A History of The Inquisition of The Middle Ages Volume III Part 17

The vicars and their advocates and the a.s.sembly of experts are all held guilty, and the verses conclude by threatening them:

"But you shall all be punished in a ma.s.s, And we shall learn who caused the wondrous tale Of Vaudois in our city of Arras."[576]

The prophecy was not wholly unverified. Fortunately there was in France a Parlement which had succeeded in establishing its jurisdiction over both the great va.s.sals and the Inquisition, and the relations between the courts of Paris and Brussels were such as to render it nothing loath to interfere. De Beauffort, before his examination, had made an appeal to this supreme tribunal, which had been disregarded and suppressed, but his son Philippe had carried to Paris the tale of the wrongs committed on his father. The Parlement moved slowly, but on January 16, 1461, Philippe came back with an usher commissioned to bring de Beauffort before it after investigating the case. This official took testimony, and on the 25th, accompanied by de Beauffort's four sons and thirty well-armed men, he presented himself before the vicars. Frightened by this formidable demonstration, they refused to see him; but he went to the episcopal palace, took the keys of the prison by force, and carried de Beauffort to the Conciergerie in Paris, after serving notice on the vicars to answer before the Parlement on February 25. The matter was now fairly in train for a legal investigation in which both sides could be heard. The convicts who had been condemned to imprisonment were set at liberty and carried to Paris, where their evidence confirmed that of de Beauffort. The conspirators were grievously alarmed. Jacques du Boys, the dean, who had been the prime mover, became insane about the time set for the hearing; and though he recovered his senses, his limbs failed him; he took to his bed, where bed-sores ate great holes in his flesh, and he died in about a year, some persons attributing to sorcery and others to divine vengeance what evidently was mental trouble, causing temporary insanity followed by paresis. The Bishop of Beirut was thrown in prison, charged with having set the affair on foot, but he managed to escape, by miracle as he a.s.serted; he made a pilgrimage to Compostella, and on his return secured the position of confessor to Queen Marie, dowager of Charles VII., where he was safe. Other conspicuous actors in the tragedy left Arras to escape the hatred of their fellow-citizens.

Meanwhile the legal proceedings dragged on with the interminable delays for which the Parlement was notorious, enhanced on this occasion by the political vicissitudes of the period, and the final decision was not rendered until 1491, thirty years after its commencement, when all the sufferers had pa.s.sed off the scene except the indomitable Huguet Aubry, who was still alive to enjoy a rehabilitation celebrated in a manner as imposing as possible. On July 18 the decree was published from a scaffold erected on the spot where the sentences had been p.r.o.nounced.

The magistrates had been ordered to proclaim a holiday, and to offer prizes for the best _folie moralisee_ and _pure folie_, and to send notice to all the neighboring towns, so that a crowd of eight or nine thousand persons was collected. After a sermon of two hours and a half, preached by the celebrated Geoffroi Broussart, subsequently chancellor of the University, the decree was read, condemning the Duke of Burgundy to pay the costs, and the processes and sentences to be torn and destroyed as unjust and abusive; ordering the accused and condemned to be restored to their good name and fame, all confiscations and payments to be refunded, while the vicars were to pay twelve hundred livres each, Gilles Flameng one thousand, de Saveuse five hundred, and others smaller sums, amounting in all to six thousand five hundred; out of which fifteen hundred were to be applied to founding a daily ma.s.s for the souls of those executed, and erecting a cross on the spot where they had been burned. The cruel and unusual tortures made use of in the trials were, moreover, prohibited for the future in all secular and ecclesiastical tribunals. It was probably the only case on record in which an inquisitor stood as a defendant in a lay court to answer for his official action. One cannot help reflecting that, if the Council of Vienne had done its duty as fearlessly as the Parlement, the affair of the Templars, so similar in many of its features, might have had a similar termination; and the contrast between this and the rehabilitation proceedings in the case of Joan of Arc shows how the Inquisition had fallen during the interval.[577]

Besides the general significance of this transaction in the history of witchcraft and of its persecution, there are several points worthy of attention in their bearing on the practical application of the methods of procedure described above. In the first place, it is evident throughout that no counsel were allowed to the accused. Then, the combined episcopal and inquisitorial court permitted no appeals, even to the Parlement, whose supreme jurisdiction was unquestioned. Not only was the attempt of de Beauffort to interject such an appeal contemptuously suppressed, but when Willaume le Febvre, who had fled to Paris and const.i.tuted himself a prisoner there to answer all charges, sent his son Willemet with a notary to serve an appeal, the service was rightly regarded as involving considerable risk. After watching their opportunity, Willemet and the notary served the notice on one of the vicars at church, then leaped on their horses and made all speed for Paris, but the vicars instantly despatched well-mounted hors.e.m.e.n, who overtook them at Montdidier and brought them back. They were clapped in jail, along with a number of friends and kinsmen who had been privy to their intention without betraying it, and were not released until they agreed to withdraw the appeal. Thus, an appeal was treated as an offence justifying vigorous measures. It is more difficult to understand the contemptuous indifference with which a papal bull was treated. Martin Cornille, the other fugitive, had pursued a different policy. He carried with him an ample store of money, part of which he invested in a bull from Pius II. transferring the whole matter to Gilles Charlier and Gregoire Nicolai of Cambrai, and two of the Arras vicars. This was brought to Arras in August, 1460, by the Dean of Soignies, after which we hear nothing more of it, though it may have contributed to cool the ardor of those who were expecting to profit by the prosecutions.[578]

The means employed to obtain confession show that Sprenger only recorded the usage of the period in advising recourse to whatever fraud or force might prove necessary. Promises of immunity or of trifling penance were lavished on those whom it was intended to burn if they yielded to the blandishment, and these were supplemented with threats of burning as the punishment of taciturnity. De Beauffort's confession without torture excited general astonishment until it was known that, on his arrest, after he had sworn to his innocence, Jacques du Boys entreated him to confess, even kneeling before him and praying him to do so, a.s.suring him that if he refused he could not be saved from the stake, and that all his property would be confiscated, to the beggaring of his children, while, if he would confess, he should be released within four days without public humiliation or exposure; and when de Beauffort argued that this would be committing perjury, du Boys told him not to mind that, as he should have absolution. Those whose constancy was proof against such persuasiveness were tortured without stint or mercy. The women were frightfully scourged. Huguet Aubry was kept in prison for eleven months, during which, at intervals, he was tortured fifteen times, and when the ingenuity of the executioners failed in devising more exquisite forms of torment, he was threatened with drowning and thrown into the river, and then with hanging and suspended from a tree with his eyes duly bandaged. Le pet.i.t Henriot's resolution was tried with seven months' incarceration, during which he was also tortured fifteen times, fire being applied to the soles of his feet until he was crippled for life. Others are mentioned whose endurance was equally tried, and we hear of such strange devices as pouring oil and vinegar down the throat, and other expedients not recognized by law.[579]

With regard to the death-penalty, it is to be observed that none of these were cases of relapse, and under the old inquisitorial practice they would all have been ent.i.tled to the penance of imprisonment. Their burning had not even the pretext of being punishment for injuries inflicted on their neighbors, for, with the exception of Pierre du Carieulx, the only offence a.s.signed to them was attendance at the Sabbat. At the same time there was no resort to the juggle suggested by later authorities, of a.s.signing penance, and then not inquiring what the secular power might see fit to do. The condemned were formally delivered to the magistrates to be burned, and though at the first _auto_ a death-sentence was p.r.o.nounced by the eschevins, at the second even this formality was omitted, and the victims were dragged directly from the place of sentence to that of execution.[580]

One specially notable feature of the whole affair was the utter incredulity everywhere excited. Just as the crimes imputed to the Templars found credence nowhere out of France, so, outside of Arras, we are told not one person in a thousand believed in the truth of the charges. This was fortunate, for the victims naturally included in their lists of a.s.sociates many residents of other places, and the conflagration might readily have spread over the whole country, had it found agents like Pierre le Brousart, who carried the spark from Langres to Arras. On the strength of revelations in the confessions several persons were arrested in Amiens, but the bishop, who was a learned clerk and had long resided in Rome, promptly released them and declared that he would dismiss all brought before him, for he did not believe in the possibility of such offences. At Tournay others were seized, and the matter was warmly debated, with the result that they were set free, although Jean Taincture, a most notable clerk, wrote an elaborate treatise to prove their guilt. It was the same with the accused who managed to fly. Martin Cornille was caught in Burgundy and brought before the Archbishop of Besancon, who acquitted him on the strength of informations made in Arras. Willaume le Febvre surrendered himself to the Bishop of Paris; the Inquisitor of Paris came to Arras to get the evidence concerning him, and the vicars furnished the confessions of those who had implicated him. The result was that the tribunal, consisting of the Archbishop of Reims, the Bishop of Paris, the Inquisitor of France, and sundry doctors of theology, not only acquitted him, but authorized him to prosecute the vicars for reparation of his honor, and for expenses and damages.[581] Evidently up to this time the excitement concerning witchcraft was to a great extent artificial--the creation of a comparatively few credulous ecclesiastics and judges: the ma.s.s of educated clerks and jurists were disposed to hold fast to the definition of the _Cap. Episcopi_, and to regard it as a delusion. Had the Church resolutely repressed the growing superst.i.tion, in place of stimulating it with all the authority of the Holy See, infinite bloodshed and misery might have been spared to Christendom.

The development of the witchcraft epidemic, in fact, had not been rapid.

The earliest detailed account which we have of it is that of Nider, in his _Formicarius_, written in 1337. Although Nider himself seems to have sometimes acted as inquisitor, he tells us that his information is princ.i.p.ally derived from the experience of Peter of Berne, a secular judge, who had burned large numbers of witches of both s.e.xes, and had driven many more from the Bernese territory, which they had infested for about sixty years. This would place the origin of witchcraft in that region towards the close of the fourteenth century, and Silvester Prierias, as we have seen, attributes it to the first years of the fifteenth. Bernardo di Como, writing about 1510, a.s.signs to it a somewhat earlier origin, for he says the records of the Inquisition of Como showed that it had existed for a hundred and fifty years. It is quite likely, indeed, that the gradual development of witchcraft from ordinary sorcery commenced about the middle of the fourteenth century.

The great jurist Bartolo, who died in 1357, when acting as judge at Novara, tried and condemned a woman who confessed to having adored the devil, trampled on the cross, and killed children by touching and fascinating them. This approach to the later witchcraft was so novel to him that he appealed to the theologians to explain it. In this there seems no reference to the distinctive feature of the Sabbat, but the popular beliefs concerning Holda and Dame Habonde and their troop were rife, and the coalescence of the various superst.i.tions was only a question of time. As early as 1353 an allusion to the witches' dance occurs in a trial at Toulouse. Thus the stories grew, under the skilful handling of such judges as Peter of Berne, until they a.s.sumed the detailed and definite shape that we find in Nider. The latter also acknowledges his obligation to the Inquisitor of Autun, which would indicate that witchcraft was prevalent in Burgundy at a comparatively early period. In 1424 we hear of a witch named Finicella burned in Rome for causing the death of many persons and bewitching many more.

According to Peter of Berne, the evil originated with a certain Scavius, who openly boasted of his powers, and always escaped by transforming himself into a mouse, until he was a.s.sa.s.sinated through a window near which he incautiously sat. His princ.i.p.al disciple was Poppo, who taught Staedelin; the latter fell into the hands of Peter, and, after four vigorous applications of torture, confessed all the secrets of the diabolical sect. The details given are virtually those described above, showing that the subsequent inquisitors who drew their inspiration from Nider were skilled in their work and knew how to extract confessions in accordance with their preconceived notions. There are a few unimportant variants, of course; infants, as already stated, when killed, were boiled down, the soup being used to procure converts by its magic power, while the solid portion was worked up into ointment required for the unholy rites. Apparently, moreover, the theory had not yet established itself that the witch was powerless against officers of public justice, for the latter were held to incur great dangers in the performance of their functions. It was only by the most careful observance of religious duties and the constant use of the sign of the cross that Peter of Berne escaped, and even he once, at the castle of Blankenburg, nearly lost his life when, going up a lofty staircase at night in such haste that he forgot to cross himself, he was precipitated violently to the bottom--manifestly the effect of sorcery, as he subsequently learned by torturing a prisoner.[582]

Although, in 1452, a witch tried at Provins declared that in all France and Burgundy the total number of witches did not exceed sixty, no believer contented himself with figures so moderate. In 1453 we hear of an epidemic of witchcraft in Normandy, where the witches were popularly known as Scobaces, from _scoba_, a broom, in allusion to their favorite mode of equitation to the Sabbat. The same year occurred the case of Guillaume Edeline, which excited wide astonishment from the character of the culprit, who was a noted doctor of theology and Prior of St.

Germain-en-Laye. Madly in love with a n.o.ble lady, he sought the aid of sorcery. He doubtless fell victim to some sharper, for on his person was found a compact with Satan, formally drawn up with reciprocal obligations, one of which was that in his sermons he should a.s.sert the falsity of the stories told of sorcerers, and this, we are told, greatly increased their number, for the judges were restrained from prosecuting them. Another condition was that he should present himself before Satan whenever required. The methods of his examination must have been sharp, for he confessed that he performed this obligation by striding a broomstick, when he would be at once transported to the Sabbat, where he performed the customary homage of kissing the devil, in the form of a white sheep, under the tail. Prosecuted before Guillaume de Floques, Bishop of Evreux, he persuaded the University of Caen to defend him; but the bishop procuring the support of the University of Paris, he was forced to confess and was convicted. It shows the uncertainty of procedure as yet that he was not burned, but was allowed to abjure, and was penanced with perpetual imprisonment on bread and water. At the _auto de fe_ the inquisitor dwelt upon his former high position and the edification of his teaching, when the unfortunate man burst into tears and begged mercy of G.o.d. He was thrown into a _ba.s.se-fosse_ at Evreux, where he lingered for four years, showing every sign of contrition, and at last he was found dead in his cell in the att.i.tude of prayer. The epidemic was spreading, for in 1446 several witches were burned in Heidelberg by the inquisitor, and in 1447 another, who pa.s.sed as their teacher; but there was as yet no uniform practice in such cases, for in this same year, 1447, at Braunsberg, a woman convicted of sorcery was only banished to a distance of two (German) miles, and three securities were required for her in the sum of ten marks.[583]

It was probably about this time that the inquisitors of Toulouse were busy with burning the numerous witches of Dauphine and Gascony, as related by Alonso de Spina, who admired on the walls of the Toulousan Inquisition pictures painted from their confessions, representing the Sabbat, with the votaries adoring, with lighted candles, Satan in the form of a goat. The allusions of Bernardo di Como show that at the same period persecution was busy in Como. In 1456 we hear of two burned at Cologne. They had caused a frost so intense in the month of May that all vegetation was blasted, without hope of recovery. The steward of the archbishop asked one of them to give him an example of her art, when she took a cup of water, and muttering spells over it for the s.p.a.ce of a couple of Paternosters, it froze so solidly that the ice could not be broken with a dagger. In this case, at least, the hand of justice had not weakened her power, though why she allowed herself to be burned is not recorded. In 1459 Pius II. called the attention of the Abbot of Treguier to somewhat similar practices in Britanny, and gave him papal authority for their suppression, showing how vain had been the zeal of Duke Artus III., of whom, at his death in 1457, it was eulogistically declared that he had burned more sorcerers in France, Britanny, and Poitou than any man of his time.[584]

These incidents will show the growth and spread of the belief throughout Europe, and it must be borne in mind that they are but the indications of much that never attracted public attention or came to be recorded in history. A chance allusion, in a pleading of 1455, shows what was working under the surface in probably every corner of Christendom. In the parish of Torcy (Normandy) there had been for forty years a belief that a family of laborers--Huguenin de la Meu and his dead father before him, and Jeanne his wife--were all sorcerers who killed or sickened many men and beasts. An appeal to the Inquisition would doubtless have extracted from them confessions of the Sabbat and devil-worship, with lists of accomplices leading to a widespread epidemic, but the simple peasants found a speedier remedy in beating Huguenin and his wife, when the person or animal whom they had bewitched would recover. A certain Andre suspected them of causing the death of some of his cattle, and Jeanne said to his wife, Alayre, "Your husband has done ill in saying that I killed his cattle, and he will find it so before long." That same day Alayre fell sick and was not expected to survive the night. To cure her Andre went next morning to Jeanne, and threatened that if she did not restore Alayre he would beat her so that she would never be well again--and Alayre recovered the next day.[585]

This shows the material which existed everywhere for development into organized persecution when properly handled by the Inquisition, and the _Flagellum Haereticorum Fascinariorum_ of the Inquisitor, Nicholaus Jaquerius, in 1458, indicates that the Holy Office was beginning to appreciate the necessity of organizing its efforts for systematic work.

Perhaps the untoward result of the affair at Arras may have r.e.t.a.r.ded this somewhat by the over-zeal and unscrupulous greed of its manipulators, but if there was a reaction it was limited, both in extent and duration. All the acc.u.mulated beliefs in the occult powers of demonic agencies inherited from so many creeds and races still flourished in their integrity. In the existing wretchedness of the peasantry throughout the length and breadth of Europe, recklessness as to the present and hopelessness as to the future led thousands to wish that they could, by transferring their allegiance to Satan, find some momentary relief from the sordid miseries of life. The tales of the sensual delights of the Sabbat, where exquisite meats and drink were furnished in abundance, had an irresistible allurement for those who could scantily reckon on a morsel of black bread, or a turnip or a few beans, to keep starvation at bay. Sprenger, as already stated, tells us that the attraction of intercourse with incubi and succubi was a princ.i.p.al cause of luring souls to ruin. The devastating wars, with bands of ecorcheurs and condottieri pillaging everywhere with savage cruelty, reduced whole populations to despair, and those who fancied themselves abandoned by G.o.d might well turn to Satan for help.

According to Sprenger, a prolific source of witches was the seduction of young girls who when refused marriage had nothing more to hope for, and sought to avenge themselves on society by acquiring at least the power of evil.[586] Not only thus was there on the part of many a desire to enter the abhorred sect of Satan-worshippers, which the Church declared to be so numerous and powerful, but doubtless not a few performed the ceremonies to effect it, when perhaps some evil wish which chanced to be realized would convince them that Satan had really accepted their allegiance, and granted them the power which they sought. Certain minds might, in moments of high-wrought exaltation, even imagine that they had obtained admission to the foul mysteries whose reality was rapidly becoming an article of orthodox belief. Others again, in weakness and poverty, found that the reputation of possessing the power of evil was a protection and a support, and they encouraged rather than repressed the credulity of their neighbors. To these must be added the mult.i.tudes who derived a source of gain from curing the sorcery which the Church was confessedly unable to relieve, and there was ample material in the despised and lower stratum of society for the innumerable army of witches conjured up by the heated imaginations of the demonographers.

Unfortunately the Church, in its alarm at the development of this new heresy, stimulated it to the utmost in the endeavor to repress it. Every inquisitor whom it commissioned to suppress witchcraft was an active missionary who scattered the seeds of the belief ever more widely. We have seen what a brood of witches Pierre le Brousart hatched at Arras out of the single one burned at Langres, and how Chiabaudi succeeded in infecting the valleys of the Canavese. It mattered little in the end that le Brousart overreached himself and that Chiabaudi was outwrangled.

The minds of the people became more and more familiarized with the idea that witches were everywhere around them, and that every misfortune and accident was the result of their malignity. Every man was thus a.s.siduously taught, when he lost an ox or a child, or a harvest, or was suddenly prostrated with illness, to suspect his neighbors and look for evidence to confirm his suspicions, so that wherever an inquisitor pa.s.sed he was overwhelmed with accusations against all who could be imagined to be guilty, from children of tender years to superannuated crones. When Girolamo Visconti was sent to Como he speedily raised such a storm of witchcraft that in 1485 he burned no less than forty-one unfortunates in the little district of Wormserbad in the Grisons--an exploit repeatedly referred to by Sprenger with honest professional pride.[587]

A special impulse was given to this development when Innocent VIII., December 5, 1484, issued his Bull _Summis desiderantes_, in which he bewailed the deplorable fact that all the Teutonic lands were filled with men and women who exercised upon the faithful all the malignant power which we have seen ascribed to witchcraft, and of which he enumerates the details with awe-inspiring amplification. Henry Inst.i.toris and Jacob Sprenger had for some time been performing the office of inquisitors in those regions, but their commissions did not specially mention sorcery as included in their jurisdiction, wherefore their efforts were impeded by over-wise clerks and laymen who used this as an excuse for protecting the guilty. Innocent therefore gives them full authority in the premises and orders the Bishop of Stra.s.sburg to coerce all who obstruct or interfere with them, calling in, if necessary, the aid of the secular arm. After this, to question the reality of witchcraft was to question the utterance of the Vicar of Christ, and to aid any one accused was to impede the Inquisition. Armed with these powers the two inquisitors, full of zeal, traversed the land, leaving behind them a track of blood and fire, and awakening in all hearts the cruel dread inspired by the absolute belief thus inculcated in all the horrors of witchcraft. In the little town of Ravenspurg alone they boast that they burned forty-eight in five years.[588]

It is true that they were not everywhere so successful. In the Tyrol the Bishop of Brixen published Innocent's bull July 23, 1485, and on September 21 he issued to the inquisitor Henry Inst.i.toris a commission granting him full episcopal jurisdiction, but recommending him to a.s.sociate with him a secular official of the suzerain, Sigismund of Austria. The latter, however, ordered the bishop to appoint a commissioner, and he named Sigismund Samer, pastor of Axams near Innsbruck. The pair commenced operations October 14, but their career, though vigorous, was short and inglorious. It chanced that some of the archduke's courtiers desired to separate him from his wife, Catharine of Saxony, and spread reports that she had endeavored to poison him; and they followed this up by placing in an oven a worthless woman who personated an imprisoned demon and denounced a number of people.

Inst.i.toris at once seized the accused and applied torture without stint.

Then the bishop interposed, and by the middle of November ordered him to leave the diocese and betake himself to his convent, the sooner the better. Inst.i.toris, however, was loath to abandon his duty, and drew upon himself a sharper reproof on Ash Wednesday, 1486; he was told that he had nought to do there, that the bishop would attend to all that was necessary through the exercise of the ordinary jurisdiction, and he was warned that if he persisted in remaining he was in danger of a.s.sa.s.sination from the husbands or kinsmen of the women whom he was persecuting. He finally withdrew to Germany, richly rewarded for his labor by Sigismund, and from his account of the matter it is easy to see that all the sick and withered of Innsbruck had flocked to him with complaints of their neighbors so detailed that he was justified in regarding the place as thoroughly infected. The next year the Tyrolese Landtag complained to the archduke that recently many persons, on baseless denunciations, had been imprisoned, tortured, and disgracefully treated, and we can readily understand the complaint of the _Malleus Maleficarum_ that Innsbruck abounded in witches of the most dangerous character, who could bewitch their judges and could not be forced to confess. Still, the seeds of superst.i.tion were scattered to fructify in due time. Although in the Tyrolese criminal ordinance issued by Maximilian I., in 1499, there is no allusion to sorcery and witchcraft, yet in 1506 we find the craze fully developed. Some records which have been preserved show trials before secular judges with juries of twelve men, in which the unfortunate women accused, after due torture, confess all the customary horrors.[589]

One result of this campaign of Inst.i.toris in the Tyrol was that it left Sigismund of Austria in a condition of perplexity as to the reality of witchcraft. His judges had apparently been inexperienced in such matters, the confessions of the accused had varied greatly, and the inquisition had been cut short before they could be forced to consentaneous avowals. To satisfy his mind, in 1487, he consulted on the subject two learned doctors of the law, Ulric Molitoris and Conrad Sturtzel, and the result was published at Constance in 1489 by Ulric, in the form of a discussion between the three. Sigismund is represented as urging the natural argument that the results obtained by witchcraft were so wofully inadequate to the powers ascribed to it as to cast doubt upon the reality of those powers--if they were real, a conqueror would only have, like William the Manzer at Ely, to put a witch at the head of his army to overcome all opposition. Against this view the customary texts and citations were alleged, and the conclusions reached represent very fairly the moderate opinions of the conservatives, who had not as yet yielded fully to the witchcraft craze, but who shrank from a rationalistic denial of that which had been handed down by the wisdom of ages. These are summed up in eight propositions: 1. Satan cannot himself, or by means of human instruments, disturb the elements, or injure men and animals, or render them impotent, but G.o.d sometimes permits him to do so to a certain determinate extent. 2. He cannot exceed this designated limit. 3. By permission of G.o.d he can sometimes cause illusions by which men appear to be transformed. 4. The night-riding and a.s.semblages of the Sabbat are illusions. 5. Incubi and succubi are incapable of procreation. 6. G.o.d alone knows the future and the thoughts of men; the devil can only conjecture and use his knowledge of the stars. 7. Nevertheless witches, by worshipping and sacrificing to Satan, are real heretics and apostates. 8. Finally, they should therefore be put to death. In this cautious endeavor to harmonize the old school and the new, the witch thus gained nothing; everything was conceded, that had a practical bearing on the tribunals, and it was a mere matter of speculation whether the Sabbat was a dream or a reality, and whether the evil she wrought was the result of a special or a general concession of power by G.o.d to Satan. Thus the work of Molitoris is important as showing how feeble were the barriers which intelligent and fair-minded men could erect against the prevailing tendencies so sedulously fostered by popes and inquisitors.[590]

The fine-drawn distinctions of such men were quickly brushed aside by the aggressive self-confidence of the inquisitors. Even more potent than the personal activity of Sprenger was the legacy which he left behind him in the work which he proudly ent.i.tled the _Malleus Maleficarum_, or Hammer of Witches, the most portentous monument of superst.i.tion which the world has produced. All his vast experience and wide erudition are brought to the task of proving the reality of witchcraft and the extent of its evils, and, further, of instructing the inquisitor how to elude the wiles of Satan and to punish his devotees. He was no vulgar witch-finder, but a man trained in all the learning of the schools. He apparently was not inhumane. In many places he manifests a laudable desire to give the accused the benefit of whatever pleas they might rightfully put forward, but he is so fully convinced of the gigantic character of the evils to be combated, he so thoroughly believes that his tribunal is engaged in a contest with Satan for human souls, that he eagerly justifies every artifice and every cruelty that could be suggested to outwit the adversary, on whom fair play would be thrown away. Like Conrad of Marburg and Capistrano, he was a man of the most dangerous type, an honest fanatic. His work is, moreover, an inexhaustible storehouse of marvels to which successive generations resorted whenever evidence was needed to prove any special manifestation of the power or malignity of the witch. Told as the results of his own experience or that of his colleagues, with the utmost good faith, they carried conviction with them. In fact, but for the delusive character of human testimony in such matters, the evidence would seem to be overwhelming. Statements of disinterested eye-witnesses, complaints of sufferers, confessions of the guilty, even after condemnation, and at the stake, when there was no hope save of pardon of their sins by G.o.d, are innumerable, and so detailed and connected together that the most fertile imagination would seem inadequate to their invention. Besides, the work is so logical in form, according to the fashion of the time, and so firmly based on scholastic theology and canon law, that we cannot wonder at the position accorded to it for more than a century of a leading authority on a subject of the highest practical importance. Quoted implicitly by all succeeding writers, it did more than all other agencies, save the papal bulls, to stimulate and perfect the persecution, and consequently the extension of witchcraft.[591]

Thus the Inquisition in its decrepitude had a temporary resumption of activity, before the Reformation came to renew its vigor in a different shape. Yet it was not everywhere allowed to work its will upon this new cla.s.s of heretics. In France edicts of 1490 and 1493 treat them as subject exclusively to the secular courts, unless the offenders happen to be justiciable by the ecclesiastical tribunals, and no allusion whatever is made to the Inquisition. At the same time the growing sharpness of persecution is seen in provisions which subject those who consult necromancers and sorcerers to the same penalties as the pract.i.tioners themselves, and threaten judges who are negligent in arresting them with loss of office, perpetual disability, and heavy arbitrary fines. It was doubtless owing to this exclusion of spiritual jurisdiction over sorcery that the spread of witchcraft in France was slower than in Germany and Italy.[592]

Cornelius Agrippa, whose learned treatises on the occult sciences trench so nearly on forbidden ground, when he held the position of Town Orator and Advocate of Metz, had the hardihood, in 1519, to save from the clutches of the inquisitor, Nicholas Savin, an unfortunate woman accused of witchcraft. The only evidence against her was that her mother had been burned as a witch. Savin quoted the "_Malleus Maleficarum_" to show that if she were not the offspring of an incubus she must undoubtedly have been devoted to Satan at her birth. In conjunction with the episcopal official, John Leonard, he had her cruelly tortured, and she was then exposed to starvation in her prison. When Agrippa offered to defend her he was turned out of court and threatened with prosecution as a fautor of heresy, and her husband was refused access to the place of trial, lest he should interject an appeal. Leonard chanced to fall mortally sick, and, touched with remorse on his death-bed, he executed an instrument declaring his conviction of her innocence and asked the chapter to set her at liberty; but Savin demanded that she should be further tortured and then burned. Agrippa, however, labored so effectually with Leonard's successor and with the chapter that the woman was discharged; but his disinterested zeal cost him his office, and he was obliged to leave Metz. Relieved of his presence, the inquisitor speedily found another witch, whom he burned after forcing her by torture to confess all the horrors of the Sabbat and customary evil deeds wrought through the power of Satan. Encouraged by this, he organized a search for others, doubtless based on the confessions of the victim, and imprisoned a number, while others fled, and there would have been a pitiless ma.s.sacre had not Roger Brennon, parish priest of St.

Cross, openly opposed him and vanquished him in disputation, whereupon the jail doors were thrown open and the fugitives returned.[593]

The most decided rebuff, however, which the Inquisition experienced in its new sphere of activity was administered by Venice. I have had occasion more than once to allude to the controversy between the Signory and the Holy See over the witches of Brescia, when the Republic definitely refused to execute the sentences of the inquisitors. To understand the full significance of its action, it is to be observed that for two generations the Church had been energetically cultivating witchcraft throughout Lombardy by unceasingly urging its persecution and breaking down all resistance on the part of the intelligent laity, until it had succeeded in rendering upper Italy a perfect hot-bed of the heresy. In 1457 Calixtus III. ordered his nuncio, Bernardo di Bosco, to use active measures in repressing its growth in Brescia, Bergamo, and the vicinage. Thirty years later Fra Girolamo Visconti found an abundant field for his labor in Como, the result of which he communicated to the world in his _Lamiarum Tractatus_, and Sprenger a.s.sures us that a whole book would be required to record the cases, in Brescia alone, of women who had become witches through despair in consequence of seduction, although the episcopal court had shown the most praiseworthy vigor in suppressing them. In 1494 we find Alexander VI. stimulating the Lombard inquisitor, Fra Angelo da Verona, to greater activity, a.s.suring him that witches were numerous in Lombardy and inflicted great damage on men, harvests, and cattle. When at Cremona, in the early years of the sixteenth century, the inquisitor, Giorgio di Casale, endeavored to exterminate the numberless witches flourishing there, and was interfered with by certain clerks and laymen, who a.s.serted that he was exceeding his jurisdiction, Julius II., following the example of Innocent VIII. in the case of Sprenger, promptly came to the rescue by defining his powers, and offering to all who would aid him in the good work indulgences such as were given to crusaders--provisions which, in 1523, were extended to the Inquisitor of Como by Adrian VI. The result of all this careful stimulation is seen in the description of the Lombard witches by Gianfrancesco Pico, and in the alarming report by Silvester Prierias that they were extending down the Apennines and boasting that they would outnumber the faithful. The spread of popular belief is ill.u.s.trated in the remark of Politian, that, when he was a child he had great dread of the witches whom his grandmother used to tell him lie in wait in the woods to swallow little boys.[594]

Venice had always been careful to preserve the secular jurisdiction over sorcery. A resolution of the great council in 1410 allows the Inquisition to act in such cases when they involve heresy or the abuse of sacraments, but if injury had resulted to individuals the spiritual offence alone was cognizable by the Inquisition, while the resultant crimes were justiciable by the lay court; and when, in 1422, some Franciscans were charged with sacrificing to demons, the Council of Ten committed the affair to a councillor, a capo, an inquisitor, and an advocate. Brescia was a spot peculiarly infected with witchcraft. As early as 1455 the inquisitor, Fra Antonio, called upon the Senate for aid to exterminate it, which was presumably afforded, but when a fresh persecution arose in 1486 the podesta refused to execute the inquisitorial sentences, and the Signoria supported him, calling forth, as we have seen, the vigorous protest of Innocent VIII. Under the stimulus of persecution the evil increased with terrible rapidity. In 1510 we hear of seventy women and seventy men burned at Brescia; in 1514 of three hundred at Como. In such an epidemic every victim was a new source of infection, and the land was threatened with depopulation. In the madness of the hour it was currently reported that on the plain of Tonale, near Brescia, the customary gathering at the Sabbat exceeded twenty-five thousand souls; and in 1518 the Senate was officially informed that the inquisitor had burned seventy witches of the Valcamonica, that he had as many in his prisons, and that those suspected or accused amounted to about five thousand, or one fourth of the inhabitants of the valleys. It was time to interfere, and the Signoria interposed effectually, leading to violent remonstrances from Rome. Leo X. issued, February 15, 1521, his fiery bull, _Honestis_, ordering the inquisitors to use freely the excommunication and the interdict, if their sentences on the witches were not executed without examination or revision, showing how transparent were the subterfuges adopted to throw upon the secular courts the responsibility of putting to death those who were not relapsed. On March 21 the imperturbable Council of Ten quietly responded by laying down regulations for all trials, including the cases in question, of which the sentences were treated as invalid, and all bail heretofore taken was to be discharged.

The examinations were to be made without the use of torture by one or two bishops, an inquisitor, and two doctors of Brescia, all selected for probity and intelligence. The result was to be read in the court of the podesta, with the partic.i.p.ation of the two _rettori_, or governors, and four more doctors. The accused were to be asked if they ratified their statements, and were to be liable to torture if they modified them. When all this was done with due circ.u.mspection, judgment was to be rendered in accordance with the counsel of all the above-named experts, and under no other circ.u.mstances was a sentence to be executed. In this way the Signoria hoped that the errors said to have been committed would be avoided for the future. Moreover, the papal legate was to be admonished to see that the expenses of the Inquisition were moderate and free from extortion, and was to find expedients to prevent greed for money from causing the condemnation of the innocent, as was said to have often been the case. He should also depute proper persons to investigate the extortions and other evil acts of the inquisitors, which had excited general complaint, and he should summarily punish the perpetrators to serve as an example. He was further requested to consider that these poor people of Valcamonica were simple folk of the densest ignorance, much more in need of good preachers than of persecutors, especially as they were so numerous.[595]

In an age of superst.i.tion this utterance of the Council of Ten stands forth as a monument of considerate wisdom and calm common-sense. Had its enlightened spirit been allowed to guide the counsels of popes and princes, Europe would have been spared the most disgraceful page in the annals of civilization. The lesson of cruel fear so sedulously inculcated on the nations was thoroughly learned. Hideous as are the details of the persecution of witchcraft which we have been considering up to the fifteenth century, they were but the prelude to the blind and senseless orgies of destruction which disgraced the next century and a half. Christendom seemed to have grown delirious, and Satan might well smile at the tribute to his power seen in the endless smoke of the holocausts which bore witness to his triumph over the Almighty.

Protestant and Catholic rivalled each other in the madness of the hour.

Witches were burned no longer in ones and twos, but in scores and hundreds. A bishop of Geneva is said to have burned five hundred within three months, a bishop of Bamburg six hundred, a bishop of Wurzburg nine hundred. Eight hundred were condemned, apparently in one body, by the Senate of Savoy. So completely had the intervention of Satan, through the instrumentality of his worshippers, become a part of the unconscious process of thought, that any unusual operation of nature was attributed to them as a matter of course. The spring of 1586 was tardy in the Rhinelands and the cold was prolonged until June: this could only be the result of witchcraft, and the Archbishop of Treves burned at Pfalz a hundred and eighteen women and two men, from whom confessions had been extorted that their incantations had prolonged the winter. It was well that he acted thus promptly, for on their way to the place of execution they stated that had they been allowed three days more they would have brought cold so intense that no green thing could have survived, and that all fields and vineyards would have been cursed with barrenness.

The Inquisition evidently had worthy pupils, but it did not relax its own efforts. Paramo boasts that in a century and a half from the commencement of the sect, in 1404, the Holy Office had burned at least thirty thousand witches who, if they had been left unpunished, would easily have brought the whole world to destruction.[596] Could any Manichaean offer more practical evidence that Satan was lord of the visible universe?

CHAPTER VIII.

INTELLECT AND FAITH.

The only heresies which really troubled the Church were those which obtained currency among the people una.s.sisted by the ingenious quodlibets of dialecticians. Possibly there may be an exception to this in the theories of the Brethren of the Free Spirit, which apparently owed their origin to the speculations of Amaury of Bene and David of Dinant; but, as a whole, the Cathari and the Waldenses, the Spirituals and the Fraticelli, even the Hussites, had little or nothing in common with the fine-spun cobwebs of the schoolmen. For a heresy to take root and bear fruit, it must be able to inspire the zeal of martyrdom; and for this it must spring from the heart, and not from the brain. We have seen how, during centuries, mult.i.tudes were ready to face death in its most awful form rather than abandon beliefs in which were entwined their sentiments and feelings and their hopes of the hereafter; but history records few cases, from Abelard to Master Eckart and Galileo, in which intellectual conceptions, however firmly entertained, were strong enough to lead to the sacrifice. It is sentiment rather than reason which renders heretics dangerous; and all the pride of intellect was insufficient to nerve the scholar to maintain his thesis with the unfaltering resolution which enabled the peasant to approach the stake singing hymns and joyfully welcoming the flames which were to bear him to salvation.

The schools, consequently, have little to show us in the shape of contests between free thought and authority pushed to the point of invoking the methods of the Inquisition. Yet the latter, by the system which it rendered practicable of enforcing uniformity of belief, exercised too potent an influence on the mental development of Europe for us to pa.s.s over this phase of its activity without some brief review.

There were two tendencies at work to provoke collisions between the schoolmen and the inquisitors. The ardor of persecution, which rendered the purity of the faith the highest aim of the Christian and the most imperative care of the ruler, secular and spiritual, created an exaggerated standard of orthodoxy, which regarded the minutest point of theology as equally important with the fundamental doctrines of religion. We have already seen instances of this in the questions as to the poverty of Christ, as to whether he was dead when lanced on the cross, and as to whether the blood which he shed in the Pa.s.sion remained on earth or ascended to heaven; and Stephen Palecz, at the Council of Constance, proved dialectically that a doctrine in which one point in a thousand was erroneous was thereby rendered heretical throughout.

Moreover, erroneous belief was not necessary, for the Christian must be firm in the faith, and doubt itself was heresy.[597]

The other tendency was the insane thirst which inflamed the minds of the schoolmen for determining and defining, with absolute precision, every detail of the universe and of the invisible world. So far as this gratified itself within the lines of orthodoxy laid down by an infallible Church it resulted in building up the most complex and stupendous body of theology that human wit has ever elaborated. The _Sentences_ of Peter Lombard grew into the _Summa_ of Thomas Aquinas, an elaborate structure to be grasped and retained only by minds of peculiar powers after severe and special training. When this was once defined and accepted as orthodox, theology and philosophy became the most dangerous of sciences, while the perverse ingenuity of the schoolmen, revelling in the subtleties of dialectics, was perpetually rearguing doubtful points, raising new questions, and introducing new refinements in matters already too subtle for the comprehension of the ordinary intellect. The inquirer who disturbs the dust now happily covering the records of these forgotten wrangles can only feel regret that such wonderful intellectual acuteness and energy should have been so wofully wasted when, if rightly applied, it might have advanced by so many centuries the progress of humanity.

The story of Roger Bacon, the _Doctor Mirabilis_, is fairly ill.u.s.trative of the tendencies of the time. That gigantic intellect bruised itself perpetually against the narrow bars erected around it by an age presumptuous in its learned ignorance. Once a transient gleam of light broke in upon the darkness of its environment, when Gui Foucoix was elevated to the papacy, and, as Clement IV., commanded the Englishman to communicate to him the discoveries of which he had vaguely heard. It is touching to see the eagerness with which the unappreciated scholar labored to make the most of this unexpected opportunity; how he impoverished his friends to raise the money requisite to pay the scribes who should set forth in a fair copy the tumultuous train of thought in which he sought to embody the whole store of human knowledge, and how, within the compa.s.s of little more than a single year, he thus accomplished the enormous task of writing the _Opus Majus_, the _Opus Minus_, and the _Opus Tertium_. Unfortunately, Clement was more concerned at the moment with the fortunes of Charles of Anjou than with the pa.s.sing fancy which had led him to call upon the scholar; in little more than two years he was dead, and it is doubtful whether he even repaid the sums expended in gratifying his wishes.[598]

It was inevitable that Bacon should succ.u.mb in the unequal struggle at once with the ignorance and the learning of his age. His labors and his utterances were a protest against the whole existing system of thought and teaching. The schoolmen evolved the universe from their internal consciousness, and then wrangled incessantly over subtleties suggested by the barbarous jargon of their dialectics. It was the same with theology, which had usurped the place of religion. Peter Lombard was greater than all the prophets and evangelists taken together. As Bacon tells us, the study of Scripture was neglected for that of the Sentences, in which lay the whole glory of the theologian. He who taught the Sentences could select his own hour for teaching, and had accommodations provided for him. He who taught the Scriptures had to beg for a time in which to be heard, and had no a.s.sistance. The former could dispute, and was held to be a master; the latter was condemned to silence in the debates of the schools. It is impossible, he adds, that the Word of G.o.d can be understood, on account of the abuse of the Sentences; and whoso seeks in Scripture to elucidate questions is stigmatized as whimsical, and is not listened to. Worse than all, the text of the Vulgate is horribly corrupt, and where not corrupt it is doubtful, owing to the ignorance of would-be correctors and their presumption, for every one deemed himself able to correct the text, though he would not venture to alter a word in a poet. First of moderns, Bacon discerned the importance of etymology and of comparative philology, and he exposed unsparingly the wretched blunders customary among the so-called learned, who only succeeded in leading their pupils into error. Bacon's methods were strictly scientific. He wanted facts, actual facts, as a basis for all reasoning, whether on dogma or physical and mental experiences. To him all study of nature or of man was empirical; to know first, and then to reason. Mathematics was first in the order of sciences; then metaphysics; and to him metaphysics was not a barren effort to frame a system on postulates a.s.sumed at caprice and built up on dialectical sophisms, but a solid series of deductions from ascertained observations, for, according to Avicenna, "the conclusions of other sciences are the principles of metaphysics."[599]

The vast labors of the earnest life of a great genius were lost to a world too conceited of its petty vanities to recognize how far he was in advance of it. It was enamored of words; he dealt in things: the actual was rejected for the unsubstantial, and an intellectual revolution of priceless value to mankind was stifled in its inception. It was as though Caliban should chain Prospero and cast him into the ocean. How completely Bacon was unappreciated by an age unable to understand him and his antagonism towards its methods is evidenced by the scarcity of ma.n.u.scripts of his works, the fragmentary condition of some of them, and the utter disappearance of others. "It is easier," says Leland, "to collect the leaves of the Sibyl than the t.i.tles of the works of Roger Bacon." The same evidence is furnished by the absence of detail as to his life no less than by the vulgar stories of his proficiency in magic arts. Even the tragic incident of his imprisonment by his Franciscan superiors and the prohibition to pursue his studies is so obscure that it is told in contradictory fashion, and its truth has been not unreasonably denied. According to one account he was accused of unorthodox speculations, in 1278, to Geronimo d'Ascoli, General of the Order; his opinions were condemned, the brethren were ordered scrupulously to avoid them, and he himself was cast into prison, doubtless because he did not submit as serenely as Olivi to Geronimo's sentence. He must have had followers and sympathizers, for Geronimo is said to have prevented their complaints by promptly applying to Nicholas III. for a confirmation of the judgment. How long his imprisonment lasted is not known, though there is a tradition that he perished in jail, either through sickness or the ill-treatment which we have seen was freely visited by the Franciscans on their erring brethren. Another statement attributes his incarceration to the ascetic Raymond Gaufridi, who was General of the Order from 1289 to 1295. In either case it would not be difficult to explain the cause of his disgrace. In the fierce pa.s.sions of the schools, one who antagonized so completely the prevailing currents of thought, and who exposed so mercilessly the ignorance of the learned, could not fail to excite bitter enmities. The daring scholar who preferred Scripture to the Sentences, and p.r.o.nounced the text of the Vulgate to be corrupt, must have given ample opportunity for accusations of heresy in a time when dogma had become so intricate, and mortal heresy might lurk in the minutest aberration. The politic Geronimo might readily listen to enemies so numerous and powerful as those whom Bacon must have provoked. The ascetic Raymond, whose aim was to bring back the Order to its primitive rudeness and simplicity, would regard Bacon's labors with the same aversion as that manifested by the early Spirituals to Crescenzio Grizzi's learning. It was a standing complaint with his section of the Order that Paris had destroyed a.s.sisi.

As Jacopone da Todi sang:

"Tal'e, qual'e, tal'e, Non religione c' e.

Mal vedemmo Parigi Che n' a destrutto a.s.sisi,"

and the Spiritual General might well like to strike a blow at the greatest scholar of the Order.[600]

While Bacon suffered because he antagonized the thought of his time, there was much of scholastic bitterness which escaped animadversion because it was the development of the tendencies of the age, and the schoolmen were allowed to indulge in endless wrangling for the most part without censure. The great quarrel between the Nominalists and the Realists occupies too large a s.p.a.ce in the intellectual history of Europe to be wholly pa.s.sed over, although its relation to our immediate subject is not intimate enough to justify detailed consideration.

In the developed theory of the Realists, genera and species--the distinctive attributes of individual beings, or the conceptions of those attributes--are real ent.i.ties, if not the only realities. Individuals are ephemeral existences which pa.s.s away; the only things which survive are those which are universal and common to all. In man this is humanity, but humanity again is but a portion of a larger existence, the animate, and the animate is but a transitory form of an Infinite Being, which is All and nothing in particular. This is the sole Immutable.

These conceptions took their origin in the Periphyseos of John Scot Erigena in the ninth century, whose reaction against the prevailing anthropomorphism led him to sublimated views of the Divine Being, which trenched closely on Pantheism. The heresy latent in his work lay undiscovered until developed by the Amaurians, when the book, after nearly four centuries, was condemned by Honorius III., in 1225.[601]

Nominalism, on the other hand, regarded the individual as the primal substance; universals are only abstractions or mental conceptions of qualities common to individuals, with no more of reality than the sounds which express them. Even as Realism in the hands of daring thinkers led to Pantheism, so, step by step, Nominalism could be brought to recognize the originality of the individual and finally to Atomism.[602]

The two antagonistic schools were first clearly defined in the beginning of the twelfth century, with Roscelin, the teacher of Abelard, as the leader of the Nominalists, and William of Champeaux at the head of the Realists. Discussion continued in the schools with constantly increasing bitterness, though neither side dared to push their own views to their ultimate conclusions. Realism in a modified form achieved a triumph with the immense authority of Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas. Duns Scotus was a Realist, though he differed with Aquinas on the problem of individuation, and the Realists became divided into the opposing factions of Thomists and Scotists. While they were thus weakened with dissension, William of Ockham revived Nominalism, and it became bolder than ever. The perennial hostility between the Dominicans and Franciscans tended to range the two Orders under the opposing banners, while Ockham's defence of Louis of Bavaria in his quarrel with the papacy served to impress upon the new school of Nominalists his views upon the relations between Church and State.[603]