Backman Clifford R. The Worlds of Medieval Europe

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

274 THE CENTRAL MIDDLE AGES

very proliferation of cathedral schools, ideally for the training of new generations

of priests, was the spearhead of the response. But until there were sufﬁcient clergy

to meet society’s needs, other volunteers stepped into the breach, often assuming

an anticlerical stance since it seemed to many of them that the Church’s slow

response was the result of a lack of concern for town dwellers’ needs.

The Waldensians, also known as the Poor of Lyons, were one such sect. The

Waldensians were a lay spiritual movement founded around 1173 by Peter Waldes

[sometimes Waldo], a well-to-do merchant from Lyons. Waldes experienced an ap-

ostolic conversion in that year after listening to a reading of the Life of St. Alexis.

Taking to heart Christ’s injunction that the wealthy ought to give away all their

money to the poor if they wish to please God, Waldes placed his wife and daugh-

ters in a convent, hired two priests to translate the entire Bible into French so that

he could read it, and gave away the rest of his wealth. He then dedicated himself

to preaching to the urban masses. Waldes and his followers were orthodox in their

dogmatic beliefs, although they did place greater emphasis on three themes than

the mainstream clergy did: the need for Christians to adopt voluntary poverty, the

need for vernacular translations of the Bible, and the need for the Waldensian

brethren to engage in public preaching. These were difﬁcult issues for the Church.

It was true that Christ had proclaimed “Blessed are the poor,” but did that mean

poverty was required of Christians? that the mere possession of wealth was proof

positive of spiritual unworthiness? The fact that the Church itself was exceedingly

wealthy suggested that the Waldensian stance entailed a criticism of the ecclesi-

astical order. The issue of translating the Bible into the vernacular formed another

sticking point. The Church had preached from the very start that Christians ought

to read the Bible for themselves, but that they had to read it in the universal

Church language. There were two reasons for this stance: First, the danger of errors

and misinterpretations working their way into faulty translations was large; sec-

ond and more important was the conviction that the faith, and the book on which

it was based, needed to be supra-national. Christians from Portugal to Norway,

from Scotland to Hungary, from Ireland to Poland, would be more closely bound

together into a religious community if they were all reading the same version of

Scripture. The proliferation of vernacular Bibles would unravel the sense of reli-

gious unity holding together the medieval world. The last issue, that of public

preaching by the Waldensian brothers, seemed to undermine clerical authority.

Christ had, after all, established a sacramental priesthood with the unique au-

thority to bind and loose, to preach and to teach. If any layman, however pious

and orthodox his beliefs, could interpret the Bible for the masses—then what need

of a priesthood?

The Waldensians’ activities soon roused the opposition of local clerics, and in

1179 Peter Waldes appealed unsuccessfully to Pope Alexander III for approval of

his order. Believing that he had been commanded by God to preach, Waldes de-

cided to disobey the papal command to cease his activities, and his order contin-

ued to grow in popularity. Condemned as heretical in 1184, the Waldensians were

inspired to sharpen their critiques of the Church, which some of them began

openly to refer to as the “Whore of Babylon.” The rhetoric escalated rapidly on

both sides, and Waldensian communities took root over a wider area, especially

within central Europe and southern France. The Waldensians are a perfect example

of the new type of heresy that spread: one bereft of fanciful ideas and calling only

for simplicity, purity, good words, good deeds, kind hearts, and a putting away

of unnecessary pomp. At the same time we ought not to romanticize them as

dewy-eyed naı¨fs crushed by a heartless bureaucracy; they could give as good as

THE PAPAL MONARCHY 275

they got when it came to spewing venom. Most of the Waldensian groups were

suppressed during the thirteenth century, but a handful of Waldensian churches

survive even to this day, primarily in Switzerland.

An even more signiﬁcant lay order was established by women known as the

beguines. These women too sought to imitate the earthly life of Christ and His ﬁrst

apostolic followers: to renounce wealth, embrace simple virtues, perform charita-

ble acts, preach the need of repentance, and anticipate the arrival of the Kingdom

of God. The beguines appeared sometime in the twelfth century and by the early

thirteenth had become a signiﬁcant social force with communities established in

cities across the Low Countries, France, and Germany. They were women who

wanted to live a religious life but were either unable to become nuns or were

uninterested in the calling. Most beguines were unmarried, either never having

married or having been widowed, and they lived in communal homes called be-

guinages; those who had families continued to live with them but spent their day-

time hours involved in the order’s works. The beguines lived by manual labor,

chieﬂy spinning and weaving, and by providing elementary education. They

vowed themselves to chastity and poverty but possessed no general administrative

structure and claimed no priestly or prophetic authority. Beguines lived as a com-

munal sisterhood, praying, working, teaching, and ministering to the sick as best

they could; but they were not an intellectual order and produced no substantial

body of writing through which we can know them. Most of our information about

them comes from clerical groups overseeing their activities, some of whom ad-

mired the sisters wholeheartedly and some of whom eyed them with deep

suspicion.

Beguinages proliferated rapidly after Pope Gregory IX (1227–1241) gave for-

mal approval to their activities in 1233. The German city of Cologne alone had

nearly sixty such communal houses. A 1328 report on the beguinage of St. Eliza-

beth in Ghent, which was so large that it formed a separate district of the town,

yielded the following observations:

It is surrounded by moats and walls and in the center of it stands a church,

next to which is a cemetery and a hospital....The women have also built

many houses for themselves, and each sister has her own garden....Two

chaplains reside there, at the sisters’ expense....They live together in these

houses in a state of considerable poverty, owning nothing but their clothing,

a bed, and a chest; they rely on no one but live by the labor of their hands,

washing wool and cleaning the clothes that are sent to them by the towns-

people. They make enough money from this that, given their simple ways,

they can still pay their dues to the church and give the rest away in alms....

During the week they habitually rise early in the morning and gather to-

gether in the church, each sitting in the seat assigned to her so that any ab-

sences will be noticed. They hear Mass and recite their prayers, then return

to their little houses and spend the rest of the day in quiet labor....They

never cease praying as they do their work; each house appoints two suitable

women to recite the Miserere and other familiar psalms, plus the Ave Maria.

...Atnight, after Vespers, they return to their church for further prayer and

meditation until the bell is rung, sending them to bed. On Sundays and holy

days they devote themselves to the Lord’s service with Masses, sermons,

prayers, and meditations. No one may leave the beguinage on these days

without the explicit permission of the headmistress.

The Capetian kings gave special protection and support to the beguine move-

ment after its approval by the Holy See. A hospital dedicated to caring for ill

276 THE CENTRAL MIDDLE AGES

beguines was established at Valenciennes in 1239; the beguinage in Paris was re-

ported to house nearly four hundred women. But as with other popular move-

ments within the Church, the very success of the beguines began to work against

them. Through pious gifts, they amassed sizable fortunes despite their dedication

to poverty. Envious people resented the special privileges and protections granted

them by ecclesiastical and secular authorities. Some of this resentment may have

been caused by the confusion generated by other, less devout, lay male groups

that called themselves beguins or beghards and who wandered through many urban

communities begging for alms but without necessarily performing the charitable

acts of the female beguines. By the latter part of the thirteenth century, public

opinion began to turn against them. Finally, at the Council of Vienne in 1312, Pope

Clement V forbade the building of new beguinages and prohibited new members

to join. Beguines already established were allowed to live out their lives, but the

movement ended with the death of the last sister sometime in the middle of the

fourteenth century.

Dissident groups that broke into open heresy were numerous. By far the most

signiﬁcant of these were the Cathars, also known as the Albigensians.

They num-

bered in the tens of thousands and dominated certain areas in southern France,

especially around Toulouse, although large Cathar communities existed in north-

ern Italy, Catalonia, and the Rhineland as well. The Cathars were a dualist sect,

meaning that they believed in the existence of two eternal and equally powerful

gods, one good and one evil. Satan, the evil deity, created the physical universe.

By a primeval trick, Satan entrapped human souls—the creation of the good and

loving God—in their physical bodies, with the result that human beings became

the battleground upon which the cosmic struggle between Good and Evil takes

place. The Cathars believed that only the destruction of the physical could liberate

one’s spiritual essence; hence they forbade sex, practiced self-ﬂagellation, ate se-

verely restricted diets, rejected the use of medicines, and generally engaged in a

highly asceticized deathwatch. They condemned marriage, denied Christ’s divin-

ity, and rejected transubstantiation. But they believed in the cyclical reincarnation

of souls: If one led a life of proper self-denial, one would return after death in a

more spiritually enlightened form until ﬁnally one achieved permanent release

from embodiment and reunion with God.

Unlike other heretical groups, the Cathars developed a formal, though simple,

ecclesiastical structure. At the head of their church stood a company of bishops.

They administered the communities, organized Cathar teaching, and presided over

the appointment of the “Perfects,” the main clerical body. The Perfects traveled

itinerantly, teaching, preaching, fasting, and promoting the Cathar system of val-

ues: the condemnation of property, the evil of sex, and the need for repentance.

Below them came the bulk of the believers. But the Cathars had many sympa-

thizers among the Catholic masses who never fully embraced their rigorous teach-

ing, so it is difﬁcult to estimate the actual number of heretics. One reason for their

popularity was clearly their strong anticlericalism. The Cathars believed ﬁrmly

that the Catholic Church had lost its way, had surrendered its spiritual mission,

had become obsessed with luxury, wealth, and the concerns of the mundane

world—and that the more the Church had “reformed” in the twelfth century, the

worse matters became. As summarized in The Inquisitor’s Handbook by Fr. Bernard

Gui, the main tool used by the Church in its struggle with the Cathars:

6. The word Cathar derives from the Greek term katharo´s, meaning “pure.” The name Albigensian derives

from the southern French town of Albi, which was one of the Cathars’ chief strongholds.

THE PAPAL MONARCHY 277

They maintain that virtually the entire Roman Church is a den of thieves, the

Whore of Babylon described in the Book of Revelations. They reject the Church’s

sacraments so adamantly that they regard the holy water of baptism to be no

different than river water, and the Host of Christ’s Sacred Body no different

than common bread....They consider Conﬁrmation and Confession to be

meaningless and frivolous. They teach that Marriage is a lie and that there is

no salvation in it if the married couple produces children. They deny the

Resurrection of the ﬂesh and propound some nonsense about our souls being

angelic spirits cast down from heaven by the sin of pride...andabout how

these souls, after living through seven earthly lives, will ﬁnal complete their

penance and return.

The Church took little action against the Cathars for two or three generations,

being more concerned with completing the reform effort and dealing with the

Church-State struggles it spawned. The Waldensians, in fact, were the ﬁrst group

to preach against this new sect. When Innocent III came to the throne in 1198 he

decided to act. His ﬁrst impulse was to organize a preaching campaign to teach

the heretics the errors of their ways and bring them back into the bosom of the

Church. But in 1207 Innocent’s personal legate Peter of Castelnau was brutally

murdered by a band of Cathars acting, apparently, at the instigation of Count

Raymond of Toulouse, a Cathar sympathizer. That is when things turned nasty.

LBIGENSIAN

RUSADE AND THE

RIGINS OF THE

NQUISITION

The word inquisition conjures up powerful images, usually of beefy sadists and

hooded hypocrites, red-hot pincers and screaming voices rising from dark dun-

geons. But the word itself simply means an “ofﬁcial inquiry.” The public hearings

that Charlemagne’s traveling lords (missi dominici) staged were inquisitions; so

were the hearings that produced the information in William the Conqueror’s

Domesday Book. Episcopal visitations to the churches within their dioceses were

inquisitions, too. The idea of an inquisition had its roots in Roman law; it was a

process by which it was incumbent upon the appropriate magistrates to gather

evidence of a possible crime and, if such a crime was found, to prosecute it. The

Romans considered this process preferable to their older custom of denunciation,

in which a citizen publicly accused another person of a crime after the fact. Certain

crimes, the Romans reasoned, were so pernicious to society at large that authorities

had both a right and duty to take action even before a speciﬁc charge had been

ﬁled against a speciﬁc individual. The inquisition, as deﬁned in Roman law and

as initially practiced by the medieval Church, was the direct forerunner of our

modern probable-cause hearings.

The recovery of Roman law added to the Church’s developing notion of in-

quisition, and the outcropping of heresy in the twelfth century provided the jus-

tiﬁcation for using it. The Church “inquisited” (to coin a new word) the Walden-

sians and beguines by having the appropriate bishops inquire into the groups’

beliefs and practices. The idea behind this inquiry was that the Church ﬁrst had

to understand what the suspected persons or groups actually believed and did

before it could effectively administer them, and that the way to do this was simply

to ask them. Once persons’ or group’s beliefs became known, then the Church

could take appropriate action—which usually meant preaching the orthodox doc-

trines to them in order to show the falsity of their ways. Given the passionate

278 THE CENTRAL MIDDLE AGES

belief in the rational order of the world and the development of Church thought

in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, most churchmen believed that reasoned

argument alone was sufﬁcient to guide most heretics back onto the true path.

Thus when Innocent III confronted the problem of the Cathars, he promoted

a campaign of inquisition, argument, and preaching. Eventually he came to rely

especially on the Order of Preachers (the Dominicans) created by Saint Dominic

in 1205. The preachers had no success, however, and sadly reported to Innocent

that the whole south of France might be lost to heresy soon. But the gratuitous

murder of the papal legate Peter of Castelnou by an underling of the Cathar-

sympathizing Count Raymond VI of Toulouse changed Innocent’s approach. He

decided that force was necessary. The question, though, was who would provide

it? Innocent turned to Philip Augustus who, as Raymond’s feudal lord, would

presumably have some inﬂuence over him, but Philip demurred. He was already

busy ﬁghting John of England, and he certainly did not want to establish a prec-

edent of attacking a vassal without just cause; Raymond, after all, had not done

anything to Philip. But Philip, like all the Capetians, was eager to stretch his direct

power farther to the south and did not mind at all the prospect of someone else

toppling Raymond. Therefore when Innocent decided to proclaim a crusade

against Raymond and all the Cathars of the south, Philip agreed to let all his

vassals who wished to join, do so.

The so-called Albigensian Crusade was a horribly bloody affair. To Innocent

and his crusaders, the Cathars were the overt enemies of Christ Himself, a threat

to Christendom even worse than the Muslims, while to the Cathars the Catholics

were deluded servants of Satan, the champions of all things physical and therefore

evil. An ugly war of words further poisoned the atmosphere while the armies

prepared for battle and made any compromise or negotiated settlement impossi-

ble. The crusaders gathered in northern France under the leadership of a new

papal legate, Arnold Amalric, and began marching south in the spring of 1209.

The ﬁrst major battle was one of the worst. In July of that year the crusaders

besieged the Cathar stronghold of Be´ziers, near the Mediterranean coast above

Narbonne. Having breached the walls, the crusaders stormed in. At that moment

someone suggested to Arnold Amalric that many devout and obedient Catholics

still lived in the city. Arnold replied grimly: “Kill them all! God will know His

own!” More than seven thousand people were slaughtered that day. Innocent re-

warded Arnold by appointing him the new archbishop of Narbonne.

Simon de Montfort, a middling baron and ambitious zealot, then took over

the leadership of the crusade. He used Be´ziers as a base from which to launch

annual campaigns throughout southern France; he took town after town, and each

victory was followed by a massacre of heretics. In 1212 Simon began to attack

Count Raymond of Toulouse himself, who had brieﬂy submitted to Rome in 1209

but had since given his support back to the Cathars. King Peter of Aragon, in

northeastern Spain, then became involved since he was Raymond’s brother-in-law

and had a claim to overlordship of Toulouse. Peter was already one of the cham-

pions of Christendom, having just led the Christian forces in the most decisive

battle of the Spanish Reconquista at Las Navas de Tolosa. So the leader of one

crusade fought the leader of another, and at the battle of Muret in 1213, Simon

defeated Peter and left him dead on the ﬁeld. Simon then captured Toulouse itself

in 1218 and became the undisputed master of southern France. Not for long, how-

ever. The towns of the regions, whether heretical or orthodox, were sickened by

his brutality and staged a rebellion. Simon was killed in a skirmish only a few

months later and no one mourned his passing.

THE PAPAL MONARCHY 279

When Simon’s son and heir proved unable to hold onto Toulouse, he surren-

dered the county to the French crown. This brought the Capetians themselves into

the fray, and ﬁnally King Louis IX (1226–1270) put an end to the Albigensian

Crusade by annexing Toulouse and Poitou to the Capetian domain, thus realizing

the dynasty’s long dream of a Mediterranean outpost. The Treaty of Meaux-Paris,

signed in early 1229, formally ended the crusade. The powerful lords who had

supported and propped up the Cathar Church were destroyed; mopping up the

rest of the heretics could be left to the inquisition.

The rise of the inquisition and the use of the crusade against the perceived internal

enemies of Christendom mark a symbolic end to the great reforming era of the

eleventh and twelfth centuries. What an extraordinary change had taken place in

these two hundred years. Latin Europe had gone from a divided and war-torn

backwater to an energized, highly developed, prosperous, reformed, and intellec-

tually reinvigorated society. Moreover, it was a society that pursured several clear

lines of development: one line of strong rural economy, social stratiﬁcation, and

monarchical authority restricted by the rights and privileges of an aristocratic class

of chivalrous elites, and another line of urban manufacture and commerce char-

acterized by social ﬂuidity, individual freedom, intellectual and cultural exchange,

interethnic contact, and communal-republican government. Geographically, the

ﬁrst line predominated in but was hardly exclusive to northern Europe, while

the second was characteristic of yet hardly unique to the Mediterranean south. In

the process of this development, western Europe had not only declared its freedom

from the Byzantine east and the Muslim south but had attempted to take the ﬁght

to them, to regain control of the Mediterranean basin from the Byzantines and

Muslims, and to establish the suzerainty of Latin Christianity over them.

Large ambitions entail large risks, however. In the process of creating a single

Christian world under the leadership of the “Two Swords” of the papacy and the

European secular powers, a great many people became disaffected. The Church

had lost its way, many believed; it had become too concerned with lands and

taxes, with borders and rights, and too little concerned with sermons and sacra-

ments and service and souls. The State, in becoming regularized and profession-

alized, all too easily slipped into tyranny and neglect of local traditions. Hence

voices called out for resistance. The Church, for its part, responded with the in-

quisition—an institution that, although we know what it devolved into, began as

a teaching program, a campaign to understand how people fell into error, and

then to correct them. But the Church had misjudged the severity of the problem.

By the end of the twelfth century, tens of thousands of people in Europe were not

only in disagreement with the Church but were convinced that it represented an

actual bar to salvation, an evil that had to be rooted out by violence if necessary.

UGGESTED

EADING

Texts

Gui, Bernard. The Inquisitor’s Handbook.

Innocent III. On Contempt for the World.

John of Salisbury. Pontiﬁcal History.

Villehardouin. The Conquest of Constantinople.

280 THE CENTRAL MIDDLE AGES

Source Anthologies

Peters, Edward. Heresy and Authority in Medieval Europe (1980).

Tierney, Brian. The Crisis of Church and State, 1050–1300 (reprint, 1988).

Wakeﬁeld, Walter L., and Austin P. Evans. Heresies of the High Middle Ages (1969).

Studies

Arnold, Benjamin. Princes and Territories in Medieval Germany (1991).

Cohen, Mark R. Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages (1994).

Constable, Giles. The Reformation of the Twelfth Century (1998).

Costen, Michael. The Cathars and the Albigensian Crusade (1997).

Kedar, Benjamin Z. Crusade and Mission: European Approaches toward the Muslims (1984).

Kieckhefer, Richard. Magic in the Middle Ages (1989).

———. Repression of Heresy in Medieval Germany (1979).

Lambert, Malcolm. Medieval Heresy: Popular Movements from the Gregorian Reform to the Reformation

(1992).

Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel. Montaillou: Catholics and Cathars in a French Village, 1294–1324 (1978).

Moore, R[obert]. I. The Formation of a Persecuting Society (1987).

Morris, Colin. The Papal Monarchy: The Western Church from 1050 to 1250 (1989).

Pennington, Kenneth. Popes and Bishops: The Papal Monarchy in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries

(1984).

Peters, Edward. Inquisition (1989).

———. The Magician, the Witch, and the Law (1978).

Powell, James M. Innocent III: Vicar of Christ or Lord of the World? (1994).

Russell, Jeffrey Burton. Dissent and Order in the Middle Ages: The Search for Legitimate Authority

(1992).

Sayers, J. E. Innocent III: Leader of Europe, 1198–1216 (1995).

Waugh, Scott L., and Peter Diehl. Christendom and Its Discontents: Exclusion, Persecution, and Re-

bellion, 1000–1500 (1995).

Webb, Diana. Pilgrims and Pilgrimage in the Medieval West (1999).

Part One

PART THREE

8 8

This page intentionally left blank

283

CHAPTER 13

OLITICS IN THE

HIRTEENTH

ENTURY

tatecraft and notions of political identity developed signiﬁcantly over the

thirteenth century. A constant tension between a centralizing royal ambition

and a centrifugal aristocratic localism characterized French, English, and German

politics, and each state responded to that tension in its own creative way. France

emerged as the largest and strongest of the centralized monarchies, mostly at En-

gland’s expense. England developed the most effective and modern parliamentary

form of government, whereas Germany’s analogous Diet served essentially a con-

servative function as a guarantor of baronial privilege. For northern Europe,

therefore, the thirteenth century was less a time of political experiment and in-

novation, as the eleventh and twelfth centuries had been, than it was a time of

maturation and ripening. Her political institutions developed an exceptional de-

gree of practical sophistication and theoretical underpinning. In the Mediterra-

nean, the communes went through a series of reﬁnements and changes, in some

cases strengthening their republican and mercantile character, in others lessening

it in favor of a growing despotism based on control of land. In all these changes,

the fundamental goal—at least among the theorists—was still to ﬁnd a right or-

dering of the world, to create a polity that was in accord with local circumstances

and traditions but also with an understanding of God’s design of and for the

world. Rebellions and reform movements usually carried the banner of trying to

uproot injustice and restore a divinely ordained order. Conditions varied from

place to place, and therefore so too did political structures and practices, but the

goal of establishing a state based on natural and divine law, one in which each

individual, class, religious and ethnic group held its natural and essential position,

remained more or less constant.

By the end of the thirteenth century, most of the states of Europe had the

fundamental institutions and political traditions that they would retain for the next

ﬁve hundred years. Lots of detail changed in the intervening centuries, but the

basic structures remained remarkably steady. The German Empire, which had en-

tered the eleventh century as Europe’s strongest monarchy, limped out of the thir-

teenth century as the weakest, while France took the opposite course and the

Capetians found themselves, especially during the reigns of Louis IX (1226–1270)

and Philip IV “the Fair” (1285–1314), unexpectedly the dominant monarchs in the

west. In the Mediterranean, three commercial and political superpowers arose:

Venice, Genoa, and the Barcelona-based confederation known as the Crown of Ar-

agon. A fourth major power, the Angevin kingdom of Naples (which included

Sicily), owed its inﬂuence more to its close alliance with the papacy than to

its own innate political or commercial might; nevertheless, it played a crucial role

in the political development of the Mediterranean in this century, and in some

senses it formed the linchpin for many of the diplomatic maneuverings of the age.