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

by Henry Charles Lea

During the Middle Ages there were few greater pests of society than the quæstuarii, or pardoners—the sellers of indulgences and pardons, who wandered over the face of Europe with relics and commissions, with brazen faces and stout lungs, vending exemptions from penance and purgatory, and prospective admission to paradise; telling all manner of lies, and at once disgracing the Church and impoverishing the credulous. Sometimes they were the authorized agents of Rome or of a bishop of a diocese; sometimes they farmed out a district for a fixed price or for a portion of the spoils; sometimes they merely bought from the curia or a local prelate the letters which authorized them to ply their trade. Tetzel, who stirred the indignation of Luther to rebellion, was only a representative of a horde of vagabonds who for centuries had fleeced the populations and had done all in their power to render religion contemptible in the eyes of thinking men. The Dominican Thomas of Cantimpré bitterly compares the trifling sums which purchased salvation from papal emissaries collecting funds for the Italian wars of the Holy See with the endless labors and austerities of his brethren and of the Franciscans—the sleepless vigils and the days spent in ministering to the spiritual needs of fellow-creatures, without obtaining assured pardon for their sins. The character of these peddlers of salvation is summed up in a tract presented to the Council of Lyons in 1274 by Umberto de’ Romani, who had resigned the generalate of the Dominican Order in 1263. He declares that they expose the Church to derision by their lies and filthiness; they bribe the prelates and thus obtain what privileges they want; the frauds of their letters of pardon are almost incredible; they find a fruitful source of gain in false relics, and though they collect large sums from the people, but little inures to the ostensible objects for which the collections are made.[669]

These creatures were not to be reached by the ordinary jurisdiction, for they either bore papal commissions or those of the bishop of the diocese; their trade was too profitable to all parties to be suppressed, and the only way of curbing their worst excesses seemed through the Inquisition. Accordingly the Inquisition had hardly been fully organized when Alexander IV. had recourse to it for this purpose, and included in the powers conferred on inquisitors that of restraining the quæstuarii and of forbidding their preaching. This was repeated by successive popes; it came to be embodied in the canon law, and was customarily included in the enumeration of duties recited in the commissions issued to inquisitors. A tithe of the energy shown in hunting down Waldenses and Spirituals would have effectually suppressed the worst features of this shameful traffic, but that energy was wholly lacking. In all the annals of the Inquisition I have met with but a single case, occurring in 1289, when Berenger Pomilli was brought before the inquisitor Guillaume de Saint-Seine. He was a married clerk of Narbonne, who stated that for thirty years he had followed the trade of quœstuarius in the dioceses of Narbonne, Carcassonne, and elsewhere, collecting the alms of the pious for the building of churches, bridges, and other objects. He was wont to preach to the people during the celebration of mass, and confessed to telling the most outrageous lies—that the cross which Christ carried to the place of crucifixion was so heavy that it would be a burden for ten men; that when the Virgin stood at the foot of the cross it bent over so that she kissed the Saviour’s hands and feet, after which it arose again, and many fables concerning purgatory and the liberation of souls—the latter, which were the real frauds of his trade, being prudently suppressed in the official report of his confession. A question as to his belief in these stories revealed to him his danger, for to admit it would have been to stamp himself a heretic. He humbly replied that he knew that he had been habitually uttering lies, but he told them to move the hearts of his hearers to liberality, and he at once begged to be penanced. What penance was awarded him does not appear.[670]

That trials of this sort were rare is evident from the complaint of the Council of Vienne, in 1311, that these vagabonds were in the habit of granting plenary indulgences to those who made donations to the churches which they represented, of dispensing from vows, of absolving for perjury, homicide, and other crimes, of relieving their benefactors from a portion of any penance assigned them, or the souls of their relations from purgatory, and granting immediate admission to paradise. All this was forbidden for the future, but the Inquisition was no longer relied upon to coerce the pardoners to obedience; the bishops were ordered to take the matter in hand and punish the evil-doers. They proved as inefficient as might have been expected. The abuse continued until it became the proximate cause of the Reformation, after which the Council of Trent abolished the profession of pardoner, avowedly because it was the occasion of great scandal among the faithful, and that all efforts to reform it had proved useless.[671]

More important was the nonfeasance of the Inquisition with respect to simony. This was the corroding cancer of the Church throughout the whole of the Middle Ages—the source whence sprang almost all the evils with which she afflicted Christendom. From the highest to the lowest, from the pope to the humblest parish priest, the curse was universal. Those who had only the sacraments to sell made a trade of them. Those whose loftier position gave them command of benefices and preferment, of dispensations and of justice, had no shame in offering their wares in open market, and preferment thus obtained filled the Church with mercenary and rapacious men whose sole object was to swell their purses by extortion and to find enjoyment in ignoble vices. Berthold of Ratisbon, about the middle of the thirteenth century, preaches that simony is the worst of sins, worse than homicide, adultery, perjury, but it now so crazes men that they think through it to serve God.[672] Instinctively all eyes turned to the Holy See as the source and fountain of all these evils. A quaint popular satire, current in the thirteenth century, shows how keenly this was felt:

“Here beginneth the Gospel according to the silver Marks. In those days the pope said to the Romans: When the Son of Man shall come to the throne of our majesty, first say to him: Friend, why comest thou? And if he continue to knock, giving you nothing, ye shall cast him into outer darkness. And it came to pass that a certain poor clerk came to the court of the lord pope and cried out, saying: Have mercy on me, ye gate-keepers of the pope, for the hand of poverty hath touched me. I am poor and hungry, I pray you to help my misery. Then were they wroth and said: Friend, thy poverty perish with thee; get thee behind me Satan, for thou knowest not the odor of money. Verily, verily, I say unto thee that thou shalt not enter into the joy of thy Lord until thou hast given thy last farthing.

“Then the poor man went away and sold his cloak and his coat and all that he had, and gave it to the cardinals and gate-keepers and chamberlains. But they said: What is this among so many? And they cast him beyond the gates, and he wept bitterly and could find nought to comfort him. Then came to the court a rich clerk, fat and broad and heavy, who in his wrath had slain a man. First he gave to the gate-keeper, then to the chamberlain, then to the cardinals; and they thought they were about to receive more. But the lord pope, hearing that the cardinals and servants had many gifts from the clerk, fell sick unto death. Then unto him the rich man sent an electuary of gold and silver, and straightway he was cured. Then the lord pope called unto him the cardinals and servants, and said unto them: Brethren, take heed that no one seduce you with empty words. I set you an example; even as I take, so shall ye take.”[673]

Vainly the intrepid energy and inflexible will of Hildebrand in the eleventh century strove to extirpate the ineradicable curse. It only grew wider and deeper as the Church extended its powers and centralized them in the Holy See. Simony was recognized in the canon law as a heresy, punishable as heresy with perpetual seclusion, and as such was justiciable by the Inquisition. With that organization at the command of the Holy See the untiring energy which through so many generations pursued the Cathari and Waldenses could in time have cured this spreading ulcer and purified the Church, but the Inquisition was never instructed to prosecute simoniacs, and there is no trace in its records that it ever volunteered to do so. In fact, had any overzealous official attempted such uncalled-for work he would speedily have been brought to his senses, for simony was not only the direct source of profit to the curia in the sale of preferment, but indirectly so in the sale of dispensations to those who had incurred its disabilities. It seems almost a contradiction in terms to speak of the Holy See issuing dispensations for heresy, and yet this was habitual. Legates and nuncios, when despatched abroad, were empowered to gather a harvest among the faithful by issuing dispensations for all manner of disabilities and irregularities, and among these simony is conspicuously noted. This ceased when John XXII. systematized the sale of absolutions and drew everything to the papal penitentiary, when pardon for simony in a layman could be had for six grossi, in a cleric for seven, and in a monk for eight. It is easy to see why the Inquisition was not used to suppress a heresy so profitable in every aspect. Indeed, while under the canon law it was held to be a heresy, yet it was practically never treated as such. Guillaume Durand, in his Speculum Juris, written in 1271, gives formulas for the accusation, by private individuals, of simoniacal bishops and priests and monks, but neither he nor his numerous commentators make the slightest allusion to it as subject to the procedure against heresy.[674]

It would be impossible to exaggerate the corruption which from this cause interpenetrated every fibre of the Church, filling benefices with ignorant and worldly men, eager to wring from the unfortunates committed to their cure the sums with which they had bought the preferment. Stephen Palecz, in a sermon preached before the Council of Constance, declares that there is scarce a church in Christendom free from the stain of simony, owing to the desperate struggle of all kinds of men to obtain the honors, wealth, and luxury attending an ecclesiastical preferment, and resulting in the promotion of the ignorant, weak, and wicked, who could not find employment as shepherds or swineherds. So unblushing was the venality of the Holy See that dialecticians and jurists of high authority seriously argued that the pope could not commit simony. This is scarce surprising when popes were found who could do a sharp stroke of business, like Boniface IX. In want of money to pay his troopers and defray the cost of his vast buildings, he suddenly deposed nearly all the prelates who chanced to be at the papal court, and many absent ones, or he translated them to titular sees, and then sold to the highest bidder the places thus vacated. Many unlucky ones, who were unable to buy back their preferment, wandered around the court without bread to eat, and the confusion and discord caused in many provinces was indescribable. Theodore a Niem, to whom we are indebted for this fact, was himself a papal official for thirty-five years, and knew whereof he spoke when he compared the splendid liberality of the German prelates with the stingy avarice of the Italians, who gave nothing in charity, but bent their whole energies to enriching themselves and their families. But when they die, he says, the collectors of the apostolic camera seize the whole spoil, and through this depredation and rapine it would be impossible to exaggerate the destruction of the Italian cathedrals and monasteries, which are left almost tenantless. As for the camera itself, its officials have hard heads and stony bosoms, and hearts more impenetrable to mercy than steel itself. They are as pitiless to Christians as Turks or Tartars could be, stripping all newly promoted prelates of everything. If the latter cannot pay their demands, forbearance for a time is sold at an immoderate price under terrible oaths, and if anything has been kept back for the expenses of the homeward journey it is extorted, so that whoever escapes from their clutches can truly say, Cantabit vacuus coram latrone viator. If you go there to pay a thousand florins and a single one is light, you are not allowed to depart till you have replaced it with a heavier one, or made good in silver twice the deficiency. And if, within a year, the promised sum is not paid, the bishop becomes a simple priest again, and the abbot a simple monk. Never satiated, the proper place of these officials is with the infernal furies, with the harpies, and with the unsatisfied Tantalus. Poggio, who was papal secretary for forty years, describes the applicants for preferment as worthy of these officials. They were idle, ignorant, sordid men, useless for all good purposes, who hung around the curia, clamoring for benefices or any other favor which they could get. Another papal official tells us that Boniface IX. filled the German sees with unfit and useless persons, for he who paid the most obtained the preferment. Many paid ten times more than it had cost their predecessors, for some archbishoprics fetched forty thousand florins, others sixty thousand, and others eighty thousand.[675]

It was in vain that Gerson proved that the papal demand of first-fruits of preferments was simony. It was in vain that the councils of Constance and of Siena complained and protested, and that of Basle endeavored to frame reformatory regulations. Equally vain was the attempt of Charles VII. and the Emperor Albert II. in the Pragmatic Sanctions of 1438, against the protests of Eugenius IV., to declare the annates and first-fruits to be simony. The papal system was too strong for its grasp to be thrown off, and up to the time of the Reformation simony continued to be the all-pervading curse.[676]

In addition to this source of infection from above there was an equally potent cause of demoralization from below in the immunity enjoyed by the clergy from secular jurisdiction. Not only were the people scandalized by seeing clerical homicides and criminals of all sorts set free after the mockery of a trial in the ecclesiastical courts, but the impunity thus enjoyed drew into the ranks of the Church hosts of vile and worthless men, who sought in the tonsure security from justice.[677]