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

by Henry Charles Lea

It might be expected that this toleration would cease as the human mind awakened and in its gropings began to cultivate with increased assiduity the occult sciences, in the endeavor to penetrate the secrets of nature; as scholastic theology developed itself into a system which sought to frame a theory of the universe; as the revived study of the Roman law brought again into view the imperial edicts against sorcery, and as the spiritual courts became effectively organized for their enforcement. Yet the development of persecution was wonderfully slow. The Church had a real and a dangerous enemy to combat in the threatening growth of heresy, and had little thought to bestow on a matter which did not endanger the power and privileges of the hierarchy. An occasional council, like those of Rouen in 1189 and of Paris in 1212, denounced the practitioners of magic, but there was no defined penalty, and only excommunication was threatened against them. Yet there was a popular idea that, like heresy, burning was the appropriate punishment, as in the case, about the same period, of a young cleric of Soest named Hermann, who, when vainly tempted by an unchaste woman, was accused by her of magic arts, was condemned and burned. In the flames he sang the Ave Maria until silenced by a blazing stick thrust into his mouth by a kinsman of the accuser; but his innocence shone forth in the miracles wrought at his grave, and a chapel was built over it which stood as a warning against such inconsiderate zeal.[464]

Cæsarius of Heisterbach, to whom we owe this incident, has an ample store of marvels which show that superstition was as active as ever, that men were eager to gain what advantage they could from intercourse with Satan, and that such practices were virtually unrepressed. He tells of a certain ecclesiastic named Philip, a celebrated necromancer, dead only a few years previous, apparently without trouble from Church or State. A knight named Henry of Falkenstein, who disbelieved in demons, applied to him to satisfy his doubts. Philip obligingly drew a circle with a sword at a cross-roads and muttered his spells, when, with a tumult like rushing waters and roaring tempests, the demon came, taller than the trees, black, and of a most fearful aspect. The knight kept within the charmed circle and escaped immediate ill, but lost his color, and remained pallid during the few years in which he survived. A priest undertook the same experience, but became frightened and allowed himself to be dragged out of the circle; he was so injured that he died on the third day, whereupon Waleran of Luxembourg piously confiscated his house, showing that immunity was not always to be reckoned on.[465]

Compacts with Satan were also not infrequent. The heretics burned at Besançon in 1180 were found to have such compacts inscribed on little rolls of parchment under the skin of their armpits. It would be difficult to find any historical fact of the period apparently resting on better authority than the story of Everwach, who was still living as a monk of St. Nicholas at Stalum when Cæsarius described his adventures as related by eye-witnesses. He had been steward of Theodoric, Bishop of Utrecht, whom he served faithfully. Accused of malversation, he found some of his accounts missing, and in despair he invoked the devil, saying, “Lord, if thou wilt help me in my necessity I will do homage to thee and serve thee in all things.” The devil appeared, and Everwach accepted his conditions of renouncing Christ and the Virgin and paying him homage, after which the accounts were proved without difficulty. Thenceforth Everwach was in the habit of openly saying, “Those who serve God are wretched and poor, but they who believe in the devil are prosperous,” and he devoted himself to the study of magic arts. It shows how lax was the discipline of the time, when, in his zeal for Satan, he bitterly opposed Master Oliver, the Scholasticus of Cologne, who preached the cross in Utrecht, and on being reproved sought to slay him, being only prevented by a sickness of which he died. He was plunged into hell and subjected to the indescribable torments of the damned, but the Lord pitied him, and he returned to life on the bier at his own funeral. Thenceforth he was a changed man. In company with Bishop Otto of Utrecht he made the pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre, inflicting on himself all manner of austerities, and on his return gave his property to the Church and entered the convent at Stalum. There is another story, of a spendthrift young knight near Liége, who, after squandering his fortune, was induced by one of his peasants to appeal to Satan. On the promise of wealth and honors he renounced allegiance to God and rendered regular feudal homage to Satan; the latter, however, required him to also renounce the Virgin, and this he refused to do, wherefore, on his repenting, he was pardoned at her intercession.[466]

These instances, which could readily be multiplied, will suffice to show the tendency of popular thought and belief at this period. It is true that Roger Bacon, who was in so many things far in advance of the age, argued that much of magic was simply fraud and delusion; that it is an error to suppose that man can summon and dismiss malignant spirits at will, and that it is much simpler to pray directly to God because demons can influence human affairs only through God’s permission. Even Bacon, however, in asserting the uselessness of charms and spells, gives as his reason that their efficacy depended on their being made under certain aspects of the heavens, the determination of which was very difficult and uncertain. Bacon’s partial incredulity only indicates the universality of the belief in less scientific minds, and, in view of the activity assigned to Satan in seeking human agents and servitors, and the ease with which men could evoke him and bind themselves to him, the supineness of the Church with regard to such offences is remarkable. The terrible excitement aroused by the persecution of the Stedingers and of Conrad of Marburg’s Luciferans must indubitably have given a stimulus to the belief in demonic agencies. Thomas of Cantimpré tells us that he had from Conrad, the Dominican provincial, as happening to one of Conrad of Marburg’s Luciferans, the well-known story that the heretic, endeavoring to convert a friar, conducted him to a vast palace where the Virgin sat enthroned in ineffable splendor surrounded by innumerable saints; but the friar, who had provided himself with a pyx containing a consecrated host, presented it to the Virgin with a demand that she should adore her Son, when the whole array vanished in darkness. Yet this excitement left behind it a reaction which rather created indisposition to further persecution. Pierre de Colmieu, afterwards Cardinal of Albano, when Archbishop of Rouen, in 1235, included invoking and sacrificing to demons and the use of the sacraments in sorcery only among the cases reserved to the bishops for granting absolution; and the cursory allusion to the subject by Bishop Durand in his Speculum Juris shows that, for at least a half-century later, the subject attracted little attention in the ecclesiastical courts. A synod of Anjou, in 1294, declares that according to the canons priests should expel from their parishes all diviners, soothsayers, sorcerers, and the like, and laments that they were permitted to increase and multiply without hindrance, to remedy which all who know of such persons are ordered to report them to the episcopal court, in order that their horrible malignity may be restrained.[467]

Still more remarkable is the indifference of secular jurists and lawgivers during the thirteenth century, when the jurisprudence of Europe was developing and assuming definite shape. In England there is a strong contrast with the Anglo-Saxon period in the silence respecting sorcery in Glanvill, Bracton, the Fleta, and Britton. The latter, in describing the circuits of the sheriffs, gives an elaborate enumeration of the offences about which they are to make inquisition, including renegades and misbelievers, but omitting sorcery, and the same omission is observable in the minute instructions given by Edward I. to the sheriffs in the Statute of Ruddlan in 1283, although Peter, Bishop of Exeter, in his instructions to confessors in 1287, mentions sorcerers and demon-worshippers among the criminals to whom they are to assign penance. It is true that Horn’s Myrror of Justice classes sorcery and heresy together as majestas, or treason to the King of Heaven, and we may assume that both were liable to the same penalty, though neither were actively prosecuted. It is the same with the mediæval laws of Scotland as collected by Skene. The Iter Camerarii embodies detailed instructions for the inquests to be held by the royal chamberlain in his circuits, but in the long list of crimes and misdemeanors requiring investigation there is no allusion to sorcery or divination.[468]

It is nearly the same in French jurisprudence. The Conseil of Pierre de Fontaines and the so-called Établissements of St. Louis contain no references to sorcery. The Livres de Jostice et de Plet, though based on the Roman law, makes no mention of it in its long list of crimes and penalties, although incidentally an imperial law is said to apply to those who slay by poisons or enchantments. Beaumanoir, however, though he seems only to know of sorcery employed to excite love, tells us that it is wholly under ecclesiastical jurisdiction; its practitioners err in the faith, and thus are justiciable by the Church, which summons them to abandon their errors, and in case of refusal condemns them as misbelievers. Then secular justice lays hold of them and inflicts death if it appears that their sorcery may bring death on man or woman, while if there is no danger of this, it imprisons them until they recant. Thus sorcery is heresy cognizable by the Church only, and punishable when abjured only by penitence; yet, when the obstinate sorcerer is handed over to the secular arm, in place of being burned like a Waldensian refusing to swear, the character of his heresy is weighed by the secular court, and if its intent be not homicide he is simply imprisoned until he recants, showing that sorcery was treated as the least dangerous form of heresy. Beaumanoir’s assertion of ecclesiastical jurisdiction is confirmed by a contemporaneous decision of the Parlement of Paris in 1282, in the case of some women arrested as sorceresses in Senlis and tried by the maire and jurats. The Bishop of Senlis claimed them, as their offence pertained to his court; the magistrates asserted their jurisdiction, especially as there had been cutting of skin and effusion of blood, and the Parlement, after due deliberation, ordered the women delivered to the spiritual court. Yet, though this was the law at the time, it did not long remain so. Under the ancestral systems of criminal practice, when conviction or acquittal in doubtful cases depended on the ordeal or the judicial duel or on compurgation, the secular courts were poorly equipped for determining guilt in a crime so obscure, and they naturally abandoned it to the encroachments of the spiritual tribunals. As the use of torture, however, gradually spread, the lay officials became quite as competent as the ecclesiastical to wring confession and conviction from the accused, and they speedily arrogated to themselves the cognizance of such cases. At the South, where the Inquisition had familiarized them with the use of torture at an earlier period, we already, in 1274 and 1275, hear of an inquest held and of wizards and witches put to death by the royal officials in Toulouse. In the North, the trials of the Templars accustomed the public mind to the use of torture, and demonstrated its efficiency, so that the lay courts speedily came to have no hesitation in exercising jurisdiction over sorcery. In 1314 Petronille de Valette was executed in Paris as a sorceress. She had implicated Pierre, a merchant of Poitiers, and his nephew Perrot. They were forthwith put to the ban and their property sequestrated, but at the place of execution Petronille had exculpated them, declaring them innocent on the peril of her soul. They hastened to Paris and purged themselves, and the Parlement, May 8, 1314, ordered the Seneschal of Poitou to withdraw the proceedings and release the property. Sorcery was now beginning to be energetically suppressed, and henceforth we shall see it occupy the peculiar position of a crime justiciable by both the ecclesiastical and secular courts.[469]

Spain had been exposed to a peculiarly active infection. The fatalistic belief of the Saracens naturally predisposed them to the arts of divination; they cultivated the occult sciences more zealously than any other race, and they were regarded throughout Europe as the most skilled teachers and practitioners of sorcery. In the school of Cordoba there were two professors of astrology, three of necromancy, pyromancy, and geomancy, and one of the Ars Notoria, all of whom lectured daily. Arabic bibliographers enumerate seven thousand seven hundred writers on the interpretation of dreams, and as many more who won distinction as expounders of goetic magic. Intercourse with the Saracens naturally stimulated among the Christians the thirst for forbidden knowledge, and as the Christian boundaries advanced, there was left in the conquered territories a large subject population allowed to retain its religion, and propagate the beliefs which had so irresistible an attraction. It was in vain that, in 845, Ramiro I. of Asturias burned a large number of sorcerers, including many Jewish astrologers. Such exhibitions of severity were spasmodic, while the denunciation of superstitions in the councils occasionally held indicate the continued prevalence of the evil without the application of an effective remedy. Queen Urraca of Castile, in the early part of the twelfth century, describes her former husband, Alonso el Batallador of Aragon, as wholly given to divination and the augury of birds, and about 1220, Pedro Muñoz, Archbishop of Santiago, was so defamed for necromancy that by order of Honorius III. he was relegated to the hermitage of San Lorenzo. The ancient Wisigothic Law, or Fuero Juzgo, was for a time almost lost sight of in the innumerable local fueros which sprang up, until in the eleventh century it was rehabilitated by Fernando I. of Castile. In Aragon, Jayme I., el Conquistador, in the thirteenth century, when recasting the Fuero of Aragon and granting the Fuero of Valencia, introduced penalties for sorcery similar to those of the Fuero Juzgo.[470] Thus the Wisigothic legislation was practically in force until, about 1260, Alonzo the Wise, of Castile, issued his code known as the Siete Partidas, in which all branches of magic are treated as completely under the secular power and in a fashion singularly rationalistic. There is no allusion to heresy or to any spiritual offence involved in occult science, which is to be rewarded or punished as it is employed for good or evil. Astrology is one of the seven liberal arts; its conclusions are drawn from the courses of the stars as expounded by Ptolemy and other sages; when an astrologer is applied to for the recovery of lost or stolen goods, and designates where they are to be found, the party aggrieved has no recourse against him for the dishonor inflicted, because he has only answered in accordance with the rules of his art. But if he is a deceiver, who pretends to know that whereof he is ignorant, the complainant can have him punished as a common sorcerer. These sorcerers and diviners who pretend to reveal the future and the unknown by augury, or lots, or hydromancy, or crystallomancy, or by the head of a dead man, or the palm of a virgin, are deceivers. So are necromancers who work by the invocation of evil spirits, which is displeasing to God and injurious to man. Philtres and love-potions and figurines, to inspire desire or aversion, are also condemned as often causing death and permanent infirmity, and all these practitioners and cheats are to be put to death when duly convicted, while those who shelter them are to be banished. But those who use incantations for a good purpose, such as casting out devils from the possessed, or removing ligatures between married folk, or for dissolving a hail-cloud or fog which threatens the harvests, or for destroying locusts or caterpillars, are not to be punished, but rather to be rewarded.[471]

Italy affords us the earliest example of mediæval legislation on the subject. In the first half of the twelfth century the Norman king of the two Sicilies, Roger, threatened punishment for compounding a love-potion, even though no injury resulted from it. The next recorded measure is found in the earliest known statutes of Venice, by the Doge Orlo Malipieri in 1181, which contain provisions for the punishment of poisoning and sorcery. Frederic II. was accused by his ecclesiastical adversaries of surrounding himself with Saracenic astrologers and diviners, whom he employed as counsellors, and who practised for his benefit all the forbidden arts of augury by the flight of birds and the entrails of victims, but though Frederic shared the universal belief of his age in keeping in his service a corps of astrologers with Master Theodore at their head, and was addicted to the science of physiognomy, he was too nearly a sceptic to have faith in vulgar sorcery. His reputation merely shared the fate of that of his protégé, Michael Scot, who translated for him philosophical treatises of Averrhoes and Avicenna. In his collection of laws known as the Sicilian Constitutions, he retained indeed the law of King Roger just alluded to, and added to it a provision that those who administer love-potions, or noxious, illicit, or exorcised food for such purposes, shall be put to death if the recipient loses his life or senses, while if no harm ensues they shall suffer confiscation and a year’s imprisonment, but this was merely a concession to current necessities, and he was careful to accompany it with a declaration that the influencing of love or hatred by meat or drink was a fable, and he took no note in his code of any other form of magic. In the Latin kingdoms of the East the Assises de Jerusalem and the Assises d’Antioch are silent on the subject, unless it may be deemed to be comprised in a general clause in the former, declaring that all malefactors and all bad men and bad women shall be put to death. Yet, that sorcery was punished throughout Italy, and was regarded as subject to the secular tribunals, is shown by an expression in the bull Ad extirpanda of Innocent IV. in 1252, ordering all potentates in public assembly to put heretics to the ban as though they were sorcerers.[472]

In German legislation the Treuga Henrici, about 1224, contains the earliest reference to sorcery, classing it with heresy and leaving the punishment to the discretion of the judge; but the Kayser-Recht, the Sächsische Weichbild, and the Richstich Landrecht contain no allusion to it. In the Sachsenspiegel it is curtly included with heresy and poisoning as punishable with burning, and there is the same provision in the Schwabenspiegel, while in a later recension of the latter the subject is developed by providing that whoever, man or woman, practises sorcery or invokes the devil by words or otherwise, shall be burned or exposed to a harsher death at the discretion of the judge, for he has renounced Christ and given himself to Satan. In this it is evident that the spiritual offence is alone kept in view, without regard to evil attempted or performed, and it would further seem that the matter was within the competence of the secular courts. The earliest legislation of the Prussian marches, about 1310, specifies for sorcerers the loss of an ear, branding on the cheek, exile, or heavy fines, but says nothing of capital punishment. Among the Norsemen the temper of legislation on the subject is to be found in the Jarnsida, compiled in 1258 by Hako Hakonsen for his Icelandic subjects, and the almost identical Leges Gulathingenses, issued by his son, Magnus Hakonsen, in 1274, which for five hundred years remained the common law of Norway. Magic, divination, and the evocation of the dead are unpardonable crimes, punished with death and confiscation; but the accused can purge himself with twelve compurgators, according to the Jarnsida, and with six, according to the code of Gula, thus showing that the crime was subject to the secular courts.[473]

In Sweden there is no allusion to sorcery in the laws compiled early in the thirteenth century by Andreas, Archbishop of Lunden; but in those issued by King Christopher in 1441, attempts on life by poison or sorcery are punished with the wheel for men and lapidation for women, and are tried by the Nämd—a sort of permanent jury of twelve men selected in each district as judges. In Denmark the laws in force until the sixteenth century were singularly mild. The accused had the right of defence with selected compurgators; the punishment for a first offence was infamy and withdrawal of the sacraments; for relapse, imprisonment, and finally death for persistent offending. In Sleswick the ancient code of the thirteenth century makes no provision for sorcery, nor does that of the free Frisians in the fourteenth. That this leniency was not the result of outgrowing the ancient superstitions we learn from Olaus Magnus, who characterizes the whole Northern regions as literally the seat of Satan.[474] In all this confused and varying legislation we can trace a distinct tendency to increased severity after the thirteenth century.