A History of The Inquisition of The Middle Ages Volume I Part 9

The brief remaining years of Dominic's life witnessed the rapid garnering of the harvest sowed in the period of humble but zealous obscurity. In 1214 Pierre Cella, a rich citizen of Toulouse, moved by his earnestness, resolved to join him in his mission-work, and gave for the purpose a stately house near the Chateau Narbonnais, which for more than a hundred years remained the home of the Inquisition. A few other zealous souls gathered around him, and the little fraternity commenced to live like monks. Foulques, the fanatic Bishop of Toulouse, a.s.signed to them a sixth of the t.i.thes, to provide them with books and other necessaries, that they might not lack the means of training themselves and others for the work of preaching, which was the main object of the community. By this time Duran de Huesca's attempt had proved a failure, and Dominic, who must have been familiar with it, doubtless saw the causes of its ill-success and the means to avoid them. Yet it is noteworthy that in the inception of the plan there was no thought of employing force. The heretics of Languedoc lay defenceless at the feet of de Montfort, an easy prey to the spoiler, but Dominic's project only looked to their peaceful conversion and to performing the duties of instruction and exhortation of which the Church had been so wholly neglectful.[221]

All eyes were now bent on the Lateran Council which was to decide the fate of the land. Foulques of Toulouse on his voyage thither took with him Dominic to obtain from the pope his approval of the new community.

Tradition relates that Innocent hesitated; his experience with Duran de Huesca had not taught him to expect much from the irregular action of enthusiasts; the council had forbidden the formation of new orders of monkhood, and had commanded that zeal for the future should satisfy itself with those already established. Yet Innocent's doubts were removed by a dream in which he saw the Lateran Basilica tottering and ready to fall, and a man in whom he recognized the humble Dominic supporting it on his shoulders. Thus divinely warned that the crumbling church edifice was to be restored by the man whose zeal he had despised, he approved the project on condition that Dominic and his brethren should adopt the Rule of some established order.[222]

Dominic returned and a.s.sembled his brethren at Prouille. They were by this time sixteen in number, and it is a curious ill.u.s.tration of the denationalizing influence of the Church to observe in this little gathering of earnest men in that remote spot that Castile, Navarre, Normandy, France, Languedoc, England, and Germany were represented. This self-devoted band adopted the rule of the Canons Regular of St.

Augustin, which was Dominic's own, and elected Matthieu le Gaulois as their abbot. He was the first and last who bore this t.i.tle, for as the Order grew its organization was modified to secure greater unity and at the same time greater freedom of action. It was divided into provinces, the head of each being a provincial prior. Supreme over all was the general master. These offices were filled by election, with tenure during good behavior, and provisions were made for stated a.s.semblies, or chapters, both provincial and general. Each brother, or friar, was held to implicit obedience. Like a soldier on duty, he was liable at any moment to be despatched on any mission that the interest of religion or of the Order might demand. They deemed themselves, in fact, soldiers of Christ, not devoted, like the monks, to a life of contemplation, but trained to mix with the world, exercised in all the arts of persuasion, skilled in theology and rhetoric, and ready to dare and suffer all things in the interest of the Church Militant. The name of Preaching Friars, which acquired such world-wide significance, was the result of accident. During the Lateran Council, while Dominic was in Rome, Innocent had occasion to address a note to him and ordered his secretary to begin, "To brother Dominic and his companions;" then, correcting himself, he said, "To brother Dominic and the preachers with him," and finally, considering further, "to Master Dominic and the brethren preachers." This greatly pleased them, and they at once commenced calling themselves Friar Preachers.[223]

Curiously enough, poverty formed no part of the original design. The impulse to found the order was given by Cella's donation of his property and the share of the t.i.thes offered by Bishop Foulques; and, as soon as it was organized, Dominic had no scruple in accepting three churches from Foulques--one in Toulouse, one in Pamiers, and one in Puylaurens.

The historians of the Order endeavor to explain this by saying that its founders desired to make poverty a feature of the Rule, but were deterred for fear that so novel an idea would prevent the papal confirmation. As Innocent had already approved of poverty in Duran de Huesca's scheme, the futility of this excuse is apparent, and we may well doubt the legends about Dominic's rigidity in requiring his brethren to dispense absolutely with the use of money. Certain it is that as early as 1217 we find the friars quarrelling with the agents of Bishop Foulques over the grant of t.i.thes, and demanding that churches with only half a dozen communicants should be reckoned as parish churches and subject to their claim on the t.i.thes. It was not until the success of the Franciscans had shown the attractive power of poverty that it was adopted by the Dominicans in the General Chapter of 1220. It was finally embodied in the const.i.tution adopted by the Chapter of 1228, which prohibited that lands or revenues should be acquired, ordered preachers not to solicit money, and cla.s.sed among the graver offences the retention by a brother of any of the things forbidden to be received. The Order speedily outgrew these restrictions, but Dominic himself set an example of the utmost rigidity in this respect, and when he died in Bologna, in 1221, it was in the bed of Friar Moneta, as he had none of his own, and in Moneta's gown, for his own was worn out and he had not another to replace it; and when the Rule was adopted in 1220 such property as was not essential for the needs of the Order was made over to the Convent of Prouille.[224]

All that now was lacking was the papal confirmation of the Order and its statutes. Before Dominic could reach Rome on the errand to obtain this, Innocent had died, but his successor, Honorius III., entered fully into his views, and the sanction of the Holy See was given on December 21, 1216. Returning to Toulouse in 1217, Dominic lost no time in dispersing his followers. It was not for them to practise the strenuous idleness of conventual life, in a ceaseless round of barren liturgies. They were the leaven which was to leaven Christianity, the soldiers of Christ who were to carry the banner of salvation to the farthest corners of the earth, and for them there was no pause or rest. The little band seemed absurdly inadequate for the task, but Dominic never hesitated. Some were sent to Spain, others to Paris, others again to Bologna, while Dominic himself went to Rome, where, under the favor of the papal court, his enthusiasm was rewarded with an abundance of disciples. Those who went to Paris were warmly received, and were granted the house of St. Jacques, where they founded the famous convent of the Jacobins, which endured until the Order was swept away in the Revolution. The state of mental exaltation in which laymen and ecclesiastics of all ranks hastened to join the new Order is shown by the persecutions which the early brethren of St.

Jacques endured from Satan. Frightful or sensual visions were constant with them, so that they were obliged by turns to keep watch at night over each other. Many of them were diabolically possessed and became mad. Their only refuge was the Virgin, and to the gracious a.s.sistance which she rendered them in their trials is attributed the Dominican custom of singing "Salve Regina" after complins, during which pious exercise she was frequently seen hovering over them in a sphere of light. Men in such a frame of mind were ready to suffer and to inflict all things for the sake of salvation.[225]

It is not worth while to follow further in detail the marvellous growth of the Order in all the lands of Europe. Already in 1221, when Dominic as General Master held the second General Chapter in Bologna, four years after the sixteen disciples had parted in Toulouse, the Order already had sixty convents, and was organized into eight provinces--Spain, Provence, France, England, Germany, Hungary, Lombardy, and Romagnuola.

The same year witnessed the death of Dominic, but his work was done and his removal from the scene made no change in the mighty machine which he had built and set in motion. Everywhere the strongest intellects of the age were donning the Dominican scapular, and everywhere they were earning the respect and veneration of the people. Their services to the papacy were fully recognized, and they are speedily found filling important offices in the curia. In 1243 the learned Hugh of Vienne became the first Dominican cardinal, and in 1276 the Dominicans rejoiced to see Brother Peter of Tarentaise raised to the chair of St. Peter as Innocent V. Yet the delay in Dominic's canonization would seem to show that personally he made less impression on his contemporaries than his followers would have us believe. Dying in 1221, the bull enrolling him in the calendar of saints only bears date July 3, 1234. His great colleague, or rival, Francis, who died in 1226, was canonized within two years, in 1228; the young Franciscan, Antony of Padua, who died in 1231, was recognized as a saint in 1233; and when the great Dominican martyr, St. Peter Martyr, was slain, April 12, 1252, proceedings for his canonization were commenced August 31 of the same year and were completed by March 25, 1253, less than a twelvemonth after his death.

That thirteen years should have elapsed in the case of Dominic shows that his merits were recognized but slowly.[226]

If the Franciscans were in the end closely a.s.similated to the Dominicans, it was through the overmastering demands of the work to be accomplished by both, for in their origin the Orders were destined to objects as diverse as the characters of their founders. If St. Dominic was the type of the active practical missionary, St. Francis was the ideal of the contemplative ascetic, modified by boundless love and charity for his fellows.

Born in 1182, Giovanni Bernardone was the son of a prosperous trader of a.s.sisi, who trained him in his business. Accompanying his father on a voyage to France, he came back with the accomplishment of speaking French, which gained for him among his companions the nickname of Francesco, a name which he adopted as his own. A dissipated youth was brought to a sudden close in his twentieth year by a dangerous illness which resulted in his conversion, and thereafter he devoted himself to works of mercy and charity, earning for himself with no little verisimilitude the reputation of insanity. In order to restore the dilapidated church of St. Damiani he stole a quant.i.ty of his father's cloths, which he sold at Foligno, together with the horse that carried them. Finding him irrevocably bent on following his own devices, the exasperated parent took him before the bishop to make him renounce all claim on his inheritance, which Francis willingly did, and to render the renunciation more complete stripped off all his clothes, save a hair s.h.i.+rt worn to mortify the flesh, when the bishop, to cover his nakedness, gave him the worn-out cloak of a peasant serving-man.[227]

Francis was now fairly embarked on a life of wandering beggary, which he used to so good an account that he was able to restore four churches which were sinking to ruin. He had no thought other than to work out his own salvation in poverty and acts of loving charity, especially to lepers; but the fame of his holiness spread, and the Blessed Bernard of Quintavalle asked to be a.s.sociated with him. The solitary ascetic at first was indisposed to companions.h.i.+p, but to learn the will of G.o.d he thrice opened the Gospels at random, and his finger lit on the three texts on which the great Franciscan order was founded:

"And Jesus said unto him, If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me" (Matt. XIX. 21).

"Be not ye therefore like unto them, for your Father knoweth what things ye have need of before ye ask him" (Matt. VI. 8).

"Then said Jesus unto his disciples, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow me" (Matt.

XVI. 24).

The command was obeyed and the recruit accepted. Others joined from time to time, till the little band numbered eight. Then Francis announced that the time had come for them to evangelize the world, and dispersed them in pairs to the four points of the compa.s.s. On their reuniting, four more volunteers were added, when Francis drew up a Rule for their governance, and the twelve proceeded to Rome, according to the Franciscan legend, at the time of the Lateran Council, to procure the papal confirmation. When Francis presented himself to the pope in the aspect of a beggar the pontiff indignantly ordered him away, but tradition relates that a vision that night induced him to send for the mendicant. There was much hesitation among the papal advisers, but the earnestness and eloquence of Francis won the day, and finally the Rule was approved and the brethren were authorized to preach the Word of G.o.d.[228]

Even yet were they undecided whether to abandon themselves to the contemplative life of anchorites or to undertake the great work of evangelization which lay before them in its immensity. They withdrew to Spoleto and counselled earnestly together without being able to reach a conclusion, until a revelation from G.o.d, which we can readily believe as actual to a mind such as that of Francis, turned the scale, and the Franciscan Order, in place of dying out in a few scattered hermitages, became one of the most powerful organizations of Christendom, though the abandoned hovel to which they resorted on their return to a.s.sisi gave little promise of future splendor. The rapidity of the growth of the Order may be measured by the fact that when Francis called together his first General Chapter in 1221, it was attended by brethren variously reported as from three thousand to five thousand, including a cardinal and several bishops; and when, in the General Chapter of 1260, under Bonaventura, the Order was redistributed to accord with its growth, it was part.i.tioned into thirty-three provinces and three vicariates, comprehending in all one hundred and eighty-two guardians.h.i.+ps. This organization can be understood by the example of England, which formed a province divided into seven guardians.h.i.+ps, containing, as we learn from another source, in 1256, forty-nine houses with twelve hundred and forty-two friars. The Order then extended into every corner of what was regarded as the civilized world and its contiguous regions.[229]

The Minorites, as in humility they called themselves, were so different in their inception from any existing organization of the Church that when, in 1219, St. Francis made the first dispersion and sent his disciples to evangelize Europe, those who went to Germany and Hungary were regarded as heretics, and were roughly handled and expelled. In France they were taken for Cathari, to whose wandering perfected missionaries their austerity doubtless gave them close resemblance. They were asked if they were Albigenses, and, not knowing the meaning of the term, knew not what to say, and it was only after the authorities had consulted Honorius III. that they were relieved from suspicion. In Spain five of them endured martyrdom. Innocent had only given a verbal approbation of the Rule; he was dead, and something more formal was requisite to protect the brethren from persecution. Francis accordingly drew up a second Rule, more concise and less rigid than the first, which he submitted to Honorius. The pope approved it, though not without objecting to some of the clauses; but Francis refused to modify them, saying that it was not his but Christ's, and that he could not change the words of Christ. From this his followers a.s.sumed that the Rule had been divinely revealed to him. This belief pa.s.sed into the traditions of the Order, and the Rule has been maintained unaltered in letter, though, as we shall see, its spirit has been more than once explained away by ingenious papal casuists.[230]

It is simple enough, amounting hardly to more than a gloss on the entrance-oath required of each friar, to live according to the gospel, in obedience, chast.i.ty, and without possessing property. The applicant for admission was required to sell all he had and give it to the poor, and if this were impossible the will so to do sufficed. Each one was permitted to have two gowns, but they must be vile in texture, and were to be patched and repaired as long as they could be made to hang together. Shoes were allowed to those who found it impossible to forego them. All were to go on foot, except in case of sickness or necessity.

No one was to receive money, either directly or through a third party, except that the ministers (as the provincial superiors were called) could do so for the care of the sick and for provision of clothing, especially in rigorous climates. Labor was strenuously enjoined on all those able to perform it, but wages were not to be in money, but in necessaries for themselves and their brethren. The clause requiring absolute poverty caused, as we shall see, a schism in the order, and therefore is worth giving textually: "The brethren shall appropriate to themselves nothing, neither house, nor place, nor other thing, but shall live in the world as strangers and pilgrims, and shall go confidently after alms. In this they shall feel no shame, since the Lord for our sake made himself poor in the world. It is this perfection of poverty which has made you, dearest brethren, heirs and kings of the kingdom of heaven. Having this, you should wish to have naught else under heaven."

The head of the Order, or General Minister, was chosen by the Provincial Ministers, who could at any time depose him when the general good required it. Faculties for preaching were to be issued by the General, but no brother was to preach in any diocese without the a.s.sent of the bishop.[231]

This is all; and there is nothing in it to give promise of the immense results achieved under it. What gave it an enduring hold on the affections of the world was the spirit which the founder infused in it and in his brethren. No human creature since Christ has more fully incarnated the ideal of Christianity than Francis. Amid the extravagance, amounting at times almost to insanity, of his asceticism, there s.h.i.+nes forth the Christian love and humility with which he devoted himself to the wretched and neglected--the outcasts for whom, in that rude time, there were few indeed to care. The Church, absorbed in worldliness, had outgrown the duties on which was founded its control over the souls and hearts of men, and there was need of the exaggeration of self-sacrifice taught by Francis to recall humanity to a sense of its obligations. Thus, of all the miseries of that age of misery, the hardest lot was that of the leper--the being afflicted by G.o.d with a loathsome, incurable, and contagious disease, who was cut off from all intercourse with fellow-men, and who, when he wandered abroad for alms from the lazar-house in which he was herded, was obliged, by clattering sticks, to give notice of his approach, that all might shun his pestiferous neighborhood. It was to these, the most helpless and hopeless and abhorred of mankind, that the boundless charity and love of Francis was especially directed. The example which he set in his own person he required to be followed by his brethren; and when n.o.ble or simple applied for admission to the Order he was told that prominent among the obligations which he a.s.sumed was that of humbly serving the lepers in their hospitals. Francis did not hesitate to sleep in the lazar-houses, to handle the dangerous sores of the afflicted, to apply medicaments, and to minister to the sufferings of the body as well as of the soul. For the sake of the leper he relaxed the rule as to receiving alms in money. Yet his humility led him to forbid his disciples from leading in public the "Christian brethren," as he called them. Once, when Friar James had taken with him to church a leper who was shockingly eaten by disease, Francis reproved him; then, reproaching himself for what the sufferer might regard as a slight, he asked Friar Peter of Catania, at that time the minister-general of the Order, to confirm the penance which he had appointed for himself, and when Peter, who looked upon him with too much reverence to deny him anything, had a.s.sented, he announced that he would eat out of the same dish as the sick man. At the next simple meal, therefore, the leper was seated among them, and the brethren were terrified to see a single dish set between the two, and the leper dipping his fingers, dripping with blood and purulent discharge, into the food common to both.[232]

It would perhaps be too much to a.s.sert one's faith in the absolute veracity of such stories, but that makes little difference. If they be but legendary, the very growth of the legend shows the impression which Francis left on those who followed him; and the value of such an ideal on an age so hard and cruel can scarce be exaggerated. We know as a fact that the Franciscans were ever foremost in the cure of the sick, that they tended the hospitals in the midst of pestilence, and that to their intelligent devotion is due whatever progress the science of healing made in the dark ages. We are told, moreover, that the tender love of Francis lavished itself on the brute creation as well as on man--on insects, birds, and beasts, whom he was wont to call his brethren and sisters, and for whom he was never weary in caring. All the stories related of him and his immediate disciples, in fact, are instinct with infinite love and self-sacrifice, with the perfection of humility and patience and long-suffering, with the control of the pa.s.sions, and with endless striving to subdue all that renders human nature imperfect, and to realize the standard which Christ had erected for the guidance of man. Viewed in this aspect, even the semi-blasphemy of the "Book of Conformities of Christ and Francis" loses its grotesqueness. We may, indeed, smile at the absurdity of some of its parallels, and they may seem shocking enough when cleverly presented, stripped of all that softens them, in the "Alcoran des Cordeliers." We may doubt the verity of the Stigmata which it took so long and so many miracles, and repet.i.tion of papal bulls, to impose upon the incredulity of a hard-hearted generation. We may think that Satan showed less than his usual shrewdness when he so repeatedly wasted his energies in seeking to tempt or to terrify the saint in the crude form of a lion or of a dragon. Yet, in spite of all the absurdities of the cult of St. Francis, we recognize the profound impression which his virtues made on his followers in the vision which showed the heavenly throne of Lucifer, next to the Highest, kept vacant to be filled by Francis.[233]

To the pride and cruelty of the age he opposed patience and humility.

"The perfection of gladness," he says, "consists not in working miracles, in curing the sick, expelling devils, or raising the dead; nor in learning and knowledge of all things; nor in eloquence to convert the world, but in bearing all ills and injuries and injustice and despiteful treatment with patience and humility." So far from valuing himself on his virtues, he humbly confesses that he had himself not lived up to the Rule, and apologizes for it through his infirmity and ignorance. To what extravagant lengths his disciples carried this striving for humility is shown by Giacomo Benedettone, better known as Jacopone da Todi, the author of the Stabat Mater, an active and successful lawyer, who, crushed by the death of a lovely wife, entered the Order, and for ten years feigned idiocy in order to revel in the abuse and ill-treatment that were showered upon him.[234]

Obedience was taught and enforced to the utter renunciation of the will, and many are the stories related to show how completely the earlier disciples subjected themselves to each other and to their superiors.

When, in 1224, the Franciscans were first sent to England, Gregory, the Provincial Minister of France, asked Friar William of Esseby if he wished to go. William replied that he did not know whether he wished it or not, because his will was not his own, but the minister's, and therefore he wished whatever the minister wished him to wish. Somewhat similar is a story told of two brethren of Salzburg in 1222. This blindness of obedience produced a discipline in the Order which increased incalculably its importance to the Church when it grew to be an instrument in the hands of the papacy. St. Francis was especially emphatic in urging upon the brethren the most implicit devotion to Rome, and the Franciscans became an army which played in the thirteenth century the part filled by the Jesuits in the sixteenth.[235]

It was no part of Francis's design that the friars should live by idle mendicancy, and we have seen that the Rule expresses the obligation to labor. This was obeyed by the stricter members. Thus his third disciple, the blessed Giles, earned his subsistence by the rudest work, such as that of carrying wood, and he always adhered to the precept not to take wages in money, but in necessaries for his support. When he had earned more than enough for the scanty subsistence of the day, he would give away the surplus in charity, and trust to G.o.d for the morrow. It was well that, in an age of cla.s.s distinctions so rigid, there should be some to teach practically the dignity of labor as a Christian doctrine.

When St. Bonaventura was elevated to the cardinalate, in 1273, he had for seventeen years been the head of what by that time was the most powerful organization in Christendom, yet the messengers sent to announce to him his promotion arrived while he was engaged in his daily task of was.h.i.+ng the dishes used in the frugal dinner of his convent. He refused to see them till his work was finished, and meanwhile the hat which they had brought was hung upon the branch of a tree.[236]

Thus the aim of St. Francis and his followers was to realize the simplicity of Christ and the apostles, and in nothing was this manifested with so much fervor as in their seeking after poverty. They argued that Jesus and his disciples owned nothing, and that the perfect Christian must likewise divest himself of all property. Of food and clothing and shelter he might have the use, as likewise of books requisite for his religious needs, but property of all kinds was absolutely prohibited, and the Christian's trust in G.o.d rendered forethought for the morrow a sin. As a protest against the avarice and worldliness of the Church, this was of exceeding value, but it was pushed to an extravagance which idealized poverty as an intrinsic good, and the greatest of all goods. "Brethren," said St. Francis, "know that poverty is the special path to salvation, the inciter to humility, and the root of perfection.... He who seeks to attain the height of poverty must, in a sense, renounce not only worldly prudence, but the knowledge of letters, so that, divesting himself of these possessions, he may offer himself naked to the arms of the Crucified.... Wherefore, like beggars, build little hovels in which to live, not as in your own, but as strangers and pilgrims in the houses of others." His prayer to Christ for poverty is a curiously earnest rhapsody. She is Lady Poverty, the Queen of virtues, for whose sake Christ descended unto earth, to marry her and beget on her all the children of perfection. She clung to him with inseparable fidelity, and in her arms he died upon the cross. She alone possesses the seal with which to mark the elect who choose the way of perfection. "Grant me, O Jesus, that I may never possess under heaven anything of my own, and sustain the flesh sparely by the use of the things of others!" This exaggerated l.u.s.t of poverty he carried out to the last, and on his death-bed stripped himself naked that he might die possessing absolutely nothing. Poverty thus was the corner-stone on which he founded the Order, and, as we shall see, the effort to maintain this super-human perfection led to a schism and gave to the Inquisition an ample store of victims whose heresy consisted in fidelity to the precepts of their founder.[237]

With all this there was too much kindliness in his nature for gloom, and cheerfulness was a virtue which he constantly inculcated. Sadness he held to be one of the most deadly weapons of Satan, while cheerfulness was the Christian's thankful acknowledgment of the blessings bestowed by G.o.d upon his creatures. This was consequently a distinguis.h.i.+ng characteristic of the Friars in the early days of the Order. In Eccleston's simple and quiet narration of their advent to England, in 1224, when nine of them crossed to Dover without knowing what their fate might be from day to day, there is something singularly beautiful in the picture of their zeal, their trustfulness, their patience, their unfailing cheerfulness under privation and disappointment, and in their tireless activity in ministering to the spiritual and corporeal wants of the neglected children of the Church. Such men were real apostles, and had the Order continued to follow the lines laid down by its founder its services to humanity would have been incalculable.[238]

The Mendicant Orders were a startling innovation upon the monastic theory. In its essence monachism was the selfish effort of the individual to secure his own salvation by repudiating all the duties and responsibilities of life. It is true that at one time it had earned the grat.i.tude of the world by leaving its retreats and carrying civilization and Christianity into barbarous regions, under such men as St. Columba, St. Gall, and St. Willibrod, but that time had long past, and for ages it had sunk into worse than its primitive selfishness. The Mendicants came upon Christendom like a revelation--men who had abandoned all that was enticing in life to imitate the apostles, to convert the sinner and unbeliever, to arouse the slumbering moral sense of mankind, to instruct the ignorant, to offer salvation to all; in short, to do what the Church was paid so enormously in wealth and privileges and power for neglecting. Wandering on foot over the face of Europe, under burning suns or chilling blasts, rejecting alms in money but receiving thankfully whatever coa.r.s.e food might be set before the wayfarer, or enduring hunger in silent resignation, taking no thought for the morrow, but busied eternally in the work of s.n.a.t.c.hing souls from Satan, and lifting men up from the sordid cares of daily life, of ministering to their infirmities and of bringing to their darkened souls a glimpse of heavenly light--such was the aspect in which the earliest Dominicans and Franciscans presented themselves to the eyes of men who had been accustomed to see in the ecclesiastic only the sensual worldling intent solely upon the indulgence of his appet.i.tes. It is no wonder that such an apparition accomplished much in restoring to the populations the faith in Christianity which had begun to be so sorely shaken, or that it spread through Christendom the hope of an approaching regeneration in the Church which greatly lessened popular impatience under its exactions, and doubtless staved off a rebellion which would have altered the aspect of modern civilization.

It is no wonder, moreover, that the love and veneration of the people followed the Mendicants; that the charitable showered their gifts upon them, to the destruction of the primal obligation of poverty; that the men of earnest convictions pressed forward to join their ranks. The purest and n.o.blest intellects might well see in such a career the realization of their loftiest aspirations; and whenever in the thirteenth century we find a man towering above his fellows, we are almost sure to trace him to one of the Mendicant Orders. Raymond of Pennaforte, Alexander Hales, Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventura, Roger Bacon, Duns Scotus, are names which show how irresistibly the men of highest gifts were led to seek among the Dominicans or Franciscans their ideal of life. That they failed to find it goes without saying, but their presence in the Orders is at once an evidence of the impression which the Mendicants made upon all that was worthiest in the age, and an explanation of the enormous influence which the Orders obtained with such marvellous rapidity. Even Dante cannot refuse to them the tribute of his admiration--

"L'un fu tutto serafico in ardore, L'altro per sapienza in terra fue Di cherubica luce uno splendore."

(PARADISO, XI.)

There was another instrumentality of vast importance, in utilizing which both Francis and Dominic manifested their organizing ability--the Tertiary Orders through which laymen, without abandoning the world, were a.s.similated to the respective brotherhoods, aided in their labors, shared in their glory, and added to their influence, thus stimulating and utilizing the zeal of the community at large. There is a trace of an order of Crucigeri or Cross-bearers, laymen organized for the defence of the Church, claiming to date back to the time of Helena, mother of Constantine, and revived in 1215 by the Lateran Council, but there is no evidence of its activity or usefulness. Francis, however, who, though unlearned in scholastic theology and untrained in rhetoric, excelled his contemporaries in insight into the gospel and possessed a simple, earnest eloquence which carried the hearts of his hearers, on one occasion produced by his preaching so profound an impression that all the inhabitants of the town, men, women, and children, begged admission to his Order. This was manifestly impossible, and he bethought him of framing a Rule by which persons of both s.e.xes, while remaining in the world, could be subjected to wholesome discipline and be connected with the fraternity, which in turn promised them its protection. Of the restrictions placed on them perhaps the most significant was that they should carry no weapons of offence except for the defence of the Roman Church, the Christian faith, and their own lands. The project and the Rule were approved by the pope in 1221, and the official name of the organization was "The Brothers and Sisters of Penitence," though it became popularly known as the Tertiary Order of Minorites, or Franciscans. Under the more aggressive name of "Militia Jesu Christi,"

or Soldiery of Christ, Dominic founded a similar a.s.sociation of laymen connected with his Order. The idea proved a most fruitful one. It reorganized to some degree the Church by removing a portion of the barrier which separated the layman from the ecclesiastic. It brought immense support to the Mendicant Orders by enlisting with them mult.i.tudes of the earnest and zealous, as well as those who from less worthy motives sought to share their protection and enjoy the benefit of their influence. Types of both cla.s.ses may be found in the royal house of France, for both St. Louis and Catherine de Medicis were Tertiaries of St. Francis.[239]

To comprehend fully the magnitude and influence of these movements we must bear in mind the impressionable character of the populations and their readiness to yield to contagious emotion. When we are told that the Franciscan Berthold of Ratisbon frequently preached to crowds of sixty thousand souls we realize what power was lodged in the hands of those who could reach ma.s.ses so easily swayed and so full of blind yearnings to escape from the ign.o.ble life to which they were condemned.

How the slumbering souls were awakened is shown by the successive waves of excitement which swept over one portion of Europe after another about the middle of the century. The dumb, untutored minds began to ask whether an existence of hopeless and brutal misery was all that was to be realized from the promises of the gospel. The Church had made no real effort at internal reform; it was still grasping, covetous, licentious, and a strange desire for something--they knew not exactly what--began to take possession of men's hearts and spread like an epidemic from village to village and from land to land. In Germany and France there is another Crusade of the Children, earning from Gregory IX. the declaration that they gave a fitting rebuke to their elders, who were basely abandoning the birth-place of humanity.[240]

But the most formidable and significant manifestation of this universal restlessness and gregarious enthusiasm is seen in the uprising of the peasantry--the first of the wandering bands known as Pastoureaux. The helpless and hopeless state of the lower cla.s.ses of society in those dreary ages has probably never been exceeded in any period of the world's history. The terrible maxim of the feudal law, that the villein's only appeal from his lord was to G.o.d--"Mes par notre usage n'a-il entre toi et ton vilein juge fors Deu"--condenses in a word the abject defencelessness of the major part of the population, and human degradation has never, perhaps, been more forcibly expressed than in the infamous _jus primae noctis_ or "droit de marquette." The bitter humor of the trouvere Rutebuf describes how Satan considered the soul of the villein too despicable to be received in h.e.l.l; there was no place for it in heaven, so that, after a life of misery on earth, it had no refuge in the hereafter. It is noteworthy in many ways that the Church, which should have been the mediator between the villein and his lord, and which, in teaching the common brotherhood of man, should have earned the grat.i.tude of the miserable serf, was always the special object of aversion and attack in the brief saturnalia of the self-enfranchised wretches.[241]

Suddenly, about Easter, 1251, there appeared a mysterious preacher, known as the Hungarian, advanced in years, and clothed with the attributes which most excite popular awe and veneration. In his clenched hand, which never was opened, he carried a paper given to him by the Virgin Mary herself, which was his mandate and commission. Yet men said that he had from his youth been an apostate from Christ to Mahomet, that he had drunk deeply of the poisonous wells of magic flowing at Toledo, and that he had received from Satan the mission of carrying the unarmed populations of Europe to the East, so that the Soldan of Babylon should find Christendom an easy prey. Remembering the Crusade of the Children, people leaped to the conclusion that it was he who had devastated so many houses with his magic arts, leading forth the tender youth to perish of starvation and exposure. Tall and pale, gifted with eloquence to win the hearts of the mult.i.tude, speaking like a native in French and German and Latin, he set forth, preaching from town to town the supineness of the rich and powerful who allowed the Holy Land to remain in the grasp of the Infidel and the good King Louis to languish in his Egyptian dungeon. G.o.d had tired of the selfishness and ambition of the n.o.bles, and he called the poor and humble, without arms and captains, to rescue the Holy Places and the Good King. All this found ready response, but even greater applause followed his attacks upon the clergy. The Mendicant Orders were vagrants and hypocrites; the Cistercians were greedy of money and lands; the Benedictines proud and gluttonous; the canons wholly given to secular aims and the l.u.s.ts of the flesh; the bishops and their officials were money-seekers, who shrank from no trickery to accomplish their aims. As for Rome, no terms of objurgation were too strong for the papal court. The people, whose hate and contempt for the clergy were unbounded, listened to this rhetoric with delight, and eagerly joined a movement which promised a reform in some unseen way. Shepherds left their sheep, husbandmen their ploughs, deaf to the commands of their lords, and followed him unarmed, taking no thought of the morrow, nor asking how they were to be fed.

There were not lacking those high in station who, carried away with the general enthusiasm, imagined that G.o.d was about to work miracles with the poor and helpless after the great ones of the earth had failed. Even Queen Blanche, eager for any means that promised to liberate her son, looked upon the movement for a while with favor, and lent it her countenance. It swelled and grew till the wandering mult.i.tudes amounted to more than a hundred thousand men, bearing fifty banners as an emblem of victory. It was impossible, of course, to confine such an uprising to the peaceful and humble. No sooner did it a.s.sume proportions promising immunity than it inevitably drew to itself all the disorderly elements inseparable from the society of the time--the "ruptarii" and "ribaldi,"

whom we have seen figure so largely in the Albigensian troubles. These flocked to it from all sides, bringing knife and dagger, sword and axe, and giving to the immense procession a still more menacing aspect. That outrages were committed we can well believe, for the wrongs of cla.s.s against cla.s.s were too flagrant to remain unavenged when opportunity offered for reprisals.

On June 11, 1251, they entered Orleans, against the commands of the bishop, but welcomed by the people, though the richer citizens prudently locked their doors. All might have pa.s.sed peaceably there as elsewhere but for a hot-headed student of the flouris.h.i.+ng university of the city, who interrupted the preaching of the Hungarian to denounce him as a liar, and was promptly brained by a zealous follower. A tumult followed, in which the Pastoureaux made short work of the Orleans clergy, breaking into their houses, burning their books, and slaying many, or tossing them into the Loire; and, what is most significant, the people are described as looking on approvingly. The bishop, and all who could hide themselves from the fury of the mob, escaped during the night, and valiantly laid the city under interdict for the guilty complicity of the citizens.

On hearing this the Regent Blanche said, "G.o.d knows I thought they would recover the Holy Land in simplicity and holiness. But since they are deceivers, let them be excommunicated and destroyed." Accordingly they were excommunicated, but before the anathema could be published they had reached Bourges, where, in a tumult, the Hungarian was slain, and they broke up into bands. The authorities, recovering from their stupor, pursued the luckless wretches everywhere, who were slain like mad dogs.

Some emissaries who penetrated to England, and succeeded in raising a revolt of some five hundred peasants, met the same fate; and it was reported that the second in command under the Hungarian was captured in a vessel on the Garonne, while endeavoring to escape, and on his person were found magic powders and strange letters in Arabic and Chaldee characters from the Soldan of Babylon promising his co-operation.

The quasi-religious nature of the uprising is shown in the functions exercised by the leaders, who acted the part of bishops, blessing the people, sprinkling holy water, and even celebrating marriages. The favor which the people everywhere showed them was attributed princ.i.p.ally to their spoiling, beating, and slaying the clergy, thus indicating the deep-seated popular antagonism to the Church, and justifying the declaration made by prelates high in station that so great a danger had never threatened Christendom since the time of Mahomet.[242]

Even more remarkable, as a manifestation of popular emotion, was the first apparition of the Flagellants. Suddenly, in 1259, in Perugia, no one knew why, the population was seized with a fury of devotional penitence, without incitement by friar or priest. The contagion spread, and soon the whole of upper Italy was filled with tens of thousands of penitents. n.o.bles and peasants, old and young, even to children five years of age, walked solemnly in procession, two by two, naked except a loin-cloth, weeping and praying G.o.d for mercy, and scourging themselves with leather thongs to the drawing of blood. The women decently inflicted the penance on themselves in their chambers, but the men marched through the cities by day and night, in the sharpest winter, preceded by priests with crosses and banners, to the churches, where they prostrated themselves before the altars. A contemporary tells us that the fields and mountains echoed with the voices of the sinners calling to G.o.d, while music and love-songs were heard no more. A general fever of repentance and amendment seized the people. Usurers and robbers restored their ill-gotten gain; criminals confessed their sins and renounced their vices; the prison doors were thrown open, and the captives walked forth; homicides offered themselves on their knees, with drawn swords, to the kindred of their victims, and were embraced with tears; old enmities were forgiven, and exiles were permitted to return to their homes. Everywhere was seen the operation of divine grace, and men seemed to be consumed with heavenly fire. The movement even spread to the Rhinelands and throughout Germany and Bohemia; but whatever hopes were aroused of the regeneration of man vanished with the subsidence of the excitement, which disappeared as rapidly as it came, and was even denounced as a heresy. Uberto Pallavicino took effectual means of keeping the Flagellants out of his city of Milan; for when he heard of their approach he erected three hundred gibbets by the roadside, at sight of which they abruptly retraced their steps.[243]

It was in a population subject to such tempests of emotion, and groping thus blindly for something higher and better than the hopeless degradation around them, that the Mendicant Orders came to gather to themselves the potential religious exaltation of the time. That they should develop with unexampled rapidity was inevitable.

Everything favored them. The papal court early recognized in them an instrument more efficient than had yet been devised to bring the power of the Holy See to bear directly upon the Church and the people in every corner of Christendom; to break down the independence of the local prelates; to combat the temporal enemies of the papacy, and to lead the people into direct relations with the successor of St. Peter. Privileges and exemptions of all kinds were showered upon them, until, by a series of bulls issued, between 1240 and 1244, by Gregory IX. and Innocent IV., they were rendered completely independent of the regular ecclesiastical organization. A time-honored rule of the Church required that any excommunication or anathema could only be removed by him who had p.r.o.nounced it, but this was revolutionized in their favor. Not only were the bishops required to give absolution to any Dominican or Franciscan who should apply for it, except in cases of such enormity that the Holy See alone could act, but the Mendicant priors and ministers were authorized to absolve their friars from any censures inflicted on them.

These extraordinary measures removed them entirely from the regular jurisdiction of the establishment; the members of each Order became responsible only to their own superiors, and in their all-pervading activity throughout Europe they could secretly undermine the power and influence of the local hierarchy, and replace it with that of Rome, which they so directly represented. This independent position, however, had only been reached by degrees. Papal briefs of 1229 and 1234, enjoining them to show proper respect and obedience to the bishops, and empowering the bishops to condemn any friars who abuse their privileges of preaching for purposes of gain, show that complaints of their aggressions had commenced thus early, and that Rome was not yet prepared to render them independent of the hierarchy; but when the policy had once been adopted it was carried to its fullest development, and the cycle of legislation was completed by Boniface VIII., in 1295 and 1296, by a series of bulls in which, following his predecessors, the Mendicants were formally released from all episcopal jurisdiction, and the statutes of the Orders were declared to be the only laws by which they were to be judged, all provisions of the canon law to the contrary notwithstanding. At the same time, by a new issue of the bull _Virtute conspicuos_, commonly known as the _Mare Magnum_, he codified and confirmed all the privileges conferred by his predecessors.[244]

The Holy See was thus provided with a militia, recruited and sustained at the expense of the faithful, panoplied in invulnerability, and devoted to its exclusive service. In order that its usefulness might suffer no limitation, in 1241 Gregory IX. granted to the friars the privilege of freely living in the lands of excommunicates, and of asking and receiving a.s.sistance and food from them. They could, therefore, penetrate everywhere, and serve as secret emissaries in the dominions of those hostile to Rome. Human ingenuity could have devised no more efficient army, for, not only were they full of zeal and inspired with profound convictions, but the reputation for superior sanct.i.ty which they everywhere acquired secured for them popular sympathy and support, and gave them an enormous advantage in any contest with local churches.[245]