A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  If the Brethren’s habits came to be less pure than their precepts, the impulse was nevertheless religious. They were in search of personal salvation, not social justice. Medieval heresies were concerned with God, not man. Poverty was embraced not only in imitation of Christ and the Apostles but in deliberate contrast to the avarice that corrupted men of property. To be without property was to be without sin. Dissent was not a denial of religion but an excess of piety in search of a purer Christianity. It became heresy by definition of the Church, which recognized in the mystics’ renunciation of property the same threat as in Wyclif’s disendowment.

  In monk-like robes deliberately ragged, the Brethren of the Free Spirit cluttered the towns like sparrows, preaching, begging, interrupting church services, scorning monks and priests. Drawn from clerks, students, dissenting clergy, and from the propertied class, especially women, they were articulate and usually literate. Women, out of their frustrations and search for ecstasy, were prominent among the mystics. In the Béguines they had a sect of their own, a lay order that followed its own religious rule of good works and, when nunneries had no room, provided a place for unmarried women and widows, or, as a bishop wrote in criticism of the Béguines, a retreat from the “coercion of marital bonds.” Members joined the Béguines by taking an oath of dedication to God before a parish priest or other cleric, but the movement was never quite sanctioned by the Church. At street meetings the Béguines read the Bible translated into French.

  While the Brethren of the Free Spirit admitted both sexes, its two major gospels were written or formulated by women, one a shadowy figure known only as Schwester Katrei, the other named Marguerite Porete, who wrote The Mirror of Free Souls and was excommunicated and burned along with her book in 1310. Following her, the daughter of a rich merchant of Brussels known as Bloemardine attracted fervent disciples by her preaching. In 1372 the movement was condemned by the Inquisition, its books were burned in Paris on the Place de Grève, and a woman leader of the French group, Jeanne Dabenton, was burned at the stake together with the corpse of a male associate who had died in prison. Like the heresy of the Spiritual Franciscans, the sect of the Free Spirit persisted and spread in spite of the Inquisition.

  Apocalypse was in the air. The Duc d’Anjou in 1376, in the course of authorizing an annual corpse for dissection by the medical faculty of Montpellier, took notice that the population was so reduced, owing to epidemics and wars, that “it may be diminished to ever greater extent and the world brought to nothing.” Under the influence of malign and capricious events, overwrought minds turned to magic and the supernatural. The Inquisitor of France, on inquiring of the Pope in 1374 if he should take cognizance of sorcerers, was authorized by Gregory XI to pursue them vigorously. Since early in the century the papacy had been taking an increasingly punitive view of recourse to the supernatural, especially during the hyperactive reign of John XXII. In a series of Bulls in the 1320s, Pope John had equated sorcerers with heretics and authorized their punishment as such, since they had made a “pact with Hell,” forsaking God and seeking the aid of the Devil. He ordered their books of magic lore to be sought out and burned. Despite his alarm, prosecuted cases were few until the second half of the century, when sorcery and its links to demonology took on new life and were met by new efforts at repression. In 1366 the Council of Chartres ordered anathema to be pronounced against sorcerers every Sunday in every parish church.

  Demonology and the black arts were the opposite of heresy, not more pious than the Church but impious, seeking communion with the Devil, not God. Adepts in their rites worshiped Lucifer arrayed as the King of Heaven and believed that he and the other fallen angels would recapture Heaven while the Archangel Michael and his fellows would take their places in Hell. A pact with the Devil offered pleasure without penitence, enjoyment of sexuality, riches, and earthly ambitions. If the price was eternal hellfire, that was what many could expect anyway at the Day of Judgment. Though old and indigenous, demonology was never more than an aberration, but insofar as it offered an alternative answer, it was seen by the Church as dangerous.

  The problem was to distinguish between diabolic and lawful magic powers. Respectable sorcerers claimed that their images of wax or lead acquired potency through being baptized and exorcised, that their mysteries were consecrated by celebration of the mass, that God was invoked to compel the obedience of demons—indeed, that God flowed from their arts, as proved by the fulfillment of wishes. Theologians disallowed such pretensions. Even if it was only to recover a straying lover or cure a peasant’s sick cow, sorcerers were offering aid outside the approved channel of prayer, priests, and saints. As the times darkened, all magic and witchcraft came to be taken as an implied contract with Satan.

  Women turned to sorcery for the same reasons they turned to mysticism. In Paris in 1390 a woman whose lover had jilted her was tried for taking revenge by employing the magical powers of another woman to render him impotent. Both were burned at the stake. In the following year two more women were condemned on charges of maleficiam or doing evil. Since confessions in trials for sorcery were extracted by torture, they tended to reflect the accusations of diabolic power drawn up by the prosecutors, and since the accused were likely to be cranks or fanatics or otherwise disturbed, they did not hesitate to claim the powers imputed to them. They admitted to consorting with demons and to pacts with the Devil for lust or revenge, to diabolic rites and flights through the night to copulate with the Devil in the shape of a monstrous black cat or goat with flaming eyes or a gigantic man with black skin, a huge phallus, and eyes like burning coals. The Devil was a Gothic satyr with horns and cloven hoofs, fierce teeth and claws, a sulfurous smell and sometimes ass’s ears. The lore developed as much from the minds of the prosecutors as from the hallucinations of the accused, and together they laid the ground for the rage against witchcraft that was to explode upon the next century.

  The clear voice of common sense spoke through the King’s adviser in philosophy, Nicolas Oresme, who despised both astrology and sorcery. A man of scientific spirit though a bishop, he was a mathematician and astronomer and translator of the Politics and Ethics of Aristotle. One of his books began with the sentence, “The earth is round like a ball,” and he postulated a theory of the earth’s rotation. Refuting the powers ascribed to sorcerers, he denied that they could invoke demons, although he did not rule out the existence of demons. Not all things, he wrote, could be explained by natural causes; some marvels or extraordinary strokes of fortune must be the work of angels or demons, but he preferred to look for a natural and rational explanation. Magicians, he pointed out, were adept at using aids to favor illusions—darkness, mirrors, drugs, or gases and fumes that could be made to give rise to visions. The basis for illusion was likely to be an abnormal state of mind induced by fasting or by frightening phenomena. A man ahead of his time, Oresme suggested that the source of demons and specters could be the disease of melancholy. He also made the point that evidence for sorcery was derived from confessions under torture, and that many miracles were fraudulently devised by the clergy to increase offerings to their churches.

  Oresme proves the frailty of generalization. He was highly esteemed by the same King in whose employ the astrologer Thomas of Pisano fashioned wax images to destroy the English.

  Scientific spirit could not dispel the sense of a malign influence upon the times. As the century entered its last quarter, the reality and power of demons and witches became common belief. The theological faculty of the University of Paris in a solemn conclave at the end of the century declared that ancient errors and evils, almost forgotten, were emerging with renewed vigor to infect society. They drew up a statement of 28 articles to disprove, not the power of the black arts, but their lawfulness. No less emphatically they rejected the incredulity of those who questioned the existence and activity of demons.

  Unorthodoxy, as always, made disproportionate noise. Heresy and sorcery, though increasingly significant, were not the norm. In 1378
the real danger to the Church emerged from within.

  Chapter 16

  The Papal Schism

  In Italy the war for control of the Papal States had renewed itself in 1375. During the temporary peace, Italian hatred of the papacy’s mercenaries and French legates had not subsided but swelled. The agents of a French Pope ruled with the contempt of colonial governors for natives. When the nephew of the Abbot of Montmayeur, legate in Perugia, was seized by desire for the wife of a Perugian gentleman and, breaking into her chamber, would have ravished her by force, the lady, seeking escape by the window to an adjoining house, lost her footing, fell to the street, and was killed. In response to a delegation of outraged citizens who demanded justice against his nephew, the Abbot said carelessly, “Quoi donc! [What then!] Did you suppose all Frenchmen were eunuchs?” The tale spread from city to city, feeding the antagonism of which Florence now made herself the champion.

  Establishment of a strong papal state at her borders was felt by Florence as a threat, heightened by the incursion into Tuscany of Hawkwood during a lapse in papal pay. Forced to buy him off at a huge cost of 130,000 florins, the Florentines believed he had been encouraged to come against them by the Pope. Anti-papism now pervaded Florentine politics in a wild swing of the perpetual feud of Guelf and Ghibelline. Described in exasperation by a later French Governor of Genoa, this ancient roil kept Italians at each other’s throats out of inherited, witless animosity.

  For with no other quarrel of land or seigneury, they have only to say, “You are Guelf and I am Ghibelline; we must hate each other,” and for this reason only and knowing no other, they kill and wound each other every day like dogs, the sons like the fathers, and so year by year the malice continues and there is no justice to remedy it.… And from this come the despots of this country, elected by the voice of the people, without reason or right of law. For as soon as one party prevails over the other and is the stronger, then those who see themselves on top cry “Long live so-and-so!” and “Death to so-and-so” and they elect one of their number and kill their adversary if he does not flee. And when the other party regains the advantage, they do the same and in the fury of the people, from which God protect us, all is torn to pieces.

  Until now, popular antagonism toward the papal party represented by the Guelfs had not reached the point of taking up arms against the Church. When during a food scarcity in 1374–75 papal legates embargoed the export of grain from the Papal States to Florence, passions reached the point of belligerence. Under the slogan Libertas inscribed in gold on a red banner, Florence organized a revolt of the Papal States in 1375 and formed a league against the papacy, joined by Milan, Bologna, Perugia, Pisa, Lucca, Genoa, and all the various potentates who had territorial ambitions in the Papal States.

  To one chronicler it seemed “as if these times are under the rule of a planet which produces strife and quarreling.” In an Augustinian monastery near Siena, he recorded, “the monks murdered their Prior with a knife,” and in a neighboring abbey, after intramural fighting, “six brethren were turned out.” Because of quarreling among the Carthusians, the General of the order came and moved them all to other houses. “It was no better among kinsfolk by blood.… The whole world was fighting. In Siena there was no one who kept his word, the people disagreed with their leaders and agreed with no one, and truly the whole world was a valley of shadows.”

  The revolt brought into action an individual destined to be the catalyst of new calamity. Robert of Geneva, the Pope’s Legate in Italy, was a cardinal of 34 who shrank from no force to regain control of the papal patrimony. A brother of the Count of Geneva, a descendant of Louis VII and cousin of Charles V, a relative of the Counts of Savoy and of half the sovereign houses of Europe, he shared the lack of inhibition characteristic of so many princes. He was lame and squinting, and described as either squat and fat or handsome and well formed, depending on partisanship in the coming schism. Imposing and autocratic in manner, he was sonorous of voice, eloquent with tongue and pen, cultivated and well read in several languages, sophisticated and artful in his management of men.

  To reconquer the Papal States, he persuaded Gregory XI to hire the Bretons, worst of the mercenary bands, with the extra incentive of removing them from the vicinity of Avignon. Crossing the Alps into Lombardy in May 1376, they spread terror across Italy with swords blessed and consecrated by the Cardinal Legate. They failed, however, to take Bologna, keystone of the Papal States, and suffered several defeats by the Florentines, to the wrath of their employer. With the fury of a conqueror defied, Cardinal Robert determined to set an example by atrocity and found his occasion at Cesena, a town near the east coast between Ravenna and Rimini. When the Bretons who were quartered there seized supplies without paying for them, they provoked an armed rising of the citizens. Swearing clemency by a solemn oath on his cardinal’s hat, Cardinal Robert persuaded the men of Cesena to lay down their arms, and won their confidence by asking for fifty hostages and immediately releasing them as evidence of good will. Then summoning his mercenaries, including Hawkwood, from a nearby town, he ordered a general massacre “to exercise justice.” Meeting some demurral, he insisted, crying, “Sangue et sangue!” (Blood and more blood!), which was what he meant by justice.

  He was obeyed. For three days and nights beginning February 3, 1377, while the city gates were closed, the soldiers slaughtered. “All the squares were full of dead.” Trying to escape, hundreds drowned in the moats, thrust back by relentless swords. Women were seized for rape, ransom was placed on children, plunder succeeded the killing, works of art were ruined, handicrafts laid waste, “and what could not be carried away, they burned, made unfit for use or spilled upon the ground.” The toll of the dead was between 2,500 and 5,000. From the sacked city, 8,000 refugees fled to Rimini begging for alms. A generation later the great preacher Bernardino of Siena still made audiences tremble with the tale of horror.

  “Not to be held entirely infamous,” Hawkwood, it was said, sent a thousand women to safety in Rimini and allowed some men to escape. Carrying out the solution threatened by Solomon, he was also reported to have cleft in half a nun over whom two of his soldiers were fighting. On the whole, however, he had more relish for money than for killing, and shortly after the massacre of Cesena he abandoned the papal employ, where pay was slack, for more lucrative contracts offered by Florence and Milan. To make employment of the great mercenary permanent, Bernabò Visconti gave one of his illegitimate daughters by a favorite mistress in marriage to Hawkwood with a dowry of 10,000 florins. The political resources of a prince with 36 living children were far-reaching.

  For his remaining two decades Hawkwood lived in riches and respect, elected Captain of Florence by the Signoria, and paid for his services, or for immunity, by almost all the city-states of central and northern Italy. He bequeathed to Italy an example of successful rapine to inspire Italian condottieri—Jacopo del Verme, Malatesta, Colleoni, Sforza—who were soon to replace the foreign captains.

  Robert of Geneva, who became for Italy the “Man of Blood” and “Butcher of Cesena,” never attempted to excuse or extenuate his action. As far as he was concerned, the citizens were rebels like those of Limoges to the Black Prince. His resort to terror, resounding through Italy, did not enhance the authority of the Church. “People no longer believe in the Pope or Cardinals,” wrote a chonicler of Bologna on the massacre, “for these are things to crush one’s faith.”

  Meanwhile, Florence was excommunicated by the Pope, who invited non-Florentines to prey upon the commerce of the outlaw. Her caravans could be seized, debts could not be collected, clients were not bound to keep their contracts. Florence retaliated by expropriating ecclesiastical property and forcing local clergy to keep churches open in defiance of the ban. Popular sentiment was so aroused that the Committee of Eight who directed strategy were called the Eight Saints, and the conflict with the papacy came to be known in Italian annals as the War of the Eight Saints.

  By now both sides had reason
to want to end the war. Besides drastic effect on Florentine commerce, the excommunication had divisive effects on the league. To hold the multiple rivalries of Italian city-states in cohesion for long was impossible. For the papacy to maintain control of the Papal States from Avignon was equally impossible, and a new danger was added when Florence offered inducements to Rome to join the league. It was as apparent to Gregory as to his predecessor that necessity was calling the papacy home. A clamorous voice at his elbow was adding force to the summons.

  Since June 1376, Catherine of Siena, who was to be canonized within a century of her death and ultimately named patron saint of Italy along with Francis of Assisi, had been in Avignon exhorting the Pope to signal reform of the Church by returning to the Holy See. Already at 29 a figure with an ardent following and an insistent voice, she was revered for her trances and raptures and her claim to have received, while in ecstasy after communion, the stigmata of the five wounds of Christ on hands, feet, and heart. While these remained visible only to her, such was her repute that Florence commissioned her as ambassador to negotiate reconciliation with the Pope and a lifting of the interdict. Catherine’s larger mission in her own mind was apostleship for all humanity through her own total incorporation with God and Jesus, and through a cleansing and renewing of the Church. Her authority was the voice of God speaking directly to her, and preserved in the Dialogues dictated to her secretary-disciples and believed by them to have been “given in person by God the Father, speaking to the mind of the most glorious and holy virgin, Catherine of Siena … she being the while entranced and actually hearing what God spoke in her.”