in what their heresy consisted. It was not because of Joachite tendencies—these might or might not exist, they were not a criterion—it was because of disobedience pure and simple. To disobey the constitution Quorundam, to dispute its ruling as to the wearing of a habit and the question of ownership of property—that was heresy. It is true that the motive which induced the recalcitrant to refuse obedience to the bull was a repudiation of papal authority to lay down such a regulation regarding the Franciscan Rule, and that such repudiation was connected with Joachite views as to the degeneracy of the Church and the unique reforming rôle of the Franciscan order. None the less the fact remained that in running directly counter to the ruling of the bull Exiit qui seminat and the decisions of the Council of Vienne John XXII had actually created a new heresy, had asserted that what had seemed most Christian and laudable to Nicholas III and Clement V was an error in the faith. The persecution had the result of actually encouraging Joachitism. ‘As well to be hanged for a sheep as a lamb’ is a proverb of very general validity. If it was heresy to disobey a papal bull—granted that that had to be disobeyed—why not go to the full length of rejecting the papacy and declaring it superseded by the era of St. Francis and the Holy Ghost? The papal pronouncement made the fanatical Spirituals more and more convinced that the Roman Church was indeed ‘the whore of Babylon,’ the Pope veritable Antichrist. And certainly we may regard the extremists latterly, under the goad of persecution, as having developed into a sect, definitely believing itself to be the true Church—that of St. Francis and the Holy Ghost. But such fanatical Spirituals were exceedingly small in numbers, their influence very restricted, and their extinction was brought about without very much difficulty.
But it was not only the extremists that were made victims. On November 12, 1323, John XXII, to whom the Spirituals’ conception of the place of poverty in the Christian Church was definitely anathema, so irreconcilable was it with his papal policy, issued the bull, Cum inter nonnullos, in which it was authoritatively denied that Christ and His Apostles possessed no property. To assert that they held none was error and heresy.52 This question of dogma became involved with secular politics, when Lewis of Bavaria, being claimant to the imperial crown and at enmity with Pope John, found it convenient to adopt the cause of the Franciscans and to denounce the Pope himself as a heretic for not believing in the absolute poverty of Christ, as he did in a formal indictment of John known as the Protest of Sachsenhausen. A controversy between Empire and Papacy was thus started which is of great interest because it evoked the ‘Defensor Pacis’ of Marsiglio of Padua and the numerous polemical works of William of Ockham on the imperial side. This controversy is of much greater interest and significance than the story of the persecutions of the Fratres de paupere vita, or Fraticelli, which continued as the result of John XXII’s action, more especially in Italy, into the later decades of the fourteenth century. The significance of the persecutions lies in the virtual creation of a heresy by a papal bull. That it should be possible for any individual wearer of the papal tiara to declare heretical what his predecessors had held to be praiseworthy and to stigmatize as heretics his opponents in secular politics revealed a great danger. To hold fast to an immutable faith is easy, but what if the immutable faith does as a matter of fact change! The bull Cum inter nonnullos made it possible that a man might be condemned as a heretic because he held a certain view as to Christ’s poverty, although perfectly able and willing to subscribe to every article in the Christian creed as defined in the great councils of the early Church. Catharism may have been a real peril to the Church; but to maintain that men who had no other wish but to preserve the strict Rule of St. Francis in the order constituted such a peril is impossible. And men might well be bewildered by the fact that whereas the revolutionary teachings of Joachitism were not at first proscribed, the wearing of a particular type of hood became heretical not many years later.
The importance of ‘The Everlasting Gospel’ lies principally in its influence on the Franciscan order, but it had several other developments which are of distinct interest as remarkable illustrations of the strange fanaticisms and superstitious credulities possible in the thirteenth century. The Joachite idea of a new era and new religion led to the astonishing discovery of incarnations of the divine. One was found in a certain woman, a native of Milan, called Guglielma, who seemed to have been in no way remarkable save for her piety.53 Yet the little band of followers who gathered round her came to venerate her as a saint and a miracle worker. The biographies of mediæval worthies are full of tales of the miraculous, and there was nothing strange in this. But the extraordinary absurdity followed of finding her to be the Holy Ghost in female form. The woman herself never countenanced such fantastic ideas and expressly repudiated any supernatural powers. But after her death a small circle of fanatic devotees established her worship in Milan with a certain Maifreda at their head, performing high sacerdotal functions and destined in the eyes of her associates to succeed to the papal throne when the corrupt Roman Church should have passed away.
The Guglielmites were a very insignificant sect, easily extinguished. Potentially more dangerous were the followers of one Gherardo Segarelli, a very ignorant and very demented enthusiast of Parma, who, being rejected on his seeking admission into the Franciscan order, determined to outdo St. Francis in the exact reproduction of the life of Christ.54 His method of accomplishing this purpose was to have himself circumcised, wrapped in swaddling clothes and suckled by a woman—after which preliminaries he stalked into the streets of his native town, a wild, uncouth figure, calling all men to repentance. In time the madman succeeded in attracting devotees from among herdsmen as ignorant and almost as foolish as himself. The movement began to be formidable when it spread beyond Parma, even beyond Italy, being found in 1287 in Germany; and it appeared that Segarelli aimed at proselytizing the world. The papacy was roused, the Inquisition put into action, Segarelli himself in 1300 burnt in Parma, his disciples, known as Apostolic Brethren, energetically persecuted.
They were not, however, entirely eradicated. Some remained—men of more intellect than the lunatic heresiarch and his half-witted herdsmen—and among them a certain Fra Dolcino, who saw in the appearance of Segarelli in the all-fateful year 1260 a fulfilment of the prophecies in ‘The Everlasting Gospel.’55 He chose to regard himself as a heaven-appointed messenger of the new dispensation. As fanatical as Segarelli himself, he was more dangerous because apparently gifted with the capacity of leadership and of inspiring even enthusiastic loyalty. Beginning in Milan, Bergamo, Brescia, Vercelli, he had by 1304 created a distinct religious community among the Italian Alps. It appears that in order to maintain their supplies of provisions they were wont to resort to robbery, and must have become a public nuisance. But they were also dangerous heretics; it is a remarkable tribute to the mark made by Dolcino’s personality that Dante makes Mohammed send a warning message to Dolcino, as to a kindred false prophet, lest he fall into the same ill-case as himself.56 In June, 1305, Clement V resolved upon drastic measures to wipe out this ‘son of Belial who had been polluting Lombardy.’57 A crusade was organized against the Dolcinists in their mountain fastnesses, and after a desperate defence against no fewer than four different expeditions, in which there was much bloodshed and ferocity and in which the heretics were so reduced as to have recourse to cannibalism, they were forced to surrender.58 The punishment of Dolcino—for the nature of which, it should be remembered, the state and in no way the Inquisition was responsible—was terrible in the extreme. He was gradually torn to pieces by red-hot pincers—an appalling torment which he bore with an almost incredible fortitude.
Indirectly connected with the ascetic and mendicant enthusiasm of the Spiritual Franciscans were certain heretical movements in Germany—those of the Beghards or Beguines. The names are used somewhat indiscriminately to denote Fraticelli, who were simply wandering Spirituals asserting the supreme virtues of poverty, and other sectaries, much more extravagant, whose only likeness to the Spirituals lay in their mendicancy. The indiscriminacy of nomenclature undoubtedly denotes a very comprehensible failure at times to distinguish between vagrants outwardly alike and all of them at least under the suspicion of heretical tendencies.59 Among the extravagants to whom this title was given were followers of two teachers of a crude mysticism and pantheism—one Amaury de Bène,60 whose doctrine had a very marked antinomian tinge, for he maintained that no one filled with the Holy Ghost and the spirit of love could commit sin; the other, Ortlieb of Strassburg, whose pantheism caused him to include Satan in the divine essence, so that his followers, generally