The lower clergy, by contrast, tended to be as poor, and as poorly educated, as their parishioners. “The ignorance of the priests,” complained an English archbishop in 1281, “precipitates the people into the ditch of error.” A French bishop addressed the Council of Vienne in 1311 with his own complaints about the “contemptible persons of abject life, utterly unworthy in learning and morals,” who populated the priesthood. From their “execrable lives and pernicious ignorance,” he insisted, “infinite scandals arise.” Indeed, the clergy were so contemptible, according to the French bishop, that “the lay folk hold the priests as viler and more despicable than Jews.”10
If the common clergy were as sinful as their bishops believed them to be, then we should not be surprised at the impiety of their parishioners. “With Sunday,” complained one medieval chronicler, “reigneth more lechery, gluttony, manslaughter, robbery, backbiting, perjury, and other sins, more than reigned all the week before.”11 The theological illiteracy of ordinary men and women, in fact, was the stuff of pointed joke-telling even in the Middle Ages. According to one disapproving Dominican friar, a pious traveler in the English countryside, encountering a shepherd in service to the lord of the local manor, asked the shepherd whether he “knew the Faith,” to which the shepherd quickly and stoutly assented.
“Do you know the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost?” the traveler persisted.
“The father and the son I know well, for I tend their sheep, but I know not that third fellow,” the shepherd answered. “There is none of that name in our village.”12
Although a Dominican cleric might tell jokes about an unschooled shepherd, the fact is that the common folk of Christendom led far richer spiritual lives than their confessors suspected. As practiced in Europe during the High Middle Ages, in fact, Christianity can be seen as a thin veneer over the far older folkways still cherished by ordinary men and women, who might go through the motions at the parish church and then seek other comforts when the priest was not watching. Joan of Arc, among the most famous victims of the Inquisition, boasted to her interrogators that “I learned my Pater and Ave and Creed from my mother,” but she also conceded that the women of her village sought the intervention of the “Fairy Ladies” who were thought to haunt an ancient and gnarled tree in the nearby countryside. The water from a spring near the tree, she allowed, was believed to cure those who were sick with fever. “I have seen girls hanging garlands on the boughs of that tree,” she confessed, “and I have sometimes done so with them.”13
Indeed, the medieval Church, as the self-appointed guardian of theological law and order, was constantly at war with the imaginings and desires of its own congregants. Consider, for example, the delights and distractions offered by the wandering poets and singers known as troubadours, a commonplace of countless romance novels and adventure movies set in the Middle Ages. Like entertainers in every age, they sought to amuse rather than instruct their audiences, and the songs they composed and performed were regarded by the Church as scandalous and sinful. Famously, the troubadours celebrated the love of a knight in shining armor for his “lady fair”—but the lady was not necessarily his wife and might even be somebody else’s wife, as in the tale of Lancelot’s love affair with Guinevere in the Arthurian legend. For that reason, the Church condemned the chivalric traditions of feudal Europe—and the whole notion of “courtly love,” which had seized the imagination of both lords and ladies and the general populace—as “a form of wanton paganism.”14
To counter the unwholesome influence of the troubadours, and to divert the ardor of their audiences into safer channels, the Church was perfectly willing to invent new traditions of its own. The medieval Church had not yet signed off on the final draft of its own dogma, and its theologians continued to debate the fine points of its rituals, sacraments, and theology. Thus, for example, the Church introduced a newfangled cult in the eleventh century: the Virgin Mary was offered as an object of adoration in place of the sexually desirable and available woman who figured in the songs of the troubadours. Only in 1050 or so did the familiar and beloved Ave Maria—“Hail Mary, full of grace…”—begin to appear in the breviaries of pious Catholics as a specific antidote to the “lady fair” and her knight-suitors.
The shifting ground on which the Roman Catholic church was built would embarrass the efforts of the Inquisition to draw the line between orthodoxy and heresy. “There were important questions which had not yet been definitively answered,” explains historian W. L. Wakefield, “areas of uncertainty in which were encountered religious ideas of which it was not possible to say: ‘To be a Christian, you must hold this belief’; or ‘If you believe that, you are not a Christian.’” Yet, as we shall see, the Church was never reluctant to define the outer limits of correct belief, and the question of whether an otherwise pious man or woman stood on the right or wrong side of the line would turn out to be, quite literally, a matter of life and death.
The unsettled state of Christendom in the years leading up to the Inquisition only encouraged an upwelling of exotic beliefs and practices. At Le Mans in 1116, a charismatic preacher known to us as Henry the Monk succeeded in attracting spirited crowds (and in scandalizing both the clergy and the gentry) by calling on wealthy women to throw off their jewelry and by inviting young men to take prostitutes as wives. At about the same time in Antwerp, a man called Tanchelm endeared himself to his followers by distributing wine and entertaining them with a theatrical style of preaching. Tanchelm liked to dress up in a golden robe, for example, and participate in a wedding ceremony with a statue of the Virgin Mary.
Even the ravings of an apparent lunatic might succeed in attracting a few credulous disciples. Sometime around the year 1000, a peasant named Leutard from the village of Vertus in Châlons-sur-Marne, awakened one morning from a shattering nightmare in which he had been tormented by bees that entered his body through his genitals and exited through his mouth, buzzing and stinging all the way and “bidding him to do things impossible to men.” He interpreted the dream as a command to send away his wife and destroy the crucifix hanging in the local church, and he was inspired to preach to the villagers before drowning himself in a well.
Among the teachings that the local bishop found to be heretical was Leutard’s insistence that good Christians need not pay tithes, a reminder that heresy was often perceived by the Church as a financial or political threat rather than merely a theological one. Modern scholars have debated whether Leutard’s wild ideas were the result of a psychiatric disturbance called ergotism—a form of psychosis caused by ingesting a fungus that grows on rotting rye bread—but the medieval chroniclers blamed Leutard for infecting the populace with the plague of false belief, and they did not fail to notice that the diocese of Châlons-sur-Marne was later “struck three times by heresy.”15
Such eccentrics may strike us as laughable, if not downright pathological, but charismatic preachers like Henry and Tanchelm, and even the village madman of Vertus, were answering the urgent and authentic spiritual needs of contemporaries who felt alienated from the Roman Catholic church. For some pious Christians, the high ceremony of the Roman Catholic mass, the rich vestments of the presiding clergy, and the opulence of the cathedrals in which the rite was conducted all seemed at odds with the ministry of Jesus as plainly depicted in the Bible. Indeed, the point was not lost on certain members of the clergy itself, including men like Francis of Assisi and Domingo de Guzmán, founders of the monastic orders that would come to play a crucial role in the Inquisition. Among the profound ironies of the Inquisition is that the Church itself can be charged with provoking some of the heresies that it punished with such rage and severity.
After all, how could the pope and the princes of the Church reconcile their imperial ways with the words of Jesus as reported in the Gospels? “Foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of man has nowhere to lay his head.” And how could the bishops, comfortably settled in cities across Europe and living off rents, tithes
, and taxes, explain why they did not follow the instructions that Jesus issued to the seventy disciples that he sent out into the world to preach? “Carry no purse, no bag, no sandals,” says Jesus. “Whenever you enter a town and they receive you, eat what is set before you.”16
Some of the most revolutionary ideas in medieval Christendom, in other words, erupted from the pages of the Bible, a fact that helps explain why the Church discouraged the unsupervised reading of the scriptures and the translation of the biblical text into languages that ordinary Christians could understand. The via apostolica—“the way of the apostles”—was embraced by Christians who recoiled at the corrupt and decadent spectacle that the Church presented and looked into their own Bibles to answer the question “What would Jesus do?” As it turned out, the provocative question was asked by popes as well as radical priests like Henry the Monk, and the answers brought the kettle of Christianity to a high boil.
The moral squalor that prompted an eccentric like Tanchelm of Antwerp to liken the Church to a brothel, for example, also prompted Pope Gregory VII (1020–1085) to address what he admitted to be a “foul plague of carnal contagion.” The so-called Gregorian Reform established the strict rule of chastity for priests, thus putting an abrupt end to the tradition of clerical marriage that dated back to the beginnings of Christianity and reinforcing the biblical notion that human sexuality was not only sinful but demonic. At the same time, Pope Gregory VII sought to discourage the practice of simony, the buying, selling, and bartering of church offices for profit and political advantage. But the Gregorian Reform could not and did not curb the appetites of the clergy, high and low, for sexual pleasure and self-enrichment. Ironically, the stark contrast between the high-minded papal pronouncements and the sorry practices of the clergy only deepened the disappointment of spiritual seekers throughout Christendom and sharpened their appetite for more meaningful spiritual pursuits.17 “A first cause for the recrudescence of heresy in the West,” explains historian Malcolm Lambert, “lay in the expectations roused by Gregorian reform and its failure to fulfill them.”18
Some of Pope Gregory’s well-intended measures created new problems that a renegade priest might take it upon himself to solve. The pope, for example, issued a prohibition against marriage between men and women related by blood, a decree that was meant to curtail the sin of incest. As a practical matter, however, the new rule reduced the number of available marriage partners, especially in smaller towns and villages. And so, when Henry the Monk called on young men of good families to take harlots as wives—but only after he ritually cut their long hair, burned their alluring garments, and thus purified them—he was creating a fresh supply of marriage partners to replace the ones declared off-limits by Pope Gregory.
Sometimes the reformers inside and outside the Church embraced the same aspirations and the same approach to achieving them. Both Francis of Assisi (1181/82–1226) and Domingo de Guzmán (ca. 1170–1221) sought to purify themselves by taking strict vows of poverty and going out into the world as barefoot beggars to preach the Christian faith, all in imitation of Jesus and the disciples. The religious orders that they founded were embraced by the Church, and they were canonized as saints upon their deaths. A man named Peter Valdes (sometimes inaccurately rendered as “Waldo”) (1140–ca. 1205) also vowed to pursue the via apostolica, but he suffered a very different fate. His followers were among the first targets of the Inquisition, and they remained within its crosshairs for centuries. By a further irony, the Inquisition was staffed by Dominicans and Franciscans, thus turning the imitators of Christ into the persecutors of their fellow Christians.
Valdes was living a privileged life in the town of Lyons in southern France when, like Francis and Dominic, he experienced a life-changing revelation. One day he passed a street minstrel who was singing about Saint Alexius, the son of a rich man who refused the marriage that had been arranged for him and chose instead a life of pious destitution. Thus inspired, Valdes settled a portion of his fortune on his baffled wife, installed his daughters in a convent, took a vow of poverty, and embarked on his own self-appointed ministry. During the famine of 1176, for example, he fed the poor at his own expense while, at the same time, eating only what was offered to him by others. His followers called themselves the Poor Men of Lyons and later, after the death of their founder about 1205, they came to be known as the Waldensians.
“They go about two by two, barefoot, clad in woolen garments, owning nothing, holding all things in common like the apostles,” wrote Walter Map (ca. 1140–ca. 1209), an English delegate to the Third Lateran Council in 1179, “naked, following a naked Christ.”19 By yet another irony, the vivid but also unsettling phrase that Map used—“naked, following a naked Christ”—is borrowed from Jerome, the fifth-century church father who translated the Bible from its original Hebrew and Greek into Latin. Jerome himself was canonized for his efforts, but the translation of Holy Writ into vernacular languages soon came to be condemned by the Church as a threat to its monopoly on interpretation and instruction. The Waldensians, who imitated Jerome by preparing and using their own translations of various biblical texts, and who insisted on the right to preach even though they were not ordained as members of the clergy, were defying two of the prerogatives that the Church valued and protected with fierce determination. “If we admit them,” concluded Walter Map, “we shall be driven out.”20
Here we see the tripwire between the kind of Christian rigorism that the Church was willing to sanction and the kind that it insisted on punishing. The Franciscans and the Dominicans were chartered orders of the Roman Catholic church who lived and worked under the authority of the pope, but the Waldensians and others like them were outsiders whose true belief did not permit them to bend to the will of the Church. They all aspired to a reformed and purified Christianity, but Francis and Dominic were raised to sainthood while Peter Valdes and his followers were condemned as heretics.
By the year 1000, the so-called Dark Ages—a term coined by Petrarch to describe the isolation and ignorance of feudal Europe—were already coming to an end. Adventurers, merchants, pilgrims, and crusaders were beginning to explore the eastern reaches of Christendom and even more far-flung places in Africa and Asia. And when they returned to the cities of western Europe, they brought back a treasure trove of new ideas—arts and crafts, food and drink, texts and teachings. The emblematic example, which turns out to be wholly fanciful, is the tale of how a Venetian merchant-adventurer named Marco Polo reached the court of Kublai Khan in China in the thirteenth century and returned to Italy with the recipe for pasta. In fact, the phenomenon began a couple of centuries before Marco Polo, and the things that the travelers brought home were far more explosive than spaghetti.
Perhaps the single most exotic import into western Europe during the High Middle Ages was a variant of Christianity that appears to have originated in the tenth century in Bulgaria, a kind of theological no-man’s-land that lay on the frontier between eastern and western Christendom. A Bulgarian village priest, whose adopted name was Bogomil (“worthy of the pity of God”), introduced his congregants, “newly and shakily converted from paganism,” to his own peculiar version of Christian belief and practice. According to the medieval chroniclers whose writings have come down to us from the era of the Crusades, a few knights from France and Italy on crusade in the Holy Land encountered the followers of Bogomil in Constantinople or Macedonia and carried their strange new ideas back to western Europe like tainted fruit in their baggage.21
At the core of the so-called Bogomils’ theology was a simple answer to the perennial question of why evil exists in a world supposedly created by a benign deity. The founder of Bogomilism taught that there were, in fact, two sources of divine power in the cosmos, one good and one evil. It’s an idea that historians of religion call dualism, and it can be traced back through the gnostics of the early Christian era to the even older apocalyptic texts of Judaism and Christianity, such as the book of Daniel and the book of Revelation, an
d from these ancient texts all the way back to the earliest traditions of Zoroastrianism in far-off Persia. But, as often as the idea of dualism had been reworked over the millennia, it found a new and remarkable expression among the Bogomils.
The world as we know it, according to the Bogomils, was created not by God but by the fallen angel called Satan and, as a result, everything on earth is purely and irretrievably evil. Only upon the death of the human body does the soul locked within its fleshly prison rise to the spiritual realm and reunite with God. In the meantime, the Bogomils aspired to distance themselves as much as possible from the things of the world that Satan had made, including the making of babies and the consumption of food derived from animals that engage in sexual procreation. For that reason, not only sex itself but also the consumption of meat, eggs, cheese, and milk were declared taboo.
The Bogomils also understood that only a few devoted men and women were capable of such self-discipline while waiting to be liberated from earthly existence by their own deaths. So they expected the purest asceticism from only a small number of devotees who submitted to a ritual of initiation and then dedicated themselves to lives of rigorous self-denial. The rest of the rank-and-file of the Bogomils were free to live ordinary lives in the carnal world while supporting the initiates in their renunciations and devotions.
Fasting and celibacy, of course, were familiar to the Christian world, and the principal prayer of the Bogomils was the Pater Noster (“Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name…”), a commonplace of Christian practice. Other aspects of Bogomilism, however, pushed them outside the bounds of Christian orthodoxy. For example, they rejected the cross as a religious symbol precisely because it suggested that Jesus of Nazareth was a creature of flesh and blood who had been crucified by the Romans. The Bogomils, by contrast, refused to imagine that God had descended to a world created by Satan, inhabited a human body, and suffered the indignities of torture and death.
The Grand Inquisitor’s Manual Page 4