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

by Henry Charles Lea

During the latter half of the century, Bohemia, under these auspices, was one of the most flourishing kingdoms of Europe. Its mines of the precious metals gave it wealth; the freedom enjoyed by its peasantry raised them mentally and morally above the level of the serfs of other lands; culture and enlightenment were diffused from its university. It was renowned throughout the Continent for the splendor of its churches, which in size and number were nowhere exceeded. At the monastery of Königsaal, where the Bohemian kings lay buried, around the walls of the garden the whole of the Scriptures, from Genesis to Revelations, was engraved, with letters enlarging in size with their distance from the ground, so that all could be easily read. In the bitter struggles of after generations the reign of King Charles was fondly looked back upon as the golden age of Bohemia. Wealth and culture, however, were accompanied with corruption. Nowhere were the clergy more worldly and depraved. Concubinage was well-nigh universal, and simony pervaded the Church in all its ranks, the sacraments were sold and penitence compounded for. All the abuses for which clerical immunity furnished opportunity nourished, and the land was overrun by vagrants whose tonsure gave them charter to rob and brawl, and dice and drink. The influences from above which moulded the Bohemian Church may be estimated from a single instance. In 1344 Clement VI. wrote to Arnest, then simple Bishop of Prague, calling attention to the numerous cases in his diocese wherein preferment had been procured for minors either by force or simony. The horror which the good pope expresses at this abuse is significantly illustrated by his having not long before issued dispensations to five members of one family in France, aged respectively seven, eight, nine, ten, and eleven years, to hold canonries and other benefices. Apparently the Bohemians had not taken the proper means to obtain the sanction of the curia for such infraction of the canons, so Clement ordered Arnest to dispossess the incumbents in all such cases, and to impose due penance on them. But he was also instructed, in conjunction with the papal collector, to force them to compound with the papal camera for all the revenues which they had thus illegally received, and after they had undergone this squeezing process he was authorized to reinstate them.[478]

Such unblushing exhibitions of rapacious simony did not tend either to the purity of the Bohemian Church, or to enhance its respect for the Holy See, especially as the frequently recurring papal exactions strained to the last degree the relations between the papacy and the German churches. When, in 1354, Innocent VI., to carry on his Italian wars, suddenly demanded a tenth of all the ecclesiastical revenues of the empire, it threw, for several years, the whole German Church into an uproar of rage and indignation. Some prelates refused to pay, and, when legal proceedings were commenced against them, formulated appeals which were contemptuously rejected as frivolous. The Bishops of Camin and Brandenburg were only compelled to yield by the direct threat of excommunication. Others pleaded poverty, and were mockingly reminded of the large sums which they had succeeded in exacting from their miserable subjects; others made the best bargain they could, and compounded for yearly payments; others banded together and formed associations mutually pledged to resist to the last. Frederic, Bishop of Ratisbon, took the audacious step of seizing the papal collector and conveying him away to a convenient castle. An ambush was laid for the Bishop of Cavaillon, the papal nuncio charged with the business, and his life, and that of his assistant, Henry, Archdeacon of Liége, were only saved by the active interposition of William, Archbishop of Cologne. When, in 1372, the levy was repeated by Gregory XI., the same spirit of resistance was aroused. The clergy of Mainz bound themselves to each other in a solemn engagement not to pay it, and Frederic, Archbishop of Cologne, promised his clergy to give them all the assistance he safely could in their refusal to submit. Trifling incidents such as these afford us a valuable insight into the complex relations between the Holy See and the churches of Christendom. On the one hand, there was the superstitious awe generated by five centuries of unquestioned domination as the representative of Christ, and there was, moreover, the dread of the material consequences of unsuccessful revolt. On the other, there was the indignation born of lawless oppression ever exciting to rebellion, and the clear-sighted recognition of the venality and corruption which rendered the Roman curia a source of contagion for all Europe. There was ample inflammable material, which the increasing friction might at any moment kindle into flame.[479]

Bohemia was peculiarly dangerous soil, for it was thoroughly interpenetrated with the leaven of heresy. We hear nothing of papal inquisitors after those commissioned by Benedict XII. in 1335, and it is presumable that for a while the heretics had peace. Archbishop Arnest, however, soon after his accession, set resolutely to work to purify the morals of his Church and to uproot heresy. He held synods frequently, he instituted a body of Correctors whose duty it was to visit all portions of the province and punish all transgressions, and he organized an episcopal Inquisition for the purpose of tracking out and suppressing heresy. In the fragmentary remains of his synodal acts, the frequency and earnestness with which this latter duty is insisted upon serve as a measure of its importance, and of the numbers of those who had forsaken the Church. In the earliest synod whose proceedings have reached us the first place is given to this subject; the archdeacons were directed to make diligent perquisition in their respective districts, both personally and through the deans and parish priests, without exciting suspicion, and all who were found guilty or suspect of heresy were to be forthwith denounced to the archbishop or the inquisitor. Similar instructions were issued in 1355; and after Arnest’s death, in 1364, his successor, John Ocko, was equally vigilant, as appears from the acts of his synods in 1366 and 1371. The neighborhood of Pisek was especially contaminated, and from the acts of the Consistory of 1381 it appears that a priest named Johl, of Pisek, could not be ordained because both his father and grandfather had been heretics. What was this heresy that thus descended from generation to generation is not stated, but it was doubtless Waldensian. In this same year Archbishop John, as papal legate for his own province and for the dioceses of Ratisbon, Bamberg, and Misnia, held a council at Prague, in which he mournfully described the spread of the Waldenses and Sarabites—the latter probably Beghards. He sharply reproved the bishops who, through sloth or parsimony, had not appointed inquisitors, and threatened that if they did not do so forthwith, he would do it himself. When, ten years later, the Church took the alarm and acted vigorously, the Waldenses of Brandenburg, who were prosecuted, declared that their teachers came from Bohemia.[480]

In all this activity for the suppression of heresy it is worthy of note that the episcopal Inquisition alone is referred to. In fact there was no papal Inquisition in Bohemia. The bull of Gregory XI., in 1372, ordering the appointment of five inquisitors for Germany, confines their jurisdiction to the provinces of Cologne, Mainz, Utrecht, Magdeburg, Salzburg, and Bremen, and pointedly omits that of Prague, although the zeal of Charles IV. might have been expected to secure the blessings of the institution for his hereditary realm.[481] This is the more curious, moreover, since the intellectual movement started by the University of Prague was producing a number of men distinguished not only for learning and piety, but for their bold attacks on the corruptions of the Church, and their questioning of some of its most profitable dogmas. The appearance of these precursors of Huss is one of the most remarkable indications of the tendencies of the age in Bohemia, and shows how the Waldensian spirit of revolt had unconsciously spread among the population.

Conrad of Waldhausen, who died in 1369, is reckoned the earliest of these. He maintained strict orthodoxy, but his denunciation in his sermons of the vices of the clergy, and especially of the Mendicants, created a deep sensation. More prominent in every way was Milicz of Kremsier, who, in 1363, resigned the office of private secretary to the emperor, the function of Corrector intrusted to him by Archbishop Arnest, and several rich preferments, in order to devote himself exclusively to preaching. His sermons in Czech, German, and Latin were filled with audacious attacks on the sins and crimes of clergy and laity, and the evils of the time led him to prophesy the advent of Antichrist between 1365 and 1367. In the latter year he went to Rome in order to lay before Urban V. his views on the present and future of the Church. While awaiting Urban’s advent from Avignon, he affixed on the portal of St. Peter’s an announcement of a sermon on the subject, which led the Inquisition to throw him into prison, but in October, on the arrival of the pope, he was released and treated with distinction. On his return to Prague he preached with greater violence than ever. To get rid of him the priesthood accused him to the emperor and archbishop, but in vain. Then they formulated twelve articles of accusation against him to the pope, and obtained, in January, 1374, from Gregory XI., bulls denouncing him as a persistent heresiarch who had filled all Bohemia, Poland, Silesia, and the neighboring lands with his errors. According to them, he taught not only that Antichrist had come, that the Church was extinct, that pope, cardinals, bishops and prelates showed no light of truth, but he permitted to his followers the unlimited gratification of their passions. Milicz undauntedly pursued his course until an inquisitorial prosecution was commenced against him, when he appealed to the pope. In Lent, 1374, he went to Avignon, where he readily proved his innocence, and on May 21 was admitted to preach before the cardinals, but he died June 29, before the formal decision of his case was published. It is highly probable that he was a Joachite—one of those who, as we shall see hereafter, reverenced the memory and believed in the apocalyptic prophecies of the Abbot Joachim of Flora.[482]

The spirit of indignation and disquiet did not confine itself to denunciations of clerical abuses. Men were growing bolder, and began to question some of the cherished dogmas which gave rise to those abuses. In the synod of 1384 one of the subjects discussed was whether the saints were cognizant of the prayers addressed to them, and whether the worshipper was benefited by their suffrages—the mere raising of such a question showing how dangerously bold had become the spirit of inquiry. The man who most fitly represented this tendency was Mathias of Janow, whom the Archbishop John of Jenzenstein utilized in his efforts to reform the incurable disorders of the clergy. Mathias was led to trace the troubles to their causes, and to teach heresies from the consequences of which even the protection of the archbishop could not wholly defend him. In the synod of 1389 he was forced to make public recantation of his errors in holding that the images of Christ and the saints gave rise to idolatry, and that they ought to be banished from the churches and burned; that relics were of no service, and the intercession of saints was useless; while his teaching that every one should be urged to take communion daily foreshadowed the eucharistic troubles which play so large a part in the Hussite excitement. Yet he was allowed to escape with six months’’ suspension from preaching and hearing confessions outside of his own parochial church, a mistaken lenity which he repaid by continuing to teach the same errors more audaciously than ever, and even urging that the laity be admitted to communion in both elements. Mathias was not alone in his heterodoxy, for in the same synod of 1389 a priest named Andreas was obliged to revoke the same heresy respecting images, and another named Jacob was suspended from preaching for ten years for a still more offensive expression of similar beliefs, with the addition that suffrages for the dead were useless, that the Virgin could not help her devotees, and that the archbishop had erred in granting an indulgence to those who adored her image, and that the utterances of the holy doctors of the Church are not to be received.[483]

Other earnest men who prepared the way for what was to follow were Henry of Oyta, Thomas of Stitny, John of Stekno, and Matthew of Cracow. Step by step the progress of free thought advanced, and when, in 1393, a papal indulgence was preached in Prague, Wenceslas Rohle, pastor of St. Martin’s in the Altstadt, ventured to denounce it as a fraud, though only under his breath, for fear of the Pharisees. All this, it is evident, could only be favorable to the growth of Waldensianism, as is seen in the activity of the sectaries. It was missionaries from Bohemia who founded the communities in Brandenburg and Pomerania; and, as we have seen, a well-informed writer, in 1395, asserts that they were numbered by thousands in Thuringia, Misnia, Bohemia, Moravia, Austria, and Hungary, notwithstanding that a thousand of them had been converted within two years in the districts extending from Thuringia to Moravia.[484]

While Bohemia was thus the scene of an agitation the outcome of which no man could foretell, a similar movement was running a still more rapid course in England, which was destined to exercise a decisive influence on the result. The assaults of John Wickliff were the most serious danger encountered by the hierarchy since the Hildebrandine theocracy had been established. For the first time a trained scholastic intellect of remarkable force and clearness, informed with all the philosophy and theology of the schools, was led to question the domination which the Church had acquired over the life, here and hereafter, of its members. It was not the poor peasant or artisan who found the Scriptures in contradiction to the teaching of the pulpit and the confessional, and with the practical examples set by the sacerdotal class; but it was a man who stood in learning and argumentative power on a level with the foremost schoolmen of the Middle Ages; who could quote not only Christ and the apostles, but the fathers and doctors of the Church, the decretals and the canons, Aristotle and his commentators; who could weave all these into the dialectics so dear to students and masters of theology, and who could frame a system of philosophy suited to the intellectual wants of the age. It is true that William of Ockham had been bold in his attacks on the overgrown papal system, but he was a partisan of Louis of Bavaria, and, with Marsiglio of Padua, his aim had merely been to set the State above the Church. With the subjection of the empire to the papacy the works of both had perished and their labors had been forgotten. The infidelity of the Averrhoists had never taken root among the people, and had been wisely treated by the Church with the leniency of contempt. It was the secret of Wickliff’s influence that he had worked out his conclusions in single-hearted efforts to search for truth; his views developed gradually as he was led from one point to another; he spared neither prince nor prelate; he labored to instruct the poor more zealously perhaps than to influence the great, and men of all ranks, from the peasant to the schoolman, recognized in him a leader who sought to make them better, stronger, more valiant in the struggle with Apollyon. It is no wonder that his work proved not merely ephemeral; that his fame as a heresiarch filled all the schools and became everywhere synonymous with rebellion against the sacerdotal system; that simple Waldenses in Spain and Germany became thereafter known as Wickliffites. Yet the endurance of his teachings was due to his Bohemian disciples; at home, after a brief period of rapid development, they were virtually crushed out by the combined power of Church and State.

As the heresy of Huss was in nearly all details copied from his master, Wickliff, it is necessary, in order to understand the nature of the Hussite movement, to cast a brief glance at the views of the English reformer. About four years after his death, in 1388 and 1389, twenty-five articles of accusation were brought against his followers, whose reply gives, in the most vigorous English, a summary of his tenets. Few documents of the period are more interesting as a picture of the worldliness and corruption of the Church, and of the wrathful indignation aroused by the hideous contrast between the teaching of Christ and the lives of those who claimed to represent him. It is observable that the only purely speculative error admitted is that concerning the Eucharist; all the others relate to the doctrines which gave to the Church control over the souls and purses of the faithful, or to the abuses arising from the worldly and sensual character of the clergy. It was an essentially practical reform, inspired for the most part with rare common-sense and with wonderfully little exaggeration, considering the magnitude of the evils which pressed so heavily upon Christendom.

The document in question shows the Wickliffite belief to be that the popes of the period were Antichrist; all the hierarchy, from the pope down, were accursed by reason of their greed, their simony, their cruelty, their lust of power, and their evil lives. Unless they give satisfaction “thai schul be depper dampned then Judas Scarioth.” The pope was not to be obeyed, his decretals were naught, and his excommunication and that of his bishops were to be disregarded. The indulgences so freely proffered in return for money or for the services of crusaders in slaying Christians were false and fraudulent. Yet the power of the keys in pious hands was not denied—“Certes, as holy prestis of lyvynge and cunnynge of holy writte han keyes of heven and bene vicaris of Jesus Crist, so viciouse prestis, unkonnynge of holy writte, ful of pride and covetise, han keyes of helle and bene vicaris of Sathanas.” Though auricular confession might be useful, it was not necessary, for men should trust in Christ. Image-worship was unlawful, and representations of the Trinity were forbidden—“Hit semes that this offrynge ymages is a sotile cast of Antichriste and his clerkis for to drawe almes fro pore men.... Certis, these ymages of hemselfe may do nouther gode nor yvel to mennis soules, but thai myghtten warme a man’s body in colde if thai were sette upon a fire.” The invocation of saints was useless; the best of them could do nothing but what God ordained, and many of those customarily invoked were in hell, for in modern times sinners stood a better chance of canonization than holy men. It was the same with their feast-days; those of the apostles and early saints might be observed, but not the rest. Song was not to be used in divine service, and prayer was as efficient anywhere as in church, for the churches were not holy--“all suche chirches bene gretely poluted and cursud of God, nomely for sellynge of leccherie and fals swering upon bokus. Sithen tho chirches bene dunnus of thefis and habitacionis of fendis.” Ecclesiastics must not live in luxury and pomp, but as poor men “gyvynge ensaumple of holynes by ther conversacion.” The Church must be deprived of all its temporalities, and whatever was necessary for the support of its members must be held in common. Tithes and offerings were not to be given to sinful priests; it was simony for a priest to receive payment for his spiritual ministrations, though he might sell his labor in honest vocations, such as teaching and the binding of books, and though no one was forbidden to make an oblation at mass, provided he did not seek to obtain more than his share in the sacrifice. All parish priests and vicars who did not perform their functions were to be removed, and especially all who were non-resident. All priests and deacons, moreover, were to preach zealously, for which no special license or commission was required.