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

by Henry Charles Lea

Among the instructions to Boniface and his fellow-missionaries was the eradication of all pagan observances, including divination, sorcery, and cognate superstitions. As the Church became reorganized, councils were held in 742 and 743, in which Church and State united in prohibiting them, although only a moderate fine was threatened, but the ecclesiastical jurisdiction over such offences was established by ordering the bishops to make yearly visitations of their sees to suppress paganism and the forbidden arts. Boniface, however, complained to Zachary that when the Frank or German visited Rome he saw there, openly practised, the things which they were laboriously endeavoring to suppress at home. The first of January was celebrated with pagan dances; women wore amulets and ligatures, and publicly offered them for sale. The pope could only reply that these things had long ago been prohibited, but as they had broken out afresh he had forbidden them again—but we may be assured without success.[454]

In the Carlovingian reconstruction which followed, efforts were made to suppress all superstitious arts, and they were treated with gradually increasing severity, but still with comparative lenity. The most vigorous legislation was an edict of Charlemagne in 805, which confides the matter to the Church, and orders the archpriest of each diocese to investigate all who were accused of divination or sorcery, apparently permitting moderate torture to obtain confession, and keeping the culprits in prison until they amend. In his efforts to christianize Saxony, on the one hand Charlemagne punished with death all who burned witches and ate them, under the belief so widely spread that they ate men, and on the other hand all soothsayers and sorcerers were made over to the Church as slaves. During this period, moreover, and for a couple of centuries following, the parallel legislation of the Church, inflicting spiritual penalties, was singularly mild, although the different penitentials vary so much that it is impossible to deduce any system from them. That which passes under the name of Theodore of Canterbury, and was of general authority, only prescribes a penance of twoscore days or a year for sorcery, or, if the offender is an ecclesiastic, three years, but it orders seven years for placing a child on a roof or in an oven to cure it of fever, and Ecbert of York indicates five years for the same practice. There evidently was no settled rule, but the most systematic code is that of Gaerbald, who was Bishop of Liége about the year 800. He orders all offenders to be brought before him for trial, and enacts seven years’ penance and liberal almsgiving for committing homicide by means of sorcery, seven years without almsgiving for rendering the victim insane, five years and almsgiving for consulting diviners or practising augury from birds, seven years for sorcerers who bring on tempests, three years and almsgiving for honoring sorcerers, one year for sorcery to excite love, provided it did not result in death, but if the offender was a monk, the penalty was increased to five years. Another penitential of the period prescribes twoscore days or a year for divination or diabolical incantations, but seven years if a woman threatens another with sorcery, to be reduced to four if she is poor. In 829 the Council of Paris attributes the misfortunes of the empire to the prevalence of crime, and especially of sorcery; it quotes the savage provisions of the Mosaic law, and enumerates at considerable length the evil deeds of the offenders—how men are rendered insane by philtres and love-potions, how tempests and hail are induced, how harvests and milk and fruits are transferred from their lawful owners, and how the future is predicted, but it indicates no penalties, and only asks the secular rulers to punish these crimes sharply. Similarly Erard, Archbishop of Tours, in 838 uttered a general prohibition, but only threatened public penance without indicating details. All that we can gather from this confused legislation, from the collections known as the Capitularies, and from the speculations and arguments of Rabanus Maurus and Hincmar of Reims, is that every species of divination and sorcery, Roman and Teutonic, was rife; that it was held to derive its power directly from Satan; that the Church was wholly unable to deal with it; that secular legislation threatened only moderate penalties, and that these were for the most part wholly unenforced.[455]

Yet, outside of the organized machinery of the Church and State, there was a rough popular justice—a sort of Lynch law—which handled individual offenders with scant ceremony. A chance allusion about this period to Gerberga, who was drowned by the Emperor Lothair in the river Arar, “as is customary with sorcerers,” indicates that much was going on not provided for in the Capitularies. The same is seen in a curious statement by St. Agobard, Archbishop of Lyons, who waged such ineffectual battle with many of the superstitions of the time. One of these, as we have seen, was that tempests could be caused by sorcery—a belief which the Church at first pronounced heretical because it inferred the Manichæan dualistic theory, which placed the visible world under the control of Satan, but which it finally accepted as orthodox, and Thomas Aquinas proved that, with the permission of God, demons could bring about perturbations of the air. Agobard tells us that the belief in his province was universal, among all ranks, that there was a region named Magonia, whence ships came in the clouds and carried back thither the harvests destroyed by hail, the Tempestarii, as these sorcerers were called, being paid by the Magonians for bringing on the storms. Whenever the rumbling of thunder was heard it was a customary remark that a sorcerer’s wind was coming. These Tempestarii carried on their nefarious trade in secrecy, but there was a recognized class of practitioners who professed to be able to neutralize them, and were regularly paid for doing so with a portion of the crops, which came to be known as the “canonical portion,” and men who paid no tithes and gave nothing in charity were regular in contributing to these impostors. On one occasion three men and a woman were seized, charged with being Magonians who had fallen from one of their aerial ships. A meeting of the people was summoned, before whom the prisoners were brought in chains, and they were promptly condemned to be stoned to death, when Agobard himself came to the rescue, and after prolonged argument succeeded in procuring their liberation. A similar instance of extra-judicial action was seen when a destructive murrain invaded the herds, and the story spread that it was caused by Grimoald, Duke of Benevento, who, out of enmity to Charlemagne, sent emissaries to scatter a magic powder on the mountains and fields and streams. As Agobard says, every inhabitant of Benevento, with three wagons apiece, could not have sprinkled a territory so extensive as that affected, but nevertheless large numbers of wretches were captured and put to death on the charge of being concerned in the matter. When he adds that it was marvellous that these persons confessed their pretended crime, and could not be prevented from bearing false witness against themselves, either by scourging, torture, or the fear of death, we learn the means adopted to secure conviction; and in this early and irregular instance of the use of torture we see a foreshadowing of the time when all the extravagant absurdities of the Witches’ Sabbat were, by the same efficacious methods, eagerly confessed, and the confessions persisted in to the stake. We see also what an atmosphere of superstitious terror pervaded the life of Europe.[456]

Carlovingian civilization was but a brief episode in the darkness of those dreary centuries. In the disorder which accompanied the breaking-up of the empire, the organization of feudalism, and the founding of the European monarchies, although the Church was quietly attributing to itself the functions and the jurisdiction on which were based its subsequent claims of theocratic supremacy, it took no efficient steps to destroy the kingdom of Satan, though his agents the diviners and sorcerers were as numerous as ever. The Council of Pavia in 850 merely prescribed penance during life for sorceresses who undertook to provoke love and hatred, leading to the death of many victims. There may have been an occasional explosion of popular cruelty, such as indicated by the brief mention in a doubtful MS. of the burning of a number of sorcerers in Saxony in 914, but in fact the Church came almost virtually to tolerate them. About the middle of the tenth century Bishop Atto of Vercelli felt it necessary to revive and publish anew a forgotten canon of the Fourth Council of Toledo, which threatened with degradation and perpetual penance in a monastery any bishop, priest, deacon, or other ecclesiastic who should consult magicians or sorcerers or augurs. Atto, however, was a puritan, who endeavored to resist the general demoralization of the age. How little repugnance was felt for the forbidden arts is seen in the fact that the reputation for necromantic skill gained in Spain did not prevent the election of Gerbert of Aurillac to the archiepiscopal sees of Reims and Ravenna, and finally to the papacy itself; while as late as 1170 we have seen an archbishop of Besançon have recourse to an ecclesiastic skilled in necromancy to aid him in detecting some heretics.[457]

In fact, the Church occupied an inconsistent attitude. Occasionally it took the enlightened view that these beliefs were groundless superstitions. An Irish council of the ninth century anathematizes any Christian who believes in the existence of witches, and forces him to recant before admitting him to reconciliation. Similarly, in 1080, Gregory VII. in writing to Harold the Simple of Denmark, strongly reproves the custom of attributing to priests and women all tempests, sickness, and other bodily misfortunes: these are the judgments of God, and to wreak vengeance for them on the innocent is only to provoke still more the divine wrath. More generally, however, the Church admitted their truth and sought, though with little energy, to repress them with spiritual censures. This halting position is well illustrated by the canons of Burchard, Bishop of Worms, in the early part of the eleventh century, where sometimes it is the belief in the existence of sorcery that is penanced, and sometimes it is the practice of the art. If confessors, moreover, followed Burchard’s instructions and interrogated their penitents in detail as to the various magic processes which they might have performed, it could only result in disseminating a knowledge of those wicked arts in a most suggestive way. At the same time Burchard, like the other canonists, Regino of Pruhm and Ivo of Chartres, gave an ample store of prohibitory canons drawn from the early councils and the writings of the fathers, showing that the reality of sorcery was freely admitted as well as the duty of the Church to combat it. So implicit was the belief in magic powers that the Church conceded the dissolution of the indissoluble sacrament of matrimony when the consummation of marriage was prevented by the arts of the sorcerer, and exorcisms and prayers and almsgiving and other ecclesiastical remedies proved powerless for three years to overcome the power of Satan. Guibert of Nogent relates, with pardonable pride, that although this occurred when his father and mother were married, through the malice of a stepmother, yet his mother resisted all persuasion to avail herself of a divorce, although the impediment continued for seven years, and the spell was broken at last, not by priestly ministrations, but by an ancient wise-woman. Such a cause was alleged when Philip Augustus abandoned his bride, Ingeburga of Denmark, on their marriage-day, and Bishop Durand, in his Speculum Juris, tells us that these cases were of daily occurrence. Even so enlightened a man as John of Salisbury airs his learning in describing all the varieties of magic, and is careful to define that if sorcerers kill men with the violence of their spells it is through the permission of God; while Peter of Blois, if he shows himself superior to the vulgar belief in omens, admits the potency of Satanic suggestiveness in the darker forms of magic.[458]

With this universal belief in sorcery and in its diabolic origin, there seems to have been no thought of enforcing the severity of the laws. About 1030, Poppo, Archbishop of Trèves, sent to a nun a piece of his cloak of which to make him a pair of shoes to be worn in saying mass. She bewitched them so that when he put them on he found himself dying of love for her. He resisted the desire and gave the shoes to one of his chief ecclesiastics, who experienced the same effect. The experiment was tried with like result on all the principal clergy of the cathedral, and when the evidence was overwhelming the fair offender was condemned simply to expulsion from the convent, while Poppo himself expiated his transient passion by a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. It was felt, however, that the discipline of the nunnery must be dangerously lax, and the other nuns were given the option of adopting a stricter rule or of dispersion. They chose the latter, and were replaced with a body of monks. When, in 1074, a revolt in Cologne forced the archbishop to fly, it is related among the excesses of the triumphant rebels that they threw from the walls and killed a woman defamed for having crazed a number of men by magic arts. That was regarded as a crime which three centuries later would have been a manifestation of praiseworthy zeal. About the same time a council in Bohemia warns the faithful not to have recourse in their troubles to sorcerers; but it only prescribes confession and repentance and to abstain from a repetition of the offence.[459]

Still, the accusation of sorcery was felt to be damaging, and as it was easy to bring and hard to disprove, it was bandied about somewhat recklessly. It was not enough for Berenger of Tours to be compelled to abjure his notions concerning transubstantiation, but he was stigmatized as the most expert of necromancers. In the bitter strife of Gregory VII., with the empire, when, in 1080, the Synod of Brescia deposed him and elected Wiberto of Ravenna as antipope, one of the reasons alleged against him was that he was a manifest necromancer—an art which he was supposed to have learned in Toledo. The manner in which partisanship availed itself of this method of attack is curiously illustrated by the opposing accounts given of Liutgarda, niece of Egilbert, Archbishop of Trèves, at this period. He was a resolute imperialist, and accepted his pallium from Wiberto, after which he made Liutgarda abbess of a convent in his diocese. The account of his episcopate is written by a contemporary; one MS., which is doubtless the genuine one, describes her as a cultured and exemplary woman, who ruled her nunnery in the service of God for forty years, leaving a happy memory behind her; another MS. of the same chronicle calls her a blasphemous witch and sorceress, under whose government the convent was almost ruined. After the Church had triumphed over the empire, it is easy to understand why such an interpolation should have been made.[460]

While thus the ancient laws against sorcery were practically falling into desuetude on the Continent, the legislation of the Anglo-Saxons shows that in England lyblac or witchcraft was the object of greater solicitude. About the year 900 the laws of Edward and Guthrum class witches and diviners with perjurers, murderers, and strumpets, who are ordered to be driven from the land, with the alternatives of reforming, of being executed, or of paying heavy fines—a provision which was repeatedly re-enacted by succeeding monarchs to the time of Cnut. Athelstan soon after decreed that when death was caused by lyblac, and the perpetrator confessed it, he should pay with his life; if he denied, he underwent the triple ordeal: failing in this he was imprisoned for four months, after which his kinsmen could release him on paying the wer-gild of the slain, the heavy fine of one hundred and twenty shillings to the king, and giving security for his good behavior. Towards the middle of the tenth century, Edward the Elder denounced perpetual excommunication for lyblac unless the offender repented. In the compilation known as the Laws of Henry I. murder by sorcery forfeited the privilege of redemption by paying wer-gild, and the perpetrator was handed over to the kinsmen of the slain, to be dealt with at their pleasure. For minor injuries thus caused, redemption was allowed as in other cases. When the accused denied, he was tried before the bishop, thus subjecting this offence to ecclesiastical jurisdiction. This severity seems to have changed with the Norman Conquest, for William the Conqueror, when besieging the Island of Ely, by advice of Ivo Taillebois placed at the head of his army a sorceress whose incantations were expected to paralyze the resistance of the defenders. Unluckily for the scheme, Hereward of Burgh made a flank attack on the invaders, and, setting fire to the reeds, burned the sorceress and all who were with her.[461]

When Olaf Tryggvesson, early in the eleventh century, endeavored to christianize Norway, he recognized the sorcerers as the most formidable enemies of the faith, and handled them unsparingly. At a Thing, or assembly, in Viken, he proclaimed that he would banish all who could be proved to deal with spirits or in witchcraft, and this he followed up with proceedings somewhat rigorous. He ransacked the district and had all the sorcerers brought together; he gave them a great feast with plenty of liquor, and when they were drunk he had the house fired, so that none escaped save Eyvind Kellda, a grandson of Harald Harfaager, and a peculiarly obnoxious wizard, who climbed through the smoke-hole in the roof. In the spring Olaf celebrated Easter on Kormt Island, when thither came Eyvind in a long ship fully manned with sorcerers. Landing, they put on caps of darkness, which rendered them invisible, and surrounded themselves with a thick mist, but when they came to Augvaldsness, where King Olaf lay, it became clear day and they were stricken with blindness, so that they wandered helplessly around till the king’s men seized them and brought them before him. He had them bound and placed on a rock which was bare only at low water, and Snorri Sturlason says that in his time it was still known as the Skerry of Shrieks. Another pious act related of Olaf illustrates both the methods requisite to spread the gospel among the rugged heroes of Norway and one of the explanations given by the Christians of the powers of sorcerers. Olaf captured Eyvind Kinnrif, a noted sorcerer, and sought to convert him, but in vain. Then a pan of fire was placed upon his belly, which he stoically endured until he burst asunder before asking its removal. Regarding this tardy request as a sign of yielding, Olaf asked him “Eyvind, wilt thou now believe in Christ?” “No,” replied Eyvind, “I can take no baptism, for I am an evil spirit placed in a man’s body by Lapland sorcery, because in no other way could my father and mother have a child,” and with that he died. Yet in the earliest Icelandic code, the Grágás, compiled probably in 1118, there is no mention of sorcery, which seems to have been left to the spiritual courts; while in the contemporary ecclesiastical body of law the punishment of magic arts is only three years’ exile, unless injury or death to man or beast has been wrought, when it is perpetual. In either case the accused is entitled to trial before twelve good men and true.[462]

Elsewhere throughout Europe, by the end of the twelfth century, the repression of sorcery seems to have been well-nigh abandoned by both secular and ecclesiastical authorities. This was not because its practice had been either given up or rendered lawful. In 1149 we find Abbot Wibald of Corvey accusing Walter, one of his monks, of using diabolical incantations. The cause which led Alexander III., in 1181, to monopolize for the Holy See the canonization of saints was that the monks of the Norman abbey of Gristan were addicted to magic, and by its means endeavored to gain the reputation of working miracles; during the absence in England of the abbot, the prior one day got drunk at dinner and struck with a table-knife two of his monks, who retaliated by beating him to death, and he perished unhouselled, yet by evil arts the monks succeeded in inducing the people to adore him as a saint until Bishop Arnoul of Lisieux reported the truth to Alexander. So easily were such offences condoned that in the case of a priest who, to recover something stolen from his church, employed a magician and looked into an astrolabe, Alexander only ordered the punishment of a year’s suspension, and this decision was embodied by Gregory IX. in the canon law as a precedent to be followed. This method of divination involved the invocation of spirits, and was wholly unlawful, yet it was employed without scruple. John of Salisbury, who died in 1181, relates that when he was a boy he was given to a priest to be taught the psalms. His instructor mingled with his sacred functions the practice of catoptromancy, and once made use of his pupil and an older scholar to look into the polished basin, after due conjurations and the use of the holy chrism. John could see nothing, and was relieved from further service of the kind, but his comrade discerned shadowy forms and thus was a more useful subject. Thus the forbidden arts flourished with but slender repression, and in this period of virtual toleration they worked little evil, save perhaps an occasional case of poisoning in a love-potion.[463]