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

by Henry Charles Lea

Proceedings such as this were not likely to diminish the favor with which the Fraticelli were popularly regarded. The two Sicilies continued to be thoroughly interpenetrated with the heresy. When, in 1362, Luigi di Durazzo made his abortive attempt at rebellion, he regarded the popularity of the Fraticelli as an element of sufficient importance for him to publicly proclaim sympathy with them, to collect them around him, and have Tommaso of Aquino celebrate mass for him. Francesco Marchisio, Archdeacon of Salerno, was a Fraticello, in spite of which he was elevated to the see of Trivento in 1362, and occupied it till his death about twenty years later. In 1372 Gregory XI. was shocked to learn that in Sicily the bones of Fraticelli were venerated as the relics of saints, that chapels and churches were built in their honor, and that on their anniversaries the populace flocked thither with candles to worship them; but it is not likely that his instructions to the inquisitors to put an end to these unseemly manifestations of mistaken piety were successful. At Perugia, in 1368, the magistrates were induced to throw many of the Fraticelli into prison, but to so little purpose that the people persisted in regarding them as the true children of St. Francis and in giving them shelter, while the Franciscans were despised on account of the laxity of their observance, the luxury of their houses, the costliness of their vestments, and the profusion of their table. They were ridiculed and insulted in the streets until they scarce dared to venture in public; if one chanced to let the collar of his shirt show above his gown, some one would pull up the linen and ask the jeering crowd if this was the austerity of St. Francis. As a last resort, in 1374, they sent for Paoluccio of Foligno and a public disputation was arranged with the Fraticelli. Paoluccio turned the tide of popular favor by proving that obedience to the pope was of greater moment than obedience to the Rule, and the Fraticelli were driven from the town. Even then the Inquisition seems not to have dared to prosecute them.[179]

The proselyting efforts of the Fraticelli were by no means confined to Italy. Believing themselves the only true Church, it was their duty to carry salvation throughout the world, and there were earnest spirits among them who were ready to dare as much as the orthodox among the infidels and barbarians. Already, in 1344, Clement VI. found himself obliged to address the archbishops, bishops, and all the faithful throughout Armenia, Persia, and the East, warning them against these emissaries of Satan, who were seeking to scatter among them the seeds of error and schism. He had no inquisitors to call upon in those regions, but he ordered the prelates to inquire after them and to punish them, authorizing them, with a singular lack of perception, to invoke, if necessary, the aid of the secular arm. The Fraticelli made at least one convert of importance, for in 1346 Clement felt himself obliged to cite for appearance within four months no less a personage than the Archbishop of Seleucia, who, infected with pseudo-minorite errors, had written in Armenian and was circulating throughout Asia a postil on St. John in which he asserted the forbidden doctrine of the poverty of Christ. In 1354 Innocent VI. heard of Fraticellian missionaries laboring among the Chazars of the Crimea, and he forthwith ordered the Bishop of Caffa to repress them with inquisitorial methods. In 1375 Gregory XI. learned that they were active in Egypt, Syria, and Asia, and he promptly ordered the Franciscan provincial of those regions to enforce on them the severity of the laws. One, named Lorenzo Carbonello, had ventured to Tunis, to infect with his heresy the Christians of that kingdom, whereupon Gregory commanded Giacomo Patani and Guillen de Ripoll, the captains of the Christian troops in the service of the Bey of Tunis, to seize him and send him in chains to the Archbishop of Naples or of Pisa. Doubtless, if the command was obeyed, it led the unthinking Moslem to thank Allah that they were not Christians.[180]

In Languedoc and Provence the rigorous severity with which the Spirituals had been exterminated seems to have exercised a wholesome influence in repressing the Fraticelli, but nevertheless a few cases on record shows the existence of the sect. In 1336 we hear of a number confined in the papal dungeons of Avignon—among them a papal chaplain—and that Guillaume Lombard, the judge of ecclesiastical causes, was ordered to exert against them the full severity of the laws. In 1354 two Tuscan Fraticelli, Giovanni da Castiglione and Francesco d’ Arquata, were arrested at Montpellier for holding that John XXII. had forfeited his authority by altering the definitions of the bull Exiit, and that his successors were not the true Church. Innocent VI. caused them to be brought before him, but all efforts to make them recant were vain; they went tranquilly to the stake, singing Gloria in excelsis, and were reverenced as martyrs by a large number of their brethren. Two others, named Jean de Narbonne and Maurice had not long before met the same fate at Avignon. In northern France we hear little of the heresy. The only recorded case seems to be that of Denis Soulechat, a professor of the University of Paris, who taught in 1363 that the law of divine love does away with property, and that Christ and the apostles held none. Summoned by the Inquisitor Guillaume Rochin, he abjured before the Faculty and then appealed to the pope. At Avignon, when he endeavored to purge himself before an assembly of theologians, he only added new errors to his old ones, and was sent back to the Cardinal of Beauvais and the Sorbonne with orders to make him recant, and to punish him properly with the advice of the inquisitor. In 1368 he was forced to a public abjuration.[181]

In Spain a few cases show that the heresy extended across the Pyrenees. In Valencia, Fray Jayme Justi and the Tertiaries Guillermo Gelabert and Marti Petri, when arrested by R. de Masqueta, commissioner of the Inquisitor Leonardo de Puycerda, appealed to Clement VI., who ordered the Bishop of Valencia to release them on their giving bail not to leave the city until their case should be decided at Avignon. They must have had wealthy disciples, for security was furnished in the heavy sum of thirty thousand sols, and they were discharged from prison. The papal court was in no hurry with the case—probably it was forgotten—when, in 1353, Clement learned that the two Tertiaries were dead, and that Justi was in the habit of leaving the city and spreading his pestiferous doctrines among the people. He therefore ordered Hugo, Bishop of Valencia, and the Inquisitor Nicolas Roselli to prosecute the case forthwith. Justi must have recanted, for he was merely imprisoned for life, while the bones of the two Tertiaries were dug up and burned. Even more obdurate was Fray Arnaldo Mutaner, who for nineteen years infected Puycerda and Urgel with the same heresy. He was contumacious and refused to appear when summoned to abjure. After consultation with Gregory XI., Berenger Darili, Bishop of Urgel, condemned him, and so did Eymerich. Pursuit apparently grew hot, and he fled to the East. The last we hear of him is in 1373, when Gregory ordered his vicar, the Franciscan Arnaud, to seize him and send him in chains to the papal court, but whether the effort was successful we have no means of knowing. A bull of Martin V. in 1426 shows the continued existence of Fraticelli in Aragon and Catalonia, and the necessity of active measures for their extirpation.[182]

It was probably a heresy of the same nature which, in 1442, was discovered in Durango, Biscay. The heresiarch was the Franciscan Alonso de Mella, brother of Juan, Cardinal-bishop of Zamora, and the sectaries were known as Cerceras. The story that Alonso taught indiscriminate sexual intercourse is doubtless one of the customary exaggerations. King Juan II., in the absence of the Inquisition, sent the Franciscan, Francisco de Soria, and Juan Alonso Cherino, Abbot of Alcalá la Real, to investigate the matter, with two alguazils and a sufficient force. The heretics were seized and carried, some to Valladolid and some to Santo Domingo de la Calçada, where torture was used to extract confession, and the obstinate ones were burned in considerable numbers. Fray Alonso de Mella, however, managed to escape and fled to Granada, it is said, with some of his girls; but he did not avert his fate, for he was acañavereado by the Moors—that is, put to a lingering death with pointed sticks. The affair must have made a profound impression on the popular mind, for even until modern times the people of Durango were reproached by their neighbors with the “autos de Fray Alonso” and in 1828 an overzealous alcalde, to obliterate all record of the matter, burned the original documents of the process, which till then had reposed quietly among the records of the parish church.[183]

The violent measures of John XXII., followed up by his successors, for a while effectually repressed the spiritual asceticism of the Franciscans. Yet it was impossible that impulses which were so marked a characteristic of the age should be wholly obliterated in an Order in which they had become traditional. We see this in the kindness manifested by the Franciscans to the Fraticelli when it could be done without too much risk, and we cannot doubt that there were many who aspired to imitate the founder without daring to overleap the bounds of obedience. Such men could not but look with alarm and disgust at the growing worldliness of the Order under the new dispensation of John. When the Provincial of Tuscany could lay aside five hundred florins out of the alms given to his brethren, and then lend this sum to the Hospital of S. Maria of Siena at ten per cent. per annum, although so flagrant a violation of his vows and of the canons against usury brought upon him the penalty of degradation, it required a divine visitation to impress his sin upon the minds of his fellows, and he died in 1373 in great agony and without the sacraments. Various other manfestations about the same time indicate the magnitude of the evil and the impossibility of suppressing it by human means. Under Boniface IX., Franciscans, we are told, were in the habit of seeking dispensations to enable them to hold benefices and even pluralities; and the pope decreed that any Mendicant desiring to be transferred to a non-Mendicant Order should, as a preliminary, pay a hundred gold florins to the papal camera. Under such a system there could be scarce a pretence of maintaining the holy poverty which had been the ideal of Francis and his followers.[184]

Yet the ardent thirst of poverty and the belief that in it lay the only assured path to salvation were too widely diffused to be repressed. Giovanni Colombini, a rich and ambitious citizen of Siena had his thoughts accidentally directed to heaven. His career strikingly resembles that of Peter Waldo, save that the Church, grown wiser, utilized his zeal instead of antagonizing him. The Order of Jesuats which he founded was approved by Urban V. in 1367. It was an order of lay brethren under the Augustinian Rule, vowed to poverty and devoted to the care of the sick, not unlike that of the Cellites or Alexians of the Rhinelands.[185]

It was inevitable that there should be dissatisfaction among the more ascetic Franciscans, and that the more zealous of these should seek some remedy short of heresy. In 1350 Gentile of Spoleto obtained from Clement VI. authorization for some houses of stricter observance. Immediately the experience of Angelo and Liberato was repeated. The wrath of the Conventuals was excited. The innovators were accused of adopting the short and narrow gowns which had been the distinguishing mark of the dreaded Olivists. In the General Chapter of 1353, the General Farignano was urged to exterminate them by the measures which had proved so effective in Languedoc. To this he did not assent, but he set spies to work to obtain evidence against them, and soon was able to accuse them of receiving Fraticelli. They admitted the fact, but argued that this had been in the hope of converting the heretics, and when they proved obstinate they had been expelled—but they had not been reported to the Inquisition as duty required. Armed with this, Farignano represented to Innocent VI. the grave dangers of the innovation, and obtained a revocation of the papal authorization. The brethren were dispersed, Gentile and two companions were thrown into prison at Orvieto; his coadjutor, Frà Martino, a most exemplary man, who shone in miracles after death, died the next year, and the rest were reduced to obedience. After prolonged captivity Gentile was released, and died in 1362, worn out with fruitless labors to restore the discipline of the Order.[186]

More fortunate was his disciple, Paoluccio da Trinci, of Foligno, a simple and unlearned friar, who had obtained from his kinsman, Ugolino, Lord of Foligno, a dungeon in which to gratify his thirst for asceticism. Though he had permission for this from his superiors, he suffered much from the hostility of the laxer brethren, but his austerities gained him great popular reverence and many disciples. In 1368 the General Farignano chanced to attend a provincial chapter at Foligno, and was persuaded to ask of Ugolino a spot called Brulliano, in the mountains between Foligno and Camerino, as a hermitage for Paoluccio and his followers. After his request was granted he dreaded a schism in the Order and wished to recall it, but Ugolino held him to his purpose. The place was wild, rocky, marshy, unwholesome, infested with serpents, and almost uninhabited. Thither Paoluccio led his brethren, and they were forced to adopt the sabots or wooden shoes, which became the distinguishing foot-gear of their Order. Their reputation spread apace; converts flocked to them; their buildings required enlargement; associate houses were founded in many places, and thus arose the Observantines, or Franciscans of strict observance—an event in the history of the Church only second in importance to the original foundation of the Mendicant Orders.[187]

When Paoluccio died, in 1390, he was already reckoned as a provincial within the Order. After an interval he was succeeded by his coadjutor, Giovanni Stronconi. In 1405 began the marvellous career of St. Bernardino of Siena, who counts as the formal founder of the Observantines. They had merely been called the Brethren of the Hermitages until the Council of Constance established them as an organization virtually independent of the Conventuals, when they took the name by which they have since been known. Everywhere their institution spread. New houses arose, or those of the Conventuals were reformed and given over to them. Thus in 1426 they were introduced into the province of Strassburg through the intervention of Matilda of Savoy, wife of the Palsgrave Louis the Bearded. Familiar in her youth with their virtues, she took occasion at Heidelberg to point out to her husband the Franciscans in their convent garden below them, amusing themselves with military exercises. It resulted in the reform of all the houses in his dominions and the introduction of the Observantine discipline, not without serious trouble. In 1453 Nicholas of Cusa, as legate, forced all the houses in the diocese of Bamberg to adopt the Observantine discipline, under threat of forfeiting their privileges. In 1431 the holy house on Mt. Alverno, the Franciscan Mecca, was made over to them, and in 1434 the guardianship of the Holy Places in Jerusalem. In 1460 we hear of their penetrating to distant Ireland. It is not to be supposed that the Conventuals submitted quietly to the encroachments and triumphs of the hated ascetics whom for a century and a half they had successfully baffled and persecuted. Quarrels, sharper and bitterer even than those with the Dominicans, were of constant occurrence, and were beyond the power of the popes to allay. A promising effort at reunion attempted by Capistrano in 1430, under the auspices of Martin V., was defeated by the incurable laxity of the Conventuals, and there was nothing left for both sides but to continue the war. In 1435 the strife rose to such a pitch in France that Charles VII. was obliged to appeal to the Council of Basle, which responded with a decree in favor of the Observantines. The struggle was hopeless. The corruption of the Conventuals was so universally recognized that even Pius II. does not hesitate to say that, though they generally excel as theologians, virtue is the last thing about which most of them concern themselves. In contrast with this the holiness of the new organization won for it the veneration of the people, while the unflagging zeal with which it served the Holy See secured for it the favor of the popes precisely as the Mendicant Orders had done in the thirteenth century. At first merely a branch of the Franciscans, then placed under a virtually independent vicar-general, at length Leo X., after vainly striving to heal the differences, gave the Observantines a general minister and reduced the Conventuals to a subordinate position under a general master.[188]