No disabilities were inflicted upon the descendants, and the house was still regarded as eligible to the noblest alliances. After a year of widowhood, Catharine de Thouars married Jean de Vendôme, Vidame of Chartres, and in 1442 Gilles’s daughter, Marie, espoused Prégent de Coétivy, Admiral of France and one of the most powerful men in the royal court. He must have considered the match most desirable, for he submitted to hard conditions in the marriage contract. He resolutely set to work to recover the alienated or confiscated lands, and succeeded in gaining possession of some of the finest estates, including Champtocé and Ingrandes, though his death at the siege of Cherbourg, in 1450, prevented his enjoying them. Marie not long after was remarried with André de Laval, Marshal and Admiral of France, who caused her rights to be respected, but on her death without issue in 1457 the inheritance passed to Gilles’s brother, René de la Suze. The interminable litigation revived and continued until after his death in 1474. He left but one daughter, who had been married to the Prince de Déols in 1446; they had but one son, André de Chauvigny, who died without issue in 1502, when the race became extinct. The barony of Rais lapsed into the house of Tournemine, and at length passed into that of Gondy, to become celebrated in the seventeenth century through the Cardinal de Retz.[538]
Admitting as we must the guilt of Gilles de Rais, all this throws an uncomfortable doubt over the sincerity of his trial and conviction, and this is not lessened by the fate of his accomplices. Only Henriet and Poitou appear to have suffered; there is no trace of the death-penalty inflicted on any of the rest, though their criminality was sufficient for the most condign punishment, and the facility with which self-incriminating evidence was obtainable by the use of torture rendered unknown the device of purchasing testimony with pardon. Gilles de Sillé, who was regarded as the worst of the marshal’s instigators, disappeared and was heard of no more. Next to him ranked Roger de Briqueville. It is somewhat mysterious that the family seem to have regarded this man with favor. Marie de Rais cherished his children with tender care. In 1446 he obtained from Charles VII. letters of remission rehabilitating him, which he certainly could not have procured had not Prégent de Coétivy favored him, and the latter, in a letter to his brother Oliver, in 1449, desires to be remembered to Roger.[539]
If the student feels that there is an impenetrable mystery shrouding the truth in this remarkable case, the Breton peasant was troubled with no such doubts. To him Gilles remained the embodiment of cruelty and ferocity. I am not sufficiently versed in folk-lore to express an opinion whether M. Bossard is correct in maintaining that Gilles is the original of Bluebeard, the monster of the nursery-tale rendered universally popular in the version of Charles Perrault. Yet, even without admitting that the story is of Breton origin, there would seem to be no doubt that in Brittany, La Vendée, Anjou, and Poitou, where the terrible baron had his chosen seats of residence, he is known by the name of Bluebeard, and the legend—possibly an older one—of cruelty to seven wives, has been attached to him who had but one, and who left that one a widow. Tradition relates how the demon changed to a brilliant blue the magnificent red beard that was his pride; and everywhere, at Tiffauges, at Champtocé, at Machecoul, for the peasant, Bluebeard is the lord of the castle where Gilles ruled over their forefathers. Even yet, when the dreaded ruins are approached at dusk, the wayfarer crosses himself and holds his breath. In one ballad the name of Bluebeard and of the Baron de Rais are interchanged as identical, and Jean de Malestroit, Bishop of Nantes, is the champion who delivers the terrorized people from their oppressor.[540]
Another phase of the popular belief in magic is illustrated in Don Enrique de Aragon, commonly known as the Marquis of Villena. Born in 1384, uniting the royal blood of both Castile and Aragon, his grandfather, the Duke of Gandia and Constable of Castile, destined him for a military life, and forbade his instruction in aught but knightly accomplishments. The child’s keen thirst for knowledge, however, overcame all obstacles, and he became a marvel of learning for his unlettered companions. He spoke numerous languages, he was gifted as a poet, and he became a voluminous historian. The occult arts formed too prominent a portion of the learning of the day for him to neglect them, and he became noted for his skill in divination, and for interpreting dreams, sneezes, and portents—things, we are told, not befitting a royal prince or a good Catholic, wherefore he was held in slight esteem by the kings of his time, and in little reverence by the fierce chivalry of Spain. In fact, he is spoken of in terms of undisguised contempt, as one who with all his acquirements knew little that was worth knowing, and who was unfit for knighthood and for worldly affairs, even for regulating his own household; that he was short and fat, and unduly fond of women and of eating. His astrological learning was ridiculed in the saying that he knew much of heaven and little of earth. He left his wife and gave up his earldom of Tineo in order to obtain the mastership of the Order of Calatrava, but the king soon deprived him of it, and thus, in the words of the chronicler, he lost both. After his death, at the age of fifty, in 1434, the King Juan II. ordered all his books to be examined by Fray Lope de Barrientos, afterwards Bishop of Cuenca, a professor of Salamanca and tutor of the Infante Enrique. A portion of them Fray Lope burned publicly on the plaza of the Dominican convent of Madrid, where the marquis lay buried. He kept the rest—probably to aid him in the books on the occult sciences which he wrote at command of the king.
Don Enrique evidently was a man of culture despised by a barbarous age which could see in his varied accomplishments only the magic skill so suggestive to the popular imagination. He was no vulgar magician. In his commentary on the Æneid he speaks of magic as a forbidden science, of whose forty different varieties he gives a curious classification. The only one of his writings that has reached us on a topic of the kind is a treatise on the evil eye. In common with his age he regards this as an admitted fact, but he attributes it to natural causes; and in the long and learned catalogue of remedies employed by different races from ancient times, he counsels abstinence from those which savor of superstition and are forbidden by the Church. Had he seriously devoted himself to the occult sciences he would scarce have written his “Art of Carving,” which was printed in 1766. In this work he not only gives the most minute directions for carving all manner of flesh, fowls, fish, and fruits, but gravely proposes that there shall be a school for training youth of gentle blood in this indispensable accomplishment, with privileges and honors to reward the most efficient graduates.
Yet of this unworldly scholar, neglected and despised during life, popular exaggeration speedily made a magician of wondrous power. His legend grew until there was nothing too wild to be attributed to him. He caused himself to be cut up and packed in a flask with certain conjurations, so as to become immortal; he rendered himself invisible with the herb Andromeda; he turned the sun blood-red with the stone heliotrope; he brought rain and tempest with a copper vessel; he divined the future with the stone chelonites; he gave his shadow to the devil in the cave of San Cebrian. Every feat of magic was attributed to him; he became the inexhaustible theme of playwright and story-teller, and to the present day he is the favorite magician of the Spanish stage. From this example it is easy to trace the evolution of the myths of Michael Scot, Roger Bacon, Albertus Magnus, Pietro d’ Abano, Dr. Faustus, and other popular necromantic heroes.[541]
CHAPTER VII.
WITCHCRAFT.
WHILE, as we have seen, princes and warriors were toying with the dangerous mysteries of the occult sciences, influencing the destinies of states, there had been for half a century a gradually increasing development of sorcery in a different direction among the despised peasantry, which, before it ran its course, worked far greater evils than any which had thus far sprung from the same source, and left an ineffaceable stain upon the civilization and intelligence of Europe. There is no very precise line of demarcation to be drawn between the more pretentious magic and the vulgar details of witchcraft; they find their origin in the same beliefs and fade into each other by imperceptible gradations, and yet, historically speaking, the witchcraft with which we now have to deal is a manifestation of which the commencement cannot be distinctly traced backward much beyond the fifteenth century. Its practitioners were not learned clerks or shrewd swindlers, but ignorant peasants, for the most part women, who professed to have skill to help or to ban, or who were credited by their neighbors with such power, and were feared and hated accordingly. Of such we hear little during the darkest portion of the Middle Ages, but with the dawn of modern culture they confront us as a strange phenomenon, of which the proximate cause is exceedingly obscure. Probably it may be traced to the effort of the theologians to prove that all superstitious practices were heretical in implying a tacit pact with Satan, as declared by the University of Paris. Thus the innocent devices of the wise-women in culling simples, or in muttering charms, came to be regarded as implying demon-worship. When this conception once came to be firmly implanted in the minds of judges and inquisitors, it was inevitable that with the rack they should extort from their victims confessions in accordance with their expectations. Every new trial would add fresh embellishments to this, until at last there was built up a stupendous mass of facts which demonologists endeavored to reduce to a science for the guidance of the tribunals.
That such was the origin of the new witchcraft is rendered still more probable by the fact that its distinguishing feature was the worship of Satan in the Sabbat, or assemblage, held mostly at night, to which men and women were transported through the air, either spontaneously or astride of a stick or stool, or mounted on a demon in the shape of a goat, a dog, or some other animal, and where hellish rites were celebrated and indiscriminate license prevailed. Divested of the devil-worship now first introduced, such assemblages have formed part of the belief of all races. In Hindu superstition the witches, through the use of mystic spells, flew naked through the night to the places of meeting, where they danced, or to a cemetery, where they gorged themselves with human flesh or revived the dead to satiate their lust. The Hebrew witch flew to the Sabbat with her hair loosened, as when it was bound she was unable to exercise her full power. Among the Norsemen we have seen the trolla-thing, or assemblage of witches, for their unholy purposes.[542] In the Middle Ages the first allusion which we meet concerning it occurs in a fragment, not later than the ninth century, in which it is treated as a diabolical illusion—“Some wicked women, reverting to Satan, and seduced by the illusions and phantasms of demons, believe and profess that they ride at night with Diana on certain beasts, with an innumerable multitude of women, passing over immense distances, obeying her commands as their mistress, and evoked by her on certain nights. It were well if they alone perished in their infidelity and did not draw so many along with them. For innumerable multitudes, deceived by this false opinion, believe all this to be true, and thus relapse into pagan errors. Therefore, priests everywhere should preach that they know this to be false, and that such phantasms are sent by the Evil Spirit, who deludes them in dreams. Who is there who is not led out of himself in dreams, seeing much in sleeping that he never saw waking? And who is such a fool that he believes that to happen in the body which is only done in the spirit? It is to be taught to all that he who believes such things has lost his faith, and he who has not the true faith is not of God, but the devil.” In some way this utterance came to be attributed to a Council of Anquira, which could never be identified; it was adopted by the canonists and embodied in the successive collections of Regino, Burchard, Ivo, and Gratian—the latter giving it the stamp of unquestioned authority—and it became known among the doctors as the Cap. Episcopi. The selection of Diana as the presiding genius of these illusory assemblages carries the belief back to classical times, when Diana, as the moon, was naturally a night-flyer, and was one of the manifestations of the triform Hecate, the favorite patroness of sorcerers. Under the Barbarians, however, her functions were changed. In the sixth century we hear of “the demon whom the peasants call Diana,” who vexed a girl and inflicted on her visible stripes, until expelled by St. Cæsarius of Arles. Diana was the dæmonium meridianum, and the name is used by John XXII. as synonymous with succubus. In some inexplicable way Bishop Burchard, in the eleventh century, when copying the text, came to add to Diana Herodias, who remained in the subsequent recensions, but Burchard in another passage substitutes as the leader Holda, the Teutonic deity of various aspect, sometimes beneficent to housewives and sometimes a member of Wuotan’s Furious Host. In a tract attributed to St. Augustin, but probably ascribable to Hugues de S. Victor, in the twelfth century, the companion of Diana is Minerva, and in some conciliar canons of a later date there appears another being known as Benzozia, or Bizazia; but John of Salisbury, who alludes to the belief as an illustration of the illusions of dreams, speaks only of Herodias as presiding over the feasts for which these midnight assemblages were held. We also meet with Holda, in her beneficent capacity as the mistress of the revels, under the name of the Domina Abundia or Dame Habonde. She was the chief of the dominæ nocturnæ, who frequented houses at night and were thought to bring abundance of temporal goods. In the year 1211 Gervais of Tilbury shows the growth of this belief in his account of the lamiæ or mascœ, who flew by night and entered houses, performing mischievous pranks rather than malignant crimes, and he prudently avoids deciding whether this is an illusion or not. He also had personal knowledge of women who flew by night in crowds with these lamiæ, when any one who incautiously pronounced the name of Christ was precipitated to the earth. Half a century later Jean de Meung tells us that those who ride with Dame Habonde claim that they number a third of the population, and when the Inquisition undertook the suppression of sorcery, in its formula of interrogatories, as we have seen in the preceding chapter, there was a question as to the night-riding of the good women.[543]
Thus the Church, in its efforts to suppress these relics of pagandom, preferred to regard the nocturnal assemblages as a fiction, and denounced as heretical the belief in the reality of the delusion. This, as part of the canon law, remained unalterable, but alongside of it grew up, with the development of heresy, tales of secret conventicles, somewhat similar in character, in which the sectaries worshipped the demon in the form of a cat or other beast, and celebrated their impious and impure rites. Stories such as this are told of the Cathari punished at Orleans in 1017, and of their successors in later times; and the Universal Doctor, Alain de Lille, even derives the name of Cathari from their kissing Lucifer under the tail in the shape of a cat.[544] How the investigators of heresy came to look for such assemblages as a matter of course, and led the accused to embellish them until they assumed nearly the development of the subsequent Witches’ Sabbat, is seen in the confessions of Conrad of Marburg’s Luciferans, and in some of those of the Templars.