and confess. As he did so his hand began to heal, and when he received absolution there was no trace left of the burn. Then the priest called attention to him, pronouncing him innocent, and on the evidence of his uninjured hand he was discharged. At Strassburg there were eighty obstinate ones, whose heresy was proved by the ordeal. They were all burned the same day in a ditch beyond the walls, and in the sixteenth century the hollow was still known to the citizens as the Ketzergrube. The property of the condemned was duly confiscated and was divided between the magistrates and those who had labored so successfully in vindicating the faith.[354]

It is not to be supposed that Strassburg was a solitary centre of heresy, and that this was the only case of contemporary persecution. Fragmentary allusions to the detection and punishment of misbelief in other places during the next few years show that the population of the Rhinelands was deeply infected, and that when the ignorance and sloth of the clergy permitted detection, heretics were ruthlessly exterminated. The event at Strassburg, however, happens to have been reported with a fulness of detail which invests it with peculiar importance as revealing the methods of the episcopal inquisition of the period, and the nature of existing religious dissidence.[355]

The Cathari appear to have virtually disappeared from Germany, where their foothold, at best, had been precarious. German soil seems to have been unpropitious to this essentially Southern growth. On the other hand, Waldenses were numerous, together with sectaries known as Ortlibenses or Ordibarii.

We have already seen how rapidly Waldensianism extended from Burgundy to Franche Comté and Lorraine, and how, in 1199, Innocent III., after vainly endeavoring to persuade the Waldenses of Metz to surrender their vernacular Scriptures, had sent thither the Abbot of Citeaux and two other abbots to repress their zeal. The abbots duly performed their mission, preached to the misguided zealots, and burned all such copies of the forbidden books as they could lay their hands on, though it is fair to presume, from the silence of the chronicler, that no human victims expiated at the stake their unlawful studies. The consequence of this misplaced lenity was the emboldenment of the heretics. Some years later when Bishop Bertrand was preaching in the cathedral he saw two whom he recognized, and pointed them out, saying, “I see among you missionaries of the Devil; there they are, who in my presence at Montpellier were condemned for heresy and cast out.” The unabashed Waldenses, with a companion, replied to him with insults, and, leaving the church, gathered a crowd, to whom they preached their doctrines. The bishop was powerless to silence them, for, when he attempted to use force, he found them protected by some of the most influential citizens of the town, and they were able to disseminate their pestiferous opinions in safety. Here, as in many other places, quarrels between the people and the bishop paralyzed the arm of the Church, and the Waldenses for many years continued to infect the city.[356]

It cannot, therefore, surprise us that nearly all the heretics burned at Strassburg in 1212 belonged to this sect. From their writings and confessions a list of three hundred errors was compiled, afterwards condensed into seventeen, and these were read before them to the people while they were on their way to the place of execution. Priest John, their leader, admitted the correctness of all save one alleging promiscuous sexual intercourse, which he indignantly denied. Those which he admitted show how rapidly their doctrines were developing to their logical conclusions, and how impassable was the gulf which already separated them from the Church. All the holy orders were rejected, and this already led to the abolition of sacerdotal celibacy; disbelief in purgatory was definitely adopted, with its consequences as to prayers and masses for the dead, and there had already been invented, before St. Francis and his followers, the dogma that Christ and his disciples held no property.[357]