§ 58. Heretical and Unchurchly Movements (part 1 of 2)

In the 14th and 15th centuries, the seat of heresy was shifted from Southern France and Northern Italy to Bohemia and Northern Germany, the Netherlands and England. In Northern and Central Europe, the papal Inquisition, which had been so effective in exterminating the Albigenses and in repressing or scattering the Waldenses, entered upon a new period of its history, in seeking to crush out a new enemy of the Church, witchcraft. The rise and progress of the two most powerful and promising forms of popular heresy, Hussitism and Lollardy, have already been traced. Other sectarists who came under the Church's ban were the Beghards and Beguines, who had their origin in the 13th century,⁸⁷⁸ the Brethren of the Free Spirit, the Fraticelli, the Flagellants and the Waldenses.

It is not possible to state with exactness the differences between the Beghards, Beguines, the Brethren of the Free Spirit and the Fraticelli as they appeared from 1300 to 1500. The names were often used interchangeably as a designation of foes of the established Church order.⁸⁷⁹ The court records and other notices that have come down to us indicate that they were represented in localities widely separated, and excited alarm which neither their numbers nor the station of their adherents justified. The orthodox mind was easily thrown into a panic over the deviations from the Church's system of doctrine and government. The distribution of the dissenters proves that a widespread religious unrest was felt in Western Christendom. They may have imbibed some elements from Joachim of Flore's millenarianism, and in a measure partook of the same spirit as German mysticism. There was a spiritual hunger the Church's aristocratic discipline and its priestly ministrations did not satisfy. The Church authorities had learned no other method of dealing with heresy than the method in vogue in the days of Innocent III. and Innocent IV., and sought, as before, by imprisonments, the sword and fire, to prevent its predatory ravages.

The Brethren of the Free Spirit⁸⁸⁰ were infected with pantheistic notions and manifested a tendency now to free thought, now to libertinism of conduct. At times they are identified with the Beghards and Beguines. The pantheistic element suggests a connection with Amaury of Bena or Meister Eckart, but of this the extant records of trials furnish no distinct evidence. To the Beghards and Beguines likewise were ascribed pantheistic tenets.

To the general class of free thinkers belonged such individuals as Margaret of Henegouwen, usually known as Margaret of Porete, a Beguine, who wrote a book advocating the annihilation of the soul in God's love, and affirmed that, when this condition is reached, the individual may, without qualm of conscience, yield to any indulgence the appetites of nature call for. After having several times relapsed from the faith, she was burnt, together with her books, in the Place de Grève, Paris, 1310.⁸⁸¹ Here belong also the Men of Reason,—homines intelligentiae,—who appeared at Brussels early in the 14th century and were charged with teaching the final restoration of all men and of the devil.⁸⁸²

The Fraticelli, also called the Fratricelli,—the Little Brothers,—represented the opposite tendency and went to an extravagant excess in insisting upon a rigid observance of the rule of poverty. Originally followers of the Franciscan Observants, Peter Olivi, Michael Cesena and Angelo Clareno, they offered violent resistance to the decrees of John XXII., which ascribed to Christ and the Apostles the possession of property. Some were given shelter in legitimate Franciscan convents, while others associated themselves in schismatic groups of their own. They were active in Italy and Southern France, and were also represented in Holland and even in Egypt and Syria, as Gregory XI., 1375, declared; but it would be an error to regard their number as large. In his bull, Sancta romana, issued in 1317, John XXII. spoke of "men of the profane multitude, popularly called Fraticelli, or brethren of the poor life, Bizochi or Beguines or known by other names." This was not the first use of the term in an offensive sense. Villani called two men Fraticelli, a mechanic of Parma, Segarelli and his pupil Dolcino of Novara, both of whom were burnt, Segarelli in 1300 and Dolcino some time later. Friar Bonato, head of a small Spiritual house in Catalonia, after being roasted on one side, proffered repentance and was released, but afterwards, 1335, burnt alive.⁸⁸³ Wherever the Fraticelli appeared, they were pursued by the Inquisition. A number of bulla of the 14th century attacked them for denying the papal edicts and condemned them to rigorous prosecution. A formula, which they were required to profess, ran as follows: "I swear that I believe in my heart and profess that our Lord Jesus Christ and his Apostles, while in mortal life, held in common the things the Scriptures describe them as having and that they had the right of giving, selling and alienating them."

In localities they seem to have carried their opposition to the Church so far as to set up a hierarchy of their own.⁸⁸⁴ The regular priests they denounced as simonists and adulterers. In places they were held in such esteem by the populace that the Inquisition and the civil courts found themselves powerless to bring them to trial. Nine were burnt under Urban V. at Viterbo, and in 1389 Fra Michaele Berti de Calci, who had been successful in making converts, met the same fate at Florence. In France also they yielded victims to the flames, among them, Giovanni da Castiglione and Francese d'Arquata at Montpellier, 1354, and Jean of Narbonne and Maurice at Avignon. These enthusiasts are represented as having met death cheerfully.

Early in the 15th century, we find the Fraticelli again the victims of the Inquisition. In 1424 and 1426, Martin V. ordered proceedings against certain of their number in Florence and in Spain. The vigorous propaganda of the papal preachers, John of Capistrano and James of the Mark, succeeded in securing the return of many of these heretics to the Church, but, as late as the reign of Paul II., 1466, they were represented in Rome, where six of their number were imprisoned and subjected to torture. The charges against them were the denial of the validity of papal decrees of indulgence other than the Portiuncula decree.⁸⁸⁵ In Northern Europe the Fraticelli were classified with the Lollards and Beghards or identified with these heretics. The term, however, occurs seldom. Walter, the Lollard, was styled, the most wicked heresiarch of the Fraticelli, a man full of the devil and most perverse in his errors."⁸⁸⁶

Of far more interest to this age are the Flagellants who attracted attention by the strange outward demonstrations in which their religious fervor found expression. Theirs was a militant Christianity. They made an attempt to do something. They correspond more closely to the Salvation Army of the 19th century than any other organization of the Middle Ages. There is no record that the beating of drums played any part in the movement, but they used popular songs, a series of distinctive physical gestures and peculiar vociferations, uniforms and some of the discipline of the camp. Their campaigns were penitential crusades in which the self-mortifications of the monastery were transferred to the open field and the public square, and were adapted to impress the impenitent to make earnest in the warfare against the passions of the flesh. The Flagellants buffeted the body if they did not always buffet Satan.

An account has already been given of the first outbreak of the enthusiasm in Italy in 1259, which, starting in Perugia, spread to Northern Italy and extended across the Alps to Austria, Prag and Strassburg.⁸⁸⁷ Similar outbreaks occurred in 1296, 1333, 1349, 1399, and again at the time of the Spanish evangelist, Vincent Ferrer.

From being regarded as harmless fanatics they came to be treated as disturbers of the ecclesiastical peace, and in Northern Europe were classed with Beghards, Lollards, Hussites and other unchurchly or heretical sectarists.

The movement of 1333 was led by an eloquent Dominican, Venturino of Bergamo, and is described at length by Villani. Ten thousand followed this leader, wearing head-bands inscribed with the monogram of Christ, IHS, and on their chests a dove with an olive-branch in her mouth. Venturino led his followers as far as Rome and preached on the Capitoline. The penniless enthusiasts soon became a laughing-stock, and Venturino, on going to Avignon, gained absolution and died in Smyrna, 1346.

The earlier exhibitions of Flagellant zeal were as dim candlelights compared with the outbursts of 1349, during the ravages of the Black Death, which in contemporary chronicles and the Flagellant codes was called the great death—das grosse Sterben, pestis grandis, mortalitas magna. Bands of religious campaigners suddenly appeared in nearly all parts of Latin Christendom, Hungary, Bohemia, Italy, France, Germany and the Netherlands. John du Fayt, preaching before Clement VI., represented them as spread through all parts—per omnes provincias—and their numbers as countless. The exact numbers of the separate bands are repeatedly given, as they appeared in Ghent, Tournay, Dort, Bruges, Liége and other cities.⁸⁸⁸ Even bishops and princes took part in them. There were also bands of women.

Our knowledge of the German and Lowland Flagellants is most extensive. While the accounts of chroniclers differ in details, they agree in the main features. The Flagellants clad themselves in white and wore on their mantles, before and behind, and on their caps, a red cross, from which they got the name, the Brothers of the Cross. They marched from place to place, stopping only a single day and night at one locality, except in case of Sunday, when they often made an exception. In the van of their processions were carried crosses and banners. They sang hymns as they marched. The public squares in front of churches and fields, near-by towns, were chosen for their encampments and disciplinary drill, which was repeated twice a day with bodies bared to the waist. A special feature was the reading of a letter which, so it was asserted, was originally written on a table of stone and laid by an angel on the altar of St. Peter's in Jerusalem.⁸⁸⁹ It represented Christ as indignant at the world's wickedness, and, more especially, at the desecration of Sunday and the prevalence of usury and adultery, but as promising mercy on condition that the Flagellants gather and make pilgrimages of penance lasting 33½ days, a period corresponding to the years of his earthly life.

The letter being read, the drill began in earnest. It consisted of their falling on their knees and on the ground three times, in scourging themselves and in certain significant gestures to indicate to what sin each had been specially addicted. Every soldier carried a whip, or scourge, which, as writers are careful to report, was tipped with pieces of iron. These were often so sharp as to justify their comparison to needles, and the blood was frequently seen trickling down the bodies of the more zealous, even to their loins.⁸⁹⁰ The blows were executed to the rhythmic music of hymns, and the ruddy militiamen, milites rubicundi,—as they were sometimes called, believed that the blood which they shed was one with Christ's blood or was mixed with it. They found a patron in St. Paul, whose stigmata they thought of, not as scars of conscience but bodily wounds.⁸⁹¹ At each genuflection they sang a hymn, four hymns being sung during the progress of a drill. The first calling to the drill began with the words:—

Nun tretet herzu wer buesen welle

Fliehen wir die heisse Hölle.

Lucifer ist bös Geselle

Wen er habet mit Pech er ihn labet.

Darum fliehen wir mit ihm zu sein.

Wer unser Busse wolle pflegen

Der soll gelten und wieder geben.

Now join us all who will repent

Let's flee the fiery heat of hell.

Lucifer is a bad companion

Whom he clutches, he covers with pitch.

Let us flee away from him.

Whoso will through our penance go

Let him restore what he's taken away.⁸⁹²

In falling flat on the ground, they stretched out their arms to represent the arms of the cross. The fourth hymn, sung at the third genuflection, was a lament over the punishment of hell to which the Usurer, the liar, the murderer, the road-robber, the man who neglected to fast on Friday and to keep Sunday, were condemned, and with this was coupled a prayer to Mary.

Das Hilf uns Maria Königin,

Dass wir deines Kindes Huld gewin.

Mary, Queen, help us, pray,

To win the favor of thy child.⁸⁹³

Each penitent indicated his besetting sin. The hard drinker put his finger to his lips. The perjurer held up his two front fingers as if swearing an oath. The adulterer fell on his belly. The gambler moved his hand as if in the act of throwing dice.

During the ravages of the Black Death a contingent of 120 of these penitential warriors crossed the channel from Holland and marched through London and other English towns, wearing red crosses and having their scourges pointed with pieces of iron as sharp as needles.⁸⁹⁴ But they failed to secure a following.

It was inevitable that the Flagellants should incur opposition from the Church authorities. The mediaeval Church as little tolerated independence in ritual or organization as in doctrine. In France, they were opposed from the first. The University of Paris issued a deliverance against them, and Philip VI. forbade their manoeuvres on French soil under pain of death. A harder blow was struck by the head of Christendom, Clement VI., who fulminated his sweeping bull Oct. 20, 1349. Flagellants starting from Basel appeared in Avignon to the number, according to one document, of 2000. Before issuing his bull, Clement and his cardinals listened to the sermon on the subject preached by the Paris doctor, John du Fayt. The preacher selected 13 of the Flagellant tenets and practices for his reprobation, including the shedding of their own blood, a practice, he declared, fit for the priests of Baal, and the murder of Jews for their supposed crime of poisoning the wells, in which was sought the origin of the Black Plague. Clement pronounced the Flagellant movement a work of the devil and the angelic letter a forgery. He condemned the warriors for repudiating the priesthood and treating their penances as equivalent to the journey to the jubilee in Rome, set for 1350.⁸⁹⁵ The bull was sent to the archbishops of England, France, Poland, Germany and Sweden, and it called upon them to invoke, if necessary, the secular arm to put down the new rebellion against the ordinances of the Church.

Against such opposition the Flagellants could not be expected to maintain themselves long. Sharp enactments were directed against them by the Fleming cities and by archbishops, as in Prag and Magdeburg. Strassburg forbade public scourgings on its streets. As late as 1353, the archbishop of Cologne found it necessary to order all priests who had favored them to confess on pain of excommunication.⁸⁹⁶

We are struck with four features of the Flagellant movement during the Black Death,—its organization, the part assumed in it by the laity, the use of music and, in general, its strong religious and ethical character. In Italy, before this time, these people had their organizations. There was scarcely an Italian city which did not have one or more such brotherhoods. Padua had six, Perugia and Fabiano three, but the movement does not seem to have developed opposition to Church authority. In some of the outbreaks priests were the leaders, and the permanent organizations seem to have formed a close association with the Dominicans and Franciscans and to have devoted themselves to the care of the poor and sick.

On the other hand, in the North, a spirit of independence of the clergy manifested itself. This is evident from the Flagellant codes of the German and Dutch groups, current at the time of the great pestilence and in after years. The conditions of membership included reconciliation with enemies, the consent of husband or wife or, in the case of servants, the consent of their masters, strict obedience to the leaders, who were called master or rector, and ability to pay their own expenses. During the campaigns, which lasted 33½ days, they were to ask no alms nor to wash their persons or their clothing, nor cut their beards nor speak to women, nor to lie on feather beds. They were forbidden to carry arms or to pursue the flagellation to the limit where it might lead to sickness or death.⁸⁹⁷

Five pater nosters and ave Marias were prescribed to be said before and after meals, and it was provided that, so long as they lived, they should flagellate themselves every Friday three times during the day and once at night. The associations were called brotherhoods, and the members were bidden to call each other not chum—socium—but brother, "seeing that all were created out of the same element and bought with the same price."⁸⁹⁸

The leaders of the fraternities were laymen, and, as just indicated, the equality of the members before God and the cross was emphasized. The movement was essentially a lay movement, an expression of the spirit of dissatisfaction in Northern Germany and the Lowlands with the sacerdotal class.⁸⁹⁹ Some of the codes condemn the worship of images, the doctrine of transubstantiation, indulgences, priestly unction and, in cases, they substituted the baptism of blood for water baptism. One of these, containing 50 articles, expressly declared that the body of Christ is not in the sacrament, and that "indulgences amount to nothing and together with priests are condemned of God." The 26th article said, "It is better to die with a skin tanned with dust and sweat than with one smeared with a whole pound of priestly ointment."⁹⁰⁰

The German hymns as well as the codes of the Flagellants urge the duty of prayer and the mortification of the flesh and the preparation for death, the abandonment of sin, the reconciliation of enemies and the restoration of goods unjustly acquired. These sentiments are further vouched for by the chroniclers.

To these religionists belongs the merit of having revived the use of popular religious song. Singing was a feature of the earliest Flagellant movement, 1259.⁹⁰¹ Their hymns are in Latin, Italian, French, German and Dutch. In Italian they went by the name of laude, and in German leisen. The Italian hymns, like the German, agree that sins have brought down the judgment of God and in appealing to the Virgin Mary, and call upon the "brethren" to castigate themselves, to confess their sins and to live in peace and brotherhood. They beseech the Virgin to prevail upon her son to stop "the hard death and pestilence—Gesune tolga via l' aspra morte e pistilentia.⁹⁰² Most of these hymns are filled with the thought of death and the woes of humanity, but the appeals to Mary are full of tenderness, and every conceivable allegory is applied to her from the dove to the gate of paradise, from the rose to a true medicine for every sickness. The songs of the Italian and the Northern Flagellants seem to have been independent of each other.⁹⁰³

The cohorts in the North agreed in using the same penitential song at their drills, but they had a variety of scores and songs for their marches.⁹⁰⁴ While the most of the words of their songs have been known, it is only recently that some of the music has been found to which the Flagellants sang their hymns. A manuscript of Hugo of Reutlingen, dating from 1349 and discovered at St. Petersburg, gives 8 such tunes, together with the words and an account of the movement.⁹⁰⁵ The hearers, in describing the impression made upon them by the melodies, mention their sweetness, their orderly rhythm,—ordine miro hymnos cantabant,—and their pathos capable of "moving hearts of stone and bringing tears to the eyes of the most stolid."⁹⁰⁶

Altogether, the Flagellant movement during the Black Death, 1349, must be regarded as a genuinely popular religious movement.

The next outbreak of Flagellant zeal, which occurred in 1399, was confined for the most part to Italy. The Flagellants, who were distinguished by mantles with a red cross, appeared in Genoa, Piacenza, Modena, Rome and other Italian cities. A number of accounts have come down to us, now favorable as the account of the "notary of Pistoja," now unfavorable as the account of von Nieheim. According to the Pistojan writer, the movement had its origin in a vision seen by a peasant in the Dauphiné, which is of interest as showing the relative places assigned in the popular worship to Christ and Mary. After a midday meal, the peasant saw Christ as a young man. Christ asked him for bread. The peasant told him there was none left, but Christ bade him look, and behold! he saw three loaves. Christ then bade him go and throw the loaves into a spring a short distance off. The peasant went, and was about to obey, when a woman, clad in white and bathed in tears, appeared, telling him to go back to the young man and say that his mother had forbidden it. He went, and Christ repeated his command, but at the woman's mandate the peasant again returned to Christ. Finally he threw in one of the loaves, when the woman, who was Mary, informed him that her Son was exceedingly angry at the sinfulness of the world and had determined to punish it, even to destruction. Each loaf signified one-third of mankind and the destruction of one-third was fixed, and if the peasant should cast in the other two loaves, all mankind would perish. The man cast himself on his knees before the weeping Virgin, who then assured him that she had prayed her Son to withhold judgment, and that it would be withheld, provided he and others went in processions, flagellating themselves and crying "mercy" and "peace," and relating the vision he had seen.⁹⁰⁷

The peasant was joined by 17 others, and they became the nucleus of the new movement. The bands slept in the convents and church grounds, sang hymns,—laude,—from which they were also called laudesi, and scourged themselves with thongs as their predecessors had done. Miracles were supposed to accompany their marches. Among the miracles was the bleeding of a crucifix, which some of the accounts, as, for example, von Nieheim's, explain by their pouring blood into a hole in the crucifix and then soaking the wood in oil and placing it in the sun to sweat. According to this keen observer, the bands traversed almost the whole of the peninsula. Fifteen thousand, accompanied by the bishop of Modena, marched to Bologna, where the population put on white. Not only were the people and clergy of Rome carried away by their demonstrations, but also members of the sacred college and all classes put on sackcloth and white. The pope went so far as to bestow upon them his blessing and showed them the handkerchief of St. Veronica. Nieheim makes special mention of their singing and their new songs—nova carmina. But the historian of the papal schism could see only evil and fraud in the movement,⁹⁰⁸ and condemns their lying together promiscuously at night, men and women, boys and girls. On their marches they stripped the trees bare of fruit and left the churches and convents, where they encamped, defiled by their uncleanness. An end was put to the movement in Rome by the burning of one of the leading prophets.

The bull of Clement VI. was followed, in l372, by the fulmination of Gregory XI., who associated the Flagellants with the Beghards, and by the action of the Council of Constance. In a tract presented to the council in 1417, Gerson asserted that the sect made scourging a substitute for the sacrament of penance and confession.⁹⁰⁹ He called upon the bishops to put down its cruel and sanguinary members who dared to shed their own blood and regarded themselves as on a par with the old martyrs. The laws of the decalogue were sufficient without the imposition of any new burdens, as Christ himself taught, when he said, "If thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments." This judgment of the theologians the Flagellants might have survived, but the merciless probe of the Inquisition to which they were exposed in the 15th century took their life. Trials were instituted against them in Thuringia under the Dominican agent, Schönefeld, 1414. At one place, Sangerhausen, near Erfurt, 91 were burnt at one time and, on another occasion, 22 more. The victims of the second group died, asserting that all the evils in the Church came from the corrupt lives of the clergy.

The Flagellant movement grew out of a craving which the Church life of the age did not fully meet. Excesses should not blind the eye to its good features. Hugo of Reutlingen concludes his account of the outbreak of 1349 with the words: "Many good things were associated with the Flagellant brothers, and these account for the attention they excited."

A group of sectaries, sometimes associated by contemporary writers with the Flagellants, was known as the Dancers. These people appeared at Aachen and other German and Dutch towns as early as 1374. In Cologne they numbered 500. Like the Flagellants, they marched from town to town. Their dancing and jumping—dansabant et saltabant—they performed half naked, sometimes bound together two and two, and often in the churches, where they had a preference for the spaces in front of the images of the Virgin. Cases occurred where they fell dead from exhaustion. In Holland, the Dancers were also called Frisker or Frilis, from frisch,—spry,—the word with which they encouraged one another in their terpsichorean feats.⁹¹⁰

To another class of religious independents belong the Waldenses, who, in spite of their reputation as heretics, continued to survive in France, Piedmont and Austria. They were still accused of allowing women to preach, denying the real presence and abjuring oaths, extreme unction, infant baptism and also of rejecting the doctrines of purgatory and prayers for the dead.⁹¹¹

With occasional exceptions, the Waldensians of Italy and France were left unmolested until the latter part of the 15th century and the dukes of Savoy were inclined to protect them in their Alpine abodes. But the agents of the Inquisition were keeping watch, and the Franciscan Borelli is said to have burned, in 1393, 150 at Grenoble in the Dauphiné in a single day. It remained for Pope Innocent VIII. to set on foot a relentless crusade against this harmless people as his predecessor of the same name, Innocent III., set on foot the crusade against the Albigenses. His notorious bull of May 5, 1487, called upon the king of France, the duke of Savoy and other princes to proceed with armed expeditions against them and to crush them out "as venomous serpents."⁹¹² It opened with the assertion that his Holiness was moved by a concern to extricate from the abyss of error those for whom the sovereign Creator had been pleased to endure sufferings. The striking difference seems not to have occurred to the pontiff that the Saviour, to whose services he appealed, gave his own life, while he himself, without incurring any personal danger, was consigning others to torture and death.

Writing of the crusade which followed, the Waldensian historian, Leger, says that all his people had suffered before was as "flowers and roses" compared to what they were now called upon to endure. Charles VIII. entered heartily into the execution of the decree, and sent his captain, Hugo de la Palu. The crusading armies may have numbered 18,000 men.

The mountaineer heretics fled to the almost inaccessible platform called Pré du Tour, where their assailants could make no headway against their arrows and the stones they hurled. On the French side of the Alps the crusade was successful. In the Val de Louise, 70, or, according to another account, 3000, who had fled to the cave called Balme de Vaudois, were choked to death by smoke from fires lit at the entrance. Many of the Waldenses recanted, and French Waldensianism was well-nigh blotted out. Their property was divided between the bishop of Embrun and the secular princes. As late as 1545, 22 villages inhabited by French Waldenses were pillaged and burnt by order of the parliament of Provence. With the unification of Italy in 1870, this ancient and respectable people was granted toleration and began to descend from its mountain fastnesses, where it had been confined for the half of a millennium.

in Austria, the fortunes of the Waldensians were more or less interwoven with the fortunes of the Hussites and Bohemian Brethren. In parts of Northern Germany, as in Brandenburg in 1480, members of the sect were subjected to severe persecutions. In the Lowlands we hear of their imprisonment, banishment and death by fire.⁹¹³

The mediaeval horror of heresy appears in the practice of ascribing to heretics nefarious performances of all sorts. The terms Waldenses and Waldensianism were at times made synonymous with witches and witchcraft. Just how the terms Vauderie, Vaudoisie, Vaudois, Waudenses and Valdenses came to be used in this sense has not been satisfactorily explained. But such usage was in vogue from Lyons to Utrecht, and the papal bull of Eugenius IV., 1440, refers to the witches in Savoy as being called Waldenses.⁹¹⁴ An elaborate tract entitled the Waldensian Idolatry,⁹¹⁵—Valdenses ydolatrae,—written in 1460 and giving a description of its treatment in Arras, accused, the Waldenses with having intercourse with demons and riding through the air on sticks, oiled with a secret unguent.

§ 59. Witchcraft and its Punishment.

Perhaps no chapter in human history is more revolting than the chapter which records the wild belief in witchcraft and the merciless punishments meted out for it in Western Europe in the century just preceding the Protestant Reformation and the succeeding century.⁹¹⁶ In the second half of that century, the Church and society were thrown into a panic over witchcraft, and Christendom seemed to be suddenly infested with a great company of bewitched people, who yielded themselves to the irresistible discipline of Satan. The mania spread from Rome and Spain to Bremen and Scotland. Popes, lawyers, physicians and ecclesiastics of every grade yielded their assent, and the only voices lifted up in protest which have come down to us from the Middle Ages were the voices of victims who were subjected to torture and perished in the flames. No Reformer uttered a word against it. On the contrary, Luther was a stout believer in the reality of demonic agency, and pronounced its adepts deserving of the flames. Calvin allowed the laws of Geneva against it to stand. Bishop Jewel's sermon before Queen Elizabeth in 1562 was perhaps the immediate occasion of a new law on the subject.⁹¹⁷ Baxter proved the reality of witchcraft in his Certainty of the World of Spirits. On the shores of New England the delusion had its victims, at Salem, 1692, and a century later, 1768, John Wesley, referring to occurrences in his own time, declared that "giving up witchcraft was, in effect, giving up the Bible."

In the establishment of the Inquisition, 1215, Innocent III. made no mention of sorcery and witchcraft. The omission may be explained by two considerations. Provision was made for the prosecution of sorcerers by the state, and heretical depravity, a comparatively novel phenomenon for the Middle Ages, was in Innocent's age regarded as the imminent danger to which the Church was exposed.

Witchcraft was one of the forms of maleficium, the general term adopted by the Middle Ages from Roman usage for demonology and the dark arts, but it had characteristic features of its own.⁹¹⁸ These were the transport of the bewitched through the air, their meetings with devils at the so-called sabbats and indulgence in the lowest forms of carnal vice with them. Some of these features were mentioned in the canon episcopi,—the bishop's canon,—which appeared first in the 10th century and was incorporated by Gratian in his collection of canon law, 1150. But this canon treated as a delusion the belief that wicked women were accustomed to ride together in troops through the air at night in the suite of the Pagan goddess, Diana, into whose service they completely yielded themselves, and this in spite of the fact that women confessed to this affinity.⁹¹⁹ The night-riding, John of Salisbury, d. 1182, treated as an illusion with which Satan vexed the minds of women; but another Englishman, Walter Map, in the same century, reports the wild orgies of demons with heretics, to whom the devil appeared as a tom-cat.⁹²⁰

From the middle of the 13th century the distinctive features of witchcraft began to engage the serious attention of the Church authorities. During the reign of Gregory IX., 1227-1241, it became evident to them that the devil, not satisfied with inoculating Western Europe with doctrinal heresy, had determined to vex Christendom with a new exhibition of his malice in works of sorcery and witchcraft. Strange cases were occurring which the inquisitors of heresy were quick to detect. The Dominican Chantimpré tells of the daughter of a count of Schwanenburg, who was carried every night through the air, even eluding the strong hold of a Franciscan who one night tried to hold her back. In 1275 a woman of Toulouse, under torture, confessed she had indulged in sexual intercourse with a demon for many years and given birth to a monster, part wolf and part serpent, which for two years she fed on murdered children. She was burnt by the civil tribunal.

But it is not till the 15th century that the era of witchcraft properly begins. From about 1430 it was treated as a distinct cult, carefully defined and made the subject of many treatises. The punishments to be meted out for it were carefully laid down, as also the methods by which witches should be detected and tried. The cases were no longer sporadic and exceptional; they were regarded as being a gild or sect marshalled by Satan to destroy faith from the earth.

It is probable that the responsibility for the spread of the wild witch mania rests chiefly with the popes. Pope after pope countenanced and encouraged the belief. Not a single utterance emanated from a pope to discourage it.⁹²¹ Pope after pope called upon the Inquisition to punish witches.

The list of papal deliverances opened in 1233, when Gregory IX., addressing the bishops of Mainz and Hildesheim, accepted the popular demonology in its crudest forms.⁹²² The devil, so Gregory asserted, was appearing in the shapes of a toad, a pallid ghost and a black cat. In language too obscene to be repeated, he described at length the orgies which took place at the meetings of men and women with demons. Where medicines did not cure, iron and fire were to be used. The rotting flesh was to be cut out. Did not Elijah slay the four hundred priests of Baal and Moses put idolaters to death?

Before the close of the 13th century, popes themselves were accused of having familiar spirits and practising sorcery, as John XXI., 1276, and Boniface VIII. Boniface went so far, 1303, as to order the trial of an English bishop, Walter of Coventry and Lichfield, on the charge of having made a pact with the devil and habitually kissing the devil's posterior parts. Under his successor, Clement, the gross charges of wantonness with the devil were circulated against the Knights of the Temple. In his work, De maleficiis, Boniface VIII.'s physician, Arnold of Villanova, stated with scientific precision the satanic devices for disturbing and thwarting the marital relation. Among the popes of the 14th century, John XXII. is distinguished for the credit he gave to all sorts of malefic arts and his instructions to the inquisitors to proceed against persons in league with the devil.⁹²³

Side by side with the papal utterances went the authoritative statements of the Schoolmen. Leaning upon Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, d. 1274, accepted as real the cohabitation of human beings with demons, and declared that old women had the power by the glance of their eye of injecting into young people a certain evil essence. If the horrible beliefs of the Middle Ages on the subject of witchcraft are to be set aside, then the bulls of Leo XIII. and Pius X.⁹²⁴ pronouncing Thomas the authoritative guide of Catholic theology must be modified.

The definitions of the Schoolmen justified the demand which papal deliverances made, that the Church tribunal has at least equal jurisdiction with the tribunal of the state in ferreting out and prosecuting the adepts of the dark arts. Manuals of procedure in cases of sorcery used by the Inquisition date back at least to 1270.⁹²⁵ The famous Interrogatory of Bernard Guy of 1320 contains formulas on the subject. The canonists, however, had difficulty in defining the point at which maleficium became a capital crime. Oldradus, professor of canon law in turn at Bologna, Padua and Avignon, sought, about 1325, to draw a precise distinction between the two, and gave the opinion that, only when sorcery savors strongly of heresy, should it be dealt with as heresy was dealt with, the position assumed before by Alexander IV., 1258-1260. The final step was taken when Eymericus, in his Inquisitorial Directory and special tracts, 1370-1380, affirmed the close affinity between maleficium and heresy, and threw the door wide open for the most rigorous measures against malefics.

To such threefold authorization was added the weight of the great influence of the University of Paris, which, in 1378, two years after the issue of Eymericus' work, sent out 28 articles affirming the reality of maleficium.

Proceeding to the second period in the history of our subject, beginning with 1430, it is found to teem with tracts and papal deliverances on witchcraft.

Gerson, the leading theologian of his age, said it was heresy and impiety to question the practice of the malefic arts, and Eugenius IV., in several deliverances, beginning with 1434, spoke in detail of those who made pacts with demons and sacrificed to them.⁹²⁶ Witchcraft was about to take the place in men's minds which heresy had occupied in the age of Innocent III. The frightful mania was impending which spread through Latin Christendom under the Renaissance popes, from Pius II. to Clement VII., and without a dissenting voice received their sanction. Of the Humanist, Pius II., better things might have been expected, but he also, in 1459, fulminated against the malefics of Brittany. To what length the Vatican could go in sanctioning the crassest superstition is seen from Sixtus IV.'s bull, 1471, in which that pontiff reserved to himself the right to manufacture and consecrate the little waxen figures of lambs, the touch of which was pronounced to be sufficient to protect against fire and shipwreck, storm and hail, lightning and thunder, and to preserve women in the hour of parturition.⁹²⁷

Among the documents on witchcraft, emanating from papal or other sources, the place of pre-eminence is occupied by the bull, Summis desiderantes issued by Innocent VIII., 1484. This notorious proclamation, consisting of nearly 1000 words, was sent out in answer to questions proposed to the papal chair by German inquisitors, and recognizes in clearest language the current beliefs about demonic bewitchment as undeniable. It had come to his knowledge, so the pontiff wrote, that the dioceses of Mainz, Cologne, Treves, Salzburg and Bremen teemed with persons who, forsaking the Catholic faith, were consorting with demons. By incantations, conjurations and other iniquities they were thwarting the parturition of women and destroying the seed of animals, the fruits of the earth, the grapes of the vine and the fruit of the orchard. Men and women, flocks and herds, trees and all herbs were being afflicted with pains and torments. Men could no longer beget, women no longer conceive, and wives and husbands were prevented from performing the marital act. In view of these calamities, the pope authorized the Dominicans, Heinrich Institoris and Jacob Sprenger, professors of theology, to continue their activity against these malefics in bringing them to trial and punishment. He called upon the bishop of Salzburg to see to it that they were not impeded in their work and, a few months later, he admonished the archbishop of Mainz to give them active support. In other documents, Innocent commended Sigismund, archbishop of Austria, the count of the Tyrol and other persons for the aid they had rendered to these inquisitors in their effort to crush out witchcraft.

The burning of witches was thus declared the definite policy of the papal see and the inquisitors proceeded to carry out its instructions with untiring and merciless severity.⁹²⁸

Innocent's communication, so abhorrent to the intelligent judgment of modern times, would seem of itself to sweep away the dogma of papal infallibility, even if there were no cases of Liberius, the Arian, or Honorius, the Monothelite. The argument is made by Pastor and Cardinal Hergenröther that Innocent did not officially pronounce on the reality of witchcraft when, proceeding upon the basis of reports, he condemned it and ordered its punishment.⁹²⁹ However, in case this explanation be not regarded as sufficient, these writers allege that the decision, being of a disciplinary nature, would have no more binding force than any other papal decision on non-dogmatic subjects. This distinction is based upon the well-known contention of Catholic canonists that the pope's inerrancy extends to matters of faith and not to matters of discipline. Leaving these distinctions to the domain of theological casuistry, it remains a historic fact that Innocent's bull deepened the hold of a vicious belief in the mind of Europe and brought thousands of innocent victims to the rack and to the flames. The statement made by Dr. White is certainly not far from the truth when he says that, of all the documents which have issued from Rome, imperial or papal, Innocent's bull first and last cost the greatest suffering.⁹³⁰ Innocent might have exercised his pontifical infallibility in denying, or at least doubting, the credibility of the witnesses. A simple word from him would have prevented untold horrors. No one of his successors in the papal chair has expressed any regret for his deliverance, much less consigned to the Index of forbidden books the Malleus maleficarum, the inquisitors' official text-book on witchcraft, most of the editions of which printed Innocent's bull at length.

Innocent's immediate successors followed his example and persons or states opposing repressive measures against witches were classed with malefactors and, as in the case of Venice, the state was threatened by Leo X. with the fulminations of the Church if it did not render active assistance. At the papal rebuke, Brescia changed its attitude and in a single year sentenced 70 to the flames.

Next to Innocent's bull, the Witches Hammer,—Malleus maleficarum,—already referred to, is the most important and nefarious legacy the world has received on witchcraft. Dr. Lea pronounces it "the most portentous monument of superstition the world has produced."⁹³¹ These two documents were the official literature which determined the progress and methods of the new crusade.

The Witches Hammer, published in 1486, proceeded from the hands of the Dominican Inquisitors, Heinrich Institoris, whose German name was Kraemer, and Jacob Sprenger. The plea cannot be made that they were uneducated men. They occupied high positions in their order and at the University of Cologne. Their book is divided into three parts: the first proves the existence of witchcraft; the second sets forth the forms in which it manifested itself; the third describes the rules for its detection and prosecution. In the last quarter of the 15th century the world, so it states, was more given over to the devil than in any preceding age. It was flooded with all kinds of wickedness. In affirming the antics of witches and other malefics, appeal is made to the Scriptures and to the teachings of the Church and especially to Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. Witches and sorcerers, whose father is the devil, are at last bound together in an organized body or sect. They meet at the weekly sabbats and do the devil homage by kissing his posterior parts. He appears among them as a tom-cat, goat, dog, bull or black man, as whim and convenience suggest. Demons of both sexes swarm at the meetings. Baptism and the eucharist are subjected to ridicule, the cross trampled upon. After an abundant repast the lights are extinguished and, at the devil's command "Mix, mix," there follow scenes of unutterable lewdness. The devil, however, is a strict disciplinarian and applies the whip to refractory members.

The human members of the fraternity are instructed in all sorts of fell arts. They are transported through the air. They kill unbaptized children, keeping them in this way out of heaven. At the sabbats such children are eaten. Of the carnal intercourse, implied in the words succubus and incubus, the authors say, there can be no doubt. To quote them, "it is common to all sorcerers and witches to practise carnal lust with demons."⁹³² To this particular subject are devoted two full chapters, and it is taken up again and again.

In evidence of the reality of their charges, the authors draw upon their own extensive experience and declare that, in 48 cases of witches brought before them and burnt, all the victims confessed to having practised such abominable whoredoms for from 10 to 30 years.

Among the precautions which the book prescribed against being bewitched, are the Lord's Prayer, the cross, holy water and salt and the Church formulas of exorcism. It also adds that inner grace is a preservative.⁹³³

The directions for the prosecution of witches, given in the third part of the treatise, are set forth with great explicitness. Public rumor was a sufficient cause for an indictment. The accused were to be subjected to the indignity of having the hair shaved off from their bodies, especially the more secret parts, lest perchance some imp or charm might be hidden there. Careful rules were given to the inquisitors for preserving themselves against being bewitched, and Institoris and Sprenger took occasion to congratulate themselves that, in their long experience, they had been able to avoid this calamity. In case the defender of a witch seemed to show an excess of zeal, this was to be treated as presumptive evidence that he was himself under the same influence. One of the devices for exposing guilt was a sheet of paper of the length of Christ's body, inscribed with the seven words of the cross. This was to be bound on the witch's body at the time of the mass, and then the ordeal of torture was applied. This measure almost invariably brought forth a confession of guilt. The ordeal of the red-hot iron was also recommended, but it was to be used with caution, as it was the trick of demons to cover the hands of witches with a salve made from a vegetable essence which kept them from being burnt. Such a case happened in Constance, the woman being able to carry the glowing iron six paces and thus going free.

Of all parts of this manual, none is quite so infamous as the author's vile estimate of woman. If there is any one who still imagines that celibacy is a sure highway to purity of thought, let him read the testimonies about woman and marriage given by mediaeval writers, priests and monks, themselves celibate and presumably chaste. Their impurities of expression suggest a foul atmosphere of thought and conversation. The very title of the Malleus maleficarum—the Hammer of the Female Malefics—is in the feminine because, as the authors inform their readers, the overwhelming majority of those who were behagged and had intercourse with demons were women.⁹³⁴ In flat contrast to our modern experience of the religious fidelity of women, the authors of this book derive the word femina—woman—from fe and minus, that is, fides minus, less in faith. Weeping and spinning and deceiving they represent as the very essence of her nature. She deceives, because she was formed from Adam's rib and that was crooked.

A long chapter, I. 6, is devoted to showing woman's inferiority to man and the subject of her alliance with demons is dwelt upon, apparently with delight. The cohabitation with fiends was in earlier ages, the authors affirm, against the will of women, but in their own age it was with their full consent and by their ardent desire. They thank God for being men. Few of their sex, they say, consent to such obscene relations,—one man to ten women. This refusal was due to the male's natural vigor of mind, vigor rationis. To show the depravity of woman and her fell agency in history, Institoris and Sprenger quote all the bad things they can heap up from authors, biblical and classic, patristic and scholastic, Cato, Terence, Seneca, Cicero, Jerome. Jesus Sirach's words are frequently quoted, "Woman is more bitter than death." Helen, Jezebel and Cleopatra are held forth as examples of pernicious agency which wrought the destruction of kingdoms, such catastrophes being almost invariably due to woman's machinations.

It was the common representation of the writers of the outgoing century of the Mediaeval Age that God permits the intervention of Satan's malefic agency through the marriage bed more than through any other medium, and for the reason that the first sin was carried down through the marital act. On this point, Thomas Aquinas is quoted by one author after the other.⁹³⁵ Preachers, as well as writers on witchcraft, took this disparaging view of woman. Geiler of Strassburg gave as the reason for ten women being burnt to one man on the charge of witchcraft, woman's loquacity and frivolity. He quoted Ambrose that woman is the door to the devil and the way of iniquity—janua diaboli et via iniquitatis. Another noted preacher of the 15th century, John Nider, gave ten cases in which the cohabitation of man and woman is a mortal sin and, in a Latin treatise on moral leprosy, included the marriage state.⁹³⁶ A century earlier, in his De planctu ecclesiae, written from Avignon, Bishop Alvarez of Pelayo enumerated 102 faults common to women, one of these their cohabitation with the denizens of hell. From his own experience, the prelate states, he knew this to be true. It was practised, he says, in a convent of nuns and vain was his effort to put a stop to it.