If Gregory of Heimburg embodies the revolt of the ruling classes against Rome, Hans of Niklaushausen shows us the restless spirit of opposition to sacerdotalism which was spreading among the lower strata of society. Hans Böheim was a wandering drummer or fifer from Bohemia, who chanced to settle at Niklaushausen, near Würzburg. He doubtless brought with him the revolutionary ideas of the Hussites, and he seems to have entered into an alliance with the parish priest and a Mendicant Friar or Beghard. He began to have revelations from the Virgin which suited so exactly the popular wishes that crowds speedily began to assemble to listen to him. She instructed him to announce to her people that Christ could no longer endure the pride, the avarice, and the lust of the priesthood, and that the world would be destroyed in consequence of their wickedness, unless they promptly showed signs of amendment. Tithes and tribute should be purely voluntary, tolls and customs dues were to be abolished, and game was no longer to be preserved. As the fame of these revelations spread, crowds flocked to hear the inspired teacher, from the Rhinelands, Bavaria, Thuringia, Saxony, and Misnia, so that at times he addressed an audience of twenty thousand to thirty thousand souls. So great was the reverence felt for him that those who could touch him deemed themselves sanctified, and fragments of his garments were treasured as relics, so that his clothes were rent in pieces whenever he appeared, and a new suit was requisite daily. That no one doubted the truth of the Virgin’s denunciations of the clergy shows the nature of the popular estimation of the Church, for the vast crowds who came eagerly to listen were by no means composed of the dangerous elements of society. They were peaceful and orderly; men and women slept in the neighboring fields and woods and caves without fear of robbery or violence; they had money to spend, moreover, for the offerings of gold and silver, jewels, garments, and wax were large—large enough, indeed, to tempt the greed of the potentates, for after the downfall of Hans the spoils were divided between the Count of Wertheim, suzerain of Niklaushausen, the Bishop of Würzburg, and his metropolitan, the Archbishop of Mainz. The latter used a portion of his plunder in building a citadel near Mainz, the destruction of which soon afterwards by fire was generally regarded as indicating the displeasure of the Virgin.
Bishop Rudolph of Würzburg repeatedly forbade the pilgrimage to Niklaushausen, but in vain, and at length he was led to take more decided steps. The great festivity of the region was the feast of St. Kilian, the martyr of Würzburg, falling on July 8. On the Sunday previous, July 6, 1476, Hans significantly told his audience to return the following Saturday armed, but to leave their women and children at home. Matters were evidently approaching a crisis, and the bishop did not wait for the result, but sent a party of guards, who seized Hans and conveyed him to a neighboring stronghold. The next day about six thousand of his deluded followers, including many women and children, set out for the castle, without arms, believing that its walls would fall at their demand. They refused to disperse when summoned, but were readily scattered by a sally of men-at-arms, supported by a discharge from the cannon of the castle, in which many were slain. Hans was easily forced by torture to confess the falsity of his revelations and the deceits by which he and his confederates had stimulated the excitement by false miracles; but his confession did not avail him, and he was condemned to be burned. At the place of execution his followers expected divine interference, and to prevent enchantment the executioner shaved him from head to foot. He walked resolutely to the stake, singing a hymn, but his fortitude gave way and he shrieked in agony as the flames reached him. To prevent his ashes from being treasured as relics, they were carefully collected and cast into the river. The priest and Beghard who had served as his confederates sought safety in flight, but were caught and confessed, after which they were discharged; but two peasants—one who had suggested the advance upon the castle and one who had wounded the horse of one of the guards who captured Hans—were beheaded.[465]
If Gregory of Heimburg and Hans of Niklaushausen represent the antagonism to Rome which pervaded the laity from the highest to the lowest, John von Ruchrath of Wesel indicates that even in the Church the same spirit was not wanting. One of the most eminent theologians and preachers of whom Germany could boast, celebrated in the schools as the “Light of the World” and the “Master of Contradictions,” he was a hardy and somewhat violent disputant, who in his sermons had no scruple in presenting his opinions in the most offensive shape. Like Luther, of whom he was the true precursor, he commenced by an assault upon indulgences, moved thereto by the Jubilee of 1450, when pious Europe precipitated itself upon Rome to take heaven by assault. Step by step he advanced to strip the Church of its powers, and was led to reject the authority of tradition and the fathers, recurring to Scripture as the sole basis of authority. He even banished from the creed the word “Filioque,” and his predestinarian views deprived the Church of all the treasures of salvation. How little he recked of the feelings of those whose faith he assailed is seen in his remark that if fasting was instituted by St. Peter, it was probably to obtain a better market for his fish.
It shows how rusty had become the machinery of persecution and the latitude allowed to free speech that John of Wesel was permitted so long, without interference, to ripen into a heresiarch and to disseminate from the pulpit and professorial chair these opinions, as dangerous as any emitted by Waldenses, Wickliffites, or Hussites. In fact, but for the bitter quarrel between the Realists and Nominalists, which filled the scholastic world with strife, it is probable that he would have been unmolested to the end and enabled to close his days in peace. He was a leader of the Nominalists, and the Dominican Thomists of Mainz were resolved to silence him. The Archbishop of Mainz was Diether of Isenburg, who had been forced to abandon his see in 1463, but had resumed it in 1475 on the death of his competitor, Adolph of Nassau; he did not wish another conflict with Rome, to which he was exposed in consequence of his public denunciations of the papal auctions of the archiepiscopal pallium; he was threatened with this unless he would surrender John of Wesel as a victim, and he yielded to the pressure in 1479.
In the great province of Mainz there was no inquisitor; trial by the regular episcopal officials would be of uncertain result; and as there was a Dominican inquisitor at Cologne, in the person of Friar Gerhard von Elten, he was sent for. He came, accompanied by Friar Jacob Sprenger, not yet an inquisitor, but whom we shall see hereafter in that capacity busy in burning witches. With him came the theologians from the universities of Heidelberg and Cologne, who were to sit as experts and assessors, and so carefully were they selected that one of the Heidelberg doctors, to whom we are indebted for an account of the proceedings, tells us that among them all there was but one Nominalist. He evidently regards the whole matter as an incident in the scholastic strife, and says that the accused would have been acquitted had he been allowed counsel and had he not been so harshly treated.
The proceedings are a curious travesty of the inquisitorial process, which show that, however much its forms had been forgotten, the principle was rigidly maintained of treating the accused as guilty in advance. There was no secrecy attempted; everything was conducted in an assembly consisting of laymen as well as ecclesiastics, prominent among whom we recognize the Count of Wertheim, fresh from the plunder of Hans of Niklaushausen. After a preliminary meeting, when the assembly convened for business, February 8, 1479, the inquisitor von Elten presided, with Archbishop Diether under him, and opened the proceedings by suggesting that two or three friends of the accused should warn him to repent of his errors and beg for mercy, in which case he should have mercy, but otherwise not. A deputation was thereupon despatched, but their mission was not speedily performed; the inquisitor chafed at the delay, and began blustering and threatening. A high official was sent to hurry the matter, but at that moment John of Wesel entered, pallid, bent with age, leaning on his staff, and supported by two Franciscans. He was made to sit on the floor; von Elten repeated to him the message, and when he attempted to defend himself he was cut short, badgered and threatened, until he was brought to sue for pardon. After this he was put through a long and exhausting examination, and was finally remanded until the next day. A commission consisting principally of the Cologne and Heidelberg doctors was appointed to determine what should be done with him. The next day he was again brought out and examined afresh, when he endeavored to defend his views. “If all men renounce Christ,” he said, “I will still worship him and be a Christian,” to which von Elten retorted, “So say all heretics, even when at the stake.” Finally it was resolved that three doctors should be deputed, piously to exhort him to abandon his errors. As in the case of Huss, it was not his death that was wanted, but his humiliation.
On the 10th the deputies labored with him. “If Christ were here,” he told them, “and were treated like me, you would condemn him as a heretic—but he would get the better of you with his subtlety.” At length he was persuaded to acknowledge that his views were erroneous, on the deputies agreeing to take the responsibility on their own consciences. He had long been sick when the trial was commenced, all assistance was withheld from him; age, weakness, and the dark and filthy dungeon from which he had vainly begged to be relieved broke down his powers of resistance, and he submitted. He publicly recanted and abjured, his books were burned before his face, and he was sentenced to imprisonment for life in the Augustinian monastery of Mainz. He did not long survive his mortification and misery, for he died in 1481. The trial excited great interest among all the scholars of Germany, who were shocked at this treatment of a man so eminent and distinguished. Yet his writings survived him and proved greatly encouraging to the early Reformers. Melanchthon enumerates him among those who by their works kept up the continuity of the Church of Christ.[466]
It is evident from this case that the Inquisition, though not extinct in Germany, was not in working order, and that even where it existed nominally a special effort was requisite to make it function. Still we hear occasionally of the appointment of inquisitors, and from the career of Sprenger we know that their labors could be fruitfully directed to the extirpation of witchcraft. Sorcery, indeed, had become the most threatening heresy of the time, and other spiritual aberrations were attracting little attention. In the elaborate statutes issued by the Synod of Bamberg, in 1491, the section devoted to heresy dwells at much length on the details of witchcraft and magic, and mentions only one other doctrinal error—the vitiation of sacraments in polluted hands—and it directs that all who neglect to denounce heretics are to be themselves treated as accomplices, but it makes no allusion to the Inquisition. Still there is an occasional manifestation showing that inquisitors existed and sometimes exercised their powers. I shall hereafter have occasion to refer to the case of Herman of Ryswick, who was condemned and abjured in 1499, escaped from prison, and was burned as a relapsed by the inquisitor at The Hague, in 1512, and only allude to it here as an evidence of continued inquisitorial activity.[467]
The persecution of John Reuchlin, like that of John of Wesel, sprang from scholastic antagonisms, but its development shows how completely, during the interval, the inquisitorial power had wasted away. Reuchlin was a pupil of John Wessel of Groningen; as the leader of the Humanists, and the foremost representative in Germany of the new learning, he was involved in bitter controversy with the Dominicans, who, as traditional Thomists, were ready to do battle to the death for scholasticism. The ferocious jocularity with which Sebastian Brandt dilates, in his most finished Latinity, upon the torture and burning of four Dominicans at Berne, in 1509, for frauds committed in the controversy over the Immaculate Conception, indicates the temper which animated the hostile parties, even as its lighter aspect is seen in the unsparing satire of Erasmus and of the Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum. When, therefore, Reuchlin stood forward to protect Jews and Jewish literature against the assaults of the renegade Pfefferkorn, the opportunity to destroy him was eagerly seized. In 1513 a Dominican inquisitor, the Prior Jacob von Hochstraten, came from Cologne to Mainz on an errand precisely similar to that of his predecessor von Elten. Unlike John of Wesel, however, Reuchlin felt that he could safely appeal to Rome, where Leo X. was himself a man of culture and a Humanist. Leo was well disposed, and commissioned the Bishop of Speier to decide the question, which was in itself a direct blow at the inquisitorial power. Still more contemptuously damaging was the bishop’s judgment. Reuchlin was declared free of all suspicion of heresy, the prosecution was pronounced frivolous, and the costs were put upon Hochstraten, with a threat of excommunication for disobedience. This was confirmed at Rome, in 1415, where silence was imposed on Reuchlin’s accusers under a penalty of three thousand marks. The Humanists celebrated their victory with savage rejoicing. Eleutherius Bizenus printed a tract summoning, in rugged hexameters, all Germany to assist in the triumph of Reuchlin, in which Hochstraten—that thief, who as accuser and judge persecutes the innocent—marches in chains, with his hands tied behind his back, while Pfefferkorn, with ears and nose cut off, is dragged by a hook through his heels, face downwards, until his features lose the semblance of humanity. The Dominicans are characterized as worse than Turks, and more worthy to be resisted, and the author wonders what unjust pope and cowardly emperor had enabled them to impose their yoke on the land. These were brave words, but premature. The quarrel had attracted the attention of all Europe, the Dominican Order itself and all it represented were on trial, and it could not afford to submit to defeat. Hochstraten hastened to Rome; the Dominicans of the great University of Cologne did not hesitate to say that if the pope maintained the sentence they would appeal to the future council, they would refuse to abide by his decision, they would pronounce him to be no pope and organize a schism, and much more, which shows upon what a slender tenure the papacy held the allegiance of its Janissaries. Leo cowered before the storm which he had provoked, and in 1416 he issued a mandate superseding the sentence, but the spirit of insubordination was growing strong in Germany, and Franz von Sickingen, the free-lance, compelled its observance. As the Lutheran revolt grew more threatening, however, the support of the Dominicans became more and more indispensable, and in 1420 Leo settled the matter by setting aside the decision of the Bishop of Speier, imposing silence on Reuchlin, and laying all the costs on him. Hochstraten, moreover, was restored to his office.[468]
The reparation came too late to render the Inquisition of any service, now that its efficiency was more sorely needed than ever before. Had it existed in Germany in good working order, Luther’s career would have been short. When, October 31, 1517, he nailed his propositions concerning indulgences on the church-door of Wittenberg, and publicly defended them, an inquisitor such as Bernard Gui would have speedily silenced him, either destroying his influence by forcing him to a public recantation, or handing him over to be burned if he proved obstinate. Hundreds of hardy thinkers had been thus served, and the few who had been found stout enough to withstand the methods of the Holy Office had perished. Fortunately, as we have seen, the Inquisition never had struck root in German soil, and now it was thoroughly discredited and useless. Hochstraten’s hands were tied; Doctor John Eck, inquisitor for Bavaria and Franconia, was himself a Humanist, who could argue and threaten, but could not act.