THE INQUISITION OF THE MIDDLE AGES

BOOK 1 - ORIGIN AND ORGANIZATION OF THE INQUISITION

CHAPTER V.

4

HESITATION TO PUNISH IN THE ELEVENTH AND TWELFTH CENTURIES

The stupor of the tenth century was too profound for heresy, which presupposes a certain amount of healthy mental activity. The Church, ruling unquestioned over the slumbering consciences of men, laid aside the rusted weapons of persecution and forgot their use. When, about 1018, Bishop Burchard compiled his collection of canon law he made no reference to heretical opinions or their punishment save a couple of regulations exhumed from the forgotten Council of Elvira in 305, respecting the treatment of apostates to idolatry. Even the introduction of the doctrine of transubstantiation was received submissively until, two centuries after Gottschalc, Berenger of Tours called it in question; but he had not in him the stuff of martyrdom, and yielded to moderate pressure. The warmer faith of the Cathari, who commenced to disturb the stagnation of orthodoxy in the eleventh century, called for energetic measures, but even with those abhorred sectaries the Church was wonderfully slow to resort to extremities. It hesitated before the unaccustomed task; it shrank from contradicting its teachings of charity and was driven forward by popular fanaticism. The persecution of Orleans in 1017 was the work of King Robert the Pious; the burning at Milan soon after was done by the people against the will of the archbishop. So unfamiliar was the Church with its duty that when, about 1045, some Manichaeans were discovered at Chalons, Bishop Roger applied to Bishop Wazo of Liege for advice as to what he should do with them, and whether he should hand them over to the secular arm for punishment; to which the good Wazo replied, urging that their lives should not be forfeited to the secular sword, as God, their Creator and Redeemer, showed them patience and mercy; and Canon Anselm, Wazo’s biographer, strongly condemns the executions under Henry III, at Goslar, in 1052, saying that if our Wazo had been there he would have acted as did St. Martin in the case of Priscillian. The same lenity was manifested by St. Anno of Cologne about 1060, when some of his flock refused, after repeated commands, to abandon the use of milk, eggs, and cheese during Lent, and the archbishop at length allowed them to have their own way, saying that those who were firm in the faith could not be much harmed by a difference in food. Even as late as 1144 the Church of Liége congratulated itself on having, by the mercy of God, saved the greater part of a number of confessed and convicted Cathari from the turbulent mob which strove to burn them. Those who were thus preserved were distributed among the religious houses while awaiting the response of Lucius II, to whom application was made for advice as to what should be done with them.

It is not worth while to repeat in detail the cases related in a former chapter which show how uncertain was the position of the Church towards heresy at this period. There was no definite policy, no fixed rule, and heretics continued to be treated with rigor or with mercy according to the temper of the prelate concerned. Theodwin, Wazo’s successor in the see of Liége, writes in 1050 to King Henry I of France, urging him to punish the followers of Berenger of Tours without even giving them a hearing. This uncertainty is well reflected by St. Bernard in his remarks on the occurrence at Cologne in 1145, when the zealous populace seized the Cathari and burned them despite the resistance of the ecclesiastical authorities. He argues that heretics should be won over by reason rather than by coercion, and if they will not be converted they are to be avoided; he approves the zeal of the people, but not of their action, for faith is to be spread by persuasion and not by force; yet he assumes the duty of the secular power to avenge the wrong done to God by heresy, and, blind to the danger of man’s assuming himself to be the minister of the wrath of God, he quotes St. Paul, “For he beareth not the sword in vain; for lie is the minister of God, and revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil” (Rom. XIII. 4). Alexander III leaned decidedly to the side of mercy when, in 1162, he refused to pass judgment on the Cathari sent to him by the Archbishop of Reims, saying that it was better to pardon the guilty than to take the lives of the innocent. Even at the close of the century Peter Cantor dared to argue that the apostle ordered the heretic to be avoided, not slain, and he dwelt upon the inconsistency of the severity shown to the slightest deviation from faith, while the grossest sins and immoralities were allowed to go unpunished.

This hesitation and uncertainty extended to the punishment appropriate to heresy. We have seen numerous cases of burning alive interspersed with sentences of imprisonment, and it was long before a definite formula was reached. Even when Alexander III, at the Council of Tours, in 1163, sought to check the alarming progress of Manichaeism in Languedoc, he only commanded the secular princes to imprison the heretics and confiscate their property; though in the same year the Cathari detected in Cologne were sentenced to be burned by judges appointed for the purpose. In 1157 the punishment inflicted by the Council of Reims was branding in the face; and the same expedient was resorted to by that of Oxford in 1166. Even as late as 1199, the first measures of Innocent III against the Albigenses only threaten exile and confiscation; there is no allusion to any duty on the part of the secular power beyond enforcing these penalties, and their enforcement is rewarded by the same indulgences as those to be gained by pilgrimage to Rome or to Compostella. As the struggle increased in bitterness, we have seen how stronger measures were adopted; yet even Simon de Montfort, in the code promulgated at Pamiers, December 1, 1212, while stimulating persecution to the utmost, and rendering it the duty of every man, does not formally adjudge the heretic to the stake, although in this very year eighty heretics were burned in Strasbourg. This form of punishment had been enacted for the first time in positive law, as already stated, by Pedro II of Aragon, in his edict of 1197, but the example was not speedily followed. Otho IV, in his constitution of 1210, simply places heretics under the imperial ban, orders their property confiscated and their houses torn down. Frederic II, in his famous statute of November 22, 1220, which made the persecution of heresy a part of the public law of Europe, only threatened confiscation and outlawry, although this, it must be added, placed their lives at the mercy of the first comer. In his constitution of March, 1221, he went further and decreed death by fire or loss of the tongue, at the discretion of the judge; and the contemporary practice in Germany left the penalty to be similarly decided. It was not until 1231, in the Sicilian Constitutions, that Frederic rendered the punishment by cremation absolute. This was in force merely in his Neapolitan dominions, and the edict of Ravenna, in March, 1232, while inflicting the death penalty does not prescribe the method; but that of Cremona, in May, 1238, embodied the Sicilian law and thus rendered the fagot and stake the recognized punishment for heresy throughout the empire, as we find it subsequently embodied in both the Sachsenspiegel and the Schwabenspiegel, or municipal laws of northern and southern Germany. In Venice, after 1219, the ducal oath of office contained a pledge to burn all heretics. In 1255 Alonso the Wise of Castile decreed the stake for all Christians who apostatized to Islam or to Judaism. In France the legislation adopted by both Louis IX and Raymond of Toulouse, for carrying out the provisions of the settlement of 1220, is discreetly silent with regard to the penalty of heresy, though under it the use of the stake was universal, and it is not until Louis issued his Établissements, in 1270, that we find the heretic formally condemned to be burned alive, thus rendering it part of the recognized law of the land, although the terms in which Beaumanoir alludes to it show that it had long been a settled custom. England, which was free from heresy, was even later in adopting it, and it was not until the rise of the Lollards caused fear in both Church and State that the writ “de haeretico comburendo” was created by statute in 1401.

BURNING ALIVE ADOPTED IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY