The Age of Faith

Innocent IV was more conciliatory. At the urging of St. Louis he agreed on terms of peace (1244). But the Lombard cities refused to ratify this agreement, and reminded Innocent that Gregory had pledged the papacy against a separate peace. Innocent left Rome secretly, and fled to Lyons. Frederick resumed the war, and no force seemed now capable of preventing his conquest and absorption of the Papal States, and the establishment of his power in Rome. Innocent summoned the prelates of the Church to the Council of Lyons; the Council renewed the excommunication of the Emperor, and deposed him as an immoral, impious, and unfaithful vassal of his acknowledged suzerain the Pope (1245). At the Pope’s urging a group of German nobles and bishops chose Henry Raspe as anti-Emperor; and when he died they named William of Holland to succeed him. Excommunication was pronounced against all supporters of Frederick, and religious services were interdicted in all regions loyal to him; a crusade was proclaimed against him and Enzio, and those who had taken the cross for the redemption of Palestine were granted all the privileges of crusaders if they joined the war against the infidel Emperor.

Surrendering to a fury of hatred and revenge, Frederick now burned all bridges behind him. He issued a “Reform Manifesto,” denouncing the clergy as “slaves to the world, drunk with self-indulgence; the increasing stream of their wealth has stifled their piety.”⁴⁶ In the Regno he confiscated the treasures of the Church to finance his war. When a town in Apulia led a conspiracy to capture him he had the ringleaders blinded, then mutilated, then killed. Receiving a call for help from his son Conrad, he set out for Germany; at Turin he learned that Parma had overthrown his garrison, that Enzio was in peril, and that all northern Italy, and even Sicily, were in revolt. He put down rebellion after rebellion in town after town; took hostages from each of them, and slew these men when their towns rebelled. Prisoners found to be messengers of the Pope had their hands and feet cut off; and Saracen soldiers, immune to Christian tears and threats, were used as executioners.⁴⁷

During the siege of Parma Frederick, impatient of inaction, went off with Enzio and fifty knights to hunt waterfowl in the neighboring marshes. While they were away the men and women of Parma came out in a desperate sortie, overwhelmed the disordered and leaderless forces of the Emperor, captured the Emperor’s treasury, his “harem,” and his menagerie. He levied heavy taxes, raised a new army, and resumed the struggle. Evidence was brought to him that his trusted premier, Piero delle Vigne, was conspiring to betray him; Frederick had him arrested and blinded; whereupon Piero beat his head against the wall of his jail till he died (1249). In that same year news came that Enzio had been captured by the Bolognese in battle at La Fossalta. About the same time Frederick’s doctor tried to poison him. The quick succession of these blows broke the spirit of the Emperor; he retired to Apulia, and took no further part in the war. In 1250 his generals won many successes, and the tide seemed to have turned. St. Louis, captured by Moslems in Egypt, demanded of Innocent IV an end to the war, so that Frederick might come to the Crusaders’ aid. But even as hope revived, the body failed. Dysentery, the humbling nemesis of medieval kings, struck the proud Emperor down. He asked for absolution, and received it; the freethinker donned the garb of a Cistercian monk, and died at Florentino on December 13, 1250. People whispered that his soul had been borne off by devils through the pit of Mt. Etna into hell.

His influence was not apparent; his empire soon collapsed, and a greater chaos ruled it than when he came. The unity for which he fought disappeared, even in Germany; and the Italian cities followed liberty, and its creative stimulus, through disorder to the piecemeal tyranny of dukes and condottieri who, hardly knowing it, inherited the unmorality of Frederick, his intellectual freedom, and his patronage of letters and arts. The virtù, or masculine unscrupulous intelligence, of the Renaissance despots was an echo of Frederick’s character and mind, without his grace and charm. The replacement of the Bible with the classics, of faith with reason, of God with Nature, of Providence with Necessity, appeared in the thought and court of Frederick, and, after an orthodox interlude, captured the humanists and philosophers of the Renaissance; Frederick was the “man of the Renaissance” a century before its time. Machiavelli’s Prince had Caesar Borgia in mind, but it was Frederick who had prepared its philosophy. Nietzsche had Bismarck and Napoleon in mind, but he acknowledged the influence of Frederick—“the first of Europeans according to my taste.”⁴⁸ Posterity, shocked by his morals, fascinated by his mind, and vaguely appreciating the grandeur of his imperial vision, applied to him again and again the epithets coined by Matthew Paris: stupor mundi et immutator mirabilis—“the marvelous transformer and wonder of the world.”

VI. THE DISMEMBERMENT OF ITALY

Frederick’s will left the Empire to his son Conrad IV, and appointed his illegitimate son Manfred regent of Italy. Revolts against Manfred broke out almost everywhere in Italy. Naples, Spoleto, Ancona, Florence submitted to papal legates; “let the heavens rejoice and the earth be glad!” exclaimed Innocent IV. The victorious Pope returned to Italy, made Naples his military headquarters, moved to annex the Regno to the Papal States, and planned a less direct suzerainty over the northern Italian towns. But these cities, while joining the Pope in his Te Deum, were resolved to defend their independence against pontiffs as well as emperors. Meanwhile Ezzelino and Uberto Pallavicino held several of the cities in fealty to Conrad; neither of these men had any respect for religion; heresy flourished under their rule; there was danger that all northern Italy would be lost to the Church. Suddenly young Conrad, with a fresh army of Germans, came down over the Alps, reconquered disaffected towns, and entered the Regno in triumph-only to die of malaria (May, 1254). Manfred assumed charge of the imperial forces, and routed a papal army near Foggia (December 2). Innocent was on his deathbed when the news of this defeat reached him; he died in despair (December 7), murmuring, “Lord, because of his iniquity Thou hast corrupted man.”

The rest of the tale is a brilliant chaos. Pope Alexander IV (1254–6) organized a crusade against Ezzelino; the tyrant was wounded and captured; he refused doctors, priests, and food, and died of self-starvation, impenitent and unshrived (1259). His brother Alberigo, likewise guilty of brutalities and crimes, was also captured, and was made to witness the torture of his family; then his flesh was torn from his body with pincers, and while he was still alive he was tied to a horse and dragged to death.⁴⁹ Christians and atheists alike now ran to savagery, except for the gay and charming bastard Manfred. Having defeated the papal troops again at Montaperto (1260), he remained for the next six years master of South Italy; he had time to hunt and sing and write poetry, and “had not his like in the world,” said Dante, “for playing of stringed instruments.”⁵⁰ Pope Urban IV (1261–4), despairing of finding in Italy a corrective for Manfred, and perceiving that the papacy must henceforth rely on France for protection, appealed to Louis IX to accept the Two Sicilies as a fief. Louis refused, but allowed his brother, Charles of Anjou, to receive from Urban the “kingdom of Naples and Sicily” (1264). Charles marched through Italy with 30,000 French troops, and routed Manfred’s lesser force; Manfred leaped amid the enemy and died a nobler death than his sire’s. In the following year a lad of fifteen, Conradin, son of Conrad, came down from Germany to challenge Charles; he was defeated at Tagliacozzo, and was publicly beheāded in the market square of Naples in 1268. With him, and the death of the long-imprisoned Enzio four years later, the House of Hohenstaufen reached a pitiful end; the Holy Roman Empire became a ceremonious ghost, and the leadership of Europe passed to France.

Charles made Naples his capital, established in the Two Sicilies a French nobility and bureaucracy, French soldiery, monks and priests, and ruled and taxed with a scornful absolutism that made the region long for a resurrected Frederick, and inclined Pope Clement IV to mourn the papal victory. On Easter Monday of 1282, as Charles was preparing to lead his fleet to conquer Constantinople, the populace of Palermo, their hatred unleashed by the insulting familiarity of a French gendarme with a Sicilian bride, rose in violent revolt and killed every Frenchman in the city. The accumulated bitterness may be judged from the savagery with which Sicilian men ripped open with their swords the wombs of Sicilian women made pregnant by French soldiers or officials, and trampled the alien embryos to death under their feet.⁵¹ Other cities followed Palermo’s lead, and over 3000 Frenchmen in Sicily were slaughtered in a massacre known as the “Sicilian Vespers” because it began at the hour of evening prayer. French ecclesiastics in the island were not spared; churches and convents were invaded by the normally pious Sicilians, and monks and priests were slain without benefit of clergy. Charles of Anjou swore “a thousand years” of revenge, and promised to leave Sicily “a blasted, barren, uninhabited rock”;⁵² Pope Martin IV excommunicated the rebels, and proclaimed a crusade against Sicily. Unable to defend themselves, the Sicilians offered their island to Pedro III of Aragon. Pedro came with an army and a fleet, and established the House of Aragon as kings of Sicily (1282). Charles made futile efforts to recapture the island; his fleet was destroyed; he died of exhaustion and chagrin at Foggia (1285); and his successors, after seventeen years of vain struggle, contented themselves with the kingdom of Naples.

North of Rome the Italian cities played Empire against papacy and maintained a heady liberty. At Milan the Delia Torre family ruled to the general satisfaction for twenty years; a coalition of nobles under Otto Visconti captured office in 1277, and the Visconti, as capitani or duci, gave Milan competent oligarchic government for 170 years. Tuscany—including Arezzo, Florence, Siena, Pisa, and Lucca—had been bequeathed to the papacy by the Countess Matilda (1107), but this theoretical papal tenure seldom interfered with the right of the cities to rule themselves, or to find their own despots.

Siena, like so many Tuscan towns, had a proud past, going back to Etruscan days. Ruined in the barbarian invasions, it revived in the eighth century as a midway stop on the road of pilgrimage and commerce between Florence and Rome. We hear of merchant guilds there in 1192, then of craft guilds, then of bankers. The House of Buonsignori, founded in 1209, became one of the leading mercantile and financial institutions in Europe; its agents were everywhere; its loans to merchants, cities, kings, and popes totaled an enormous sum. Florence and Siena contested the control of the Via Francesa that connected them; the two commercial cities fought exhausting wars with each other intermittently from 1207 to 1270; and as Florence supported the popes in the struggles between Empire and papacy, Siena supported the emperors. The victory of Manfred at Montaperto (1260) was chiefly a victory of Siena over Florence. The Sienese, though fighting against the pope, ascribed their success in that battle to their patron saint, the Virgin Mother of God. They gave Siena to Mary as a fief, placed the proud legend Civitas Virginis on their coins, and laid the keys of the city at the feet of the Virgin in the great cathedral which they had dedicated to her name. Every year they celebrated the feast of her Assumption into heaven with a solemn and stirring ceremony. On the eve of the festival all the citizens, from the age of eighteen to seventy, each holding a lighted candle, formed in procession, according to their parishes, behind their priests and their magistrates, marched to the duomo, and renewed their vows of fealty to the Virgin. On the feast day itself another procession came—of representatives from conquered or dependent cities, villages, and monasteries; these delegates too marched to the cathedral, brought gifts, and repeated their oath of allegiance, to the commune of Siena and its Queen. In the city square, Il Campo, a great fair was held on this day; goods from a hundred cities could be bought there; acrobats, singers, and musicians performed; and the booth provided for gambling was second in attendance only to Mary’s shrine.

The century from’ 1260 to 1360 saw the apogee of Siena. In those hundred years it built the cathedral (1245–1339), the massive Palazzo pubblico (1310–20), and the lovely campanile (1325–44). Niccolô Pisano carved a lordly fountain for the duomo in 1266; and by 1311 Duccio di Buoninsegna was adorning Sienese churches with some of the earliest masterpieces of Renaissance painting. But the proud city undertook more than it could finance. The victory of Montaperto was fatal to Siena; the defeated Pope laid an interdict upon the town, forbidding the entry of goods or the payment of debts; and many Sienese banks failed. In 1270 Charles of Anjou incorporated the chastened city into the Guelf (or Papal) League. Thereafter Siena was dominated and outshone by her ruthless rival in the north.

VII. THE RISE OF FLORENCE: 1095–1308

Florentia, named for its flowers, had begun some two centuries before Christ as a trading post on the Arno where it received the Mugnone. Ruined by the barbarian invasions, it recovered in the eighth century as a crossroads on the Via Francesa between France and Rome. Ready access to the Mediterranean encouraged maritime trade. Florence acquired a large mercantile fleet, which brought in dyes and silk from Asia, wool from England and Spain, and exported finished textiles to half the world. A zealously guarded trade secret enabled Florentine dyers to color silks and woolens in shades of beauty unsurpassed even in the long-skilled East. The great wool guilds—the Arte della Lana and the Arte de’ Calimala*—imported their own materials, and made lush profits in transforming them into finished goods. Most of the work was done in small factories, some of it in city or rural homes. The merchants provided the materials, collected the marketable product, and paid by the piece. The competition of home workers—chiefly women-kept factory wages low; the weavers were not allowed to take united action to raise their wages or better their working conditions; and they were forbidden to emigrate. To further promote discipline, the employers persuaded the bishops to issue pastoral letters, to be read from all pulpits four times a year, threatening with ecclesiastical censure, even excommunication, the worker who repeatedly wasted wool.⁵³

This industry and trade needed ready supplies of investment capital; and soon the bankers contested with the merchants the control of Florentine life. They acquired large estates through foreclosures; they became indispensable to the pope through financial control of ecclesiastical properties mortgaged to them; and in the thirteenth century they had almost a monopoly of papal finance in Italy.⁵⁴ The general alliance of Florence with the popes in their struggle against the emperors was motivated partly by this financial nexus, partly by fear of imperial and aristocratic encroachments upon municipal and mercantile liberties. The bankers were therefore the chief supporters of the papal party in Florence. It was they who financed the invasion of Italy by Charles of Anjou through a loan of 148,000 livres ($29,600,000) to Pope Urban IV. When Charles seized Naples the Florentine bankers, to secure repayment, were allowed to mint the coin and collect the taxes of the new kingdom, to monopolize the trade in armor, silk, wax, oil, and grain, and the supply of arms and provisions to the troops.⁵⁵ These Florentine bankers, if we may believe Dante, were not the polished manipulators of our age, but coarse and greedy buccaneers of lucre, who made fortunes by foreclosures and charged unconscionable interest on loans—like that Folco Portinari who fathered Dante’s Beatrice.⁵⁶ They spread their operations over a wide region. About 1277 we find two Florentine banking firms—the Brunelleschi and the Medici—controlling finance in Nîmes. The Florentine House of Franzesi financed the wars and intrigues of Philip IV; and from his reign Italian bankers dominated French finance till the seventeenth century. Edward I of England borrowed 200,000 gold florins ($2,160,000) from the Frescobaldi of Florence in 1295. Such loans were risky, and subjected the economic life of Florence to distant and apparently irrelevant events. A multiplication of political investments and governmental defaults, capped by the fall of Boniface VIII and the removal of the papacy to Avignon (1307), brought a series of bank failures to Italy, a general depression, and intensified class war.

Three classes divided the secular life of Florence: the popolo minuto or “little people”—shopkeepers and artisans; the popolo grasso or “fat people”—employers or businessmen; and the grandi or nobles. The artisans, grouped in arti minori or lesser guilds, were largely manipulated in politics by the masters, merchants, and financiers who filled the arti maggiori or major guilds. In the competition to control the government the “little” and the “fat” people united for a time as popolani against the nobles, who claimed ancient feudal dues from the city, and supported first the emperors and then the popes against municipal liberties. The popolani organized a militia in which every able-bodied resident of the city had to serve and to learn the arts of war; so prepared, they captured and demolished the castles of the nobles in the countryside, and forced the nobles to come and dwell within the city walls under municipal law. The nobles, still rich with rural rents, built palace-castles in the town, divided into factions, fought one another in the streets, and competed to see which faction should overthrow the limited democracy of Florence and set up an aristocratic constitution. In 1247 the Uberti faction led a Ghibelline revolt to establish in Florence a government favorable to Frederick; the popolani resisted bravely, but a detachment of German knights routed them, and the Florentine democracy fell. The leading Guelfs fled from the city; their homes were torn down in unforgetting revenge for their destruction of feudal castles a century before; thereafter each fluctuation of victory in the war of the classes and factions was celebrated by the exile of the defeated leaders and the confiscation or destruction of their property.⁵⁷ For three years the Ghibelline aristocracy, backed by a garrison of German soldiers, ruled the city; then, as an aftermath of Frederick’s death, a Guelf revolt of the middle and lower classes captured the government (1250), and appointed a capitano del popolo to check the podesta, as the ancient tribunes of the people had checked the consuls of Rome. The exiled Guelfs were recalled, and the triumphant bourgeoisie cemented its domestic success with wars against Pisa and Siena to control the road of Florentine commerce to the sea and to Rome. The richer merchants became a new nobility, and sought to confine state offices to their class.

The defeat of Florence at Montaperto by Siena and Manfred entailed a second flight of the Guelf leaders; and for six years Florence was ruled by Manfred’s delegates. The collapse of the imperial cause in 1268 brought the Guelfs back to power, nominally subject to Charles of Anjou. To control the podesta, who was an appointee of Charles, they established a body of twelve anziani (“ancients” or elders) to “advise” that official, and a Council of One Hundred “without whose sanction no important measure, nor any expenditure, is to be undertaken.”⁵⁸ Taking advantage of Charles’s preoccupation with the Sicilian Vespers, the bourgeoisie in 1282 put through a constitutional change by which a “Priory of the Arts,” composed of six priori (foremen) chosen from the greater guilds, became in effect the ruling body in the city government. Through all these mutations the office of podesta survived, but shorn of power; the merchants and the bankers were supreme.

The vanquished party of the old nobility reorganized itself under the handsome and haughty Corso Donati, and, for unknown reasons, received the name of Neri, the Blacks. The new nobility of bankers and merchants, led by the Cerchi family, took the name of Bianchi, the Whites. Hopeless of aid from the shattered Empire, the old nobility turned to the Pope for succor from the triumphant bourgeoisie. Through the Spini, his Florentine agents in Rome, Donati planned with Boniface VIII to capture control of Florence. The Tuscan factions had infected the Papal States, and Boniface despaired of restoring order there unless he should secure a decisive voice in the municipal governments of Tuscany.⁵⁹ A Florentine attorney learned of these negotiations, and accused three Spini agents in Rome of treason to Florence. The priori condemned the three men (April, 1300), whereupon the Pope threatened to excommunicate the accusers. A group of armed nobles of the Donati faction assaulted certain officers of the guilds. The Priory, of which Dante was now a member, exiled several nobles, in defiance of the Pope (June, 1300). Boniface appealed to Charles of Valois to enter Italy, subdue Florence, and recapture Sicily from Aragon.

Charles reached Florence in November, 1301, and announced that he had come only to establish order and peace. But soon thereafter Corso Donati entered the city with an armed band, sacked the houses of the priors who had banished him, threw open the prisons, and released not only his friends but all who cared to escape. Riot ran loose; nobles and criminals joined in robbing, kidnaping, killing; warehouses were plundered; heiresses were forced to marry impromptu suitors, and the fathers were compelled to sign rich settlements. Finally Corso turned out the priors and the podesta; the Blacks chose a new Priory, which submitted all its proposed measures to the Black leaders; for seven years Corso was the dashing dictator of Florence. The deposed priors were tried, condemned, and banished, including Dante (1302); 359 Whites were sentenced to death, but most of them were allowed to escape into exile. Charles of Valois accepted these events gracefully, and 24,000 florins ($4,800,000) for his trouble, and departed south. In 1304 the unchecked Blacks set fire to the homes of their enemies; 1400 houses were destroyed, leaving the center of Florence in ashes. The Blacks then divided into new factions, and in one of a hundred acts of violence Corso Donati was stabbed to death (1308).

We must remind ourselves again that the historian, like the journalist, is forever tempted to sacrifice the normal to the dramatic, and never quite conveys an adequate picture of any age. During these conflicts of popes and emperors, Guelfs and Ghibellines, Blacks and Whites, Italy was sustained by a hard-working peasantry; perhaps then, as now, Italian fields were cultivated with art as well as industry, and were divided and arranged to please the eye as well as feed the flesh. Hills and crags and mountains were carved and terraced to hold grapevines, fruit and nut orchards, and olive trees; and gardens were laboriously walled to check erosion and hold the precious rain. In the cities a hundred industries absorbed the great majority of men, and left little time for the strife of speeches, votes, knives, and swords. Merchants and bankers were not all merciless ghouls; they too, if only by their acquisitive fever, made the cities hum and grow. Nobles like Corso Donati, Guido Cavalcanti, Can Grande della Scala could be men of culture even if, now and then, they used their swords to make a point. Women moved with vibrant freedom in this high-spirited society; love was for them no wordy sham of troubadours, nor the grim fusion of sweating peasants, nor yet the service of a knight to a parsimonious goddess; it was a gallant and ardent amorousness leading with reckless despatch to a full-bodied abandonment and unpremeditated motherhood. Here and there, in this ferment, teachers maneuvered with desperate patience to insert instruction into reluctant youth; prostitutes eased the tumescence of imaginative men; poets distilled their foiled desire into compensatory verse; artists hungered while seeking perfection; priests played politics and consoled the bereaved and the poor; and philosophers struggled through a labyrinth of myths toward the bright mirage of truth. There was a stimulus in this society, an excitement and competition, that sharpened men’s wits and tongues, brought forth their reserve and unsuspected powers, and lured them, even if by their own destruction, to clear the way and set the stage for the Renaissance. Through many pains, and the shedding of blood, would come the great Rebirth.

CHAPTER XXVII

The Roman Catholic Church

1095–1294

I. THE FAITH OF THE PEOPLE

IN many aspects religion is the most interesting of man’s ways, for it is his ultimate commentary on life and his only defense against death. Nothing is more moving, in medieval history, than the omnipresence, almost at times the omnipotence, of religion. It is difficult for those who today live in comfort and plenty to go down in spirit into the chaos and penury that molded medieval faiths. But we must think of the superstitions, apocalypses, idolatry, and credulity of medieval Christians, Moslems, and Jews with the same sympathy with which we should think of their hardships, their poverty, and their griefs. The flight of thousands of men and women from “the world, the flesh, and the Devil” into monasteries and nunneries suggests not so much their cowardice as the extreme disorder, insecurity, and violence of medieval life. It seemed obvious that the savage impulses of men could be controlled only by a supernaturally sanctioned moral code. Then, above all, the world needed a creed that would balance tribulation with hope, soften bereavement with solace, redeem the prose of toil with the poetry of belief, cancel life’s brevity with continuance, and give an inspiring and ennobling significance to a cosmic drama that might else be a meaningless and intolerable procession of souls, species, and stars stumbling one by one into an inescapable extinction.

Christianity sought to meet these needs with a tremendous and epic conception of creation and human sin, of the Virgin Mother and the suffering God, of the immortal soul destined to face a Last Judgment, to be damned to everlasting hell, or to be saved for eternal bliss by a Church administering through her sacraments the divine grace earned by the Redeemer’s death. It was within this encompassing vision that most Christian lives moved and found their meaning. The greatest gift of medieval faith was the upholding confidence that right would win in the end, and that every seeming victory of evil would at last be sublimated in the universal triumph of the good.

The Last Judgment was the pivot of the Christian, as of the Jewish and the Moslem, faith. The belief in the Second Advent of Christ, and the end of the world, as preludes to the Judgment, had survived the disappointments of the apostles, the passing of the year 1000, and the fears and hopes of forty generations; it had become less vivid and general, but it had not died; “wise men,” said Roger Bacon in 1271, considered the end of the world to be near.¹ Every great epidemic or disaster, every earthquake or comet or other extraordinary event was looked upon as heralding the end of the world. But even if the world continued, the souls and bodies of the dead would be resurrected at once* to face their Judge.

Men hoped vaguely for heaven, but vividly feared hell. There was much tenderness in medieval Christianity, probably more than in any other religion in history, but the Catholic, like the early Protestant, theology and preaching, felt called upon to stress the terror of hell.† Christ was to this age no “gentle Jesus meek and mild,” but the stern avenger of every mortal sin. Nearly all churches showed some representation of Christ the Judge; many had pictures of the Last Judgment, and these portrayed the tortures of the damned more prominently than the bliss of the saved. St. Methodius, we are told, converted King Boris of Bulgaria by painting a picture of hell on the wall of the royal palace.⁴ Many mystics claimed to have had visions of hell, and described its geography and terror.⁵ The monk Tundale, in the twelfth century, reported exquisite details. In the center of hell, he said, the Devil was bound to a burning gridiron by red-hot chains; his screams of agony never ended; his hands were free, and reached out and seized the damned; his teeth crushed them like grapes; his fiery breath drew them down his burning throat. Assistant demons with hooks of iron plunged the bodies of the damned alternately into fire or icy water, or hung them up by the tongue, or sliced them with a saw, or beat them flat on an anvil, or boiled them or strained them through a cloth. Sulphur was mixed with the fire in order that a vile stench might be added to the discomforts of the damned; but the fire gave no light, so that a horrible darkness shrouded the incalculable diversity of pains.⁶ The Church herself gave no official location or description of hell; but she frowned upon men who, like Origen, doubted the reality of its material fires.⁷ The purpose of the doctrine would have been frustrated by its mitigation. St. Thomas Aquinas held that “the fire which will torment the bodies of the damned is corporeal,” and located hell in “the lowest part of the earth.”⁸

To common medieval imagination, and to such men as Gregory the Great, the Devil was no figure of speech but a life and blood reality, prowling about everywhere, suggesting temptations and creating all kinds of evil; he could usually be sent packing by a dash of holy water or the sign of the cross; but he left an awful odor of burning sulphur behind him. He was a great admirer of women, used their smiles and charms as bait to lure his victims, and occasionally won their favors—if the ladies themselves might be believed. So a woman of Toulouse admitted that she had frequently slept with Satan, and had, at the age of fifty-three, given birth, through his services, to a monster with a wolf’s head and a serpent’s tail.⁹ The Devil had an immense cohort of assistant demons, who hovered around every soul and persistently maneuvered to lead it into sin. They, too, liked to lie as “incubi” with careless or lonely or holy women.¹⁰ The monk Richalm described them as “filling the whole world; the whole air is but a thick mass of devils, always and everywhere in wait for us … it is marvelous that any one of us should be alive; were it not for God’s grace, no one of us could escape.”¹¹ Practically everybody, including the philosophers, believed in this multitude of demons; but a saving sense of humor tempered this demonology, and most healthy males looked upon the little devils rather as poltergeist mischief-makers than as objects of terror. Such demons, it was believed, intruded audibly but invisibly into conversations, cut holes in people’s garments, and threw dirt at passersby. One tired demon sat on a head of lettuce, and was inadvertently eaten by a nun.¹²

More alarming was the doctrine that “many are called but few are chosen” (Matt, xxii, 14). Orthodox theologians—Mohammedan as well as Christian —held that the vast majority of the human race would go to hell.¹³ Most Christian theologians took literally the statement ascribed to Christ: “He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned” (Mark xvi, 16). St. Augustine reluctantly concluded that infants dying before being baptized went to hell.¹⁴ St. Anselm thought that the damnation of unbaptized infants (vicariously guilty through the sin of Adam and Eve) was no more unreasonable than the slave status of children born to slaves—which he considered reasonable.¹⁵ The Church softened the doctrine by teaching that unbaptized infants went not to hell but to limbo—Infernus puerorum—where their only suffering was the pain of the loss of paradise.¹⁶ Most Christians believed that all Moslems—and most Moslems (Mohammed excepted) believed that all Christians—would go to hell; and it was generally accepted that all “heathen” were damned.¹⁷ The Fourth Lateran Council (1215) declared that no man could be saved outside the Universal Church.¹⁸ Pope Gregory IX condemned as heresy Raymond Lully’s hope that “God hath such love for His people that almost all men will be saved, since, if more were damned than saved, Christ’s mercy would be without great love.”¹⁹ No other prominent churchman allowed himself to believe—or say—that the saved would outnumber the damned.²⁰ Berthold of Regensburg, one of the most famous and popular preachers of the thirteenth century, reckoned the proportion of the damned to the saved as a hundred thousand to one.²¹ St. Thomas Aquinas thought that “in this also doth God’s mercy chiefly appear, that He raiseth a few to that salvation wherefrom very many fail.”²² Volcanoes were supposed by many to be the mouths of hell; their rumbling was a faint echo of the moans of the damned;²³ and Gregory the Great argued that the crater of Etna was daily widening to receive the enormous number of souls that were fated to be damned.²⁴ The congested bowels of the earth held in their hot embrace the great majority of all the human beings that had ever been born. From that hell there would be no respite nor escape through all eternity. Said Berthold: Count the sands of the seashore, or the hairs that have grown on man or beast since Adam; reckon a year of torment for each grain or hair, and that span of time would hardly represent the beginning of the agony of the condemned.²⁵ The last moment of a man’s life was decisive for all eternity; and the fear that that final moment might find one sinful and unshrived lay heavy on men’s souls.

These terrors were in some careful measure mitigated by the doctrine of purgatory. Prayers for the dead were a custom as old as the Church; penances undergone, and Masses said, to aid the dead, can be traced as far back as 250.²⁶ Augustine had discussed the possibility of a place of purging punishment for sins forgiven but not fully atoned for before death. Gregory I had approved the idea, and had suggested that the pains of souls in purgatory might be shortened and softened by the prayers of their living friends.²⁷ The theory did not fully capture popular belief till Peter Damian, about 1070, gave it the afflatus of his fevered eloquence. In the twelfth century it was advanced by the spread of a legend that St. Patrick, to convince some doubters, had allowed a pit to be dug in Ireland, into which several monks descended; some returned, said the tale, and described purgatory and hell with discouraging vividness. The Irish knight Owen claimed to have gone down through that pit into hell in 1153; and his account of his nether experiences had a prodigious success.²⁸ Tourists came from afar to visit this pit; financial abuses developed; and Pope Alexander VI, in 1497, ordered it closed as an imposture.²⁹

What proportion of the people in medieval Christendom accepted the doctrines of Christianity? We hear of many heretics, but most of these admitted the basic tenets of the Christian creed. At Orléans in 1017 two men, “among the worthiest in lineage and learning,” denied creation, the Trinity, heaven, and hell as “mere ravings.”³⁰ John of Salisbury, in the twelfth century, tells of hearing many persons talk “otherwise than faith may hold”;³¹ in that century, says Villani, there were at Florence epicureans who scoffed at God and the saints, and lived “according to the flesh.”³² Giraldus Cambrensis (1146?-1220) tells of an unnamed priest who, reproved by another for careless celebration of the Mass, asked whether his critic really believed in transubstantiation, the Incarnation, the Virgin Birth, and resurrection-adding that all this had been invented by cunning ancients to hold men in terror and restraint, and was now carried on by hypocrites.³³ The same Gerald of Wales quotes the scholar Simon of Tournai (c. 1201) as crying out, one day, “Almighty God! how long will this superstitious sect of Christians, and this upstart invention endure?”³⁴ Of this Simon the story is told that in a lecture he proved by ingenious arguments the doctrine of the Trinity, and then, elated by the applause of his audience, boasted that he could disprove the doctrine with yet stronger arguments; whereupon, we are told, he was immediately stricken with paralysis and idiocy.³⁵ About 1200 Peter, Prior of Holy Trinity in Aldgate, London, wrote: “There are some who believe that there is no God, and that the world is ruled by chance…. There are many who believe neither in good or evil angels, nor in life after death, nor in any other spiritual and invisible thing.”³⁶ Vincent of Beauvais (1200?-64) mourned that many “derided visions and stories” (of the saints) “as vulgar fables or lying inventions,” and added, “We need not wonder if such tales get no credence from men who believe not in hell.”³⁷

The doctrine of hell stuck in many throats. Some simple souls asked “why God had created the Devil if He foresaw Satan’s sin and fall?”³⁸ Skeptics argued that God could not be so cruel as to punish finite sin with infinite pain; to which the theologians answered that a mortal sin was an offense against God, and therefore involved infinite guilt. A weaver of Toulouse, in 1247, remained unconvinced. “If,” he said, “I could lay hold on that god who, out of a thousand men whom he has made, saves one and damns all the rest, I would tear and rend him tooth and nail as a traitor, and would spit in his face.”³⁹ Other skeptics argued more genially that hell-fire must in time calcine the soul and body to insensitivity, so that “he who is used to hell is as comfortable there as anywhere else.”⁴⁰ The old joke about hell having more interesting company than heaven appears in the French idyl of Aucassin et Nicolette (c. 1230).⁴¹ Priests complained that most people put off thought of hell to their deathbed, confident that however sinful their lives, “three words” (ego te absolvo) “will save me.”⁴²

Apparently there were village atheists then as now. But village atheists leave few memorials behind them; and the literature that has come down from the Middle Ages was largely composed by churchmen, or was largely screened by ecclesiastical selection. We shall find “wandering scholars” composing irreverent poetry, rough burghers swearing the most blasphemous oaths; people sleeping and snoring,⁴³ even dancing⁴⁴ and whoring,⁴⁵ in church; and “more lechery, gluttony, murder, and robbery in the Sunday” (said a friar) “than reigned all the week before.”⁴⁶ Such items, suggesting a lack of real faith, might be multiplied by heaping up instances from a hundred countries and a thousand years on one page; they serve to warn us against exaggerating medieval piety; but the Middle Ages still convey to the student a pervasive atmosphere of religious practices and beliefs. Every European state took Christianity under its protection, and enforced submission to the Church by law. Nearly every king loaded the Church with gifts.

Nearly every event in history was interpreted in religious terms. Every incident in the Old Testament prefigured something in the New; in vetere testamento, said Augustine, novum latet, in novo vetus patet; e.g., said the great Bishop, David watching Bathsheba bathing symbolized Christ beholding His Church cleansing herself from the pollution of the world.⁴⁷ Everything natural was a supernatural sign. Every part of a church, said Guillaume Durand (1237?-96), Bishop of Mende, has a religious meaning: the portal is Christ, through whom we enter heaven; the pillars are the bishops and doctors who uphold the Church; the sacristy, where the priest puts on his vestments, is the womb of Mary, where Christ put on human flesh.⁴⁸ Every beast, to this mood, had a theological significance. “When a lioness gives birth to a cub,” says a typical medieval bestiary, “she brings it forth dead, and watches over it three days, until the father, coming on the third day, breathes upon its face and brings it to life. So the Father Almighty raised His Son Our Lord Jesus Christ from the dead.”⁴⁹

The people welcomed, and for the most part generated, a hundred thousand tales of supernatural events, powers, and cures. An English urchin tried to steal some pigeon fledglings from a nest; his hand miraculously adhered to the stone upon which he tamed; only three days of prayer by the community released him.⁵⁰ A child offered bread to the sculptured Infant of a Nativity shrine; the Christ Babe thanked it, and invited it to paradise; three days later the child died.⁵¹ A “certain lecherous priest wooed a woman. Unable to win her consent, he kept the most pure Body of the Lord in his mouth after Mass, hoping that if he thus kissed her she would be bent to his desire by the force of the Sacrament…. But when he would fain have gone forth from the church he seemed to himself to grow so huge that he struck his head against the ceiling.” He buried the wafer in a corner of the church; later he confessed to another priest; they dug up the wafer, and found it had turned into the blood-stained figure of a crucified man.⁵² A woman kept the sacred wafer in her mouth from church to home, and placed it in a hive to reduce mortality among the bees; these built “for their most sweet Guest, out of their sweetest honeycombs, a tiny chapel of marvelous workmanship.”⁵³ Pope Gregory I filled his works with stories of this kind. Perhaps the people, or the literate among them, took such tales with a grain of salt, or as pleasant fiction no worse than the wondrous narratives wherewith our presidents and kings relax their burdened brains; credulity may have changed its field rather than its scope. There is a touching faith in many of these medieval legends: so, when the beloved Pope Leo IX returned to Italy from his tour of reform in France and Germany, the river Aniene divided like the Red Sea to let him pass.⁵⁴

The power of Christianity lay in its offering to the people faith rather than knowledge, art rather than science, beauty rather than truth. Men preferred it so. They suspected that no one could answer their questions; it was prudent, they felt, to take on faith the replies given with such quieting authoritativeness by the Church; they would have lost confidence in her had she ever admitted her fallibility. Perhaps they distrusted knowledge as the bitter fruit of a wisely forbidden tree, a mirage that would lure man from the Eden of simplicity and an undoubting life. So the medieval mind, for the most part, surrendered itself to faith, trusted in God and the Church, as modern man trusts in science and the state. “You cannot perish,” said Philip Augustus to his sailors in a midnight storm, “for at this moment thousands of monks are rising from their beds, and will soon be praying for us.”⁵⁵ Men believed that they were in the hands of a power greater than any human knowledge could give. In Christendom, as in Islam, they surrendered to God; and even amid profanity, violence, and lechery, they sought Him and salvation. It was a God-intoxicated age.

II. THE SACRAMENTS

Next to the determination of the faith, the greatest power of the Church lay in the administration of the sacraments—ceremonies symbolizing the conferment of divine grace. “In no religion,” said St. Augustine, “can men be held together unless they are united in some sort of fellowship through visible symbols or sacraments.”⁵⁶ Sacramentum was applied in the fourth century to almost anything sacred—to baptism, the cross, prayer; in the fifth century Augustine applied it to the celebration of Easter; in the seventh century Isidore of Seville restricted it to baptism, confirmation, and the Eucharist. In the twelfth century the sacraments were finally fixed at seven: baptism, confirmation, penance, the Eucharist, matrimony, holy orders, and extreme unction. Minor ceremonies conferring divine grace—like sprinkling with holy water, or the sign of the cross—were distinguished as “sacramentals.”

The most vital sacrament was baptism. It had two functions: to remove the stain of original sin, and, by this new birth, to formally receive the individual into the Christian fold. At this ceremony the parents were expected to give the child the name of a saint who was to be its patron, model, and protector; this was its “Christian name.” By the ninth century the early Christian method of baptism by total immersion had been gradually replaced by aspersion—sprinkling—as less dangerous to health in northern climes. Any priest—or, in emergency, any Christian—could confer baptism. The old custom of deferring baptism to the later years of life had now been replaced by infant baptism. In some congregations, especially in Italy, a special chapel, the baptistery, was constructed for this sacrament.

In the Eastern Church the sacraments of confirmation and Eucharist were conferred immediately after baptism; in the Western Church the age of confirmation was gradually postponed to the seventh year, in order that the child might learn the essentials of the Christian faith. It was administered only by a bishop, with a “laying on of hands,” a prayer that the Holy Ghost would enter the candidate, an anointing of the forehead with chrism, and a slight blow on the cheek; so, as in the dubbing of a knight, the young Christian was confirmed in his faith, and was sworn by implication into all the rights and duties of a Christian.

More important was the sacrament of penance. If the doctrines of the Church inculcated a sense of sin, she offered means of periodically cleansing the soul by confessing one’s sins to a priest and performing the assigned penances. According to the Gospel (Matt. xvi, 19; xviii, 18), Christ had forgiven sins, and had endowed the apostles with a similar power to “bind and loose.” This power, said the Church, had descended by apostolic succession from the apostles to the early bishops, from Peter to the popes; and in the twelfth century the “power of the keys” was extended by bishops to the priests. The public confession practiced in primitive Christianity had been replaced in the fourth century by private confession, to spare embarrassment to dignitaries, but public confession survived in some heretical sects, and a public penance might be imposed for such monstrous crimes as the massacre of Thessalonica or the murder of Becket. The Fourth Council of the Lateran (1215) made annual confession and communion a solemn obligation, whose neglect was to exclude the offender from church services and Christian burial. To encourage and protect the penitent a “seal” was placed upon every private confession: no priest was allowed to reveal what had been so confessed. From the eighth century onward “Penitentials” were published, prescribing canonical (ecclesiastically authorized) penances for each sin-prayers, fasts, pilgrimage, almsgiving, or other works of piety or charity.

“This wondrous institution,” as Leibniz called the sacrament of penance,⁵⁷ had many good effects. It gave the penitent relief from secret and neurotic broodings of remorse; it allowed the priest to improve by counsel and warnings the moral and physical health of his flock; it comforted the sinner with the hope of reform; it served, said the skeptical Voltaire, as a restraint upon crime;⁵⁸ “auricular confession,” said Goethe, “should never have been taken from mankind.”⁵⁹ There were some bad effects. Sometimes the institution was used for political purposes, as when priests refused absolution to those who sided with the emperors against the popes;⁶⁰ occasionally it was used as a means of inquisition, as when St. Charles Borromeo (1538–84), Archbishop of Milan, instructed his priests to demand of penitents the names of any heretics or suspects known to them;⁶¹ and some simple souls mistook absolution as license to sin again. As the fervor of faith cooled, the severe canonical penances tempted penitents to lie, and priests were permitted to substitute lighter penalties, usually some charitable contribution to a cause approved by the Church. From these “commutations” grew indulgences.

An indulgence was not a license to commit sin, but a partial or plenary exemption, granted by the Church, from some or all of the purgatorial punishment merited by earthly sin. Absolution in confession removed from sin the guilt that would have condemned the sinner to hell, but it did not absolve him from the “temporal” punishment due to his sin. Only a small minority of Christians completely atoned on earth for their sins; the balance of atonement would be exacted in purgatory. The Church claimed the right to remit such punishments by transmitting to any Christian penitent who performed stipulated works of piety or charity a fraction of the rich treasury of grace earned by Christ’s sufferings and death, and by saints whose merits outweighed their sins. Indulgences had been granted as far back as the ninth century; some were given in the eleventh century to pilgrims visiting sacred shrines; the first plenary indulgence was that which Urban II offered in 1095 to those who would join the First Crusade. From these uses the custom arose of giving indulgences for repeating certain prayers, attending special religious services, building bridges, roads, churches, or hospitals, clearing forests or draining swamps, contributing to a crusade, to an ecclesiastical institution, to a Church jubilee, to a Christian war…. The system was put to many good uses, but it opened doors to human cupidity. The Church commissioned certain ecclesiastics, usually friars, as quaestiarii to raise funds by offering indulgences in return for gifts, repentance, and prayer. These solicitors—whom the English called “pardoners”—developed a competitive zeal that scandalized many Christians; they exhibited real or false relics to stimulate contributions; and they kept for themselves a due or undue part of their receipts. The Church made several efforts to reduce these abuses. The Fourth Lateran Council ordered bishops to warn the faithful against false relics and forged credentials; it ended the right of abbots, and limited that of bishops, to issue indulgences; and it called upon all ecclesiastics to exercise moderation in their zeal for the new device. In 1261 the Council of Mainz denounced many quaestiarii as wicked liars, who displayed the stray bones of men or beasts as those of saints, trained themselves to weep on order, and offered purgatorial bargains for a maximum of coin and a minimum of prayer.⁶² Similar condemnations were issued by church councils at Vienne (1311) and Ravenna (1317).⁶³ The abuses continued.

Next to baptism the most vital sacrament was the Eucharist, or Holy Communion. The Church took literally the words ascribed to Christ at the Last Supper: of the bread, “this is my body”; and of the wine, “this is my blood.” The main feature of the Mass was the “transubstantiation” of wafers of bread and a chalice of wine into the body and blood of Christ by the miraculous power of the priest; and the original purpose of the Mass was to allow the faithful to partake of the “body and blood, soul and divinity,” of the Second Person of the Triune God by eating the consecrated Host and drinking the consecrated wine. As the drinking of the transubstantiated wine risked spilling the blood of Christ, the custom arose in the twelfth century of communicating through taking only the Host; and when some conservatives (whose views were later adopted by the Hussites of Bohemia) demanded communion in both forms to make sure that they received the blood as well as the body of the Lord, theologians explained that the blood of Christ was “concomitant” with His body in the bread, and His body was “concomitant” with His blood in the wine.⁶⁴ A thousand marvels were told of the power of the consecrated Host to cast out devils, cure disease, stop fires, and detect perjury by choking liars.⁶⁵ Every Christian was required to communicate at least once a year; and the First Communion of the young Christian was made an occasion of solemn pageantry and happy celebration.

The doctrine of the Real Presence developed slowly; its first official formulation was by the Council of Nicaea in 787. In 855 a French Benedictine monk, Ratramnus, taught that the consecrated bread and wine were only spiritually, not carnally, the body and blood of Christ. About 1045 Berengar, Archdeacon of Tours, questioned the reality of transubstantiation; he was excommunicated; and Lanfranc, Abbot of Bec, wrote a reply to him (1063), stating the orthodox doctrine:

We believe that the earthly substance … is, by the ineffable, incomprehensible … operation of heavenly power, converted into the essence of the Lord’s body, while the appearance, and certain other qualities, of the same realities remain behind, in order that men should be spared the shock of perceiving raw and bloody things, and that believers should receive the fuller rewards of faith. Yet at the same time the same body of the Lord is in heaven … inviolate, entire, without contamination or injury.⁶⁶

The doctrine was proclaimed as an essential dogma of the Church by the Lateran Council of 1215; and the Council of Trent in 1560 added that every particle of the consecrated wafer, no matter how broken, contains the whole body, blood, and soul of Jesus Christ. Thus one of the oldest ceremonies of primitive religion—the eating of the god—is widely practiced and revered in European and American civilization today.

By making matrimony a sacrament, a sacred vow, the Church immensely raised the dignity and permanence of the marriage bond. In the sacrament of holy orders the bishop conferred upon the new priest some of the spiritual powers inherited from the apostles and presumably given to these by God Himself in the person of Christ. And in the final sacrament—extreme unction —the priest heard the confession of the dying Christian, gave him the absolution that saved him from hell, and anointed his members so that they might be cleansed of sin and fit for resurrection before his Judge. His survivors gave him Christian burial instead of pagan cremation, because the Church held that the body too would rise from the dead. They wrapped him in his shroud, placed a coin in his coffin as if for Charon’s ferriage,^66a and bore him to his grave with solemn and costly ceremony. Mourners might be hired to weep and wail; the relatives put on black garments for a year; and no one could tell, from grief so long sustained, that a contrite heart and a ministering priest had won for the departed the pledge of paradise.

III. PRAYER

In every great religion ritual is as necessary as creed. It instructs, nourishes, and often begets, belief; it brings the believer into comforting contact with his god; it charms the senses and the soul with drama, poetry, and art; it binds individuals into fellowship and a community by persuading them to share in the same rites, the same songs, the same prayers, at last the same thoughts.

The oldest Christian prayers were the Pater noster and the Credo; toward the end of the twelfth century the tender and intimate Ave Maria began to take form; and there were poetic litanies of praise and supplication. Some medieval prayers verged on magic incantations to elicit miracles; some ran to an importunate iteration that desperately overruled Christ’s ban on “vain repetitions.”⁶⁷ Monks and nuns, and later the laity, from an Oriental custom brought in by Crusaders,⁶⁸ gradually developed the rosary. As this was made popular by Dominican monks, so the Franciscans popularized the Via Crucis, or Way or Stations of the Cross, by which the worshiper recited prayers before each of fourteen pictures or tableaux representing stages in the Passion of Christ. Priests, monks, nuns, and some laymen sang or recited the “canonical hours”—prayers, readings, psalms, and hymns formulated by Benedict and others, and gathered into a breviarium by Alcuin and Gregory VII. Every day and night, at intervals of some three hours, and from a million chapels and hearths, these conspiring prayers besieged the sky. Pleasant must have been their music to homes within their hearing; dulcis cantilena divini cultus, said Ordericus. Vitalis, quae corda fidelium mitigat ac laetificat—“sweet is the song of the divine worship, which comforts the hearts of the faithful, and makes them glad.”⁶⁹

The official prayers of the Church were often addressed to God the Father; a few appealed to the Holy Ghost; but the prayers of the people were addressed mostly to Jesus, Mary, and the saints. The Almighty was feared; He still carried, in popular conception, much of the severity that had come down from Yahveh; how could a simple sinner dare to take his prayer to so awful and distant a throne? Jesus was closer, but He too was God, and one hardly ventured to speak to Him face to face after so thoroughly ignoring His Beatitudes. It seemed wiser to lay one’s prayer before a saint certified by canonization to be in heaven, and to beg his or her intercession with Christ. All the poetic and popular polytheism of antiquity rose from the never dead past, and filled Christian worship with a heartening communion of spirits, a brotherly nearness of earth to heaven, redeeming the faith of its darker elements. Every nation, city, abbey, church, craft, soul, and crisis of life had its patron saint, as in pagan Rome it had had a god. England had St. George, France had St. Denis. St. Bartholomew was the protector of the tanners because he had been flayed alive; St. John was invoked by candlemakers because he had been plunged into a caldron of burning oil; St. Christopher was the patron of porters because he had carried Christ on his shoulders; Mary Magdalen received the petitions of perfumers because she had poured aromatic oils upon the Saviour’s feet. For every emergency or ill men had a friend in the skies. St. Sebastian and St. Roch were mighty in time of pestilence. St. Apollinia, whose jaw had been broken by the executioner, healed the toothache; St. Blaise cured sore throat. St. Corneille protected oxen, St. Gall chickens, St. Anthony pigs. St. Médard was for France the saint most frequently solicited for rain; if he failed to pour, his impatient worshipers, now and then, threw his statue into the water, perhaps as suggestive magic.⁷⁰

The Church arranged an ecclesiastical calendar in which every day celebrated a saint; but the year did not find room for the 25,000 saints that had been canonized by the tenth century. The calendar of saints was so familiar to the people that the almanac divided the agricultural year by their names. In France the feast of St. George was the day for sowing. In England St. Valentine’s Day marked the winter’s end; on that happy day birds (they said) coupled fervently in the woods, and youths put flowers on the window sills of the girls they loved. Many saints received canonization through the insistent worship of their memory by the people or the locality, sometimes against ecclesiastical resistance. Images of the saints were set up in churches and public squares, on buildings and roads, and received a spontaneous worship that scandalized some philosophers and Iconoclasts. Bishop Claudius of Turin complained that many folk “worship images of saints; … they have not abandoned idols, but only changed their names.”⁷¹ In this matter, at least, the will and need of the people created the form of the cult.

With so many saints there had to be many relics—their bones, hair, clothing, and anything that they had used. Every altar was expected to cover one or more such sacred memorials. The basilica of St. Peter boasted the bodies of Peter and Paul, which made Rome the chief goal of European pilgrimage. A church in St. Omer claimed to have bits of the True Cross, of the lance that had pierced Christ, of His cradle and His tomb, of the manna that had rained from heaven, of Aaron’s rod, of the altar on which St. Peter had said Mass, of the hair, cowl, hair shirt, and tonsure shavings of Thomas à Becket, and of the original stone tablets upon which the Ten Commandments had been traced by the very finger of God.⁷² The cathedral of Amiens enshrined the head of St. John the Baptist in a silver cup.⁷³ The abbey of St. Denis housed the crown of thorns and the body of Dionysius the Areopagite. Each of three scattered churches in France professed to have a complete corpse of Mary Magdalen;⁷⁴ and five churches in France vowed that they held the one authentic relic of Christ’s circumcision.⁷⁵ Exeter Cathedral showed parts of the candle that the angel of the Lord used to light the tomb of Jesus, and fragments of the bush from which God spoke to Moses.⁷⁶ Westminster Abbey had some of Christ’s blood, and a piece of marble bearing the imprint of His foot.⁷⁷ A monastery at Durham displayed one of St. Lawrence’s joints, the coals that had burned him, the charger on which the head of the Baptist had been presented to Herod, the Virgin’s shirt, and a rock marked with drops of her milk.⁷⁸ The churches of Constantinople, before 1204, were especially rich in relics; they had the lance that had pierced Christ and was still red with His blood, the rod that had scourged Him, many pieces of the True Cross enshrined in gold, the “sop of bread” given to Judas at the Last Supper, some hairs of the Lord’s beard, the left arm of John the Baptist….⁷⁹ In the sack of Constantinople many of these relics were stolen, some were bought, and they were peddled in the West from church to church to find the highest bidder. All relics were credited with supernatural powers, and a hundred thousand tales were told of their miracles. Men and women eagerly sought even the slightest relic, or relic of a relic, to wear as a magic talisman—a thread from a saint’s robe, some dust from a reliquary, a drop of oil from a sanctuary lamp in the shrine. Monasteries vied and disputed with one another in gathering relics and exhibiting them to generous worshipers, for the possession of famous relics made the fortune of an abbey or a church. The “translation” of the bones of Thomas à Becket to a new chapel in the cathedral of Canterbury (1220) drew from the attending worshipers a collection valued at $300,000 today.⁸⁰ So profitable a businessmen-listed many practitioners; thousands of spurious relics were sold to churches and individuals; and monasteries were tempted to “discover” new relics when in need of funds. The culmination of abuse was the dismemberment of dead saints so that several places might enjoy their patronage and power.⁸¹

It is to the credit of the secular clergy, and of most monasteries, that while fully accepting the miraculous efficacy of genuine saintly relics, they discountenanced, and often denounced, the excesses of this popular fetishism. Some monks, seeking privacy for their devotions, resented the miracles wrought by their relics; at Grammont the abbot appealed to the remains of St. Stephen to stop his wonder-working, which was luring noisy crowds; “otherwise,” he threatened, “we will throw your bones into the river.”⁸² It was the people, not the Church, that took the lead in creating or swelling the legends of relic miracles; and the Church in many cases warned the public to discredit the tales.⁸³ In 386 an imperial decree presumably requested by the Church forbade the “carrying about or sale of” the remains of “martyrs”; St. Augustine complained of “hypocrites in the garb of monks” who “trade in members of martyrs, if martyrs they be”; and Justinian repeated the edict of 386.⁸⁴ About 1119 Abbot Guibert of Nogent wrote a treatise On the Relics of Saints, calling a halt to the relic craze. Many of the relics, he says, are of “saints celebrated in worthless records”; some “abbots, enticed by the multitude of gifts brought in, suffered the fabrication of false miracles.” “Old wives and herds of base wenches chant the lying legends of patron saints at their looms … and if a man refute their words they will attack him … with their distaffs.” The clergy, he notes, have rarely the heart or courage to protest; and he confesses that he too held his peace when relic-mongers offered to eager believers “some of that very bread which Our Lord pressed with His own teeth”; for “I should rightly be condemned for a madman if I should dispute with madmen.”⁸⁵ He observes that several churches have complete heads of St. John the Baptist, and marvels at the hydra heads of that undecapitable saint.⁸⁶ Pope Alexander III (1179) forbade monasteries to carry their relics about seeking contributions; the Lateran Council of 1215 prohibited the display of relics outside their shrines;⁸⁷ and the Second Council of Lyons (1274) condemned the “debasement” of relics and images.⁸⁸

In general the Church did not so much encourage superstitions as inherit them from the imagination of the people or the traditions of the Mediterranean world. The belief in miracle-working objects, talismans, amulets, and formulas was as dear to Islam as to Christianity, and both religions had received these beliefs from pagan antiquity. Ancient forms of phallic worship lingered far into the Middle Ages, but were gradually abolished by the Church.⁸⁹ The worship of God as Lord of Hosts and King of Kings inherited Semitic and Roman ways of approach, veneration, and address; the incense burnt before altar or clergy recalled the old burnt offerings; aspersion with holy water was an ancient form of exorcism; processions and lustrations continued immemorial rites; the vestments of the clergy and the papal title of pontifex maximus were legacies from pagan Rome. The Church found that rural converts still revered certain springs, wells, trees, and stones; she thought it wiser to bless these to Christian use than to break too sharply the customs of sentiment. So a dolmen at Plouaret was consecrated as the chapel of the Seven Saints, and the worship of the oak was sterilized by hanging images of Christian saints upon the trees.⁹⁰ Pagan festivals dear to the people, or necessary as cathartic moratoriums on morality, reappeared as Christian feasts, and pagan vegetation rites were transformed into Christian liturgy. The people continued to light midsummer fires on St. John’s Eve, and the celebration of Christ’s resurrection took the pagan name of Eostre, the old Teutonic goddess of the spring. The Christian calendar of the saints replaced the Roman fasti; ancient divinities dear to the people were allowed to revive under the names of Christian saints; the Dea Victoria of the Basses-Alpes became St. Victoire, and Castor and Pollux were reborn as Sts. Cosmas and Damian.

The finest triumph of this tolerant spirit of adaptation was the sublimation of the pagan mother-goddess cults in the worship of Mary. Here too the people took the initiative. In 431 Cyril, Archbishop of Alexandria, in a famous sermon at Ephesus, applied to Mary many of the terms fondly ascribed by the pagans of Ephesus to their “great goddess” Artemis-Diana; and the Council of Ephesus in that year, over the protests of Nestorius, sanctioned for Mary the title “Mother of God.” Gradually the tenderest features of Astarte, Cybele, Artemis, Diana, and Isis were gathered together in the worship of Mary. In the sixth century the Church established the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin into heaven, and assigned it to August 13, the date of ancient festivals of Isis and Artemis.⁹¹ Mary became the patron saint of Constantinople and the imperial family; her picture was carried at the head of every great procession, and was (and is) hung in every church and home in Greek Christendom. Probably it was the Crusades that brought from the East to the West a more intimate and colorful worship of the Virgin.⁹²

The Church herself did not encourage Mariolatry. The Fathers had recommended Mary as an antidote to Eve; but their general hostility to woman as “the weaker vessel” and the source of most temptations to sin; the timid flight of monks from women; the tirades of preachers against the charms and foibles of the sex—these could hardly have led to the intense and ecumenical adoration of Mary. It was the people who created the fairest flower of the medieval spirit, and made Mary the most beloved figure in history. The population of a recovering Europe could no longer accept the stern picture of a god damning the majority of his creatures to hell; and of their own accord the people softened the terrors of the theologians with the pity of the Mother of Christ. They would approach Jesus—still too sublime and just—through her who refused no one, and whom her Son could not refuse. A youth, says Caesarius of Heisterbach (1230), was persuaded by Satan, on the promise of great wealth, to deny Christ, but could not be induced to deny Mary; when he repented, the Virgin persuaded Christ to forgive him. The same monk tells of a Cistercian lay brother who was heard to pray to Christ: “Lord, if Thou free me not from this temptation, I will complain of Thee to Thy mother.”⁹³ Men prayed so much to the Virgin that popular fancy pictured Jesus as jealous; to one who had deluged heaven with Ave Marias He appeared (says a pretty legend), and gently reproached him: “My mother thanks you much for all the salutations you make to her, but still you should not forget to salute me too.”⁹⁴ Just as the sternness of Yahveh had necessitated Christ, so the justice of Christ needed Mary’s mercy to temper it. In effect the Mother—the oldest figure in religious worship—became, as Mohammed had prophetically misconceived her, the third person of a new Trinity. Everyone joined in her love and praise: rebels like Abélard bowed to her; satirists like Rutebeuf, roistering skeptics like the wandering scholars, never ventured one irreverent word about her; knights vowed themselves to her service, and cities gave her their keys; the rising bourgeoisie saw in her the sanctifying symbol of motherhood and the family; the rough men of the guilds—even the blaspheming heroes of barracks and battlefields—vied with peasant maidens and bereaved mothers in bringing their prayers and gifts to her feet.⁹⁵ The most passionate poetry of the Middle Ages was the litany that in mounting fervor proclaimed her glory and besought her aid. Images of her rose everywhere, even at street corners, at crossroads, and in the fields. Finally, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, in the noblest birth of religious feeling in history, the poor and the rich, the humble and the great, the clergy and the laity, the artists and the artisans devoted their savings and their skills to honor her in a thousand cathedrals nearly all dedicated to her name, or having as their chief splendor some Lady Chapel set aside as her shrine.

A new religion had been created, and perhaps Catholicism survived by absorbing it. A Gospel of Mary took form, uncanonical, incredible, and indescribably charming. The people begot the legends, the monks wrote them down. So The Golden Legend told how a widow surrendered her only son to her country’s call; the youth was captured by the enemy; the widow prayed daily to the Virgin to redeem and restore her son; when many weeks passed without response, the woman stole the sculptured Child from the Virgin’s arms and hid Him in her home; whereupon the Virgin opened the prison, released the youth, and bade him: “Tell your mother, my child, to return me my Son now that I have returned hers.”⁹⁶ About 1230 a French prior, Gaultier de Coincy, gathered the Mary legends into a tremendous poem of 30,000 lines. Therein we find the Virgin curing a sick monk by having him suck milk from her douce mamelle; a robber who always prayed to her before embarking on his thefts, was caught and hanged, but was supported by her unseen hands until, her protection of him being perceived, he was released; and a nun who left her convent to lead a life of sin, returned years later in broken repentance, and found that the Virgin—to whom she had never omitted a daily prayer—had all the time filled her place as sacristan, so that none had noted her absence.⁹⁷ The Church could not approve of all these stories, but she made great festivals of the events in Mary’s life—the Annunciation, the Visitation, the Purification (Candlemas), the Assumption; and finally, yielding to the appeals of generations of the laity and of Franciscan monks, she allowed the faithful to believe, and in 1854 bade them believe, in the Immaculate Conception—that Mary had been conceived free of that taint of original sin which, in the Christian theology, lay upon every child born of man and woman since Adam and Eve.

The worship of Mary transformed Catholicism from a religion of terror—perhaps necessary in the Dark Ages—into a religion of mercy and love. Half the beauty of Catholic worship, much of the splendor of Catholic art and song, are the creation of this gallant faith in the devotion and gentleness, even the physical loveliness and grace, of woman. The daughters of Eve have entered the temple and have transformed its spirit. Partly because of that new Catholicism feudalism was chastened into chivalry, and the status of woman was moderately raised in a man-made world; because of it medieval and Renaissance sculpture and painting gave to art a depth and tenderness rarely known to the Greeks. One can forgive much to a religion and an age that created Mary and her cathedrals.

IV. RITUAL

In art and hymns and liturgy the Church wisely made place for the worship of the Virgin; but in the older elements of her practice and ritual she insisted on the sterner and more solemn aspects of the faith. Following ancient customs, and perhaps for reasons of health, she prescribed periodical fasts: all Fridays were to be meatless; throughout the forty days of Lent no meat, eggs, or cheese might be eaten, and the fast was not to be broken till the hour of none (three P.M.); furthermore, there were to be in that period no weddings, no rejoicing, no hunting, no trials in court, no sexual intercourse.⁹⁸ These were counsels of perfection, seldom fully observed or enforced, but they helped to strengthen the will and to tame the excessive appetites of an omnivorous and carnal population.

The liturgy of the Church was another ancient inheritance, remolded into lofty and moving forms of religious drama, music, and art. The Psalms of the Old Testament, the prayers and homilies of the Jerusalem Temple, readings from the New Testament, and the administration of the Eucharist, constituted the earliest elements of the Christian service. The division of the Church into Eastern and Western resulted in divergent rites; and the inability of the early popes to extend their full authority beyond Central Italy resulted in a diversity of ceremony even in the Latin Church. A ritual established at Milan spread to Spain, Gaul, Ireland, and North Britain, and was not overcome by the Roman form till 664. Pope Hadrian I, probably completing labors begun by Gregory I, reformed the liturgy in a “Sacramentary” sent to Charlemagne toward the end of the eighth century. Guillaume Durand wrote the medieval classic on the Roman liturgy in his Rationale divinorum officiorum, or Rational Exposition of the Divine Offices (1286); we may judge its wide acceptance from the fact that it was the first book printed after the Bible.

The center and summit of the Christian worship was the Mass. In the first four centuries this ceremony was called the Eucharist or thanksgiving; and that sacramental commemoration of the Last Supper remained the essence of the service. Around it there gathered in the course of twelve centuries a complicated succession of prayers and songs, varying with the day and season of the year and the purpose of the individual Mass, and inscribed for the convenience of the priest in the missal, or Book of the Mass. In the Greek rite, and sometimes in the Latin, the two sexes were separated in the congregation. There were no chairs; all stood, or, at the most solemn moments, knelt. Exceptions were made for old or weak people; and for monks or canons, who had to stand through long services, little ledges were built into the choir stalls to support the base of the spine; these misericordiae (mercies) became a favorite recipient of the wood carver’s skill. The officiating priest entered in a toga covered by alb, chasuble, maniple, and stole—colorful garments bearing symbolical decorations; the most prominent symbols were usually the letters IHS—i.e., lesos Huios Soter, “Jesus Son [of God], Saviour.” The Mass itself was begun at the foot of the altar with a humble Introit: “I shall go in to the altar of God,” to which the acolyte added, “To God Who giveth joy to my youth.” The priest ascended the altar, and kissed it as the sacred repository of saintly relics. He intoned the Kyrie eleison (“Lord have mercy upon us”)—a Greek survival in the Latin Mass; and recited the Gloria (“Glory to God in the highest”) and the Credo. He consecrated little wafers of bread and a chalice of wine into the body and blood of Christ with the words Hoc est corpus meum* and Hic est sanguinis meus; and offered these transubstantiated elements—namely His Son—as a propitiatory sacrifice to God in commemoration of the sacrifice on the cross, and in lieu of the ancient sacrifice of living things. Turning to the worshipers, he bade them lift up their hearts to God: sursum corda; to which the acolyte, representing the congregation, answered, Habemus ad Dominum: “We hold them up to the Lord.” The priest then recited the triple Sanctus, the Agnus Dei, and the Pater noster; himself partook of the consecrated bread and wine, and administered the Eucharist to communicants. After some additional prayers he pronounced the closing formula—Ite, missa est—“Depart, it is dismissal”—from which the Mass (missa) probably derived its name.⁹⁹ In late forms there still followed a blessing of the congregation by the priest, and another Gospel reading—usually the Neoplatonic exordium of the Gospel of St. John. Normally there was no sermon except when a bishop officiated, or when, after the twelfth century, a friar came to preach.

At first all Masses were sung, and the congregation joined in the singing; from the fourth century onward the vocal participation of the worshipers declined, and “canonical choristers” provided the musical response to the celebrant’s chant.† The hymns sung in the various services of the Church are among the most moving products of medieval sentiment and art. The known history of the Latin hymn begins with Bishop Hilary of Poitiers (d. 367). Returning to Gaul from exile in Syria, he brought home some Greco-Oriental hymns, translated them into Latin, and composed some of his own; all of these are lost. Ambrose at Milan made a new beginning; eighteen survive of his sonorous hymns, whose restrained fervor so affected Augustine. The noble hymn of faith and thanksgiving, Te Deum laudamus, formerly ascribed to Ambrose, was probably written by the Romanian Bishop Nicetas of Remisiana toward the end of the fourth century. In later centuries the Latin hymns may have assumed a new delicacy of feeling and form under the influence of Moslem and Provençal love poetry.¹⁰⁰ Some of the hymns (like some Arabic poems) verged on jingling doggerel, tipsy with excess of rhyme; but the better hymns of the medieval flowering—the twelfth and thirteenth centuries—developed a subtle turn of compact phrase, a melodiousness of frequent rhyme, a grace and tenderness of thought, that rank them with the greatest lyrics in literature.

To the famous monastery of St. Victor, outside of Paris, there came about 1130 a Breton youth known to us only as Adam of St. Victor. He lived there in quiet content his remaining sixty years, imbibed the spirit of the famous mystics Hugo and Richard, and expressed it humbly, beautifully, and powerfully in hymns mostly designed as sequences for the Mass. A century after him a Franciscan monk, Jacopone da Todi (1228?-1306), composed the supreme medieval lyric, the Stabat Mater. Jacopone was a successful lawyer in Todi, near Perugia; his wife was renowned for both goodness and loveliness; she was crushed to death by the fall of a platform at a festival; Jacopone became insane with grief, roamed the Umbrian roads as a wild vagrant crying out his sins and sorrows; smeared himself with tar and feathers, and walked on all fours; joined the Franciscan tertiaries, and wrote the poem that sums up the tender piety of his time:

Stabat mater dolorosa

iuxta crucem lacrimosa,

dum pendebat filius;

cuius animan gementem

contristantem et dolentem

pertransivit gladius.

O quam tristis et afflicta

fuit illa benedicta

mater unigeniti!

Quae maerebat et dolebat,

et tremebat, cum videbat

nati poenas incliti.

Quis est homo qui non fleret

matrem Christi si videret

in tanto supplicio?

Quis not posset contristan,

piam matrem contemplan,

dolentem cum filio? …

Stood the mother broken-hearted

All in tears before the cross

While her Son hung dying;

Through her spirit heavy laden,

Mourning for Him and in pain,

Pierced a sword of grief.

Oh, how sad and deep-afflicted

Was that mother, all so blessed,

Of the only Son!

Wailed she then and sore lamented,

Trembled when she saw the torture

Of her noble Son.

Who is he that would not sorrow

If he saw our Saviour’s mother

In such agony?

Who could help but share her sadness,

Seeing her, the loving mother,

Grieving with her Son? …

Eia, mater, fons amoris,

me sentire vim doloris

fac, ut tecum lugeam;

fac ut ardeat cor meum

in amando Christum deum

ut sibi complaceam.

Sancta mater, illud agas,

crucifixi fige plagas

cordi meo valide;

tui nati vulnerati,

tam dignati pro me pati,

poenas mecum divide.

Fac me vere tecum flere

crucifixo condoleré,

donec ego vixero.

Iuxta crucem tecum stare,

te libenter sociare

in planctu desidero.

Fac me cruce custodiri

morte Christi praemuniri

confoveri gratia;

quando corpus morietur,

fac ut animae donetur

paradisi gloria.

Come, my mother, fount of loving,

Make me feel your fullest anguish,

Let me mourn with you;

Let my heart be fired with ardor

Loving Christ our God and Saviour,

Let me please Him so!

Holy mother, do this for me:

Plant the blows of Him so martyred

Deeply in my heart;

Of your offspring sorely wounded,

Bearing ignominy for me,

Let me share the pains!

Let me truly weep beside you,

Mourn with you the Crucified,

All my living years.

Standing by the cross together

Would that I might e’er be with you,

Gladly bound in grief.

Let me by the cross be guarded,

Saved by Christ’s redeeming Passion,

Cherished by His grace;

When my body shall have perished,

Let my soul in heaven’s glory

See Him face to face.

Only two poems rival this among medieval Christian hymns. One is the Pange lingua that St. Thomas Aquinas composed for the Corpus Christi feast. The other is the terrible Dies irae, or “Day of Wrath,” written about 1250 by Thomas of Celano, and still sung in the Mass for the Dead; here the horror of the Last Judgment inspires a poem as dark and perfect as any of Dante’s tormented dreams.¹⁰¹

To the moving ritual of her prayers, hymns, and Mass the Church added the imposing ceremonies and processions of religious festivals. In northern countries the Feast of the Nativity took over the pleasant rites wherewith the pagan Teutons had celebrated the victory of the sun, at the winter solstice, over the advancing night; hence the “Yule” logs that burned in German, North French, English, Scandinavian homes, and the Yule trees laden with gifts, and the merry feasting that tried strong stomachs till the Twelfth Night thereafter. There were countless other feasts or holydays—Epiphany, Circumcision, Palm Sunday, Easter, Ascension, Pentecost…. Such days—and only in less degree all Sundays—were exciting events in the life of medieval man. For Easter he confessed such of his sins as he cared to remember, bathed, cut his beard or hair, dressed in his best and most uncomfortable clothes, received God in the Eucharist, and felt more profoundly than ever the momentous Christian drama of which he was made a part. In many towns, on the last three days of Holy Week, the events of the Passion were represented in the churches by a religious play, with dialogue and plain chant; and several other occasions of the ecclesiastical year were signalized with such “mysteries.” About 1240 Juliana, prioress of a convent near Liége, reported to her village priest that a supernatural vision had urged upon her the need of honoring with a solemn festival the body of Christ as transubstantiated in the Eucharist; in 1262 Pope Urban IV sanctioned such a celebration, and entrusted to St. Thomas Aquinas the composition of an “office” for it—appropriate hymns and prayers; the philosopher acquitted himself wonderfully well in this assignment; and in 1311 the Feast of Corpus Christi was finally established and was celebrated on the first Thursday after Pentecost, with the most impressive procession of the Christian year. Such ceremonies drew immense crowds, and glorified numerous participants; they opened the way to the medieval secular drama; and they helped the pageantry of the guilds, the tournaments and knightly initiations, and the coronation of kings, to occupy with pious flurry and sublimating spectacle the occasional leisure of men not natively inclined to order and peace. The Church based her technique of moralization through faith not on arguments to reason but on appeals to the senses through drama, music, painting, sculpture, architecture, fiction, and poetry; and it must be confessed that such appeals to universal sensibilities are more successful—for evil as well as for good—than challenges to the changeful and individualistic intellect. Through such appeals the Church created medieval art.

The culminating pageants were at the goals of pilgrimage. Medieval men and women went on pilgrimage to fulfill a penance or a vow, or to seek a miraculous cure, or to earn an indulgence, and doubtless, like modern tourists, to see strange lands and sights, and find adventure on the way as a relief from the routine of a narrow life. At the end of the thirteenth century there were some 10,000 sanctioned goals of Christian pilgrimage. The bravest pilgrims fared to distant Palestine, sometimes barefoot or clothed only in a shirt, and usually armed with cross, staff, and purse all given by a priest. In 1054 Bishop Liedbert of Cambrai led 3000 pilgrims to Jerusalem; in 1064 the archbishops of Cologne and Mainz, and the bishops of Speyer, Bamberg, and Utrecht started for Jerusalem with 10,000 Christians in their wake; 3000 of them perished on the way; only 2000 returned safely to their native lands. Other pilgrims crossed the Pyrenees, or risked themselves on the Atlantic, to visit the reputed bones of the apostle James at Compostela in Spain. In England pilgrims sought the tomb of St. Cuthbert at Durham, the grave of Edward the Confessor in Westminster, or that of St. Edmund at Bury, the church supposedly founded by Joseph of Arimathea at Glastonbury, and above all, the shrine of Thomas à Becket at Canterbury. France drew pilgrims to St. Martin’s at Tours, to Notre Dame at Chartres, Notre Dame at Le-Puy-en-Velay. Italy had the church and bones of St. Francis at Assisi, and the Santa Casa, or Holy House, at Loreto, which the pious believed to be the very dwelling in which Mary had lived with Jesus at Nazareth; when the Turks drove the last Crusader from Palestine this cottage was carried by angels through the air and deposited in Dalmatia (1291), then flown across the Adriatic to the Ancona woods (lauretum) from which the honored village took its name.

Finally, all the roads of Christendom led pilgrims to Rome, to see the tombs of Peter and Paul, to earn indulgences by visiting the Stations or famous churches of the city, or to celebrate some jubilee, or joyous anniversary, in Christian history. In 1299 Pope Boniface VIII declared a jubilee for 1300, and offered a plenary indulgence to those who should come and worship in St. Peter’s in that year. It was estimated that on no day in those twelve months had Rome less than 200,000 strangers within her gates; and a total of 2,000,000 visitors, each with a modest offering, deposited such treasure before St. Peter’s tomb that two priests, with rakes in their hands, were kept busy night and day collecting the coins.¹⁰² Guidebooks taught the pilgrims by what roads to travel, and what points to visit at their goal or on the way. We may weakly imagine the exaltation of the tired and dusty pilgrims when at last they sighted the Eternal City, and burst into the Pilgrims’ Chorus of joy and praise:

O Roma nobilis, orbis et domina,

cunctarum urbium excellentissima,

roseo martyrum sanguine rubea,

albis et virginum liliis candida;

salutem dicimus tibi per omnia;

te benedicimus; salve per saecula!

“O noble Rome, of all this world the queen, of all the cities the most excellent! O ruby red with martyrs’ rosy blood, yet white with lilies pure of virgin maids; we give thee salutation through all years; we bless thee; through all generations hail!”

To these varied religious services the Church added social services. She taught the dignity of labor, and practiced it through the agriculture and industry of her monks. She sanctified the organization of labor in the guilds, and organized religious guilds to perform works of charity.¹⁰³ Every church was a sanctuary with right of asylum in which hunted men might find some breathless refuge till the passions of their pursuers could yield to the processes of law; to drag men from such a sanctuary was a sacrilege entailing excommunication. The church or cathedral was the social as well as the religious center of the village or town. Sometimes the sacred precinct, or even the church itself, was used, with genial clerical consent, to store grain or hay or wine, to grind corn or brew beer.¹⁰⁴ There most of the villagers had been baptized, there most of them would be buried. There the older folk would gather of a Sunday for gossip or discussion, and the young men and women to see and be seen. There the beggars assembled, and the alms of the Church were dispensed. There nearly all the art that the village knew was brought together to beautify the House of God; and the poverty of a thousand homes was brightened by the glory of that temple which the people had built with their coins and hands, and which they considered their own, their collective and spiritual home. In the church belfry the bells rang the hours of the day or the call to services and prayer; and the music of those bells was sweeter than any other except the hymns that bound voices and hearts into one, or warmed a cooling faith with the canticles of the Mass. From Novgorod to Cadiz, from Jerusalem to the Hebrides, steeples and spires raised themselves precariously into the sky because men cannot live without hope, and will not consent to die.

V. CANON LAW

Side by side with this complex and colorful liturgy there developed the even more complex body of ecclesiastical legislation that regulated the conduct and decisions of a Church governing a wider and more varied realm than any empire of the time. Canon law—the “law of the rule” of the Church —was a slow accretion of old religious customs, scriptural passages, opinions of the Fathers, laws of Rome or the barbarians, the decrees of Church councils, and the decisions and opinions of the popes. Some parts of the Justinian Code were adapted to govern the conduct of the clergy; other parts were recast to accord with the views of the Church on marriage, divorce, and wills. Collections of ecclesiastical legislation were made in the sixth and eighth centuries in the West, and periodically by Byzantine emperors in the East. The laws of the Roman Church received their definitive medieval formulation by Gratian about 1148.

As a monk of Bologna, Gratian may have studied under Irnerius in the university there; certainly his digest shows a wide acquaintance with both Roman law and medieval philosophy. He called his book Concordia discordantium canonum—reconciliation of discordant regulations; later generations called it his Decretum. It drew into order and sequence the laws and customs, the conciliar and papal decrees, of the Church down to 1139 on her doctrine, ritual, organization, and administration, the maintenance of ecclesiastical property, the procedure and precedents of ecclesiastical courts, the regulation of monastic life, the contract of marriage, and the rules of bequest. The method of exposition may have stemmed from Abélard’s Sic et non, and had in turn some influence on Scholastic method after Gratian: it began with an authoritative proposition, quoted statements or precedents contradicting it, sought to resolve the contradiction, and added a commentary. Though the book was not accepted by the medieval Church as a final authority, it became, for the period it covered, the indispensable and almost sacred text. Gregory IX (1234), Boniface VIII (1294), and Clement V (1313) added supplements; these and some minor additions were published with Gratian’s Concordia in 1582 as Corpus iuris canonici, a body of canonical—Church-regulating—law comparable with the Corpus iuris civilis of Justinian.*

Indeed, the field covered by canon law was larger than that covered by any contemporary civil code. It embraced not merely the structure, dogmas, and operation of the Church, but rules for dealing with non-Christians in Christian lands; procedure in the investigation and suppression of heresy; the organization of crusades; the laws of marriage, legitimacy, dower, adultery, divorce, wills, burial, widows, and orphans; laws of oath, perjury, sacrilege, blasphemy, simony, libel, usury, and just price; regulations for schools and universities; the Truce of God and other means of limiting war and organizing peace; the conduct of episcopal and papal courts; the use of excommunication, anathema, and interdict; the administration of ecclesiastical penalties; the relations between civil and ecclesiastical courts, between state and Church. This vast body of legislation was held by the Church to be binding on all Christians, and she reserved the right to punish any infraction of it with a variety of physical or spiritual penalties, except that no ecclesiastical court was to pronounce a “judgment of blood”—i.e., condemn to capital punishment.

Usually, before the Inquisition, the Church relied on spiritual terrors. Minor excommunication excluded a Christian from the sacraments and ritual of the Church; any priest could pronounce this penalty; and to believers it meant everlasting hell if death should reach the offender before absolution came. A major excommunication (the only kind now used by the Church) could be pronounced only by councils or by prelates higher than a priest, and only upon persons within their jurisdiction. It removed the victim from all legal or spiritual association with the Christian community: he could not sue or inherit or do any valid act in law, but he could be sued; and no Christian was to eat or talk with him on pain of minor excommunication. When King Robert of France was excommunicated (998) for marrying his cousin he was abandoned by all his courtiers and nearly all his servants; two domestics who remained threw into the fire the victuals left by him at his meals, lest they be contaminated by them. In extreme cases the Church added to excommunication anathema—a curse armed and detailed with all the careful pleonasm of legal phraseology. As a last resort the pope could lay an interdict upon any part of Christendom—i.e., suspend all or most religious services. A people feeling the need of the sacraments, and fearful of death supervening upon unforgiven sins, sooner or later compelled the excommunicated individual to make his peace with the Church. Such interdicts were laid upon France in 998, Germany in 1102, England in 1208, Rome itself in 1155.

The excessive use of excommunication and interdict weakened their effectiveness after the eleventh century.¹⁰⁵ Popes employed interdict, now and then, for political purposes, as when Innocent II threatened Pisa with interdict if it did not join the Tuscan League.¹⁰⁶ Wholesale excommunications—e.g., for false returns of tithes due the Church—were so numerous that large sections of the Christian community were outlawed at once or without knowing it; and many who knew it ignored the curse or laughed it off.¹⁰⁷ Milan, Bologna, and Florence thrice received wholesale excommunications in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; Milan ignored the third edict for twenty-two years. Said Bishop Guillaume le Maire in 1311: “I have sometimes seen with my own eyes three or four hundred excommunicates in a single parish, and even seven hundred … who despised the Power of the Keys, and uttered blasphemous and scandalous words against the Church and her ministers.”¹⁰⁸ Philip Augustus and Philip the Fair paid little attention to the decrees that excommunicated them.

Such occasional indifference marked the beginning of a decline in the authority of canon law over the laity of Europe. As the Church had taken so wide an area of human life under her rule when, in the first Christian millennium, secular powers had broken down, so in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, as secular government grew stronger, one phase after another of human affairs was recaptured by civil from canon law. The Church properly won in the matter of ecclesiastical appointments; in most other fields her authority began to decline—in education, marriage, morals, economy, and war. The states that had grown up under the protection, and by the permission, of the social order that she had created declared themselves of age, and began that long process of secularization which culminates today. But the work of the canonists, like most creative activity, was not lost. It prepared and trained the Church’s greatest statesmen; it shared in transmitting Roman law to the modern world; it raised the legal rights of widows and children, and established the principle of dower in the civil law of Western Europe;¹⁰⁹ and it helped to shape the form and terms of Scholastic philosophy. Canon law was among the major achievements of the medieval mind.

VI. THE CLERGY

Medieval parlance divided all persons into two classes: those who lived under a religious rule, and those who lived “in the world.” A monk was “a religious”; so was a nun. Some monks were also priests, and constituted the “regular clergy”—i.e., clergy following a monastic rule (regula). All other clergy were called “secular,” as living in the “world” (saeculum). All ranks of clergy were distinguished by the tonsure—a shaven crown of the head—and wore a long robe, of any single color but red or green, buttoned from head to foot. The term clergy included not only those in “minor orders”—i.e., church doorkeepers, readers, exorcists, and acolytes—but all university students, all teachers, and all who, having taken the tonsure as students, later became physicians, lawyers, artists, authors, or served as accountants or literary aides; hence the later narrowing of the terms clerical and clerk. Clerics who had not taken major orders were allowed to marry, and to take up any respectable profession, and they were under no obligation to continue the tonsure.

The three “major” or “holy orders”—subdeacon, deacon, priest—were irrevocable, and generally closed the door to marriage after the eleventh century. Instances of marriage or concubinage in the Latin priesthood after Gregory VII are recorded,¹¹⁰ but they become more and more exceptional.* The parish priest had to content himself with spiritual joys. As the parish was normally coterminous with a manor or a village, he was usually appointed by the lord of the manor¹¹¹ in collusion with the bishop. He was seldom a man of much schooling, for a university education was costly and books were rare; it was enough if he could read the breviary and the missal, administer the sacraments, and organize the parish for worship and charity. In many cases he was only a vicarius, a vicar or substitute, hired by a rector to do the religious work of the parish for a fourth of the revenues of the “benefice”; in this way one rector might hold four or five benefices while the parish priest lived in humble poverty,¹¹² eking out his income with “altar fees” for baptisms, marriages, burials, and Masses for the dead. Sometimes, in the class war, he sided with the poor, like John Ball.¹¹³ His morals could not compare with those of the modern priest, who has been put on his best behavior by religious competition; but by and large he did his work with patience, conscience, and kindliness. He visited the sick, comforted the bereaved, taught the young, mumbled his breviary, and brought some moral and civilizing leaven to a rough and lusty population. Many parish priests, said their cruelest critic, “were the salt of the earth.”¹¹⁴ “No other body of men,” said the freethinking Lecky, “have ever exhibited a more single-minded and unworldly zeal, refracted by no personal interests, sacrificing to duty the dearest of earthly objects, and confronting with dauntless heroism every form of hardship, of suffering, and of death.”¹¹⁵

Priesthood and episcopate constituted the sacerdotium, or sacerdotal order. The bishop was a priest selected to co-ordinate several parishes and priests into one diocese. Originally and theoretically he was chosen by priests and people; usually, before Gregory VII, he was named by the baron or king; after 1215 he was elected by the cathedral chapter in co-operation with the pope. To his care were committed many secular as well as ecclesiastical affairs, and his episcopal court tried some civil cases as well as all those involving clergy of any rank. He had the power to appoint and depose priests; but his authority over the abbots and monasteries in his diocese diminished in this period, as the popes, fearing the power of the bishops, brought the monastic orders under direct papal control. His revenues came partly from his parishes, mostly from the estates attached to his see; sometimes he gave more to a parish than he received from it. Candidates for a bishopric usually agreed to pay—at first to the king, later to the pope—a fee for their nomination; and as secular rulers they sometimes yielded to the amiable weakness of appointing relatives to lucrative posts; Pope Alexander III complained that “when God deprived bishops of sons the Devil gave them nephews.”¹¹⁶ Many bishops lived in luxury, as became feudal lords; but many were consumed in devotion to their spiritual and administrative tasks. After the reform of the episcopate by Leo IX the bishops of Europe were, in mind and morals, the finest body of men in medieval history.

Above the bishops of a province stood the archbishop or metropolitan. He alone could call, or preside over, a provincial council of the Church. Some archbishops, by their character or their wealth, ruled nearly all the life of their provinces. In Germany the archbishops of Hamburg, Bremen, Cologne, Trier, Mainz, Magdeburg, and Salzburg were powerful feudal lords, who were in several instances chosen by the emperors to administer the Empire, or to serve as ambassadors or royal councilors; the archbishops of Reims, Rouen, and Canterbury played a similar role in France, Normandy, and England. Certain archbishops—of Toledo, Lyons, Narbonne, Reims, Cologne, Canterbury—were made “primates,” and exercised a debated authority over all the ecclesiastics of their region.

The bishops gathered in council constituted, periodically, a representative government for the Church. In later centuries these councils would lay claim to powers superior to those of the pope; but in this, the age of the greatest pontiffs, no one in Western Europe questioned the supreme ecclesiastical and spiritual authority of the bishop of Rome. The scandals of the tenth century had been atoned for by the virtues of Leo IX and Hildebrand; amid the oscillations and struggles of the twelfth century the power of the papacy had grown until, in Innocent III, it claimed to overspread the earth. Kings and emperors held the stirrup and kissed the feet of the white-robed Servant of the Servants of God. The papacy was now the highest reach of human ambition; the finest minds of the time prepared themselves in rigorous schools of theology and law for a place in the hierarchy of the Church; and those who rose to the top were men of intelligence and courage, who were not appalled by the task of governing a continent. Their individual deaths hardly disturbed the pursuit of the policies formed by them and their councils; what Gregory VII left unfinished Innocent III completed; and Innocent IV and Alexander IV carried to a victorious end the struggle that Innocent III and Gregory IX had fought against Imperial encirclement of the papacy.

In theory the authority of the pope was derived from his succession to the power conferred upon the apostles by Christ; in this sense the government of the Church was a theocracy—a government of the people, through religion, by the earthly vicars of God. In another sense the Church was a democracy: every man in Christendom except the mentally or physically defective, the convicted criminal, the excommunicate and the slave was eligible to the priesthood and the papacy. As in every system, the rich had superior opportunities to prepare themselves for the long hierarchical climb; but career was open to all, and talent, not ancestry, chiefly determined success. Hundreds of bishops, and several popes, came from the ranks of the poor.¹¹⁷ This flow of fresh blood into the hierarchy from every rank continually nourished the intelligence of the clergy, and “was for ages the only practical recognition of the equality of man.”*

In 1059, as we have seen, the right to select the pope was confined to “cardinal bishops” stationed near Rome. These seven cardinals were gradually increased, by papal appointment from various nations, to a Sacred College of seventy members, who were marked off by their red caps and purple robes, and constituted a new rank in the hierarchy, second only to the pope himself.

Aided by such men, and by a large staff of ecclesiastics and other officials constituting the papal Curia or executive and judicial court, the pope governed a spiritual empire which in the thirteenth century was at the height of its curve. He alone could summon a general council of the bishops, and their legislation had no force except when confirmed by his decree. He was free to interpret, revise, and extend the canon law of the Church, and to grant dispensations from its rules. He was the final court of appeals from the decisions of episcopal courts. He alone could absolve from certain grave sins, or issue major indulgences, or canonize a saint. After 1059 all bishops had to swear obedience to him, and submit to supervision of their affairs by legates of the pope. Islands like Sardinia and Sicily, nations like England, Hungary, and Spain, acknowledged him as their feudal lord, and sent him tribute. Through bishops, priests, and monks his eyes and hands could be on every part of his realm; these men constituted a service of intelligence and administration with which no state could compete. Gradually, subtly, the rule of Rome was restored over Europe by the astonishing power of the word.

VII. THE PAPACY SUPREME: 1085–1294

The conflict between Church and state over lay investitures did not die with Gregory VII and the apparent triumph of the Empire; it continued for a generation through several pontificates, and reached a compromise in the Concordat of Worms (1122) between Pope Calixtus II and the Emperor Henry V. Henry surrendered to the Church “all investiture by ring and staff,” and agreed that elections of bishops and abbots “shall be conducted canonically”—i.e., be made by the affected clergy or monks—“and shall be free from all interference” and simony. Calixtus conceded that in Germany the elections of bishops or abbots holding lands from the crown should be held in the presence of the king; that in disputed elections the king might decide between the contenders after consulting with the bishops of the province; and that an abbot or bishop holding lands from the king should render to him all feudal obligations due from vassal to suzerain.¹¹⁸ Similar agreements had already been signed for England and France. Each side claimed the victory. The Church had made substantial progress toward autonomy, but the feudal nexus continued to give the kings a predominant voice in the choice of bishops everywhere in Europe.¹¹⁹

In 1130 the college of cardinals divided into factions; one chose Innocent II, the other Anacletus II. Anacletus, though of the noble family of the Pierleoni, had had a Jewish grandfather, a convert to Christianity; his opponents called him “Judaeo-pontifex”; and St. Bernard, who on other occasions was friendly to the Jews, wrote to the Emperor Lothaire II that “to the shame of Christ a man of Jewish origin was come to occupy the chair of St. Peter”—forgetting Peter’s origin. The greater part of the clergy, and all but one of Europe’s kings, upheld Innocent. The populace of Europe amused itself with slanders charging Anacletus with incest, and with plundering Christian churches to enrich his Jewish friends; but the people of Rome supported him till his death (1138). It was probably the story of Anacletus that led to the fourteenth-century legend of Andreas “the Jewish Pope.”^119a

Hadrian IV (1154–9) exemplified again the ecclesiastical carrière ouverte aux talents. Born in England of lowly parentage, and coming as a beggar to a monastery, Nicholas Breakspear raised himself by pure ability to be abbot, cardinal, and pope. He bestowed Ireland upon Henry II of England, compelled Barbarossa to kiss his feet, and almost maneuvered the great Emperor into conceding the right of the popes to dispose of royal thrones. When Hadrian died a majority of cardinals chose Alexander III (1159–81), a minority chose Victor IV. Barbarossa, thinking to restore the power once held by German emperors over the papacy, invited both men to lay their claims before him; Alexander refused, Victor agreed; and at the Synod of Pavia (1160) Barbarossa recognized Victor as Pope. Alexander excommunicated Frederick, released the Emperor’s subjects from civil obedience, and helped revolt in Lombardy. The victory of the Lombard League at Legnano (1176) humbled Frederick. He made his peace with Alexander at Venice, and once more kissed papal feet. The same pontiff compelled Henry II of England to repair barefoot to the tomb of Becket, and there receive discipline from the canons of Canterbury. It was Alexander’s long struggle and complete victory that made straight the way for one of the greatest popes.

Innocent III was born at Anagni, near Rome, in 1161. As Lotario dei Conti, son of the count of Segni, he had all the advantages of aristocratic birth and cultured rearing. He studied philosophy and theology at Paris, canon and civil law at Bologna. Back in Rome, by his mastery of both diplomacy and doctrine, and his influential connections, he advanced rapidly on the ecclesiastical ladder; at thirty he was a cardinal deacon; and at thirty-seven, though still not a priest, he was unanimously chosen pope (1198). He was ordained on one day, and consecrated on the next. It was his good fortune that the Emperor Henry VI, who had acquired control of South Italy and Sicily, had died in 1197, leaving the throne to the three-year-old Frederick II. Innocent seized the opportunity vigorously: deposed the German prefect in Rome, ousted the German feudatories from Spoleto and Perugia, received the submission of Tuscany, re-established the rule of the papacy in the Papal States, was recognized by Henry’s widow as overlord of the Two Sicilies, and consented to be the guardian of her son. In ten months Innocent had made himself master of Italy.

He had, on the existing evidence, the best mind of his time. In his early thirties he had written four works of theology; they were learned and eloquent, but they are lost in the glare of his political fame. His pronouncements as Pope were characterized by a clarity and logic of thought, a fitness and pungency of phrase, that could have made him a brilliant Aquinas or an orthodox Abélard. Despite his small stature he derived a commanding presence from his keen eyes and stern dark face. He was not without humor; he sang well, and composed poetry; he had a tender side, and could be kindly, patient, and personally tolerant. But in doctrine and morals he allowed no deviation from the dogmas or ethics of the Church. The world of Christian faith and hope was the empire that he had been named to protect; and like any king he would guard his realm with the sword when the word did not suffice. Born to riches, he lived in philosophic simplicity; in an age of universal venality he remained incorruptible;¹²⁰ at once after his consecration he forbade the officials of his Curia to charge for their services. He liked to see the wealth of the world enrich Peter’s See, but he administered the papal funds with a reasonably honest hand. He was a consummate diplomat, and moderately shared in the reluctant unmorality of that distinguished trade.¹²¹ As if eleven centuries had fallen away, he was a Roman emperor, Stoic rather than Christian, and never doubting his right to rule the world.

With so many strong popes in the fresh memory of Rome, it was natural that Innocent should base his policies upon a belief in the sanctity and high mission of his office. He carefully maintained the pomp and majesty of papal ceremony, and never stooped in public from imperial dignity. Sincerely believing himself the heir to the powers then generally conceded to have been given by the Son of God to the apostles and the Church, he could hardly recognize any authority as equal to his own. “The Lord left to Peter,” he said, “the government not only of all the Church, but of the whole world.”¹²² He did not claim supreme power in earthly or purely secular affairs, except in the Papal States;¹²³ but he insisted that where the spiritual conflicted with the secular power the spiritual power should be held as superior to the secular as the sun is to the moon. He shared the ideal of Gregory VII—that all governments should accept a place in a world state of which the pope should be the head, with paramount authority over all matters of justice, morality, and faith; and for a time he almost realized that dream.

In 1204, through the conquest of Constantinople by the Crusaders, he achieved one part of his plans: the Greek Church submitted to the Bishop of Rome, and Innocent could speak with joy of “the seamless garment of Christ.” He brought Serbia and even distant Armenia under the dominion of the Roman See. Gradually he secured control over ecclesiastical appointments, and made the powerful episcopacy the organ and servant of the papacy. Through an astonishing succession of vital conflicts he reduced the potentates of Europe to an unprecedented recognition of his sovereignty. His policies were least effective in Italy: he failed in repeated efforts to end the wars of the Italian city-states; and in Rome his political enemies made life so unsafe for him that for a time he had to shun his capital. King Sverre of Norway (1184–1202) successfully resisted him despite excommunication and interdict.¹²⁴ Philip II of France ignored his command to make peace with England, but yielded to the Pope’s insistence that he take back his discarded wife. Alfonso IX of Leon was persuaded to put away Berengaria, whom he had married within the forbidden degrees of kinship. Portugal, Aragon, Hungary, and Bulgaria acknowledged themselves as feudal fiefs of the papacy, and sent it tribute yearly. When King John rejected Innocent’s appointment of Langton as archbishop of Canterbury, the Pope drove him by interdict and shrewd diplomacy to add England to the list of papal fiefs. Innocent extended his power in Germany by supporting Otto IV against Philip of Swabia, then Philip against Otto, then Otto against Frederick II, then Frederick against Otto, in each case exacting concessions to the papacy as the price of his favor, and freeing the Papal States from the threat of encirclement. He reminded the emperors that it was a pope who had “translated” the imperium or imperial power from the Greeks to the Franks; that Charlemagne had been made Emperor only by papal anointment and coronation; and that what the popes had given they could take away. A Byzantine visitor to Rome described Innocent as “the successor not of Peter but of Constantine.”¹²⁵

He repelled all secular efforts to tax the Christian clergy without papal consent. He provided papal funds for necessitous priests, and labored to improve the education of the clergy. He raised the social status of the clergy by defining the Church not as all Christian believers but as all the Christian clergy. He condemned the episcopal or monastic absorption of parochial tithes at the expense of the parish priest.¹²⁶ To reform monastic laxity he ordered the regular surveillance and visitation of monasteries and convents. His legislation reduced to order the complex relations of clergy and laity, priest and bishop, bishop and pope. He developed the papal Curia to an efficient court of counsel, administration, and judgment; it became now the most competent governing body of its time, and its methods and terminology helped to form the art and technique of diplomacy. Innocent himself was probably the best lawyer of the age, capable of finding legal support, in logic and precedent, for every decision that he made. Lawyers and learned men frequented the “consistory” where he presided over the cardinals as a superior ecclesiastical court, to profit from his discussions and decisions on points of civil or canon law. Some called him Pater iuris, Father of the Law;¹²⁷ others, in fond humor, called him Solomon III.¹²⁸

In his final triumph as legislator and Pope, he presided in 1215 over the Fourth Lateran Council, held in the church of St. John’s Lateran in Rome. To this twelfth ecumenical council came 1500 abbots, bishops, archbishops, and other prelates, and plenipotentiaries from all the important nations of a united Christendom. The Pope’s opening address was a bold admission and challenge: “The corruption of the people has its chief source in the clergy. From this arise the evils of Christendom: faith perishes, religion is defaced… justice is trodden under foot, heretics multiply, schismatics are emboldened, the faithless grow strong, the Saracens triumph.”¹²⁹ The assembled power and intellect of the Church here allowed itself to be completely dominated by one man. His judgments became the Council’s decrees. It allowed him to redefine the basic dogmas of the Church; now for the first time the doctrine of transubstantiation was officially defined. It accepted his decrees requiring that a distinctive badge be worn by non-Christians in Christian lands. It responded enthusiastically to his call for a war against the Albigensian heretics. But it also followed his lead in recognizing the shortcomings of the Church. It denounced the peddling of fraudulent relics. It severely censured the “indiscreet and superfluous indulgences which some prelates … are not afraid to grant, whereby the Keys of the Church are made contemptible, and the satisfaction of penance is deprived of its force.”¹³⁰ It attempted a far-reaching reform of monastic life. It denounced clerical drunkenness, immorality, and clandestine marriage, and passed vigorous measures against them; but it condemned the Albigensian claim that all sexual intercourse is sinful. In its attendance, scope, and effects the Fourth Lateran Council was the most important assembly of the Church since the Council of Nicaea.

From that apex of his career Innocent declined rapidly to an early death. He had given himself so unremittingly to the administration and enlargement of his office that at fifty-five he was exhausted. “I have no leisure,” he mourned, “to meditate on supramundane things. Scarce can I breathe. So much must I live for others that almost I am a stranger to myself.”¹³¹ Perhaps in his last year he could look back upon his work and judge it more objectively than in the heat of strife. The crusades that he had organized for the reconquest of Palestine had failed; the one that would succeed after his death was the ferocious extermination of the Albigensians in southern France. He had won the admiration of his contemporaries, but not, like Gregory I or Leo IX, their affection. Some churchmen complained that he was too much the king, too little the priest; St. Lutgardis thought he could only by a narrow margin escape hell;¹³² and the Church herself, though proud of his genius and grateful for his labors, withheld from him that canonization which she had conferred upon lesser and more scrupulous men.

But we must not refuse him the credit of having brought the Church to her greatest height, and close to the realization of her dream of a moral world-state. He was the ablest statesman of his age. He pursued his aims with vision, devotion, flexible persistence, and unbelievable energy. When he died (1216) the Church had reached a height of organization, splendor, repute, and power which she had never known before, and would only rarely and briefly know again.

Honorius III (1216–27) does not rank high in the cruel annals of history, because he was too gentle to carry on with vigor the war between Empire and papacy. Gregory IX (1227–41), though eighty when made Pope, waged that war with almost fanatical tenacity; fought Frederick II so successfully as to postpone the Renaissance for a hundred years; and organized the Inquisition. Yet he too was a man of unquestionable sincerity and heroic devotion, who defended what seemed to him the most precious possession of mankind —its Christ-begotten faith. He could not have been a hard man who, as cardinal, had protected and wisely guided the possibly heretical Francis. Innocent IV (1243–54) destroyed Frederick II, and sanctioned the use of torture by the Inquisition.¹³³ He was a good patron of philosophy, aided the universities, and founded schools of law. Alexander IV (1254–61) was a man of peace, kindly, merciful, and just, who “astounded the world by his freedom from despotism”;¹³⁴ he deprecated the martial qualities of his predecessors,¹³⁵ preferred piety to politics, and “died of a broken heart,” said a Franciscan chronicler, “considering daily the terrible and increasing strife among Christians.”¹³⁶ Clement IV (1265–8) returned to war, organized the defeat of Manfred, and ruined the Hohenstaufen dynasty and Imperial Germany. The recapture of Constantinople by the Greeks threatened to end the accord between the Greek and the Roman Church; but Gregory X (1271–6) earned the gratitude of Michael Palaeologus by discountenancing the ambition of Charles of Anjou to conquer Byzantium, the restored Greek Emperor submitted the Eastern Church to Rome; and the papacy was again supreme.

VIII. THE FINANCES OF THE CHURCH

A Church that was actually a European superstate, dealing with the worship, morals, education, marriages, wars, crusades, deaths, and wills of the population of half a continent, sharing actively in the administration of secular affairs, and raising the most expensive structures in medieval history, could sustain its functions only through exploiting a hundred sources of revenue.

The widest stream of income was the tithe: after Charlemagne all secular lands in Latin Christendom were required by state law to pay a tenth of their gross produce or income, in kind or money, to the local church. After the tenth century every parish had to remit a part of its tithes to the bishop of the diocese. Under the influence of feudal ideas the tithes of a parish could be enfeoffed, mortgaged, bequeathed, or sold like any other property or revenue, so that by the twelfth century a financial web had been woven in which the local church and its priest were rather the collectors than the consumers of its tithes. The priest was expected to “curse for his tithes,” as the English put it—to excommunicate those who shirked or falsified their returns; for men were as reluctant then to pay tithes to the Church, whose functions they considered vital to their salvation, as men are now to pay taxes to the state. We hear of occasional revolts of the tithepayers: in Reggio Emilia in 1280, says Fra Salimbene, the citizens, defying excommunication and interdict, promised one another “that none should pledge the clergy any tithe… nor sit at meat with them … nor give them eat or drink”—an excommunication in reverse; and the bishop was compelled to compromise.¹³⁷

The basic revenue of the Church was from her own lands. These she had received through gift or bequest, through purchase or defaulted mortgage, or through reclamation of waste lands by monastic or other ecclesiastic groups. In the feudal system each owner or tenant was expected to leave something to the Church at death; those who did not were suspected of heresy, and might be refused burial in consecrated ground.¹³⁸ Since only a few of the laity could write, a priest was usually called in to draft the wills; Pope Alexander III decreed in 1170 that no one could make a valid will except in presence of a priest; any secular notary who drew up a will except under these conditions was to be excommunicated;¹³⁹ and the Church had exclusive jurisdiction over the probate of wills. Gifts or legacies to the Church were held to be the most dependable means of telescoping the pains of purgatory. Many bequests to the Church, especially before the year 1000, began with the words adventante mundi vespero—“since the evening of the world is near.”¹⁴⁰ Some owners, as we have seen, gave their property to the Church in precarium as disability insurance: the Church provided an annuity, and care in sickness and old age, to the donor, and received the property free of lien at his death.¹⁴¹ Some monasteries, by “confraternities,” gave their benefactors a share in the merits or purgatorial deductions earned by the prayers and good works of the monks.¹⁴² Crusaders not only sold lands to the Church at low prices to raise cash, but they received loans from church bodies on the security of pledged property, which was in many cases forfeited by default. Some persons, dying without natural heirs, left their whole estate to the Church; the Countess Matilda of Tuscany tried to bequeath to the Church almost a fourth of Italy.

As the property of the Church was inalienable, and, before 1200, was normally free from secular taxation,¹⁴³ it grew from century to century. It was not unusual for a cathedral, a monastery, or a nunnery to own several thousand manors, including a dozen towns or even a great city or two.¹⁴⁴ The bishop of Langres owned the whole county; the abbey of St. Martin of Tours ruled over 20,000 serfs; the bishop of Bologna held 2000 manors; so did the abbey of Lorsch; the abbey of Las Huelgas, in Spain, held sixty-four townships.¹⁴⁵ In Castile, about 1200, the Church owned a quarter of the soil; in England a fifth; in Germany a third; in Livonia one half;¹⁴⁶ these, however, are loose and uncertain estimates. Such accumulations became the envy and target of the state. Charles Martel confiscated church property to finance his wars; Louis the Pious legislated against bequests that disinherited the children of the testator in favor of the Church;¹⁴⁷ Henry II of Germany stripped many monasteries of their lands, saying that monks were vowed to poverty; and several English statutes of mortmain put restrictions on the deeding of property to “corporations”—meaning ecclesiastical bodies. Edward I levied from the English Church in 1291 a tenth of its property, and in 1294 a half of its annual revenue. Philip II began, St. Louis continued, Philip IV established, the taxation of ecclesiastical property in France. As industry and commerce developed, and money multiplied and prices rose, the income of abbeys and bishoprics, derived largely from feudal dues once fixed at a low-price level and now hard to raise, proved inadequate not only for luxury but even for maintenance.¹⁴⁸ By 1270 the majority of French cathedrals and abbeys were heavily in debt; they had borrowed from the bankers at high interest rates to meet the exactions of the kings; hence, in part, the decline of architectural activity in France at the end of the thirteenth century.

The popes added to the impoverishment of bishoprics by taxing their property and revenues first to finance the Crusades, later to pay the mountting expenses of the papal see. New sources of central income became necessary as the papacy widened the area and complexity of its functions. Innocent III (1199) directed all bishops to send to the See of Peter yearly a fortieth of their revenue. A cens or tax was levied upon all monasteries, convents, and churches that came directly under papal protection. “An annate” —theoretically the whole, actually half, the first year’s revenue of a newly elected bishop—was required by the popes as a fee for confirming his appointment; and large sums were expected from recipients of the archiepiscopal pallium. All Christian households were asked to send an annual penny (some 90 cents) to the Roman See as “Peter’s Pence.” Normally fees were charged for litigation brought to the papal court. The popes claimed the power to dispense in certain cases from canon law, as in permitting consanguineous marriage where some good political end seemed to justify the deviation; and fees were charged for legal processes involved in such dispensations. Considerable sums came to the popes from the recipients of papal indulgences, and from pilgrims to Rome. It has been calculated that the total income of the papal see about 1250 was greater than the combined revenues of all the secular sovereigns of Europe.¹⁴⁹ From England in 1252 the papacy received a sum thrice the revenue of the crown.¹⁵⁰

The wealth of the Church, however proportionate to the extent of its functions, was the chief source of heresy in this age. Arnold of Brescia proclaimed that any priest or monk who died possessing property would surely go to hell.¹⁵¹ The Bogomiles, the Waldenses, the Paterines, the Cathari made headway by denouncing the wealth of the followers of Christ. A favorite satire in the thirteenth century was the “Gospel According to Marks of Silver,” which began: “In those days the Pope said to the Romans: ‘When the Son of Man shall come to the seat of our majesty say first of all, “Friend, wherefore art Thou come hither?” And if He give you naught, cast Him forth into outer darkness.’”¹⁵² Throughout the literature of the time—in the fabliaux, the chansons de geste, the Roman de la Rose, the poems of the wandering scholars, the troubadours, Dante, even in the monastic chroniclers, we find complaints of ecclesiastical avarice or wealth.¹⁵³ Matthew Paris, an English monk, denounced the venality of English and Roman prelates “living daintily on the patrimony of Christ”;¹⁵⁴ Hubert de Romans, head of the Dominican order, wrote of “pardoners corrupting with bribes the prelates of the ecclesiastical courts”;¹⁵⁵ Petrus Cantor, a priest, told of priests who sold Masses or Vespers;¹⁵⁶ Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, declaimed against the papal chancery as bought and sold, and quoted Henry II as boasting that he had the whole college of cardinals in his pay.¹⁵⁷ Charges of corruption have been made against every government in history; they are nearly always partly true, and partly exaggerated from startling instances; but at times they rise to a revolutionary resentment. The same parishioners who built cathedrals to Mary with their pennies could protest angrily against the collective propensities of the Church, and occasionally they murdered a pertinacious priest.¹⁵⁸

The Church herself joined in this criticism of clerical money-grubbing, and made many efforts to control the acquisitiveness and luxury of her personnel. Hundreds of clergymen, from St. Peter Damian, St. Bernard, St. Francis, and Cardinal de Vitry down to simple monks, labored to mitigate these natural abuses;¹⁵⁹ it is chiefly from the writings of such ecclesiastical reformers that our knowledge of the abuses is derived. A dozen monastic orders devoted themselves to preaching reform by their good example. Pope Alexander III and the Lateran Council of 1179 condemned the exaction of fees for administering baptism or extreme unction, or performing a marriage; and Gregory X called the Ecumenical Council of Lyons in 1274 specifically to take measures for the reform of the Church. The popes themselves, in this age, showed no taste for luxury, and earned their keep by arduous devotion to their exhausting tasks. It is the tragedy of things spiritual that they languish if unorganized, and are contaminated by the material needs of their organization.

CHAPTER XXVIII

The Early Inquisition

1000–1300

I. THE ALBIGENSIAN HERESY HERESY

ANTICLERICALISM rose to a flood at the end of the twelfth century. There were, in the Age of Faith, recesses of religious mysticism and sentiment that escaped and resented organized sacerdotal Christianity. Moving perhaps with returning Crusaders, new waves of Oriental mysticism flowed into the West. From Persia, through Asia Minor and the Balkans, came echoes of Manichean dualism and Mazdakian communism; from Islam a hostility to images, an obscure fatalism, and distaste for priests; and from the failure of the Crusades a secret doubt as to the divine origin and support of the Christian Church. The Paulicians, driven westward by Byzantine persecution, carried through the Balkans into Italy and Provence their scorn of images, sacraments, and the clergy; they divided the cosmos into a spiritual world created by God and a material world created by Satan; and they identified Satan with the Yahveh of the Old Testament. The Bogomiles (i.e., Friends of God) took form and name in Bulgaria, and spread especially in Bosnia; they were attacked by fire and sword at various times in the thirteenth century, defended themselves tenaciously, and finally (1463) surrendered not to Christianity but to Islam.

About the year 1000 a sect appeared in Toulouse and Orléans which denied the reality of miracles, the regenerative virtue of baptism, the presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and the efficacy of prayers to the saints. They were ignored for a time, then condemned; and thirteen of their number were burned at the stake in 1023. Similar heresies developed, and led to uprisings, at Cambrai and Liége (1025), Goslar (1052), Soissons (1114), Cologne (1146), etc. Berthold of Regensburg reckoned 150 heretical sects in the thirteenth century.¹ Some were harmless groups who gathered to read the Bible to one another in the vernacular without a priest, and to put their own interpretation upon its disputed passages. Several, like the Humiliati in Italy, the Béguines and Beghards in the Low Countries, were orthodox in everything except their embarrassing insistence that priests should live in poverty. The Franciscan movement arose as such a sect, and narrowly escaped being classed as heretical.

The Waldenses did not escape. About 1170 Peter Waldo, a rich merchant of Lyons, engaged some scholars to translate the Bible into the langue d’oc of south France. He studied the translation zealously, and concluded that Christians should live like the apostles—without individual property. He gave part of his wealth to his wife, distributed the remainder among the poor, and began to preach evangelical poverty. He gathered about him a small group, the “Poor Men of Lyons,” who dressed like monks, lived in chastity, went barefoot or in sandals, and pooled their earnings communistically.² For a time the clergy made no objection, and allowed them to read and sing in the churches.³ But when Peter thrust his sickle into another man’s harvest in too literal fulfillment of the Gospel, the archbishop of Lyons sharply reminded him that only bishops were allowed to preach. Peter went to Rome (1179), and asked Alexander III for a preaching license. It was granted, on condition of consent and supervision by the local clergy. Peter resumed his preaching, apparently without such local consent. His followers became devotees of the Bible, and learned large sections of it by heart. Gradually the movement took on an antisacerdotal tinge, rejected all priesthood, denied the validity of sacraments administered by a sinful priest, and attributed to every believer in a state of sanctity the power to forgive sins.’ Some members repudiated indulgences, purgatory, transubstantiation, and prayer to the saints; one group preached that “all things should be in common”;⁴ another identified the Church with the scarlet woman of the Apocalypse.⁵ The sect was condemned in 1184. One part of it, the “Poor Catholics,” was received into the Church in 1206 by Innocent III; the majority persisted in heresy, and spread through France into Spain and Germany. Probably to check their increase, a Council of Toulouse in 1229 decreed that no lay folk should possess scriptural books except the Psalter and the Hours (which were chiefly psalms); nor should they read these except in Latin, for no vernacular translation had yet been examined and guaranteed by the Church.⁶ In the suppression of the Albigenses thousands of Waldenses went to the stake. Peter himself died in Bohemia in 1217, apparently by a natural death.

By the middle of the twelfth century the towns of Western Europe were honeycombed with heretical sects; “the cities,” said a bishop in 1190, “are filled with these false prophets”;⁷ Milan alone had seventeen new religions. The leading heretics there were the Patarines—named apparently from Pataria, a poor quarter of the town. The movement seems to have begun as a protest against the rich; it was turned to anticlericalism, denounced the simony, wealth, marriage, and concubinage of the clergy, and proposed, in the words of one leader, that “the wealth of the clergy be impounded, their property put up at auction; if they resist, let their houses be given up to pillage, and let them and their bastards be hounded out of the city.”⁸ Similar anticlerical parties rose in Viterbo, Orvieto, Verona, Ferrara, Parma, Piacenza, Rimini….⁹ At times they dominated the popular assemblies, captured city governments, and taxed the clergy to pay for civic enterprises.¹⁰ Innocent III instructed his legate in Lombardy to exact an oath from all municipal officials that they would not appoint or admit heretics to office. In 1237 a Milanese mob, “blaspheming and reviling,” polluted several churches with “unmentionable filth.”¹¹

The most powerful of the heretical sects was variously named Cathari, from the Greek for “pure”; Bulgari, from their Balkan provenance (whence the abusive term bugger); and Albigenses, from the French town of Albi, where they were especially numerous. Montpellier, Narbonne, and Marseille were the first French centers of the heresy, perhaps through contact with Moslems and Jews, and through frequentation by merchants from heretical centers in Bosnia, Bulgaria, and Italy. Merchants spread the movement to Toulouse, Orléans, Soissons, Arras, and Reims, but Languedoc and Provence remained its strongholds. There French medieval civilization had reached its height; the great religions mingled in urbane amity, women were imperiously beautiful, morals were loose, troubadours spread gay ideas, and, as in Frederick’s Italy, the Renaissance was ready to begin. Southern France was at that time (1200) composed of practically independent principalities, tenuously bound in theoretical allegiance to the king of France. In this region the counts of Toulouse were the greatest lords, possessing territories more extensive than those directly owned by the king. The doctrines and practices of the Cathari were in part a return to primitive Christian beliefs and ways, partly a vague memory of the Arian heresy that had prevailed in southern France under the Visigoths, partly a product of Manichean and other Oriental ideas. They had a black-robed clergy of priests and bishops called perfecti, who at their ordination vowed to leave parents, mate, and children, to devote themselves “to God and the Gospel … never to touch a woman, never to kill an animal, never to eat meat, eggs, or dairy food, nor anything but fish and vegetables.”* The “believers” (crecientes) were followers who promised to take these vows later; they were allowed meanwhile to eat meat and marry, but they were required to renounce the Catholic Church, to advance toward the “perfect” life, and to greet any of the perfecti with a triple and reverent genuflection.

The theology of the Cathari divided the cosmos Manicheanly into Good, God, Spirit, Heaven; and Evil, Satan, Matter, the material universe. Satan, not God, created the visible world. All matter was accounted evil, including the cross on which Christ died, and the consecrated Host of the Eucharist; Christ spoke only figuratively when He said of the bread, “This is my body.”¹³ All flesh was matter, and all contact with it was impurity; all sexual congress was sinful; the sin of Adam and Eve was coitus.¹⁴ Opponents describe the Albigenses as rejecting the sacraments, the Mass, the veneration of images, the Trinity, and the Virgin Birth; Christ was an angel, but not one with God. They repudiated (we are told) the institution of private property, and aspired to an equality of goods.¹⁵ They made the Sermon on the Mount the essence of their ethics. They were taught to love their enemies, to care for the sick and the poor, never to swear, always to keep the peace; force was never moral, even against infidels; capital punishment was a capital crime; one should quietly trust that in the end God would triumph over evil, without using evil means.¹⁶ There was no hell or purgatory in this theology; every soul would be saved, if only after many purifying transmigrations. To attain heaven one had to die in a state of purity; for this it was necessary to receive from a Catharist priest the consolamentum, a last sacrament which completely cleansed the soul of sin. Cathari believers (like some early Christians in the case of baptism) postponed this sacrament to what they judged to be their final illness. Those who recovered ran a risk of acquiring new impurity and dying without the consolamentum; hence it was a great misfortune to recover after receiving it; and it is charged that the Albigensian priests, to avert this calamity, persuaded many a recovering patient to starve himself into paradise. Sometimes, we are assured, they made matters certain by suffocating a patient with his consent.¹⁷

The Church might have allowed this sect to die of its own suicide had not the Cathari engaged in active criticism of the Church. They denied that the Church was the Church of Christ; St. Peter had never come to Rome, had never founded the papacy; the popes were successors to the emperors, not to the apostles. Christ had no place to lay His head, but the pope lived in a palace; Christ was propertyless and penniless, but Christian prelates were rich; surely, said the Cathari, these lordly archbishops and bishops, these worldly priests, these fat monks, were the Pharisees of old returned to life! The Roman Church, they were sure, was the Whore of Babylon, the clergy were a Synagogue of Satan, the pope was Antichrist.¹⁸ They denounced the preachers of crusades as murderers.¹⁹ Many of them laughed at indulgences and relics. One group, it is alleged, made an image of the Virgin, ugly, one-eyed, and deformed, pretended to work miracles with it, secured wide credence for the imposture, and then revealed the hoax.²⁰ Many views of the Cathari were spread on the wings of song by troubadours who resented the ethics of Christ without quite adopting those of the new sect; all the leading troubadours except two were considered to be on the side of the Albigensians; these troubadours made fun of pilgrims, confession, holy water, the cross; they called the churches “dens of thieves,” and Catholic priests seemed to them “traitors, liars, and hypocrites.”²¹

For some time the Cathari received a broad toleration from the ecclesiastics and the secular powers of southern France. Apparently the people were allowed to choose freely between the old religion and the new.²² Public debates were held between Catholic and Catharist theologians; one such took place at Carcassonne in the presence of a papal legate and King Pedro II of Aragon (1204). In 1167 various branches of the Cathari held a council of their clergy, attended by representatives from several countries; it discussed and regulated Catharist doctrine, discipline, and administration, and adjourned without having been disturbed.²³ Moreover, the nobility found it desirable to weaken the Church in Languedoc; the Church was rich, and owned much land; the nobles, relatively poor, began to seize Church property. In 1171 Roger II, Viscount of Béziers, sacked an abbey, threw the bishop of Albi into prison, and set a heretic to guard him. When the monks of Allet chose an abbot unsatisfactory to the Viscount, he burned the monastery and jailed the abbot; when the latter died the merry Viscount installed his corpse in the pulpit and persuaded the monks to choose a pleasing substitute. Raymond Roger, Count of Foix, drove abbot and monks from the abbey of Pamiers; his horses ate oats from the altar; his soldiers used the arms and legs of the crucifixes as pestles to grind grain, and practiced their markmanship upon the image of Christ. Count Raymond VI of Toulouse destroyed several churches, persecuted the monks of Moissac, and was excommunicated (1196). But excommunication had become a trifle to the nobles of southern France. Many of them openly professed, or liberally protected, the Catharist heresy.²⁴

Innocent III, coming to the papacy in 1198, saw in these developments a threat to both Church and state. He recognized some excuse for criticism of the Church, but he felt that he could hardly remain idle when the great ecclesiastical organization for which he had such lofty plans and hopes, and which seemed to him the chief bulwark against human violence, social chaos, and royal iniquity, was attacked in its very foundations, robbed of its possessions and dignity, and mocked with blasphemous travesties. The state too had committed sins and cherished corruption and unworthy officials, but only fools wished to destroy it. How could any continuing social order be built on the principles that forbade parentage and counseled suicide? Could any economy prosper on the idolatry of poverty and without the incentives of property? Could the relations of the sexes, and the rearing of children, be rescued from a wild disorder except by some such institution as marriage? Catharism seemed to Innocent a mess of nonsense, made poisonous by the simplicity of the people. What was the sense of a crusade against infidels in Palestine, when these Albigensian infidels were multiplying in the heart of Christendom?

Two months after his accession Innocent wrote to the archbishop of Auch in Gascony:

The little boat of St. Peter is beaten by many storms and tossed about on the sea. But it grieves me most of all that… there are now arising, more unrestrainedly and injuriously than ever before, ministers of diabolical error who are ensnaring the souls of the simple. With their superstitions and false inventions they are perverting the meaning of the Holy Scriptures and trying to destroy the unity of the Catholic Church. Since … this pestilential error is growing in Gascony and the neighboring territories, we wish you and your fellow bishops to resist it with all your might…. We give you a strict command that, by whatever means you can, you destroy all these heresies, and repel from your diocese all who are polluted by them…. If necessary, you may cause the princes and people to suppress them with the sword.²⁵

The archbishop of Auch, a man indulgent to others as well as to himself, seems to have taken no action on this letter; and the archbishop of Narbonne and the bishop of Béziers resisted the papal legates that Innocent sent to enforce his decrees. About this time six noble ladies, led by the sister of the Count of Foix, were converted to Catharism in a public ceremony attended by many of the nobility. Innocent replaced his unsuccessful legates with a more resolute agent, Arnaud, head of the Cistercian monks (1204); gave him extraordinary powers to make inquisition throughout France, and commissioned him to offer a plenary indulgence to the king and nobles of France for aid in suppressing the Catharist heresy. To Philip Augustus, in return for such aid, the Pope offered the lands of all who should fail to join in a crusade against the Albigensians.²⁶ Philip demurred; he had just conquered Normandy, and wanted time for digestion. Raymond VI of Toulouse agreed to use persuasion on the heretics, but refused to join a war against them. Innocent excommunicated him; he promised to comply, was absolved, and proved negligent again. “How can we do it?” asked a knight who had been commanded by a papal legate to expel the Cathari from their lands. “We have been brought up with these people, we have kindred among them, and we see them living righteously.”²⁷ St. Dominic entered the scene from Spain, preached peaceably against the heretics, and made converts to orthodoxy by the holiness of his life.²⁸ Perhaps the problem could have been met by such means, aided by clerical reform, had not Pierre de Castelnau, a papal legate, been slain by a knight who was thereafter protected by Raymond.²⁹ Innocent, who had borne with patience the frustration of his efforts against the heresy for almost ten years, now resorted to extreme measures. He excommunicated Raymond and all his abettors; laid under interdict all lands subject to them, and offered these lands to any Christian who could seize them. He summoned Christians from all countries to a crusade against the Albigensians and their protectors. Philip Augustus allowed many barons of his realm to enlist, and contingents came from Germany and Italy. To all participants the same plenary indulgence was promised as to those who took the cross for Palestine. Raymond asked forgiveness, did public penance (being scourged, half naked, in the church of St. Gilles), was absolved again, and joined the holy war (1209).

Most of the population of Languedoc, nobles and commoners alike, resisted the crusaders, seeing in the attack of northern barons and soldiers of fortune an attempt to seize their lands under cover of religious zeal; even the orthodox Christians of the south fought the invasion from the north.³⁰ When the crusaders approached Béziers they offered to spare it the horrors of war if it would surrender all heretics listed by its bishop; the city leaders refused, saying they would rather stand siege till they should be reduced to eating their children. The crusaders scaled the walls, captured the town, and slew 20,000 men, women, and children in indiscriminate massacre; even those who had sought asylum in the church.³¹ Caesarius of Heisterbach, a Cistercian monk writing twenty years after, is our only authority for the story that when Arnaud, the papal legate, was asked should Catholics be spared, he answered, “Kill them all, for God knows His own”;³² perhaps he feared that all the defeated would profess orthodoxy for the occasion. Béziers having been burned to the ground, the crusaders, led by Raymond, advanced to attack the fortress of Carcassonne, where Raymond’s nephew, Count Roger of Béziers, made a final stand. The fortress was taken, and Roger died of dysentery.

The bravest leader in this siege was Simon de Montfort. Born in France about 1170, he was the elder son of the lord of Montfort, near Paris; he became Earl of Leicester through his English mother. Like many men of that swashbuckling age, he was able to combine great piety with great wars; he heard Mass every day, was famous for his chastity, and had served with honor in Palestine. With his small army of 4500 men, and urged on by the papal legate, he now assaulted town after town, overcame all resistance, and gave the population a choice between swearing allegiance to the Roman faith or suffering death as heretics. Thousands swore, hundreds preferred death.³³ For four years Simon continued his campaigns, devastating nearly all the territory of Count Raymond except Toulouse. In 1215 Toulouse itself surrendered to him; Count Raymond was deposed by a council of prelates at Montpellier, and Simon succeeded to his title and most of his lands.

Innocent III did not quite approve of these proceedings. He was shocked to find that the crusaders had appropriated the holdings of men never guilty of heresy, and had robbed and murdered like savage buccaneers.³⁴ Taking mercy on Raymond, he assigned him an annuity, and took under the care of the Church a portion of his lands in trust for Raymond’s son. Raymond VII, coming of age, recaptured Toulouse; Simon died in a second siege of the city (1218); the crusade was suspended now that Innocent had died; and such Albigensian devotees as had survived came forth to practice and preach again under the lenient rule of the new Count of Toulouse.

In 1223 Louis VIII of France offered to depose Raymond VII, and to crush out all heresy in Raymond’s territory, if Honorius III would allow him to add the region to the royal domain. We do not know the Pope’s reply. But a new crusade was begun, and Louis was on the verge of victory when he died at Montpensier (1226). Seizing the opportunity to make peace with Blanche of Castile, regent for Louis IX, Raymond offered the hand of his daughter Jeanne to Louis’ brother Alphonse, with the reversion of Raymond’s lands to Jeanne and her husband at Raymond’s death. Blanche, harassed by rebellious nobles, accepted, and Pope Gregory IX approved on Raymond’s pledge to suppress all heresy. A treaty of peace was signed at Paris in 1229, and the Albigensian wars came to an end after thirty years of strife and devastation. Orthodoxy triumphed, toleration ceased; and the Council of Narbonne (1229) forbade the possession of any part of the Bible by laymen.³⁵ Feudalism spread, municipal liberty declined, the gay age of the troubadours passed away, in southern France. In 1271 Jeanne and Alphonse, who had inherited Raymond’s possessions, died without issue, and the spacious county of Toulouse fell to Louis IX and the French crown. Central France now had free commercial outlets on the Mediterranean, and France had taken a great step toward unity. This, and the Inquisition, were the chief results of the Albigensian crusades.

II. THE BACKGROUND OF THE INQUISITION

The Old Testament laid down a simple code for dealing with heretics: they were to be carefully examined; and if three reputable witnesses testified to their having “gone and served other gods,” the heretics were to be led out from the city and “stoned with stones till they die” (Deut. xvii, 25).

If there arise among you a prophet, or a dreamer of dreams … saying, Let us go after other gods … that prophet, or that dreamer of dreams, shall be put to death…. If thy brother … or thy son, or thy daughter, or the wife of thy bosom, or thy friend which is as thine own soul, entice thee secretly, saying, Let us go and serve other gods … thou shalt not consent unto him, nor hearken unto him; neither shalt thine eye pity him, neither shalt thou … conceal him; but thou shalt surely kill him (Deut. xiii, 1–9)…. Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live (Exod. xxii, 18).

According to the Gospel of St. John (xv, 6), Jesus accepted this tradition: “If anyone abide not in me he shall be cast forth as a branch, and shall wither; and they shall gather him up, and cast him into the fire, and he burneth.” Medieval Jewish communities retained the Biblical law of heresy in theory, but rarely practiced it. Maimonides adopted it without reserve.³⁶

The laws of the Greeks made asebeia—failure to worship the gods of the orthodox Hellenic pantheon—a capital crime; it was by such a law that Socrates was put to death. In classic Rome, where the gods were allied with the state in close harmony, heresy and blasphemy were classed with treason, and were punishable with death. Where no accuser could be found to denounce an offender, the Roman judge summoned the suspect and made an inquisitio, or inquiry, into the case; from this procedure the medieval Inquisition took its form and name. The Eastern emperors, applying Roman law in the Byzantine world, inflicted the death penalty upon Manicheans and other heretics. During the Dark Ages in the West, when Christianity was seldom challenged by its own children, tolerance increased, and Leo IX held that excommunication should be the only punishment for heresy.³⁷ In the twelfth century, as heresy spread, some ecclesiastics argued that the excommunication of heretics by the Church should be followed with their banishment or imprisonment by the state.³⁸ The revival of Roman law at Bologna in the twelfth century provided terms, methods, and stimulus for a religious inquisition; and the canon law of heresy was copied word for word from the fifth law of the title De haereticis in the Justinian Code.³⁹ Finally, in the thirteenth century, the Church took over the law of its greatest enemy, Frederick II, that heresy should be punished with death.

It was a general assumption of Christians—even of many heretics—that the Church had been established by the Son of God. On this assumption any attack upon the Catholic faith was an offense against God Himself; the contumacious heretic could only be viewed as an agent of Satan, sent to undo the work of Christ; and any man or government that tolerated heresy was serving Lucifer. Feeling herself an inseparable part of the moral and political government of Europe, the Church looked upon heresy precisely as the state looked upon treason: it was an attack upon the foundations of social order. “The civil law,” said Innocent III, “punishes traitors with confiscation of their property, and death…. All the more, then, should we excommunicate, and confiscate the property of, those who are traitors to the faith of Jesus Christ; for it is an infinitely greater sin to offend the divine majesty than to attack the majesty of the sovereign.”⁴⁰ To ecclesiastical statesmen like Innocent the heretic seemed worse than a Moslem or a Jew; these lived either outside of Christendom, or by an orderly—and equally severe—law within it; the alien enemy was a soldier in open war; the heretic was a traitor within, who undermined the unity of a Christendom engaged in a gigantic conflict with Islam. Furthermore, said the theologians, if every man may interpret the Bible according to his own light (however dim), and make his own individual brand of Christianity, the religion that held up the frail moral code of Europe would soon be shattered into a hundred creeds, and lose its efficacy as a social cement binding natively savage men into a society and a civilization.

Whether because it shared these views without formulating them, or because simple souls naturally fear the different or the strange, or because men enjoy releasing, in the anonymity of the crowd, instincts normally suppressed by individual responsibility, the people themselves, except in southern France and northern Italy, were the most enthusiastic persecutors; “the mob lynched heretics long before the Church began to persecute.”⁴¹ The orthodox population complained that the Church was too lenient with heretics.⁴² Sometimes it “snatched sectaries from the hands of protecting priests.”⁴³ “In this country,” wrote a priest of northern France to Innocent III, “the piety of the people is so great that they are always ready to send to the stake not only avowed heretics, but those merely suspected of heresy.”⁴⁴ In 1114 the bishop of Soissons imprisoned some heretics; while he was away the populace, “fearing that the clergy might be too lenient,” broke into the jail, dragged forth the heretics, and burned them at the stake.⁴⁵ In 1144 at Liége the mob insisted on burning some heretics whom Bishop Adalbero still hoped to convert.⁴⁶ When Pierre de Bruys said, “The priests lie when they pretend to make the body of Christ” (in the Eucharist),⁴⁷ and burned a pile of crosses on Good Friday, the people killed him there and then.⁴⁸

The state, with some reluctance, joined in persecuting heretics because it feared that government would be impossible without the aid of a Church inculcating a unified religious belief. Moreover, it suspected religious heresy to be a cloak for political radicalism, and was not always wrong.⁴⁹ Material considerations may have played a part, for religious or political heresy threatened the possessions of Church and state. The public opinion of the upper classes—again excepting Languedoc—demanded the extirpation of heresy at any cost.⁵⁰ Henry VI of Germany (1194) ordered severe punishment of heretics, and the confiscation of their property; and similar edicts were issued by Otto IV (1210), Louis VIII of France (1226), Florence (1227), and Milan (1228). The most rigorous code of suppression was enacted by Frederick II in 1220–39. Heretics condemned by the Church were to be delivered to the “secular arm”—the local authorities—and burned to death. If they recanted they were to be let off with imprisonment for life. All their property was to be confiscated, their heirs were to be disinherited, their children were to remain ineligible to any position of emolument or dignity unless they atoned for their parents’ sin by denouncing other heretics. The houses of heretics were to be destroyed and never rebuilt.⁵¹ The gentle Louis IX placed similar laws among the statutes of France. Indeed it was the kings who disputed with the people the distinction of inaugurating the persecution of heresy. King Robert of France had thirteen heretics burned at Orléans in 1022; this is the first known case of capital punishment of heresy since the secular execution of Priscillian in 385. In 1051 Henry HI of Germany hanged several Manicheans or Cathari at Goslar over the protests of Bishop Wazo of Liége, who argued that excommunication was enough.⁵² In 1183 Count Philip of Flanders, in collaboration with the archbishop of Reims, “sent to the stake a great many nobles, clerics, knights, peasants, young girls, married women, and widows, whose property they confiscated and shared between them.”⁵³

Normally, before the thirteenth century, inquisition into heresy was left to the bishops. They were hardly inquisitors; they waited for public rumor or clamor to point out the heretics. Summoning them, they found it difficult to elicit confessions by inquiry; loath to use torture, they resorted to trial by ordeal, apparently in the sincere belief that God would work miracles to protect the innocent. St. Bernard approved of this expedient, and an episcopal council at Reims (1157) prescribed it as regular procedure in trials for heresy; but Innocent III forbade it. In 1185 Pope Lucius III, dissatisfied with the negligence of the bishops in pursuing heresy, ordered them to visit their parishes at least once a year, to arrest all suspects, to reckon as guilty any who would not swear full loyalty to the Church (the Cathari refused to take any oaths), and to hand over such recalcitrants to the secular arm. Papal legates were empowered to depose bishops negligent in stamping out heresy.⁵⁴ Innocent III, in 1215, required all civil authorities, on pain of being themselves indicted for heresy, to swear publicly “to exterminate, from the lands subject to their obedience, all heretics who have been marked out by the Church for animadversio debita—“due punishment.” Any prince who neglected this duty was to be deposed, and the pope would release his subjects from their allegiance.⁵⁵ “Due punishment” was as yet only banishment and confiscation of goods.⁵⁶

When Gregory IX mounted the papal throne (1227), he found that despite popular, governmental, and episcopal prosecutions, heresy was growing; all the Balkans, most of Italy, much of France were so turbulent with heresy that the Church, so soon after Innocent’s splendid power, seemed doomed to division and disintegration. As the aged pontiff saw the matter, the Church, simultaneously fighting Frederick and heresy, was engaged in a struggle for survival, and was warranted in adopting the morals and measures of a state of war. Shocked at learning that Bishop Filippo Paternon, whose diocese extended from Pisa to Arezzo, had been converted to Catharism, Gregory appointed a board of inquisitors, headed by a Dominican monk, to sit in Florence and bring the heretics to judgment (1227). This, in effect, was the beginning of the papal inquisition, though formally the inquisitors were to be subject to the local bishop. In 1231 Gregory adopted into the law of the Church Frederick’s legislation of 1224; henceforth Church and state agreed that impenitent heresy was treason, and should be punished with death. The Inquisition was now officially established under the control of the popes.

III. THE INQUISITORS

After 1227 Gregory and his successors sent out an increasing number of special inquisitores to pursue heresy. He favored for this task the members of the new mendicant orders, partly because the simplicity and devotion of their lives would counteract the scandals of ecclesiastical luxury, and partly because he could not depend upon the bishops; however, no inquisitor was to condemn a heretic to serious punishment without episcopal consent. So many Dominicans were employed in this work that they were nicknamed Domini canes—the (hunting) “dogs of the Lord.”⁵⁷ Most of them were men of strict morals, but few had the quality of mercy. They thought of themselves not as judges impartially weighing evidence, but as warriors pursuing the enemies of Christ. Some were careful and conscientious men like Bernard Gui; some were sadists like “Robert the Dominican,” a converted Patarine heretic, who in one day in 1239 sent 180 prisoners to the stake, including a bishop who, in his judgment, had given heretics too much freedom. Gregory suspended Robert from office, and imprisoned him for life.⁵⁸

The jurisdiction of the inquisitors extended only to Christians; Jews and Moslems were not summoned unless they were relapsed converts.⁵⁹ The Dominicans made special efforts to convert Jews, but only by peaceful means. When, in 1256, some Jews were accused of ritual murder, Dominican and Franciscan monks risked their own lives to save them from the mob.⁶⁰ The purpose and scope of the Inquisition are best expressed by a bull of Nicholas III (1280):

We hereby excommunicate and anathematize all heretics—Cathari, Patarines, Poor Men of Lyons … and all others, by whatever name they may be called. When condemned by the Church they shall be given over to the secular judge to be punished…. If any, after being seized, repent and wish to do penance, they shall be imprisoned for life…. All who receive, defend, or aid heretics shall be excommunicated. If anyone remains under excommunication a year and a day, he shall be proscribed…. If those who are suspected of heresy cannot prove their innocence, they shall be excommunicated. If they remain under the ban of excommunication a year, they shall be condemned as heretics. They shall have no right of appeal…. Whoever grants them Christian burial shall be excommunicated until he makes proper satisfaction. He shall not be absolved until he has with his own hands dug up their bodies and cast them forth…. We prohibit all laymen to discuss matters of the Catholic faith; if anyone does so he shall be excommunicated. Whoever knows of heretics, or of those who hold secret meetings, or of those who do not conform in all respects to the orthodox faith, shall make it known to his confessor, or to someone else who will bring it to the knowledge of the bishop or the inquisitor. If he does not do so he shall be excommunicated. Heretics and all who receive, support, or aid them, and all their children to the second generation, shall not be admitted to an ecclesiastical office…. We now deprive all such of their benefices forever.⁶¹

Inquisitorial procedure might begin with the summary arrest of all heretics, sometimes also of all suspects; or the visiting inquisitors might summon the entire adult population of a locality for a preliminary examination. During an initial “time of grace,” about thirty days, those who confessed heresy and repented were let off with brief imprisonment or some work of piety or charity.⁶² Heretics who did not now confess, but were detected in this initial inquiry, or by the spies of the Inquisition,⁶³ or elsewise, were cited before the inquisitorial court. Normally this court was composed of twelve men chosen by the local secular ruler from a list of nominees presented to him by the bishop and the inquisitors; two notaries and several “servitors” were added. If the accused took this second chance to confess they received punishments varying with the degree of their adjudged offense; if they denied their guilt they were imprisoned. Accused persons might be tried in their absence, or after their death. Two condemnatory witnesses were required. Confessed heretics were accepted as witnesses against others; wives and children were allowed to testify against, but not for, husbands and fathers.⁶⁴ All the accused in a locality were, on demand, allowed to see a combined list of all accusers, without any specification as to which had accused whom; it was feared that individual confrontations would lead to the killing of accusers by friends of the accused; and “in fact,” says Lea, “a number of witnesses were slain on simple suspicion.”⁶⁵ Usually the accused man was asked to name his enemies, and any evidence against him by such men was rejected.⁶⁶ False accusers were severely punished.⁶⁷ Before 1300 the accused was not allowed to have legal aid.⁶⁸ After 1254 the inquisitors were required by papal decree to submit the evidence not only to the bishop but also to men of high repute in the locality, and to decide in agreement with their votes.⁶⁹ Sometimes a board of experts (periti) was called in to pass on the evidence. In general the inquisitors were instructed that it was better to let the guilty escape than to condemn the innocent, and that they must have either clear proof or a confession.

Roman law had permitted the eliciting of confessions by torture. It was not used in the episcopal courts, nor in the first twenty years of the papal inquisition; but Innocent IV (1252) authorized it where the judges were convinced of the accused man’s guilt, and later pontiffs condoned its use.⁷⁰ The popes advised that torture should be a last resort, should be applied only once, and should be kept “this side of loss of limb and danger of death.” The inquisitors interpreted “only once” as meaning only once for each examination; sometimes they interrupted torture to resume examination, and then felt free to torture anew. Torture was in several cases used to force witnesses to testify, or to induce a confessing heretic to name other heretics.⁷¹ It took the form of flogging, burning, the rack, or solitary imprisonment in dark and narrow dungeons. The feet of the accused might be slowly roasted over burning coals; or he might be bound upon a triangular frame, and have his arms and legs pulled by cords wound on a windlass. Sometimes the diet of the imprisoned man was restricted to weaken his body and will and render him susceptible to such psychological torture as alternate promises of mercy or threats of death.⁷² Confessions elicited under torture were little respected by the inquisitorial court, but this difficulty was met by having the accused confirm, three hours later, the admissions he had made under torture; if he refused, the torture could be resumed. In 1286 the officials of Carcassonne sent to Philip IV of France and Pope Nicholas IV a letter of complaint alleging the severity of the tortures used by the inquisitor Jean Galand. Some of Jean’s prisoners were left for long periods in complete darkness and solitude; some were so manacled that they had to sit in their own filth, and could only lie on their backs on the cold earth.⁷³ Some men had been so drawn on the rack that they had lost the use of their arms and legs; some had died under torture.⁷⁴ Philip denounced these barbarities, and Pope Clement V (1312) endeavored to moderate the use of torture by inquisitors; but his cautions were soon ignored.⁷⁵

Prisoners who had refused two opportunities to confess and were later convicted, and those who had relapsed into heresy after recanting, were imprisoned for life, or were put to death. Life imprisonment might be mitigated with certain freedom of movement, visitation, and games; or it might be enhanced with fasting or chains.⁷⁶ Confiscation of property was an added penalty of conviction after resistance. Usually a part of the confiscated goods went to the secular ruler of the province, part to the Church; in Italy one third was given to the informer; in France the crown took all. These considerations stimulated individuals and the state to join in the hunt, and led to trials of the dead; at any time the possessions of innocent persons might be seized on the charge that the testator had died in heresy; this was one of many abuses that popes vainly denounced.⁷⁷ The bishop of Rodez boasted that he had made 100,000 sols in a single campaign against the heretics of his diocese.⁷⁸

Periodically the inquisitors, in a fearful ceremony (sermo generalis), announced convictions and penalties. The penitents were placed on a stage in the center of a church, their confessions were read, and they were asked to confirm them, and to pronounce a formula abjuring heresy. The celebrant inquisitor then absolved the penitents from excommunication, and announced the various sentences. Those who were to be “relaxed,” or abandoned to the secular arm, were allowed another day for conversion; those who confessed and repented, even at the foot of the stake, were given life imprisonment; the obdurate were burned to death in the public square. In Spain this entire procedure of sermo generalis and execution was termed an act of faith, auto-da-fé, for it was intended to strengthen the orthodoxy of the people and to reaffirm the faith of the Church. The Church never pronounced a sentence of death; her old motto was eccelesia abhorret a sanguine—“the Church shrinks from blood”; clerics were forbidden to shed blood. So, in turning over to the secular arm those whom she had condemned, the Church confined herself to asking the state authorities to inflict the “due penalty,” with a caution to avoid “all bloodshed and all danger of death.” After Gregory IX it was agreed by both Church and state that the caution should not be taken literally, but that the condemned were to be put to death without shedding of blood—i.e., by burning at the stake.⁷⁹

The number of those sentenced to death by the official Inquisition was smaller than historians once believed.⁸⁰ Bernard de Caux, a zealous inquisitor, left behind him a long register of cases tried by him; not one of these was “relaxed.”⁸¹ In seventeen years as an inquisitor Bernard Gui condemned 930 heretics, forty-five of them to death.⁸² At a sermo generalis in Toulouse in 1310 twenty persons were ordered to go on pilgrimage, sixty-five were condemned to life imprisonment, eighteen to death. In an auto-da-fé of 1312 fifty-one were sent on pilgrimage, eighty-six received various terms of imprisonment, five were turned over to the secular arm.⁸³ The worst tragedies of the Inquisition were concealed in the dungeons rather than brought to light at the stake.

IV. RESULTS

The medieval Inquisition achieved its immediate purposes. It stamped out Catharism in France, reduced the Waldenses to a few scattered zealots, restored south Italy to orthodoxy, and postponed by three centuries the dismemberment of Western Christianity. France lost to Italy the cultural leadership of Europe; but the French monarchy, strengthened by the acquisition of Languedoc, grew powerful enough to subdue the papacy under Boniface VIII, and to imprison it under Clement V.

In Spain the Inquisition played a minor role before 1300. Raymond of Peñafort, Dominican confessor to James I of Aragon, persuaded him to admit the Inquisition in 1232. Perhaps to check inquisitorial zeal a statute of 1233 made the state the chief beneficiary of confiscations for heresy; in later centuries, however, this would prove a heady stimulus to monarchs who found that inquisition and acquisition were near allied.

In northern Italy heretics continued to exist in great number. The orthodox majority were too indifferent to join actively in the hunt; and independent dictators like Ezzelino at Vicenza and Pallavicino at Cremona and Milan clandestinely or openly protected heretics. In Florence the monk Ruggieri organized a military order of orthodox nobles to support the Inquisition; the Patarines fought bloody battles with them in the streets, and were defeated (1245); thereafter Florentine heresy hid its head. In 1252 the inquisitor Fra Piero da Verona was assassinated by heretics at Milan; and his canonization as Peter Martyr did more to check heresy in north Italy than all the rigors of the inquisitors. The papacy organized crusades against Ezzelino and Pallavicino; the one was overthrown in 1259, the other in 1268. The triumph of the Church in Italy was, on the surface, complete.

In England the Inquisition never took hold. Henry II, anxious to prove his orthodoxy amid his controversy with Becket, scourged and branded twenty-nine heretics at Oxford (1166);⁸⁴ for the rest there was little heresy in England before Wyclif. In Germany the Inquisition flourished with brief madness, and then died away. In 1212 Bishop Henry of Strasbourg burned eighty heretics in one day. Most of them were Waldenses; their leader, Priest John, proclaimed their disbelief in indulgences, purgatory, and sacerdotal celibacy, and held that ecclesiastics should own no property. In 1227 Gregory IX made Conrad, a priest of Marburg, head of the Inquisition in Germany, and commissioned him not only to exterminate heresy but to reform the clergy, whose immorality was denounced by the Pope as the chief cause of waning faith. Conrad approached both tasks with outstanding cruelty. He gave all indicted heretics a simple choice: to confess and be punished, or to deny and be burned at the stake. When he applied like energy to reforming the clergy, orthodox and heretics joined to oppose him; he was killed by the friends of his victims (1233); and the German bishops took over the Inquisition and domesticated it to a juster procedure. Many sects, some heretical, some mystical, survived in Bohemia and Germany, and prepared the way for Huss and Luther.

In judging the Inquisition we must see it against the background of a time accustomed to brutality. Perhaps it can be better understood by our age, which has killed more people in war, and snuffed out more innocent lives without due process of law, than all the wars and persecutions between Caesar and Napoleon. Intolerance is the natural concomitant of strong faith; tolerance grows only when faith loses certainty; certainty is murderous. Plato sanctioned intolerance in his Laws; the Reformers sanctioned it in the sixteenth century; and some critics of the Inquisition defend its methods when practiced by modern states. The methods of the inquisitors, including torture, were adopted into the law codes of many governments; and perhaps our contemporary secret torture of suspects finds its model in the Inquisition even more than in Roman law. Compared with the persecution of heresy in Europe from 1227 to 1492, the persecution of Christians by Romans in the first three centuries after Christ was a mild and humane procedure. Making every allowance required of an historian and permitted to a Christian, we must rank the Inquisition, along with the wars and persecutions of our time, as among the darkest blots on the record of mankind, revealing a ferocity unknown in any beast.

CHAPTER XXIX

Monks and Friars

1095–1300

I. THE MONASTIC LIFE

IT may be that the Church was saved not by the tortures of the Inquisition but by the rise of new monastic orders that took out of the mouths of heretics the gospel of evangelical poverty, and for a century gave to the older monastic orders, and to the secular clergy, a cleansing example of sincerity.

The monasteries had multiplied during the Dark Ages, reaching a peak in the troubled nadir of the tenth century, and then declining in number as secular order and prosperity grew. In France, about 1100, there were 543; about 1250 there were 287;¹ possibly this loss in the number of abbeys was compensated by a rise in their average membership, but very few monasteries had a hundred monks.² It was still a custom in the thirteenth century for pious or burdened parents to commit children of seven years or older to monasteries as oblates—“offered up” to God; St. Thomas Aquinas began his monastic career so. The Benedictine order considered the vows taken for an oblate by his parents as irrevocable;³ St. Bernard and the new orders held that the oblate, on reaching maturity, might without reproach return to the world.⁴ Generally an adult monk required a papal dispensation if he wished, without sin, to renounce his vows.

Before 1098 most Western monasteries followed, with variable fidelity, some form of the Benedictine rule. A year of novitiate was prescribed, during which the candidate might freely withdraw. One knight drew back, says the monk Caesarius of Heisterbach, “on the cowardly plea that he feared the vermin of the [monastic] garment; for our woolen clothing harbors much vermin.”⁵ Prayer occupied some four hours of the monk’s day; meals were brief, and usually vegetarian; the remainder of the day was given to labor, reading, teaching, hospital work, charity, and rest. Caesarius tells how his monastery, in the famine of 1197, gave as many as 1500 “doles” of food in a day, and “kept alive till harvest time all the poor who came to us.”⁶ In the same crisis a Cistercian abbey in Westphalia slaughtered all its flocks and herds, and pawned its books and sacred vessels, to feed the poor.⁷ Through their own labor and that of their serfs, the monks built abbeys, churches, and cathedrals, farmed great manors, subdued marshes and jungles to tillage, practiced a hundred handicrafts, and brewed excellent wines and ales. Though the monastery seemed to take many good and able men from the world to bury them in a selfish sanctity, it trained thousands of them in mental and moral discipline, and then returned them to the world to serve as councilors and administrators to bishops, popes, and kings.*

In the course of time the growing wealth of the communities overflowed into the monasteries, and the generosity of the people financed the occasional luxury of the monks. The abbey of St. Riquier was not among the richest; yet it had 117 vassals, owned 2500 houses in the town where it was placed, and received from its tenants yearly 10,000 chickens, 10,000 capons, 75,000 eggs … and a money rent individually reasonable, cumulatively great.⁸ Much richer were the monasteries of Monte Cassino, Cluny, Fulda, St. Gall, St. Denis. Abbots like Suger of St. Denis, Peter the Venerable of Cluny, or even Samson of Bury St. Edmund’s, were mighty lords controlling immense material wealth and social or political power. Suger, after feeding his monks and building a majestic cathedral, had enough resources left to half-finance a crusade.⁹ It was probably of Suger that St. Bernard wrote: “I lie if I have not seen an abbot riding with a train of sixty horses and more”;¹⁰ but Suger was prime minister, and had to clothe himself in pomp to impress the populace; he himself lived with austere simplicity in a humble cell, observing all the rules of his order so far as his public duties would allow. Peter the Venerable was a good man, but he failed, despite repeated efforts, to check the progress of the Cluniac monasteries—once the leaders of reform—toward a corporate wealth that enabled the monks, while owning nothing, to live in a degenerative idleness.

Morals fall as riches rise, and nature will out according to men’s means. In any large group certain individuals will be found whose instincts are stronger than their vows. While the majority of monks remained reasonably loyal to their rule, a minority took an easier view toward the world and the flesh. In many cases the abbot had been appointed by some lord or king, usually from a rank accustomed to comfort; such abbots were above monastic rules; they enjoyed hunting, hawking, tournaments, and politics; and their example infected the monks. Giraldus Cambrensis paints a merry picture of the abbot of Evesham: “None was safe from his lust”; the neighborhood reckoned his offspring at eighteen; finally he had to be deposed.¹¹ Worldly abbots, fat and rich and powerful, became a target of public humor and literary diatribe. The most merciless and incredible satire in medieval literature is a description of an abbot by Walter Map.¹² Some cloisters were known for their fine food and wines. We should not grudge the monks a little good cheer, and we can understand how weary they were of vegetables, how they longed for meat; we can sympathize with their occasional gossiping, quarreling, and sleeping at Mass.¹³

The monks, in vowing celibacy, had underestimated the power of a sexual instinct repeatedly stirred by secular example and sights. Caesarius of Heisterbach tells a story, often repeated in the Middle Ages, of an abbot and a young monk riding out together. The youth saw women for the first time. “What are they?” he asked. “They be demons,” said the abbot. “I thought,” said the monk, “that they were the fairest things that ever I saw.”¹⁴ Said the ascetic Peter Damian, nearing the end of a saintly but acerbic life:

I, who am now an old man, may safely look upon the seared and wrinkled visage of a blear-eyed crone. Yet from sight of the more comely and adorned I guard my eyes like boys from fire. Alas, my wretched heart!—which cannot hold scriptural mysteries read through a hundred times, and will not lose the memory of a form seen but once.¹⁵

To some monks virtue seemed a contest for their souls between woman and Christ; their denunciation of woman was an effort to deaden themselves to her charms; their pious dreams were sometimes softened with the dews of desire; and their saintly visions often borrowed the terms of human love.¹⁶ Ovid was a welcome friend in some monasteries, and not least thumbed were his manuals of the amorous art.¹⁷ The sculptures of certain cathedrals, the carvings of their furniture, even the paintings in some missals, portrayed riotous monks and nuns—pigs dressed as monks, monastic robes bulging over erect phalli, nuns sporting with devils.¹⁸ A relief on the Portal of the Judgment at Reims shows a devil dragging condemned men to hell; among them is a mitered bishop. Medieval ecclesiastics—perhaps seculars envying regulars —allowed such caricatures to remain in place; modern churchmen thought it better to have most of them removed. The Church herself was the severest critic of her sinning members; a noble succession of ecclesiastical reformers labored to bring monks and abbots back to the ideals of Christ.

II. ST. BERNARD

At the end of the eleventh century, simultaneously with the purification of the papacy and the fervor of the First Crusade, a movement of self-reform swept through Christendom, immensely improved the secular clergy, and founded new monastic orders dedicated to the full rigor of the Augustinian or Benedictine rule. At an unknown date before 1039 St. John Gualbertus¹⁹ established the order of Vallombrosa in the “shady valley” of that name in Italy, and inaugurated in it the institution of lay brothers later developed by the mendicant orders. The Roman Synod of 1059 exhorted canons—clergymen sharing the labors and revenues of a cathedral—to live in community and hold all their property in common, like the apostles. Some were reluctant, and remained “secular canons”; many responded, adopted a monastic rule that they ascribed to St. Augustine, and formed semimonastic communities collectively known as Augustinian or Austin Canons.* In 1084 St. Bruno of Cologne, having declined the archbishopric of Reims, founded the Carthusian order by establishing a monastery at a desolate spot named Chartreuse, in the Alps near Grenoble; other pious men, sick of worldly strife and clerical laxity, formed similar Carthusian units in secluded places. Each monk worked, ate, and slept in his own separate cell, lived on bread and milk, wore garments of horsehair, and practiced almost perpetual silence. Three times a week they came together for Mass, vespers, and midnight prayers; and on Sundays and holydays they indulged themselves in conversation and a common meal. Of all the monastic orders this was the most austere, and has kept most faithfully, through eight centuries, to its original rule.

In 1098 Robert of Molesmes, tired of trying to reform the various Benedictine monasteries of which he had been prior, built a new monastic house at a wild point called Cîteaux near Dijon; and as Chartreuse named the Carthusians, so Cîteaux named the Cistercian monks. The third abbot of Cîteaux, Stephen Harding of Dorsetshire, reorganized and expanded the monastery, opened branches of it, and drew up the Carta caritatis, or Charter of Love, to insure the peaceful federal co-operation of the Cistercian houses with Cîteaux. The Benedictine rule was restored in full severity: absolute poverty was essential, all flesh food was to be avoided, learning was to be discouraged, verse-making was forbidden, and all splendor of religious vestment, vessel, or building was to be shunned. Every physically able monk was to join in manual labor in gardens and workshops that would make the monastery independent of the outside world, and give no excuse for any monk to leave the grounds. The Cistercians outshone all other groups, monastic or secular, in agricultural energy and skill; they set up new centers of their order in unsettled regions, subdued marshes, jungles, and forests to cultivation, and played a leading part in colonizing eastern Germany, and in repairing the damage that William the Conqueror had done in northern England. In this magnificent labor of civilization the Cistercian monks were aided by lay brothers—conversi—vowed to celibacy, silence, and illiteracy,²⁰ and working as farmers or servants in return for shelter, clothing, and food.²¹