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

by Henry Charles Lea

In 1386 Telesforo, the hermit of Cosenza, could only explain the Schism by the wealth and worldliness of the clergy, whom God could only reform by stripping them of their temporalities and thus forcing them to live according to the gospel. Although Henry of Hesse disputed the prophetic gifts of Telesforo, he, too, had no hesitation in ascribing the Schism to the simony, avarice, pride, luxury, and vanity of the Church, and he can only explain it by God sometimes in his wrath allowing his servants to act according to their own evil desires. Even should the Schism be healed, he can only look forward to the Church falling from bad to worse until the coming of Antichrist. This he anticipates speedily, for all the prophetic signs are present in the extreme iniquity of the world. The insatiable avarice and ambition of clergy and laity will lead them to support any one who promises them worldly advantage, and they will unite in aiding Antichrist to conquer the world. Bad as were the attacks of heresy, he says, the peace now enjoyed by the Church after overcoming the heretics is even worse, for in it the evil spirits succeed in excluding virtues and substituting vices—a significant admission from an enthusiastic churchman of the result of the labors of the Inquisition.[686]

These deplorable statements are confirmed by the supplication of the Council of Pisa in 1409 to Alexander V., and by the reformers who gathered around the Council of Constance in hopes of seeing it fulfil its functions of purifying the Church in its head and members—John Gerson, Cardinal d’Ailly, Cardinal Zabarella, Bernhardus Baptizatus, Theodoric Vrie. I have already quoted Nicholas de Clemangis, and need only say that the others were equally outspoken and equally full of detail, while the reformatory projects drawn up for consideration by the council are eloquent as to the evils which they were designed to remove. At first Sigismund and the Germans, with the French and English nations, were united in demanding that reformation should precede the election of a pope in place of the deposed John XXIII., but the close alliance formed between Sigismund and Henry V. alienated the French; by a skilful use of this they were won over, and the prospects of reform grew so desperate that Sigismund seriously contemplated seizing all the cardinals, as the main obstacle to the wished-for action, and removing them from Constance. On learning this, far from yielding, they put on their red hats and wore them in the streets as a token of their readiness to undergo martyrdom, and a paper was drawn up stigmatizing the English and Germans as Wickliffites and Hussites. The Germans responded in a vigorous protest, officially describing the condition of the Church in terms as decided as those employed by Nicholas de Clemangis. For this state of things they hold the Holy See solely responsible, for they date back these abuses to a time, a century and a half before, when the increasing pretensions of the curia enabled it to infect all Christendom with its vices, and they allude with special horror to the use of the papal penitentiary, worse than ordinary simony, whereby crimes were taxed in proportion to their heinousness and villainous traffic was made in sin. The Church, they concluded, had forfeited the reverence of the laity, which regarded it with contempt, as rather Antichristian than Christian. The steadfast attitude of the Germans, however, was weakened by the death of their strongest ally, Robert Hallam, Bishop of Salisbury, and two of Sigismund’s most trusted prelates were bribed to betray the cause. The Archbishop of Riga, who was tired of his constant quarrels with the Teutonic knights, was promised the rich bishopric of Liége, and the Bishop of Coire was promised the archbishopric of Riga. The opposition crumbled away, and Martin V. was elected. The French quickly saw their mistake, and appealed to Sigismund, who curtly referred them to the pope whom they had chosen, and who now had full power of granting or refusing reform. The council hurriedly adjourned after passing a few canons of little worth, and providing for a succession of general councils at short intervals.[687]

We have seen how reform was skilfully eluded at the Council of Siena in 1424. At Basle it fared no better. In 1435 Andreas, Bishop of Minorca, addressed to the Cardinal-legate Cesarini an exhortation in which he said, “Evils, sins, and scandals have so increased, especially among the clergy, that, as the prophet says, already accursed lying and theft, and adultery and simony, and murder and many other crimes have deluged the earth.... The avarice and lust of domination and the foul and abominable lives of the ecclesiastics are the cause of all the misfortunes of Christendom. The infidel and the heretic say that if the Christian faith and gospel law were true and holy, the prelates and priests would not live as they do, nor would the spiritual rulers work such confusion and scandal in Christendom without instant punishment from the Lord Jesus Christ, the founder of the gospel and the Church.” Bishop Andreas further urged that the council condemn by an irrefragable decision the impious doctrine of some canonists that the pope cannot commit simony. Two years later, in 1437, John Nider, the Dominican, declared that the general reformation of the Church was hopeless, on account of the wickedness of the prelates and the lack of good-will of the clergy. Partial reforms might be practicable, but even in this the difficulty was almost insuperable. The council, he said, in its six years of existence had been unable to reform a single nunnery, although aided by all the force of the secular power.[688]

The council, indeed, attempted some reformation, but Eugenius IV. and his successors refused to observe its canons. Even in Germany and France the old abuses were reinstated, with their deplorable consequences. The writers of the period are as emphatic as their predecessors in describing the superabounding and universal turpitude of the Church during the remainder of the century. That they do not exaggerate may be assumed from one or two instances. In 1459 there died at Arras, at the age of eighty, Nicaise le Vasseur, canon and head of the chapter of Arras. He not only had daughters and committed incest with them, but also with a daughter-granddaughter whom he had by one of them. Yet so blunted was the moral sense of Church and people that, as we are told, this monster officiated “très honorablement” in divine service on all feasts and holidays, and the only comment of the chronicler is that he did it most becomingly. When, in 1474, the death of Sixtus IV. was received in Rome with a pæan of joy, people commented not so much upon his selling benefices to the highest bidder and his other devices of extorting money, as upon the manner in which he rewarded the boys who served his unnatural lusts by granting to them rich bishoprics and archbishoprics. Under such men as Innocent VIII. and Alexander VI., there could only be deeper degradation expected. Julius II. was a condottiere rather than a priest; but when political exigencies led him to summon the Lateran Council, earnest souls like Jacob Wimpfeling permitted themselves to hope that he would set bounds to the moral plague which pervaded all the churches. When he died, and Leo X. conducted the labors of the assembled fathers, Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola addressed him an epistle describing the evils for which reformation was requisite. It is a repetition of the old complaints. The worship of God was neglected, the churches were held by pimps and catamites; the nunneries were dens of prostitution, justice was a matter of hatred or favor; piety was lost in superstition; the priesthood was bought and sold; the revenues of the Church ministered only to the foulest excesses, and the people were repelled from religion by the example of their pastors. The author of a little anonymous tract printed about the year 1500 feels obliged to prove by laborious citations that fornication is forbidden to the clergy, and he attributes the contempt generally entertained for the Church to the openly scandalous lives of its members. To appreciate fully the effect on the popular mind of this degradation of the Church, we must keep in view the supernatural powers claimed and exercised by the priesthood, which made it the arbiter of every man’s destiny, for salvation depended not so much on individual desert as on the ministrations of those who controlled the sacraments. How benumbing was this influence on the moral faculties is visible in the confession of Anna Miolerin, one of the Tyrolese witches burned in 1506, where the spread of witchcraft is attributed to the sensual and drunken priests who are unable to confess their penitents properly, or to baptize children, so that the latter, unprotected by the sacrament, are easily betrayed to Satan. The priests, she says, ought to baptize children reverently and repeat all the words of the ceremony.[689]

As for monasticism, Abbot Trithemius gives us a vigorous sketch of its demoralization. The great Benedictine Order, the mother and exemplar of the rest, had been founded on a wise and comprehensive system, including productive labor in the fields and religious observances in the houses: but he tells us that the monks when abroad were idle and vain, and when inside the walls were abandoned to carnal delights, with nothing of decorous to show but the habit, and even this was mostly neglected. No one thought of enforcing the forgotten discipline. The monasteries had become stables for clerks, or fortresses for fighting-men, or markets for traders, or brothels for strumpets, in which the greatest of crimes was to live without sin. The abbots thought of nothing but of satisfying their appetites and vanities, their lusts, their ambition, and their avarice, while the brethren were monks only in name, and were vessels of wrath and sin. A confirmatory glimpse at the interior life of these establishments is afforded by Angelus Rumpherus, elected Abbot of Formbach in 1501, in his account of his immediate predecessor, Leonhard, who had ruled the abbey since 1474. He was especially fond of using torture, of which he had infinite ingenious varieties at his service. Unable to endure his tyranny, a monk named Engelschalk, a man of good natural parts and disposition, fled, but was taken sick and brought back. He was thrown into the dungeon of the abbey, a building without light and ventilation, except a narrow slit through which to pass in food. Here he died, without even the viaticum, his request for a confessor being refused, and when, as he was dying, the abbot and some of the monks entered, the blood flowed copiously from his nose, showing that they were his murderers.[690]

Under the guidance of a Church such as this, the moral condition of the laity was unutterably depraved. Uniformity of faith had been enforced by the Inquisition and its methods, and so long as faith was preserved, crime and sin were comparatively unimportant except as a source of revenue to those who sold absolution. As Theodoric Vrie tersely puts it, hell and purgatory would be emptied if enough money could be found. The artificial standard thus created is seen in a revelation of the Virgin to St. Birgitta, that a pope who was free from heresy, no matter how polluted by sin and vice, is not so wicked but that he has the absolute power to bind and loose souls. There are many wicked popes plunged in hell, but all their lawful acts on earth are accepted and confirmed by God, and all priests who are not heretics administer true sacraments, no matter how depraved they may be. Correctness of belief was thus the sole essential; virtue was a wholly subordinate consideration. How completely under such a system religion and morals came to be dissociated is seen in the remarks of Pius II. quoted above, that the Franciscans were excellent theologians, but cared nothing about virtue.[691]

This, in fact, was the direct result of the system of persecution embodied in the Inquisition. Heretics who were admitted to be patterns of virtue were ruthlessly exterminated in the name of Christ, while in the same holy name the orthodox could purchase absolution for the vilest of crimes for a few coins. When the only unpardonable offence was persistence in some trifling error of belief, such as the poverty of Christ; when men had before them the example of their spiritual guides as leaders in vice and debauchery and contempt of sacred things, all the sanctions of morality were destroyed and the confusion between right and wrong became hopeless. The world has probably never seen a society more vile than that of Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The brilliant pages of Froissart fascinate us with their pictures of the artificial courtesies of chivalry; the mystic reveries of Rysbroek and of Tauler show us that spiritual life survived in some rare souls, but the mass of the population was plunged into the depths of sensuality and the most brutal oblivion of the moral law. For this Alvaro Pelayo tells us that the priesthood were accountable, and that, in comparison with them, the laity were holy. What was that state of comparative holiness he proceeds to describe, blushing as he writes, for the benefit of confessors, giving a terrible sketch of the universal immorality which nothing could purify but fire and brimstone from heaven. The chroniclers do not often pause in their narrations to dwell on the moral aspects of the times, but Meyer, in his annals of Flanders, under date of 1379, tells us that it would be impossible to describe the prevalence everywhere of perjuries, blasphemies, adulteries, hatreds, quarrels, brawls, murder, rapine, thievery, robbery, gambling, whoredom, debauchery, avarice, oppression of the poor, rape, drunkenness, and similar vices, and he illustrates his statement with the fact that in the territory of Ghent, within the space of ten months, there occurred no less than fourteen hundred murders committed in the bagnios, brothels, gambling-houses, taverns, and other similar places. When, in 1396, Jean sans Peur led his crusaders to destruction at Nicopolis, their crimes and cynical debauchery scandalized even the Turks, and led to the stern rebuke of Bajazet himself, who as the monk of Saint-Denis admits, was much better than his Christian foes. The same writer, moralizing over the disaster of Agincourt, attributes it to the general corruption of the nation. Sexual relations, he says, were an alternation of disorderly lusts and of incest; commerce was nought but fraud and trickery; avarice withheld from the Church her tithes, and ordinary conversation was a succession of blasphemies. The Church, set up by God as a model and protector for the people, was false to all its obligations. The bishops, through the basest and most criminal of motives, were habitual accepters of persons; they anointed themselves with the last essence extracted from their flocks, and there was in them nothing of holy, of just, of wise, or even of decent. Luke Wadding is a witness above suspicion; his conscientious study of original sources entitles his opinions to weight, and we may accept his description of Italy in the early part of the fifteenth century: “At that time Italy was sunk in vice and wickedness. In the Church there was no devotion, in the laity no faith, no piety, no modesty, no discipline of morals. Every man cursed his neighbor; the factions of Guelf and Ghibelline flooded the streets of the towns with fraternal blood, the roads were closed by robbers, the seas infested with pirates. Parents slew with rejoicing their children who chanced to be of the opposite faction. The world was full of sorcery and incantations; the churches deserted, the gambling-houses filled.” The testimony is too uniform to explain it away with the assumption that it represents only the disenchantment of puritanism. Æneas Sylvius was no puritan, and his adventurous life had made him, perhaps, better acquainted with the whole of Christendom than any other man of his time, and in 1453 he says: “It is for this that I dread the Turks. Whether I look upon the deeds of princes or of prelates I find that all have sunk, all are worthless. There is not one who does right, in no one is there pity or truth. There is no recognition of God upon earth; you are Christians in name, but you do the work of heathen. Execration and falsehood and slaughter and theft and adultery are spread among you, and you add blood to blood. What wonder if God, indignant at your acts, places on your necks Mahomet, the leader of the Turks, like another Nebuchadnezzar, for you are either swollen with pride, or rapacious with avarice, or cruel in wrath, or livid with envy, or incestuous in lust, or unsparing in cruelty. There is no shame in crime, for you sin so openly and shamelessly that you seem to take delight in it.” To what extent the Church was responsible for this may be judged by the terrible condition of Rome under Innocent VIII. as pictured in the diary of Infessura. Outrages of all kinds were committed with impunity so long as the criminal had wherewith to compound with the papal chancery; and when Cardinal Borgia, the vice-chancellor, was reproached with this, he piously replied that God did not desire the death of the sinner, but that he should pay and live. A census of the public women showed them to number sixty-eight hundred, and when the vicar of the city issued a decree ordering all ecclesiastics to dismiss their concubines, Innocent sent for him and ordered its withdrawal, saying that all priests and members of the curia kept them, and that it was no sin.[692]

This was the outcome of the theocracy whose foundation had been laid by Hildebrand in the honest belief that it would realize the reign of Christ on earth. Power such as was claimed and exercised by the Church could only be wielded by superhuman wisdom. Human nature was too imperfect not to convert it into an instrumentality for the gratification of worldly passions and ambition, and its inevitable result was to plunge society deeper and deeper into corruption, as unity of faith was enforced by persecution. In this enforcement, as I have said, faith became the only object of supreme importance, and morals were completely subordinated, tending naturally to the creation of a perfectly artificial and arbitrary standard of conduct. If, to win the favor of Satan, a man trampled on the Eucharist believing it to be the body of Christ, he was not liable to the pains of heresy; but if he did so out of disbelief, he was a heretic. If he took interest for money believing it to be wrong, he was comparatively safe; if believing it to be right, he was condemned. It was not the act, but the mental process, that was of primary importance, and wilful wrong-doing was treated more tenderly than ignorant conscientiousness. Thus the divine law on which the Church professed to be founded was superseded by human law administered by those who profited by its abuse. As Cardinal d’Ailly tells us, the doctors of civil law regarded the imperial jurisprudence as more binding than the commands of God, while the professors of canon law taught that the papal decretals were of greater weight than Scripture. Such a theocracy, practically deeming itself as superior to its God, when it had overcome all dissidence, could have but one result.[693]

When we consider, however, the simple earnestness with which such multitudes of humble heretics endured the extremity of outrage and the most cruel of deaths, in the endeavor to ascertain and obey the will of God in the fashioning of their lives, we recognize what material existed for the development of true Christianity, and for the improvement of the race, far down in the obscurer ranks of society. We can see now how greatly advanced might be the condition of humanity had that leaven been allowed to penetrate the whole mass in place of being burned out with fire. Unorganized and unresisting, the heretics were unable to withstand the overwhelming forces arrayed against them. Power and place and wealth were threatened by their practical interpretation of the teachings of Christ. The pride of opinion in the vast and laboriously constructed theories of scholastic theology, the conscientious belief in the exclusive salvation obtainable through the Church alone, the recognized duty of exterminating the infected sheep and preserving the vineyard of the Lord from the ravages of heretical foxes, all united to form a conservatism against which even the heroic endurance of the sectaries was unavailing. Yet there are few pages in the history of humanity more touching, few records of self-sacrifice more inspiring, few examples more instructive of the height to which the soul can rise above the weaknesses of the flesh, than those which we may glean from the fragmentary documents of the Inquisition and the scanty references of the chroniclers to the abhorred heretics so industriously tracked and so pitilessly despatched. Ignorant and toiling men and women—peasants, mechanics, and the like—dimly conscious that the system of society was wrong, that the commands of God were perverted or neglected, that humanity was capable of higher development, if it could but find and follow the Divine Will; striving each in his humble sphere to solve the inscrutable and awful problems of existence, to secure in tribulation his own salvation, and to help his fellows in the arduous task—these forgotten martyrs of the truth drew from themselves alone the strength which enabled them to dare and to endure martyrdom. No prizes of ambition lay before them to tempt their departure from the safe and beaten track, no sympathizing crowds surrounded the piles of fagots and strengthened them in the fearful trial; but scorn and hatred and loathing were their portion to the last. Save in cases of relapse, life could always be saved by recantation and return to the bosom of the Church, which recognized that even from a worldly point of view a converted heretic was more valuable than a martyred one, yet the steadfast resolution, which the orthodox characterized as satanic hardening of the heart, was too common to excite surprise.[694]

This inestimable material for the elevation of humanity was plucked up as tares and cast into the furnace. Society, so long as it was orthodox and docile, was allowed to wallow in all the wickedness which depravity might suggest. The supreme object of uniformity in faith was practically attained, and the moral condition of mankind was dismissed from consideration as of no importance. Yet the incongruity between the ideal of Christianity and its realization was too unnatural for the situation to be permanent. In the Church as well as out of it there was a leaven working. While St. Birgitta was thundering her revelations in the unwilling ears of Gregory XI., William Langland, the monk of Malvern, sharpened his bitter denunciations of friar and prelate by reminding the common-folk that love and truth were the sole essentials of Christianity—