In Aragon there was less disposition to accede to the papal wishes. Constant struggle with the Saracen had left memories of services rendered, or sharpened the sense of benefits to come from some new Order devoted wholly to national objects, which could not be expected of a body like the Hospitallers, whose primary duty was devotion to the Holy Land. The Templars had contributed largely to all the enterprises which had enlarged the boundaries of the kingdom. They had rendered faithful service to the monarchy in the council as well as in the field; to them was in great part attributed the rescue of Jayme I. from the hands of de Montfort, and they had been foremost in the glorious campaigns which had earned for him the title of el Conquistador. Pedro III. and Jayme II. had scarce had less reason for gratitude to them, and the latter, after sacrificing them, naturally desired to use their forfeited property for the establishment of a new Order from which he might expect similar advantages, but Clement’s engagements with the Hospitallers were such that he turned a deaf ear to the king’s repeated representations. On the accession of John XXII., however, matters assumed a more favorable aspect, and in 1317 Vidal de Vilanova, Jayme’s envoy, procured from him a bull authorizing the formation of the Order of Nuestra Señora de Montesa, affiliated to the Order of Calatrava, from which its members were to be drawn. Its duties were defined to be the defence of the coasts and frontier of Valencia from corsairs and Moors; the Templar property in Aragon and Catalonia was made over to the Hospitallers, while the new Order was to have in Valencia not only the possessions of the Temple, but all those of the Hospital, except in the city of Valencia and for half a league around it. In 1319 the preliminaries were accomplished, and the new Order was organized with Guillen de Eril as its Grand Master.[352]
In Castile Alonso XI. retained for the crown the greater part of the Templar lands, though, along the frontier, nobles and cities succeeded in obtaining a portion. Some were given to the Orders of Santiago and Calatrava, and the Hospitallers received little. After an interval of half a century another effort was made, and in 1366 Urban V. ordered the delivery within two months of all the Templar property to the Hospitallers, but it is safe to assume that the mandate was disregarded, though in 1387 Clement VII., the Avignonese antipope, confirmed some exchanges made of Templar property by the Hospitallers with the Orders of Santiago and Calatrava.[353] Castile, as we have already seen, was always singularly independent of the papacy. In Portugal, as mentioned above, the property was handed over as a whole to the Order of Jesus Christ.
In the Morea, where the Templar possessions were extensive, Clement had, as early as November 11, 1310, exercised rights of proprietorship by ordering his administrators, the Patriarch of Constantinople and the Archbishop of Patras, to lend to Gautier de Brienne, Duke of Athens, all the proceeds which they had collected, and all that they might collect for a year to come.[354]
Thus disappeared, virtually without a struggle, an organization which was regarded as one of the proudest, wealthiest, and most formidable in Europe. It is not too much to say that the very idea of its destruction could not have suggested itself, but for the facilities which the inquisitorial process placed in able and unscrupulous hands to accomplish any purpose of violence under the form of law. If I have dwelt on the tragedy at a length that may seem disproportionate, my apology is that it affords so perfect an illustration of the helplessness of the victim, no matter how high-placed, when once the fatal charge of heresy was preferred against him, and was pressed through the agency of the Inquisition.
The case of the learned theologian, Jean Petit, Doctor of Sorbonne, is of no great historical importance, but it is worth noting as an example of the use made of the charge of heresy as a weapon in political warfare, and of the elastic definition by which heresy was brought to include offences not easily justiciable in the ordinary courts.
Under Charles VI. of France the royal power was reduced to a shadow. His frequently recurring fits of insanity rendered him incapable of governing, and the quarrels of ambitious princes of the blood reduced the kingdom almost to a state of anarchy. Especially bitter was the feud between the king’s brother, Louis, Duke of Orleans, and his cousin, Jean sans Peur of Burgundy. Yet even that age of violence was startled when, by the procurement of Jean sans Peur, the Duke of Orleans, in 1407, was assassinated in the streets of Paris—a murder which remained unavenged until 1419, when the battle-axe of Tanneguy du Châtel balanced the account on the bridge of Montereau. Even Jean sans Peur felt the need of some apology for his bloody deed, and he sought the assistance of Jean Petit, who read before the royal court a thesis—the Justificatio Ducis Burgundiæ—to prove that he had acted righteously and patriotically, and that he deserved the thanks of king and people. Written in the conventional scholastic style, the tract was not a mere political pamphlet, but an argument based on premises of general principles. It is a curious coincidence that, nearly three centuries earlier, another Johannes Parvus, better known as John of Salisbury, the worthiest representative of the highest culture of his day, in a purely speculative treatise had laid down the doctrine that a tyrant was to be put to death without mercy. According to the younger Jean Petit, “Any tyrant can and ought properly to be slain by any subject or vassal, and by any means, specially by treachery, notwithstanding any oath or compact, and without awaiting judicial sentence or order.” This rather portentous proposition was limited by defining the tyrant to be one who is endeavoring through cupidity, fraud, sorcery, or evil mind to deprive the king of his authority, and the subject or vassal is assumed to be one who is inspired by loyalty, and him the king should cherish and reward. It was not difficult to find Scriptural warrant for such assertion in the slaying of Zimri by Phineas, and of Holofernes by Judith; but Jean Petit ventured on debatable ground when he declared that St. Michael, without awaiting the divine command and moved only by natural love, slew Satan with eternal death, for which he was rewarded with spiritual wealth as great as he was capable of receiving.[355]
That this was not a mere lawyer’s pleading is shown by the fact that it was written in the vernacular and exposed for sale. Doubtless Jean sans Peur circulated it extensively, and it was doubtless convincing to those who were already convinced. It might safely have been allowed to perish in the limbo of forgetfulness, but when, some six years later, the Armagnac faction obtained the upper hand, it was exhumed from the dust as a ready means of attacking the Burgundians. Jean Petit himself, by opportunely dying some years before, escaped a trial for heresy, but in November, 1313, a national council was assembled in Paris to consider nine propositions extracted from his work. Gérard, Bishop of Paris, and Frère Jean Polet, the inquisitor, summoned the masters of theology of the University to give their opinions, which solemnly condemned the propositions. The council debated the question with unwearied prolixity through twenty-eight sessions, and finally, on February 23, 1314, it adopted a sentence condemning the nine propositions to be burned as erroneous in faith and morals, and manifestly scandalous. The sentence was duly executed two days later on a scaffold in front of Nôtre Dame, in presence of a vast crowd, to whom the famous doctor, Benoist Gencien, elaborately explained the enormity of the heresy. Jean sans Peur thereupon appealed to the Holy See from this sentence, and John XXIII. appointed a commission of three cardinals—Orsini, Aquileia, and Florence—to examine and report. Thus Jean Petit had succeeded in becoming a European question, but in spite of this a royal ordonnance on March 17 commanded all the bishops of the kingdom to burn the propositions; on March 18, the University ordered them burned; on June 4 there was a royal mandate to publish the condemnation; on December 4 the University came to the royal court and delivered an oration on the subject, and on December 27 Charles VI. addressed a royal letter to the Council of Constance asking it to join in the condemnation. Evidently the affair was exploited to the uttermost; and when, on January 4, 1315, the long-delayed obsequies of the Duke of Orleans were performed in Nôtre Dame, Chancellor Gerson preached a sermon before the king and the court, the boldness of which excited general comment. The government of the Duke of Orleans had been better than any which had succeeded it; the death of the Duke of Burgundy was not counselled, but his humiliation was advocated; the burning of Petit’s propositions was well done, but more remained to do, and all this Gerson was ready to maintain before all comers.[356]
It was in this mood that Gerson went to Constance as head of the French nation. In his first address to the council, March 23, 1415, he urged the condemnation of the nine propositions. The trial of John XXIII., the condemnation of Wickliff and of communion in both elements, and the discussion over Huss for a while monopolized the attention of the council, and no action was taken until June 15. Meanwhile Gerson found an ally in the Polish nation. John of Falckenberg had written a tract applying the arguments of Jean Petit to the slaying of Polish princes, of which the Archbishop of Gnesen had readily procured the condemnation by the University of Paris, and the Polish ambassador joined Gerson in the effort to have both put under the ban. On June 15, Andrea Lascaris, Bishop of Posen, proposed that a commission be appointed to conduct an inquisition upon new heresies. Jean Petit was not alluded to, but it was understood that his propositions were aimed at, for the only negative vote was that of Martin, Bishop of Arras, the ambassador of Jean sans Peur, who asserted that the object of the movement was to assail his master; and he further protested against Cardinal Peter d’Ailly, who was put on the commission with Orsini, Aquileia, and Florence, as well as two representatives of the Italian nation and four each of the French, English, and German. On July 6, after rendering judgment against Huss, the council condemned as heretical and scandalous the proposition Quilibet tyrannus, which was virtually the first of the nine condemned in Paris. This did not satisfy the French, who wanted the judgment of the University confirmed on the whole series. During the two years and a half that the council remained assembled, Gerson was unwearied in his efforts to accomplish this object. These heresies he declared to be of more importance than those of Huss and Jerome, and bitterly he scolded the fathers for leaving the good work unfinished. Interminable was the wrangling and disputation, appeals from Charles VI. and the University on the one side, and from the Duke of Burgundy on the other. John of Falckenberg was thrown into prison, but nothing would induce the council to take further action, and the affair at last died out. It is difficult for us at the present day to understand the magnitude which it assumed in the eyes of that generation. Gerson subsequently felt himself obliged to meet the jeers of those who reproached him with having risked a question of such importance before such a body as the council, and he justified himself by alleging that he had acted under instructions from the king and the University, and the Gallican Church as represented in the province of Sens. Moreover, he argued, when the council had manifested such zeal in condemning the Wickliffite doctrines and in burning Huss and Jerome, he would have been rash and unjust to suppose that it would not have been equally earnest in repressing the yet more pernicious heresies of Jean Petit. To us the result of greatest interest was its influence on the fate of Gerson himself. On the dissolution of the council he was afraid to risk the enmity of the Duke of Burgundy by returning to France, and gladly accepted a refuge offered him in Austria by Duke Ernest, which he repaid in a grateful poem. He never ventured nearer home than Lyons, where his brother was friar of a convent of Celestinian hermits, and where he supported himself by teaching school till his death, July 14, 1429.[357]