Among other accessory penalties, we must notice the condemnation of books. There were many precedents for this: Constantine had had the Arian writings burnt, Theodosius II. and Valentinian III. those of the Condemnation of books. Nestorians and Manichaeans, Justinian the Talmud. In 1210 were burnt the books of David of Dinant and the Periphyseon of Aristotle. In 1255 the De periculis novissimorum temporum of William of St Amour[4] was burnt by order of Pope Alexander IV., and from 1248 to 1319 was pronounced a series of condemnations of the Talmud. Nicholas Eymerich (c. 1320-1399), the Spanish inquisitor, demanded from Pope Gregory XI. the condemnation of Raymond Lully’s books, and in 1376 obtained it, but before long the Lullists returned into favour with the pope and Eymerich was banished. This rebuff suffered by an inquisitor shows how uncertain the censure of books still was, even in a country where in less than two centuries’ time it was to become one of the chief spheres of inquisitorial activity.
The definite object of the Inquisition was the prosecution of heresy; but its sphere of action was gradually extended by the theologians and casuists until sorcery and magic ranked with dogmatic heresy. The council of Valence Sorcery and magic. (1248) dealt with sorcerers as well as sacrilegious persons, but did not treat them as heretics. Alexander IV. went further, declaring that divination and sorcery should only come within the competence of the inquisitor when they directly affected the unity or faith of the Church (9th December 1257; cf. bull Quod super nonnullis, 10th January 1260). Cases of simple sorcery were left to be dealt with by the ordinary judges. The distinction was very subtle, but it was not tampered with until 1451, at which date Nicholas V. gave the inquisitor Hugues Lenoir the cognizance of cases of divination, even when the crime did not savour of heresy. In dealing with such a subtle question, great variations had naturally arisen in practice, and the repression of sorcery was carried on jointly by the inquisitors, the bishops and the secular courts. John XXII., in consequence of a perfect epidemic of sorcery about 1320, handed over to the inquisitors for a time (1320-1333) all cases of crimes involving magic; but this measure was temporary and exceptional and only confirms the rule. There were various occasions during the middle ages when men’s minds became infatuated, and it seemed as if the scourge of magic were likely entirely to destroy the Catholic faith; and during such times, morbidly infected with fear and the spirit of persecution, the ecclesiastical judges regained all their prestige. One of these crises culminated in the affair of the “Vauderie”[5] of Arras (1459), in which twelve unfortunates perished at the stake; and there were similar occurrences at the same period in Dauphiné and Gascony; of this nature again was the violent persecution in the Germanic countries begun by the bull Summis desiderantes of Innocent VIII. (5th December 1484), in the course of which the two authors of the Malleus maleficorum, the inquisitors Sprenger and Institoris (Heinrich Krämer), distinguished themselves as much by their knowledge of theoretical demonology as by their zeal as persecutors. In France the secular authority was not long in claiming and obtaining jurisdiction over sorcerers (parlement of Paris, 1374), and as early as 1378 the university of Paris gave judgment in a case of demonology. Those unfortunates who were charged with sorcery gained, however, nothing by this change of jurisdiction, for they were invariably put to death.
The inquisitors could not take proceedings against Jews as such. They might profess their religion and observe its rites without being in a state of heresy; they were only The Inquisition and the Jews. heretic when they attacked the Christian faith or community, made proselytes, or returned to Judaism after being converted. Further, those who practised usury were “suspected of not holding very orthodox doctrine as to theft” (Vacandard), and on this account the Inquisition gained a hold on them. Pope Martin V. (6th November 1419) authorized inquisitors to take proceedings against usurers.
But these are merely extensions of competence resulting from the works of the casuists; the Inquisition was primarily the instrument for the repression of all kinds of breaches Treatment of heresy in the various countries.
England. of orthodoxy. Its work in this capacity we will now describe in outline for each of the great countries of medieval Christendom. England, whether before or after the establishment of the Inquisition, had but few trials for heresy and, particularist in this as in all her religious activity, judged them according to her own discipline, without asking Rome for laws or special judges. In 1166, a few heretics having been apprehended, Henry II. called a council at Oxford and summoned them to appear before it; they all confessed, and were condemned to be scourged, branded on the face with the mark of a key, and expelled from the country, and by the 21st article of the Assize of Clarendon the king forbade any one to harbour on their lands or in the house any “of that sect of renegades who had been excommunicated at Oxford.” Any one offending against this law was to be “at the king’s mercy” and his house was to be “carried outside the town and burnt.” The sheriffs were obliged to swear observance of this law and to require a similar oath from all barons’ stewards, knights and free tenants. This was the first civil law against heresy since the end of the Roman empire, and preceded the famous rescripts of Frederick II. against sectaries in the 13th century. It should, however, be noted that the political acts of Henry II. and Frederick II. drew down the most explicit condemnation of the church. Orthodoxy remained almost unimpaired in England up till the time of Wycliffe. Apparently neither the Catharist, Waldensian nor Pantheistic heresies gained any footing in Great Britain. The affair of the Templars in France, which was quite political, was repeated in England: Clement V. having ordered their arrest, Edward II., after much hesitation, gave orders to the sheriffs to execute it and then decided that the ecclesiastical law should be applied. The papal inquisitors sent to England met with a bad reception, and the pope was obliged to forbid them to use torture, which was contrary to the laws of the kingdom. It was found impossible to establish the Templars’ guilt and only canonical penalties were inflicted on them. The rising of the Lollards having alarmed both the church and the state, the article De haeretico comburendo was established by statute in 1401, and gained a melancholy notoriety during the religious struggles of the 16th century; it seems to have been not so much a measure for the safeguarding of dogma as a violent assertion of the secular absolutism. It was not till 1676 that Charles II. caused it to be abrogated, and obtained a decision that in cases of atheism, blasphemy, heresy, schism and other religious offences, the ecclesiastical courts should be confined to the penalties of excommunication, removal from office, degradation and other ecclesiastical means of censure, to the exclusion of the death penalty. Scotland was much Scotland. later than England in giving up persecution and bloodshed; and so late as 1696 a student of medicine aged eighteen and named Aikenhead was accused of heresy and hanged at Edinburgh. In Ireland Richard de Lederede or Ledred, a Franciscan and bishop of Ossory, in 1324 prosecuted on suspicion of heresy and for sorcery a certain Dame Alice Kettle or Kyteler and her accomplices, Petronilla of Meath and her daughter Bassilla, who were accused of holding “nightly Ireland. conference with a spirit called Robert Artisson, to whom she sacrificed in the high way nine red cocks and nine peacocks’ eyes.” The lady had powerful connexions, and her brother-in-law, Arnold le Powre, seneschal of Kilkenny, even went so far as to imprison the bishop. But in spite of the refusal of the secular authorities to co-operate with him, the bishop was strong enough to force them in 1325 to burn some of the accused. Dame Kettle herself, however, who had been cited to appear at Dublin before the dean of St Patrick’s, escaped with the assistance of some of the nobles to England. Meanwhile the bishop, who had attempted to involve Arnold le Powre in the same charge, became involved in a quarrel with the administrators of the English government in Ireland; counter charges were brought against him, he was excommunicated by his metropolitan, Alexander de Bicknor, archbishop of Dublin; and in defiance of the king’s commands, after publishing counter charges against the archbishop, he appealed to Rome and left the country. In 1335 Benedict XII. wrote to Edward III. deploring the absence of any inquisition in the king’s dominions, and exhorting him to lend the aid of the secular arm in repressing heresy. Archbishop Alexander, who in 1347 was denounced as an abettor of heresy, died in 1349, and his successor was ordered to chastise those heretics who had taken refuge in the diocese from Richard de Lederede’s violence, and whom his predecessor had protected. Finally, in 1354, Richard de Lederede himself was allowed to return to his diocese, where his zeal for persecution does not, however, seem to have found much further scope. He died in 1360.
The scene of the activities of the monastic Inquisition in France lay chiefly in the south. The repression of the Albigensian heresy (see [Albigenses]) went on even when its importance had quite disappeared. The chronicle France. of the inquisitor Guilhem Pelhisso (d. 1268) shows us the most tragic episodes of the reign of terror which wasted Languedoc for a century. Guillaume Arnaud, Peter Cella, Bernard of Caux, Jean de St Pierre, Nicholas of Abbeville, Foulques de St Georges, were the chief of the inquisitors who played the part of absolute dictators, burning at the stake, attacking both the living and the dead, confiscating their property and land, and enclosing the inhabitants both of the towns and the country in a network of suspicion and denunciation. The secular authorities were of the utmost assistance to them in this task; owing to the confiscations, the crown had too direct an interest in the success of the inquisitorial trials not to connive at all their abuses. Under the regency of Alphonse of Poitiers Languedoc was regularly laid under contribution by the procureur des encours. There were frequent attempts at retaliation, directed for the most part against the inquisitors, and isolated attacks were made on Dominicans. In 1234-1235 there were regular risings of the people at Albi and Narbonne, which forced the inquisitors to retreat. In 1235 the inquisitors were driven out of Toulouse. These risings were followed by terrible measures of repression, which, in turn, led to violent outbreaks on the part of the relatives, friends or compatriots of the sufferers. During the night of the 28th or 29th of May 1242 the inquisitors and their agents were massacred at the castle of Avignonet. This massacre led to a persecution which went on without opposition and almost without a lull for nearly fifty years. At the beginning of the 14th century the terrified people found a defender in the heroic Franciscan Bernard Délicieux. For a moment King Philip the Fair and Pope Clement V. seemed to interest themselves in the misfortunes of Languedoc, and the king of France sent down reformers; but they had no effect, their activity being restrained by the king himself, who was alarmed at a separatist movement which was arising in Languedoc. The work of repression which followed this moment of hope was carried out, between 1308 and 1323, by the inquisitor Bernard Guy, and completed the destruction of the Catharist heresy, the appearances of which after the middle of the 14th century became less and less frequent. Other heretics, for a time at least, took their place, namely the Spirituals, who had developed out of a branch of the Franciscans, and were remotely disciples of Joachim, abbot of Floris (q.v.), and whom their rigid rule of absolute poverty led, by a reaction against the cupidity of the ordinary ecclesiastics, to repudiate any hierarchy and to uphold the doctrines of Peter John de Oliva against the word of the pope. On the 17th of February 1317 John XXII. condemned all these irregular followers of St Francis, “fraticelli, fratres de paupere vita, bizochi or beghini,” and the Inquisition of Languedoc was at once set in motion against them. Four spirituales were burnt at Marseilles in 1318, and soon the persecution was extended to the Franciscan beguins or tertiarii, many people being burnt about 1320 at Narbonne, Lunel, Béziers, Carcassonne, &c. The persecution stopped for lack of an object, for the small groups of beguins were soon destroyed, and those of the Spirituales who were not sent to the stake or to prison were compelled by the papacy to enter other orders than the Franciscan. The Waldenses (q.v.) were more difficult to destroy: originally less dangerous to the church than the Cathari, they resisted longer, and their dispersal in scattered communities aided their long resistance.
In the north of France the workings of the Inquisition were very intermittent; for there were fewer heretics there than in the south, and as they were poorer, there was less zeal on the part of the secular arm to persecute them. At its outset, however, the Inquisition in the north of France was marked by a series of melancholy events: the inquisitor Robert le Bougre, formerly a Catharist, spent six years (1233-1239) in going through the Nivernais, Burgundy, Flanders and Champagne, burning at the stake in every place unfortunates whom he condemned without a judgment, supported as he was by the ecclesiastical authorities and by princes such as Theobald of Champagne. The pope was forced to put a check on his zeal, and, after an inquiry, condemned him to imprisonment for life. We know that there were inquisitors settled in Île de France, Orléanais, Touraine, Lorraine and Burgundy during the 12th century, but we know next to nothing of what they did. In the 14th century, the Flemish and German heresies of the Free Spirit made their appearance in France; in 1310 a heretic named Marguerite Porette was burnt at Paris, and in 1373 another named Jeanne Daubenton, both of whom seem to have professed a kind of rudimentary pantheism, the latter being the head of a sect called the Turlupins. The Turlupins reappeared in 1421 at Arras and Douai and were persecuted in a similar way. But in the 15th century, with the exception of a few condemnations aimed against the Hussites, the Inquisition acted but feebly against heresy, which, as in the famous case of the “Vauderie” of Arras, was often nothing but fairly ordinary sorcery.
From the middle of the 14th century onward, the parlement had taken upon itself the right of hearing appeals from persons sentenced by the Inquisition. And the University again, by its faculty of theology, escaped the jurisdiction of the Inquisition. It was these two great bodies which at the time of the Reformation took the place of the Inquisition in dealing with heresy.
In Italy heresy not infrequently took on a social or political character; it was sometimes almost indistinguishable from the opposition of the Ghibellines or the communalist spirit of independence. Lombardy, besides a number Italy. of Cathari, contained a certain number of vaguely-defined sects against whom the efforts of the Apostolic Visitors sent by Innocent III. were not of much effect. From the very earliest days of the Inquisition, John of Vicenza, Roland of Cremona and Rassiero Sacchoni directed their persecutions against Lombardy, and especially against Milan. St Peter Martyr, who was conspicuous for his bigoted violence, was assassinated in 1252. On the 20th of March 1256 Alexander IV. ordered the provincial of the friar preachers of Lombardy to increase the number of inquisitors in that province from four to eight. At Florence both heresy and Ghibellinism were alike crushed by the terrible severities of Fra Ruggieri, and indulgences were promised to all who should aid in the extinction of heresy in Tuscany. Certain districts revolted against this violence, which threatened to devastate Italy as it had devastated Provence; in 1277 Fra Corrado Pagano was killed on an expedition against the heretics of the Vattelline, and two years after the people of Parma rose against the inquisitors. Besides, this reign of terror only raised to a furious pitch the passionate and independent piety of the Italian peoples. The body of a heretic, Armanno Ponzilupo, who was killed at Ferrara in 1269, was venerated by the people, and his mediation was even invoked, until the Inquisition had to suppress this cult. But it had a harder struggle against the successes of Gerard Legarelli, and especially Dolcino (see [Apostolici]), which only came to an end after a long and difficult trial of the adepts of the Messianist sect of Guglielma, some of whom belonged to the noble families of Lombardy. Up till the beginning of the 14th century, however, the power of the Inquisition steadily increased, and at this period Zanghino Ugolini appeared as the most skilful exponent of its theory and procedure. About the same time Charles of Anjou introduced the Inquisition into the Two Sicilies, but it could rarely effect anything there; the religious cohesion of the country was weak, and refugees were sure of safe hiding, both Waldenses and Fraticelli being frequently harboured there. When Sicily passed into the hands of Peter III. of Aragon, moreover, it came into a position of open hostility to the Holy See and became a refuge for heretics.
Venice always preserved its autonomy as regards the repression of heresy; she was perfectly orthodox, but remained entirely independent of Rome; Innocent IV. sent inquisitors there, but the heretics continued actually to be subject to the secular tribunals. In 1288 a compromise was arrived at, and the papal Inquisition was admitted into the republic, but only on condition that it should remain under the control of the secular power; thus there was established a mixed régime which survived till the last days of the Venetian state. In Savoy the Inquisition constantly carried on severe measures against the Waldenses of the Alps. During the 14th and 15th centuries there was an uninterrupted succession of trials.
As regards the papal states, “it was in the nature of things that, by a confusion of the two personages, the pope should consider all opposition to him qua Italian prince as resistance offered to the head of the church, i.e. to the States of the Church. church” (Ch. V. Langlois). The Colonna had a personal animosity against the Gaetani; therefore Boniface VIII., a Gaetano, declared the Colonna to be heretics. Rienzi was accused of heresy for having questioned the temporal sovereignty of the pope at Rome. The Venetians, who in 1309 opposed the annexation of Ferrara by Clement V. to the detriment of the house of Este, were proclaimed heretics and placed under the ban of Christendom. Savonarola was attacked because he interfered with the policy of Alexander VI. at Florence. It was this same desire for the hegemony of Italy which inspired the attitude of the popes throughout the middle ages, causing them to excommunicate, apparently without reason so far as doctrine was concerned, the Visconti of Milan, the Della Scala of Verona, the Maffredi of Faenza, &c., and prompting them to lay under an interdict or preach a crusade against certain rebellious great towns (Clement V. against Venice, John XXII. against Milan). Further, in each of the great cities of Lombardy and Tuscany, the papal party directed the local inquisition, and this power was rarely abused.