Page images
PDF
EPUB

the penalties prescribed for it by divine and human laws.1

[ocr errors]

That contradicting the Pope was treated and punished as heresy was shown in the most pointed way, when the Minorites, who, as genuine disciples of St. Francis, wished to observe the rule of poverty in all its strictness, were condemned. John of Belna, the inquisitor at Carcassonne, appealed to the most famous canonist of that time, Henry of Segusio, who had declared that he is a heretic who does not receive Papal decrees, and that he lapses into heathenism who refuses to obey the Papal See.2 As we said before, a number of the "Spirituals' paid with their lives for disputing the right of John XXII. to upset their rule and the Bull of his predecessor, Nicolas III. No Council had condemned their opinion; it was only Papal authority, and in this case the authority of the reigning Pope, on the strength of which they were sentenced to the stake, and it went against all natural feeling to ascribe possibility of error to an authority which it was a capital offence to reject. Jurists and theologians who were building up the rights of the Inquisition went further still. Ambrose of Vignate

3

1 Raynald. Annal. ann. 1457, p. 49.

2 "Peccatum Paganitatis incurrit."-Baluze and Mansi, Miscell. ii. 275. 3 Tract. de Hor. (Roma, 1581), f. 11.

(who wrote about 1460) declares him to be a heretic who thinks of the sacraments otherwise than the Roman Church, so that if a theologian had then raised his voice against the recent decree of Eugenius IV. to the Armenians, and the errors contained in it, he would have incurred sentence of death.

As in the thirteenth century, so it was still in the sixteenth. Cornelius Agrippa describes the conduct of the inquisitors in his time, about 1530, as follows: "The inquisitors act entirely by the rule of the canon law and the Papal decretals, as if it was impossible for a Pope to err. They neither go by Scripture nor the tradition of the Fathers. The Fathers, they say, can err and mislead, but the Roman Church, whose head the Pope is, cannot err. They accept as a rule of faith the teaching of the Curia, and the only question they ask the accused is, whether he believes in the Roman Church. If he says Yes, they say, 'The Church condemns this proposition-recant it.' If he refuses, he is handed over to the secular power to be burnt."1

In the long strife of Guelphs and Ghibellines, inquisitors and trials for heresy were among the means constantly employed by the Popes to crush the opponents of

1 De Vanit. Scient. c. 96.--Hagacomit. 1662, p. 444.

their policy and of the Angiovine preponderance. The Bolognese jurist, Calderini, maintains that whoever despises Papal decretals is a heretic, for he thereby seems to contemn the power of the keys. That might be applied to every Ghibelline.1 Thus Innocent IV., in 1248, declared his great Guelphic enemy, Ezzelino, a heretic. In vain did he give assurance, through an ambassador, of the purity of his faith, and offer to swear to it; Innocent stuck to his point, that Ezzelino was one of the Paterines (a new Gnostic sect), without being able to bring forward even any plausible ground for the charge. John XXII. made still more copious use of the same means, partly for carrying out his own territorial claims, partly in support of the rule of King Robert in Italy. On this ground the Margraves Rinaldo and Obizzo of Este, zealous Catholics, and never Ghibellines, but Guelphs, found themselves suddenly declared heretics by the Pope in 1320, and subjected to a process of the Inquisition. Two years afterwards the same thing happened to the whole of the stanchly Ghibelline house of the Visconti at Milan; a Papal Bull announced to them that they were heretics,

1 Tractat. Novus Aureus et Solemn. de Hæret. (Venet. 1571), f. 5. Calderini, adopted son of the famous Giovanni d'Andrea, wrote about 1330. 2 Verci, Storia degli Ecelini, ii. 258.

3 Muratori, Annali, xii. 138 (Milano, 1819).

and condemned all their adherents and subjects to slavery.1 Similar cases occurred repeatedly.

When the Popes themselves made such a use of their judicial power in matters of faith, when Nicolas III. is reproached by his contemporaries with enriching his family through the plunder extorted by means of the Inquisition, one cannot be much surprised to find the inquisitors so habitually using their office for purposes of extortion, as Alvaro Pelayo complains. Clement V., however, declared that an inquisitor, "simply following his conscience," has full power to imprison, and even put into irons, any one he pleases.2

§ XVII.-Trials for Witchcraft.

When we affirm that the whole treatment of witchcraft, as it existed from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century, was partly the direct, partly the indirect, result of the belief in the irrefragable authority of the Pope, this will perhaps sound like a paradox, and yet it is not difficult to show that such is certainly the case.

For many centuries the relics of heathen misbelief, and the popular notions about diabolical agency, nocturnal meetings with demons, enchantments, and witch1 Muratori, op. cit. 150. 2 Clement de Hæret. c. "Multorum."

1

craft, were viewed and treated as a folly inconsistent with Christian belief. Many Councils directed that penance should be imposed on women addicted to this delusion. A canon, adopted into the collections of Regino, Burkard, Ivo, and Gratian, and always appealed to, ordered the people to be instructed on the nonentity of witchcraft, and its incompatibility with the Christian faith. It was long looked upon as a wicked and unchristian error, as something heretical, to attribute superhuman powers and effects to the aid of demons. In the eleventh century it was still considered a heinous sin merely to believe in enchantments and the tricks of professors of witchcraft, as may be seen from Burkard and the penitentiaries. No one could then anticipate a time when the Popes would acknowledge this belief in their Bulls, and direct their subordinates to condemn thousands of men to death on the strength of it.

There is no trace of any belief in diabolical sorcery to be found throughout the liturgical literature of the

1 This canon got into Gratian's Decretum as a canon of Ancyra, through a mistake of Burkard's, who took it from Regino, but misinterpreted the reference, as though this passage also came from the Ancyran canon. See Berardi, Gratian. Can. i. 40; Regino (ed. Wassersahleben), p. 354. Regino has compiled his chapter 371 from passages in the pseudo-Augustinian writing, De Spiritu et Animâ, with some additions.

« PreviousContinue »