Military and religious life in the Middle Ages and at the period of the Renaissance

by P. L. Jacob

This campaign was begun in 1196. The council which condemned the new Manichean heresy met at Montpellier in December of that year, and the first effect of the repressive measures which it very promptly employed was to drive back into the Cevennes, the Alps, and the Vosges, and towards the Rhône, the Moselle, and the Rhine, a host of heretics who endeavoured to teach publicly in the free towns of Germany.

An excess of devotion, which had its origin in the wish to avert the wrath of God, gave birth in Italy quite spontaneously to the sect known as the Flagellants. This strange infatuation for scourging began at Perugia, whence it passed to Rome and afterwards to Germany and Poland. The nobles, the elders, the people of all classes, the poor and even the children, traversed the streets of the towns and the country districts with bare shoulders, scourging themselves mercilessly with whips having leathern thongs (Fig. 312). These fanatics who travelled through all Europe, firmly believed that an angel had brought a missive from Jesus Christ, which declared that there was only one way for a Christian to obtain pardon for his sins, viz. to leave his native country and scourge himself for thirty-three consecutive days, in commemoration of the thirty-three years which Christ had passed upon earth. The Apostolicals, the Dulcinists, the Beghards, the Flagellants, the Spiritual Brothers, the Brethren of the Free Spirit, the Turlupins, &c., adopted these superstitious ideas, and constituted distinct sects which were condemned by the Church as heretical. The sectaries appealed from the sentence: the civil tribunals backed up the ecclesiastical ones; the faggots were kindled and a vast number of heretics perished; many, however, escaped, and, joining the Albigenses, they formed the sect of the Lollards. The Englishman Wickliff, whose heresy had pervaded all Britain (1368–1384), openly attacked the Court of Rome, the upper clergy, the liturgy, and the sacraments, with an audacity all the greater because he felt that he had the support of the people at large and of several sovereigns. The University of Oxford made a critical examination of Wickliff’s books, and found them to contain two hundred and seventy-eight reprehensible propositions, which it submitted for censure to the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London. After he had declaimed against the Church, its customs and its institutions, Wickliff attacked the very foundations of civil society, by his doctrine that, to possess any right or authority upon earth, it was necessary to be in a state of grace. Consequently kings, nobles, and the landowners were to lose their political and domanial rights, since they were in a state of mortal sin, just as the pope, the bishops, and the priests through sin were to lose their spiritual powers. He moreover denied the existence of free-will; and his allegation that everything which man did he was necessarily obliged to do, implied that all punishment was unjust, for no one is guilty who acts under compulsion. Lastly, he only recognised the existence of God to make Him responsible for evil, maintaining that God also is moved by an invincible necessity, that He looks with approval on those who sin, that He even constrains men to commit sin; “so that,” as Bossuet remarks, “the religion of this so-called Reformer was worse than atheism.” It is true that with Wickliff God counted for little, for, according to his system, “every creature is God, everything is God.” It is easy to understand the effect of such doctrines as these upon the masses; the religious dispute was transformed into a social question. The followers of Wickliff, when condemned, refused to bow to the decisions of the ecclesiastical authority. Their books were burnt, their apostles were sent to the stake, while others were imprisoned or exiled. But, in spite of this rigorous treatment, Wickliff’s doctrines made a deep impression in England, obtained shortly afterwards the protection of the House of Commons, and disposed men’s minds to bend beneath the despotic will of Henry VIII.

Fig. 313.—John Wickliff, a theologian Heresiarch, the Precursor of Luther, born at Wickliff, in England, about 1324, died in 1387.—After the “Vrais Pourtraits des Hommes Illustres:” 4to, Jean de Laon, Geneva, 1581.

The staunchest Catholic writers admit that the clergy are themselves responsible for the triumph of the heretics. Moeller says—“The relaxation of ecclesiastical discipline amongst the clergy and that in a great many religious communities, from which the pontifical court itself was not always exempt, gave the sectaries of the sixteenth century a pretext for their rebellion against the Church, its doctrines, its hierarchy, and its institutions. To this moral decadence of a great part of the clergy must further be added the profound ignorance of the upper clergy; and even those who cultivated literature and science confined themselves almost exclusively to the study of Greek and Latin literature, which directed the whole course of scientific research from the fifteenth century downwards. Many pagan ideas had pervaded men’s minds, and had contributed to create a feeling of contempt both for Christianity and for that beautiful Christian literature which had shed a lustre on the Church from the very earliest times. This condition of the clergy had a baneful influence upon the mass of the people, who lived in utter ignorance of religion, and who had lost their attachment to the Church and all respect for its pastors.”

This religious indifference of the clergy and of the people explains the success, not only of the heresiarchs who presented themselves as reformers of manners and discipline, but even of the sects held in the lowest esteem, the sorcerers, for instance. The facts are too numerous and too well-authenticated to admit of any doubt upon this head. There existed throughout all Europe, in the Middle Ages, numerous sects of sorcerers and witches who in all seriousness professed to give themselves over to the devil in exchange for the gift of magic power. The Spanish Inquisition was not the only body which sent them to the stake, after having submitted them to trial and received the confession of their misdeeds; the French tribunals pronounced sentence of death in similar cases when the accused, after long and minute interrogatories, but without being put to the torture, made a confession of their satanic orgies known by the name of sabbat (Fig. 314). This kind of heresy eluded all the steps taken by the civil and the religious powers to put it down. The “Histoire des Procès de Sorcellerie,” by Soldam, tells us that, even at the close of the sixteenth century, from 1590 to 1594, thirty-five witches were condemned to be burnt, out of a total population of six thousand, in the small Protestant town of Nordling, in Germany. The enormities of the sect of sorcerers attest, no doubt, a profound depravation of morals, but they contained no germ of social revolution; such, however, was not the case with the theories expounded by the great heresiarchs.

Fig. 314.—The “Sabbat,” reprint of the legend contained in a sentence of the Arras Tribunal in 1460.—Engraving of the Sixteenth Century, preserved in the National Library, Paris.

Wickliff’s doctrine soon made its way into Germany. It was propagated by John Huss, one of the doctors at the University of Prague. When the University discovered this, it solemnly condemned Wickliff’s books, and prohibited them from being read. John Huss did not venture upon any overt opposition; but, as the doctors of the University were Germans, he called to his aid the vanity of the Bohemians and the personal ill-will of King Wenceslaus against the Germans, who had deposed him from the empire. The situation of the professors became untenable, and they left with their two thousand pupils for Leipsic, where they founded the University. John Huss was joined by several ecclesiastics, who were anxious to acquire liberty of action; but the leading Bohemian professors, convoked by the archbishop to examine the works of Wickliff which John Huss had distributed amongst the Bohemian nobles, decided that the possessors of these books should surrender them to be burnt. John Huss again endeavoured to temporise, promising the archbishop to correct in his preaching anything which might have escaped him contrary to Christian doctrine; for, in his view, this promise did not prevent him from propagating the doctrine of Wickliff, which he believed to be quite orthodox. He was supported by Jerome of Prague, a man of position, who, in addition to his ardour and daring, was a bachelor in theology, though a layman. The latter was so zealous in his partisanship, that he upon one occasion stopped three Carmelite monks who had been combating the theories of Wickliff, and threw one of them into the Moldau. Denounced to the pope by the clergy of Prague, John Huss and his adherents were declared heretics and excommunicated. A rebellion got up in Prague by his partisans, headed by the impetuous Jerome, cost a great number of them their lives, the senate visiting their crimes with capital punishment. John Huss appealed from the sentence of the pope to the next council; and this, which was held at Rome in 1413, condemned afresh the writings of Wickliff and excommunicated John Huss, who had not put in an appearance, although he was cited before the Council. The Chancellor Gerson, the illustrious Dean of the Faculty of Theology in the University of Paris, which had just condemned the nineteen errors of John Huss, wrote to the Archbishop of Prague, exhorting him to take the necessary steps for repressing this heresy.

That prelate, in conformity with Gerson’s advice, obtained the support of the King of Bohemia; and it was decreed that all those who still adhered to the condemned theories of Wickliff should be expelled from the kingdom. John Huss was thus compelled to leave the city, but he declaimed as vehemently as ever against the Church, and especially against the pope.