Among the most tenacious heresies to attract the Inquisition's attention was that of the Brethren of the Free Spirit. The Brethren appear to have originated towards the beginning of the twelfth century in the region of Switzerland and the upper Rhine. In 1212, at least eighty of them were thrown into a ditch outside the city walls of Strasburg and burned alive. That did not prevent them from becoming active by the middle of the century in Swabia, whence they spread across the rest of Germany and eventually reached the Low Countries. By the fifteenth century, their membership in Holland is believed to have included the painter Hieronymus Bosch.
Like the Waldensians, the Brethren of the Free Spirit produced religious books in the vernacular. Unlike the Waldensians, however, their orientation was essentially mystical, even incipiently Hermetic. ‘God is everything that is,’ they proclaimed. ‘All emanates from him and returns to him.’3 In consequence, even vermin – rats, for instance – were deemed as divine as human beings. Satan, too, was regarded as an emanation from and a manifestation of God. The Brethren of the Free Spirit contemptuously repudiated Church ritual and the sacraments. ‘As the soul thus reverts to God after death, there is neither purgatory nor hell, and all external cult is useless.’4 Instead, the Brethren spoke of the ‘divine internal light’, for which they invented the term ‘illuminism’.5 Not surprisingly, perhaps, they were widely accused of devil worship and satanistic practices. They were also accused of sexual licence and abandon – of what later generations would come to call ‘free love’. The Inquisition's persecution of them was particularly ferocious.
Among the numerous others to suffer at the Inquisition's hands, it is worth noting Jan Hus in Bohemia. Hus was a member of the faculty at the University of Prague and, from 1401, Dean of Philosophy. At this time, the Church owned 50 per cent of all land in the Kingdom of Bohemia. Like Wycliffe in England, Hus demanded a redistribution of Church property, and insisted on other ecclesiastical reforms as well. He also opposed, bitterly and vociferously, the sale of indulgences – the practice which, a century later, was to elicit such indignation from Martin Luther. At the Council of Constance in 1415, Hus was convicted of heresy for his outspokenness and burned at the stake.
The Destruction of the Knights Templar
In 1304, Pope Benedict XI had died. In the summer of the following year, the King of France, Philippe IV or Philippe le Bel, contrived to install his own candidate, Bertrand de Goth, Archbishop of Bordeaux, on the throne of Saint Peter. The new pontiff took the name of Clement V and proceeded to act as the French monarch's abjectly docile puppet. That, however, did not satisfy Philippe's ambition and compulsive need to control. To consolidate his authority further, he proceeded to kidnap the entire Papacy in 1309 and move it from Rome to Avignon. It was to remain at Avignon for nearly three-quarters of a century, and all seven Popes who presided over it during those years were French. When Gregory XI finally returned to Rome in 1377, the French cardinals elected another Pope, subsequently designated ‘Antipope’, who remained at Avignon. The ‘Great Schism’ of 1378 – the conflict between rival Popes, or between Popes and Antipopes – was not to be resolved until 1417.
At the very beginning of the Avignon ‘Captivity’, when Clement V was first installed as pontiff, the Inquisition faced an entirely new kind of challenge. In the past, it had addressed itself to the ferreting out of heretics. Now, it was to find itself pitted against the single most powerful institution in Christendom at the time, the Knights Templar.
The Templars had originally been established in the Holy Land at the beginning of the twelfth century, shortly after the capture of Jerusalem in the First Crusade. By 1300, they had come to constitute a vast international corporation – a network and a virtual empire second in wealth and influence only to the Papacy itself. If they had consisted initially of fighting men, they now included an even larger number of administrators, bureaucrats, workers and support staff. The Order owned immense estates across the whole of the Christian world – not just in the sphere of Rome's spiritual authority, but also in that of the Greek Orthodox Church of Constantinople. On these estates, the Order's personnel produced timber, farmed, bred horses, raised cattle and sheep. The Order owned ships, too, which trafficked in wool and other commodities, as well as transporting pilgrims and crusaders to and from the Holy Land.
The Templars commanded the most advanced military technology of the era. Their military resources, in expertise, in matériel and in trained manpower, exceeded those of any other European institution. They were also the chief bankers of Europe, adept at the transfer of funds throughout Christendom and complicated financial transactions on behalf of monarchs, ecclesiastics, nobles and merchants. And they were widely respected diplomats, able to act independently of warring factions. Their embassies dealt not only with Catholic potentates, but with the Byzantine Church as well, and with military, political and religious representatives of Islam.
Given their status, it was hardly surprising that the Templars should inspire increasing jealousy and suspicion; and their haughtiness, their high-handed arrogance and lofty complacency elicited further hostility. But there were more serious grounds for antipathy as well, at least so far as the Church was concerned. As early as the beginning of the thirteenth century, at the start of the Albigensian Crusade, Pope Innocent III had criticised the Order, citing allegations of excess and even of apostasy. Among other suspect practices, the Templars welcomed into their ranks excommunicated knights who, in consequence, could receive the burial in consecrated soil that would otherwise have been denied them. The Templars were also notorious for their disrespectful treatment of Papal legates. They displayed an un-Christian tolerance towards Muslims and Jews. And during the Albigensian Crusade, they provided a refuge in their Order for a substantial number of known Cathars. Indeed, certain of their Grand Masters and regional Masters came from prominent Cathar families.6
By the beginning of the fourteenth century, King Philippe IV of France had abundant reasons for disliking the Order of the Temple. He also coveted their wealth, his own fiscal needs being constantly acute. In 1291, he had ordered the arrest of all Italian merchants and bankers in France, whose property he had expropriated. In 1306, he had driven all Jews from his kingdom and confiscated their property as well. It was probably inevitable that Philippe should turn his attention to the Templars as a fresh source of revenue.
But Philippe had reason to fear the Templars, too. Since the loss of the Holy Land in 1291, the Order had been effectively dispossessed, lacking any permanent base or headquarters. For a time, they had settled on Cyprus; but the island proved too small for their grandiose ambitions. They envied the Teutonic Knights, their kindred Order, who had established a virtually independent principality in Prussia and on the Baltic, far to the northeast, well beyond the reach of any enforceable Papal authority. The Templars dreamed of creating a similar principality for themselves, but closer to the hub of European activity. Their designs focused on the Languedoc, still in a devastated condition after the Albigensian Crusade.7 The prospect of an autonomous, self-contained and self-sufficient Templar state in his own backyard cannot have allowed the French king to sleep very peacefully.
Philippe thus had a number of plausible excuses, and even a few ostensibly valid reasons, for moving against the Templars – and doing so in a manner that would simultaneously neutralise them as a threat and permit him to seize their wealth. It helped, of course, to have a Pope in his pocket. It also helped to have the Inquisitor for France, Guillaume de Paris, as personal confessor and close friend. There was obviously ample latitude for collusion – and for Philippe to proceed with a semblance of unimpugnable legality.
Some time earlier, one of Philippe's ministers had been collecting and collating evidence against the Templars, which was kept under Dominican guard, at Corbeil. From this evidence, it became apparent that the most convenient charge to bring against the Order would be heresy – a charge which may not have been wholly without foundation. On 14 Septembe
r 1307, letters were accordingly dispatched to royal officials across France, instructing them to arrest, on Friday the 13th of October following, all Templars within their jurisdiction. Personnel of the Order were to be kept under strict guard in solitary confinement, then brought one by one before the Inquisition's commissioners. Each was to have the articles of accusation formally read to him; and each was promised pardon if he confessed to the charges and returned to the bosom of the Church. Should a Templar refuse to confess, he would be sent as promptly as possible to the king. In the meantime, all the Order's property was to be sequestrated and comprehensive inventories of all holdings and possessions were to be compiled. Although issuing from the monarch, these instructions were officially promulgated under the authority of the Inquisitor. Philippe could thus claim to be acting entirely at the Inquisition's behest and deny any personal interest in the matter. To reinforce the charade, the Inquisitor himself, Guillaume de Paris, wrote to his minions throughout the kingdom, listing the crimes of which the Templars were accused and outlining instructions for their interrogation.
During the ensuing months, Inquisitors across France were kept conscientiously busy interrogating hundreds of Templars. A substantial number of victims died in the process – thirty-six in Paris alone, another twenty-five at Sens. But most of the Templars arrested in France were either very young and inexperienced, or elderly. The majority of the fighting men, apparently tipped off by some advance warning, managed to escape. And of the Order's alleged ‘treasure’, which Philippe had hoped to expropriate, nothing was ever found. Either it had never actually existed, or it was smuggled off to safety in time.
There followed seven years of interrogation, torture and execution, punctuated by trials and retractions of confessions. In 1310, nearly 600 French Templars threatened to retract their confessions and defend their Order to the Pope. Some seventy-five of them were burned by the Inquisition as relapsed heretics. At last, the Order of the Temple was officially dissolved by the Pope; and on 19 March 1314, two of the Order's highest dignitaries – Jacques de Molay, the Grand Master, and Geoffroi de Charnay, his immediate subordinate – were roasted to death over a slow fire on an island in the Seine.
In the years preceding this grisly denouement, action against the Templars was most assiduous in domains where the Inquisition's writ ran most effectively – in France, in Italy, in certain parts of Austria and Germany. Elsewhere persecution of the Order was a rather more desultory affair. In England, for example, where the Inquisition had never previously operated, there was no one to undertake the persecution. Philippe accordingly wrote to his son-in-law, the newly crowned Edward II, and urged him to proceed against the Templars. The English king was shocked by the exhortation – so shocked indeed that he wrote to the monarchs of Portugal, Castile, Aragón and Sicily, encouraging them to ignore the pressure Philippe was bringing to bear on them. Edward asked his fellow rulers to
turn a deaf ear to the slanders of ill-natured men, who are animated, as we believe, not with the zeal of rectitude, but with a spirit of cupidity and envy.8
Subjected to relentless pestering from Philippe, Edward at last relented and, in January 1308, performed the token gesture of arresting ten Templars. There was no serious effort to keep them under guard. On the contrary, they were allowed to wander about in secular apparel, coming and going as they pleased from the castles in which they were supposed to be imprisoned.
Philippe, needless to say, was unhappy. In mid-September 1309, nearly two years after the initial arrests in France, the Inquisition first set foot in England – with the specific objective of prosecuting the Templars. The welcome the Inquisitors received was less than enthusiastic. Their fun was further spoiled when Edward forbade them to employ torture, the one means whereby they might hope to extort the confessions they desired. Aggrieved, the Inquisitors complained to the French king and the Pope. Under pressure from these two sources Edward, in December, reluctantly agreed to sanction ‘limited’ torture; but the Templars’ jailers showed no taste for it whatever, and the Inquisitors continued to feel thwarted.
In their frustration, the Inquisitors proposed alternatives. Perhaps the Templars could be gradually deprived of food until they were subsisting entirely on water. Or perhaps they could be transferred to France, where torture might be properly applied by men with the expertise and the zest for it. Edward continued to be obstructive. At last, in mid 1310, under renewed pressure from the Pope, he grudgingly authorised at least some torture of the requisite intensity to be employed.
In the end, however, less than a hundred Templars were arrested in England and only three confessions were obtained. The three self-acknowledged culprits were not burned. Instead, they were obliged to make a public confession of their ‘sins’, after which they were absolved by the Church and packed off to a monastery. No other charges were deemed proved against the Templars in England. When the Order was dissolved, those who remained in prison were dispersed to various monasteries – with pensions to support them for the remainder of their days. By that time, a number of English Templars, like many from France before them, had escaped to Scotland.9 Scotland at the time lay under a Papal interdict, and her king, Robert the Bruce, had been excommunicated. In consequence, Papal writ did not run in the country; and fugitive knights could expect to find there a congenial refuge.
Attacks on the Franciscans
When the Inquisition was called on to act against the Templars, it had already acquired experience in contending with other official Christian institutions. For the better part of the previous century, it had been engaged in an ongoing dispute, a virtual running feud, with the Order that constituted the Dominicans’ chief rival for authority and influence. This Order was the Franciscans.
The man later canonised as Saint Francis was born around 1181, the son of a rich cloth merchant of Assisi. If Dominic was a fanatic from the moment he appeared on the stage of history, Francis conformed to a different, though equally familiar, pattern. Like Saint Augustine, Francis spent his youth as a libertine and profligate. Even the most reverential accounts refer coyly to him having done all the things a young man of the time customarily did, and the word ‘dissipated’ occurs more than once.
Until the age of twenty, Francis worked in the family business. In 1202, he became a soldier, fighting in one of the minor campaigns Assisi was waging against her neighbours. He was captured and spent some months in prison. According to some sources, he suffered a bout of serious illness around this period. There are fragments of evidence to suggest that this illness either was or coincided with some sort of nervous or mental breakdown.
In any case, Francis returned to Assisi disenchanted with his former worldliness. He embarked on a pilgrimage to Rome and discovered in the process a personal exhilaration in poverty. On returning to Assisi, he adopted a lifestyle of austerity and simplicity, caring for beggars and helping to restore a derelict church. He financed the restoration by pilfering some of his father's goods and selling them, together with the horse on which he had carried them off. His father peremptorily disowned him.
All of this was but a prelude to Francis' conversion. The conversion occurred one morning in 1208, as Francis was listening to a biblical text being read in a church near Assisi. The words he heard seem to have resonated for him as a personal call. Immediately thereafter, he discarded his shoes, donned an ascetic dark robe and embarked on a peripatetic life of preaching. As followers began to attend and accompany him, he drew up a rule for his embryonic organisation. According to one clause:
The brethren shall appropriate to themselves nothing, neither house, nor place… but shall live in the world as strangers and pilgrims, and shall go confidently after alms.10
Francis and Dominic were almost exactly contemporary. But while Dominic sought power, Francis sought to divest himself of all power. While Dominic sought external adversaries against whom to pit himself, Francis – in a manner much more in keeping with traditional. Christian teaching – contended
against supposed vice and temptation within himself. Like certain of the heretical sectarians, Francis endeavoured to live in a fashion worthy of that ascribed to Jesus and the ‘first Christians’. Had he lived in the south of France, or had the Dominicans not been preoccupied with the pursuit of Cathars there, he himself would very likely have been condemned as a heretic. He and Dominic together reflect two conflicting, diametrically opposed and incipiently schizophrenic aspects of the medieval Church.
In 1209, just as the Albigensian Crusade was gaining bloody momentum, Pope Innocent III approved the rule Francis had drawn up, and the Franciscan Order was established. He and his associates took the designation of ‘friars minor’. Three years later, in 1212, the poor Clares, a Franciscan organisation for women, was founded by a member of the Assisi nobility, a lady subsequently canonised as Saint Clare. Francis, in the meantime, began to preach further afield. He wandered through eastern Europe. He then embarked on crusade and, in 1219, was present in Egypt at the siege and capture of the Nile Delta port of Damietta.
So poor and ragged were the early Franciscans that overzealous Dominican Inquisitors sometimes mistook them for Cathars or Waldensians. As a result of one such misapprehension, for example, five of them were executed in Spain. Like the early Dominicans, the early Franciscans were sworn to poverty and forbidden to own property, being forced to subsist entirely by begging. Unlike the Dominicans, however, the Franciscans were committed to manual labour. They were also denied some of the consolations afforded to their rivals. Most Franciscans initially were uneducated, for instance, and thus precluded from the intellectual excitement and distraction of scholarship and theological study. And while the Dominicans could satisfy whatever sadistic or other perverse desires they might harbour by persecuting heretics, the Franciscans were denied this as well.
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