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

by Henry Charles Lea

The Maffredi of Faenza afford a case very similar to that of the Visconti. In 1345 we find them in high favor with Clement VI. In 1350 they are opposing the papal policy of aggrandizement in Romagnuola. Cited to appear in answer to charges of heresy, they refuse to do so, and in July, 1352, are excommunicated for contumacy. In June, 1354, Innocent VI. recites their persistent endurance of this excommunication, and gives them until October 10 to put in an appearance. On that day he condemns them as contumacious heretics, declares them deprived of all lands and honors, and subject to the canonical and civil penalties of heresy. To execute the sentence was not so easy, but in 1356 Innocent offered Louis, King of Hungary, who had shown his zeal against the Cathari of Bosnia, three years’ tithe of the Hungarian churches if he would put down those sons of damnation, the Maffredi, who have been sentenced as heretics, and other adversaries of the Church, including the Ordelaffi of Friuli. Frà Fortanerio, Patriarch of Grado, was also commissioned to preach a crusade against them, and succeeded in raising an army under Malatesta of Rimini. The appearance of forty thousand Hungarians in the Tarvisina frightened all Italy; the Maffredi succumbed, and in the same year Innocent ordered their absolution and reconciliation.[214]

It would be easy to multiply instances, but these will probably suffice to show the use made by the Church of heresy as a political agent, and of the Inquisition as a convenient instrumentality for its application. When the Great Schism arose it was natural that the same methods should be employed by the rival popes against each other. As early as 1382 we find Charles III. of Naples confiscating the property of the Bishop of Trivento, just dead, as that of a heretic because he had adhered to Clement VII. In the commission issued in 1409 by Alexander V. to Pons Feugeyron, as Inquisitor of Provence, the adherents of Gregory XII. and of Benedict XIII. are enumerated among the heretics whom he is to exterminate. It happened that Frère Étienne de Combes, Inquisitor of Toulouse, held to the party of Benedict XIII., and he retaliated by imprisoning a number of otherwise unimpeachable Dominicans and Franciscans, including the Provincial of Toulouse and the Prior of Carcassonne, for which the provincial, as soon as he had an opportunity, removed him and appointed a successor, giving rise to no little trouble.[215]

The manner in which the Inquisition was used as an instrument by the contending factions in the Church is fairly illustrated by the adventures of John Malkaw, of Prussian Strassburg (Brodnitz). He was a secular priest and master of theology, deeply learned, skilful in debate, singularly eloquent, and unflinching even to rashness. Espousing the cause of the Roman popes against their Avignonese rivals with all the enthusiasm of his fiery nature, he came to the Rhinelands in 1390, where his sermons stirred the popular heart and proved an effective agency in the strife. After some severe experiences in Mainz at the hands of the opposite faction, he undertook a pilgrimage to Rome, but tarried at Strassburg, where he found a congenial field. The city had adhered to Urban VI. and his successors, but the bishop, Frederic of Blankenheim, had alienated a portion of his clergy by his oppressions. In the quarrel he excommunicated them; they appealed to Rome and had the excommunication set aside, whereupon he went over, with his following, to Clement VII., the Avignonese antipope, giving rise to inextricable confusion. The situation was exactly suited to Malkaw’s temperament; he threw himself into the turmoil, and his fiery eloquence soon threatened to deprive the antipapalists of their preponderance. According to his own statement he quickly won over some sixteen thousand schismatics and neutrals, and the nature of his appeals to the passions of the hour may be guessed by his own report of a sermon in which he denounced Clement VII. as less than a man, as worse than the devil, whose portion was with Antichrist, while his followers were all condemned schismatics and heretics; neutrals, moreover, were the worst of men and were deprived of all sacraments. Besides this he assailed with the same unsparing vehemence the deplorable morals of the Strassburg clergy, both regular and secular, and in a few weeks he thus excited the bitterest hostility. A plot was made to denounce him secretly in Rome as a heretic, so that on his arrival there he might be seized by the Inquisition and burned; his wonderful learning, it was said, could only have been acquired by necromancy; he was accused of being a runaway priest, and it was proposed to arrest him as such, but the people regarded him as an inspired prophet and the project was abandoned. After four weeks of this stormy agitation he resumed his pilgrimage, stopping at Basle and Zurich for missionary work, and finally reached Rome in safety. On his return, in crossing the Pass of St. Bernard, he had the misfortune to lose his papers. News of this reached Basle, and on his arrival there the Mendicants, to whom he was peculiarly obnoxious, demanded of Bishop Imer that he should be arrested as a wanderer without license. The bishop, though belonging to the Roman obedience, yielded, but shortly dismissed him with a friendly caution to return to his home. His dauntless combativeness, however, carried him back to Strassburg, where he again began to preach under the protection of the burgomaster, John Bock. On his previous visit he had been personally threatened by the Dominican inquisitor, Böckeler—the same who in 1400 persecuted the Winkelers—and it was now determined to act with vigor. He had preached but three sermons when he was suddenly arrested, without citation, by the familiars of the inquisitor and thrown in prison, whence he was carried in chains to the episcopal castle of Benfeld and deprived of his books and paper and ink. Sundry examinations followed, in which his rare dexterity scarce enabled him to escape the ingenious efforts to entrap him. Finally, on March 31, 1391, Böckeler summoned an assembly, consisting principally of Mendicants, where he was found guilty of a series of charges, which show how easily the accusation of heresy could be used for the destruction of any man. His real offence was his attacks on the schismatics and on the corruption of the clergy, but nothing of this appears in the articles. It was assumed that he had left his diocese without the consent of his bishop, and this proved him to be a Lollard; that he discharged priestly functions without a license, showing him to be a Vaudois; because his admirers ate what he had already bitten, he was declared to belong to the Brethren of the Free Spirit; because he forbade the discussion as to whether Christ was alive when pierced with the lance, he was asserted to have taught that doctrine, and, therefore, to be a follower of Jean Pierre Olivi. All this was surely enough to warrant his burning, if he should obstinately refuse to recant, but apparently it was felt that the magistracy would decline to execute the sentence, and the assembly contented itself with referring the matter to the bishop and asking his banishment from the diocese. Nothing further is known of the trial, but as, in 1392, Malkaw is found matriculating himself in the University of Cologne, the bishop probably did as he was asked.

We lose sight of Malkaw until about 1414, when we meet him again in Cologne. He had maintained his loyalty to the Roman obedience, but that obedience had been still further fractioned between Gregory XII. and John XXIII. Malkaw’s support of the former was accompanied with the same unsparing denunciation of John as he had formerly bestowed on the Avignonese antipopes. The Johannites were heretics, fit only for the stake. Cologne was as attractive a field for the audacious polemic as the Strassburg of a quarter of a century earlier. Two rival candidates for the archbishopric were vindicating their claims in a bloody civil war, one of them as a supporter of Gregory, the other of John. Malkaw was soon recognized as a man whose eloquence was highly dangerous amid an excitable population, and again the Inquisition took hold of him as a heretic. The inquisitor, Jacob of Soest, a Dominican and professor in the university, seems to have treated him with exceptional leniency, for while the investigation was on foot he was allowed to remain in the St. Ursula quarter, on parole. He broke his word and betook himself to Bacharach, where, under the protection of the Archbishop of Trèves, and of the Palsgrave Louis III., both Gregorians, he maintained the fight with his customary vehemence, assailing the inquisitor and the Johannites, not only in sermons, but in an incessant stream of pamphlets which kept them in a state of indignant alarm. When Cardinal John of Ragusa, Gregory’s legate to the Council of Constance, came to Germany. Malkaw had no difficulty in procuring from him absolution from the inquisitorial excommunication, and acquittal of the charge of heresy; and this was confirmed when on healing the schism the council, in July, 1415, declared null and void all prosecutions and sentences arising from it. Still, the wounded pride of the inquisitor and of the University of Cologne refused to be placated, and for a year they continued to seek from the Council the condemnation of their enemy. Their deputies, however, warned them that the prosecution would be prolonged, difficult, and costly, and they finally came to the resolution that the action of the Cardinal of Ragusa should be regarded as binding, so long as Malkaw kept away from the territory of Cologne, but should be disregarded if he ventured to return—a very sensible, if somewhat illogical, conclusion. The obstinacy with which Benedict XIII. and Clement VIII. maintained their position after the decision of the Council of Constance prolonged the struggle in southwestern Europe, and as late as 1428 the remnants of their adherents in Languedoc were proceeded against as heretics by a special papal commissioner.[216]

When the schism was past the Inquisition could still be utilized to quell insubordination. Thomas Connecte, a Carmelite of Britanny, seems to have been a character somewhat akin to John Malkaw. In 1428 we hear of him in Flanders, Artois, Picardy, and the neighboring provinces, preaching to crowds of fifteen or twenty thousand souls, denouncing the prevalent vices of the time. The hennins, or tall head-dresses worn by women of rank, were the object of special vituperation, and he used to give boys certain days of pardon for following ladies thus attired, and crying “au hennin” or even slyly pulling them off. Moved by the eloquence of his sermons, great piles would be made of dice, tables, chess-boards, cards, nine-pins, head-dresses, and other matters of vice and luxury, which were duly burned. The chief source, however, of the immense popular favor which he enjoyed was his bitter lashing of the corruption of all ranks of the clergy, particularly their public concubinage, which won him great applause and honor. He seems to have reached the conclusion that the only cure for this universal sin was the restoration of clerical marriage. In 1432 he went to Rome in the train of the Venetian ambassadors, to declaim against the vices of the curia. Usually there was a good-natured indifference to these attacks—a toleration born of contempt—but the moment was unpropitious. The Hussite heresy had commenced in similar wise, and its persistence was a warning not to be disregarded. Besides, at that time Eugenius IV. was engaged in a losing struggle with the Council of Basle, which was bent on reforming the curia, in obedience to the universal demand of Christendom, and Sigismund’s envoys were representing to Eugenius, with more strength than courtliness, the disastrous results to be expected from his efforts to prorogue the council. Connecte might well be suspected of being an emissary of the fathers of Basle, or, if not, his eloquence at least was a dangerous element in the perturbed state of public opinion. Twice Eugenius sent for him, but he refused to come, pretending to be sick; then the papal treasurer was sent to fetch him, but on his appearing Thomas jumped out of the window and attempted to escape. He was promptly secured and carried before Eugenius, who commissioned the Cardinals of Rouen and Navarre to examine him. These found him suspect of heresy; he was duly tried and condemned as a heretic, and his inconsiderate zeal found a lasting quietus at the stake.[217]

There are certain points of resemblance between Thomas Connecte and Girolamo Savonarola, but the Italian was a man of far rarer intellectual and spiritual gifts than the Breton. With equal moral earnestness, his plans and aspirations were wider and of more dangerous import, and they led him into a sphere of political activity in which his fate was inevitable from the beginning.

In Italy the revival of letters, while elevating the intellectual faculties, had been accompanied with deeper degradation in both the moral and spiritual condition of society. Without removing superstition, it had rendered scepticism fashionable, and it had weakened the sanctions of religion without supplying another basis for morality. The world has probably never seen a more defiant disregard of all law, human and divine, than that displayed by both the Church and the laity during the pontificates of Sixtus IV. and Innocent VIII. and Alexander VI. Increase of culture and of wealth seemed only to afford new attractions and enlarged opportunities for luxury and vice, and from the highest to the lowest there was indulgence of unbridled appetites, with a cynical disregard even of hypocrisy. To the earnest believer it might well seem that God’s wrath could not much longer be restrained, and that calamities must be impending which would sweep away the wicked and restore to the Church and to mankind the purity and simplicity fondly ascribed to primitive ages. For centuries a succession of prophets—Joachim of Flora, St. Catharine of Siena, St. Birgitta of Sweden, the Friends of God, Tommasino of Foligno, the Monk Telesforo—had arisen with predictions which had been received with reverence, and as time passed on and human wickedness increased, some new messenger of God seemed necessary to recall his erring children to a sense of the retribution in store for them if they should continue deaf to his voice.

That Savonarola honestly believed himself called to such a mission, no one who has impartially studied his strange career can well doubt. His lofty sense of the evils of the time, his profound conviction that God must interfere to work a change which was beyond human power, his marvellous success in moving his hearers, his habits of solitude and of profound meditation, his frequent ecstasies with their resultant visions might well, in a mind like his, produce such a belief, which, moreover, was one taught by the received traditions of the Church as within the possibilities of the experience of any man. Five years before his first appearance in Florence, a young hermit who had been devotedly serving in a leper hospital at Volterra, came thither, preaching and predicting the wrath to come. He had had visions of St. John and the angel Raphael, and was burdened with a message to unwilling ears. Such things, we are told by the diarist who happens to record this, were occurring every day. In 1491 Rome was agitated by a mysterious prophet who foretold dire calamities impending in the near future. There was no lack of such earnest men, but, unlike Savonarola, their influence and their fate were not such as to preserve their memory.[218]

When, in his thirtieth year, Savonarola came to Florence, in 1481, his soul was already full of his mission as a reformer. Such opportunity as he had of expressing his convictions from the pulpit he used with earnest zeal, but he produced little effect upon a community sunk in shameless debauchery, and in the Lent of 1486 he was sent to Lombardy. For three years he preached in the Lombard cities, gradually acquiring the power of touching the hearts and consciences of men, and when he was recalled to Florence in 1489, at the instance of Lorenzo de’ Medici, he was already known as a preacher of rare ability. The effect of his vigorous eloquence was enhanced by his austere and blameless life, and within a year he was made Prior of San Marco—the convent of the Observantine Dominicans, to which Order he belonged. In 1494 he succeeded in re-establishing the ancient separation of the Dominican province of Tuscany from that of Lombardy, and when he was appointed Vicar-general of the former he was rendered independent of all authority save that of the general, Giovacchino Torriani, who was well affected towards him.[219]

He claimed to act under the direct inspiration of God, who dictated his words and actions and revealed to him the secrets of the future. Not only was this accepted by the mass of the Florentines, but by some of the keenest and most cultured intellects of the age, such as Francesco Pico della Mirandola and Philippe de Commines. Marsilio Ficino, the Platonist, admitted it, and went further by declaring, in 1494, that only Savonarola’s holiness had saved Florence for four years from the vengeance of God on its wickedness. Nardi relates that when, in 1495, Piero de’ Medici was making a demonstration upon Florence, he personally heard Savonarola predict that Piero would advance to the gates and retire without accomplishing anything, which duly came to pass. Others of his prophecies were fulfilled, such as those of the deaths of Lorenzo de’ Medici and Charles VIII. and the famine of 1497, and his fame spread throughout Italy, while in Florence his influence became dominant. Whenever he preached, from twelve to fifteen thousand persons hung upon his lips, and in the great Duomo of Santa Maria del Fiore it was necessary to build scaffolds and benches to accommodate the thronging crowds, multitudes of whom would have cast themselves into fire at a word from him. He paid special attention to children, and interested them so deeply in his work that we are told they could not be kept in bed on the mornings when he preached, but would hurry to the church in advance of their parents. In the processions which he organized sometimes five or six thousand boys would take part, and he used them most effectively in the moral reforms which he introduced in the dissolute and pleasure-loving city. The boys of Frà Girolamo were regularly organized, with officers who had their several spheres of duty assigned to them, and they became a terror to evil-doers. They entered the taverns and gambling-houses and put a stop to revelry and dicing and card-playing, and no woman dared to appear upon the streets save in fitting attire and with a modest mien. “Here are the boys of the Frate” was a cry which inspired fear in the most reckless, for any resistance to them was at the risk of life. Even the annual horse-races of Santo-Barnabo were suppressed, and it was a sign of Girolamo’s waning influence when, in 1497, the Signoria ordered them resumed, saying, “Are we all to become monks?” From the gayest and wickedest of cities Florence became the most demure, and the pious long looked back with regret to the holy time of Savonarola’s rule, and thanked God that they had been allowed to see it.[220]