R. I. Moore has developed an influential argument that, over the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, persecution of certain groups - heretics, Jews, lepers and others - became habitual and institutionalised in medieval society.681 This was not because of any objective changes within those persecuted groups themselves; they were no more of a 'threat' to Christianity than they had ever been. The 'formation of a persecuting society', as Moore put it, had two interlinked causes. One was the development of nascent state bureaucracies, capable of institutionalising repression. The other was the rise of the litterati, a selfconscious class of educated churchmen and administrators (who largely ran the bureaucracies) who rhetorically demonised as a collective group those they deemed 'outsiders', as a means of bolstering their own elite legitimacy.
Moore's theory of the rise of the litterati may not tell the whole tale: one notes that whilst Conrad of Marburg's power is partially ascribed by the Worms chronicler to his literacy, Conrad Dors was described as 'totally illiterate'. However, the words used in that description - laicus totalis - point to the way in which clerical conceptions of the laity and their intellectual abilities informed cultural and religious change. Eleventh - and early twelfth-century sources depicting outbreaks of heresy tend to represent the laity as a rather simple, undifferentiated group: either credulous sheep easily seduced by the gilded tongue of the heresiarch, or devout believers wreaking righteous violence against the heretical sect. If such latter accounts sometimes depict a degree of reality, lay hostility towards heresy sprang not from innate antipathy to religious heterogeneity, but from attitudes taught by the church in precisely this period - and taught, most particularly, to secular authorities. The church's first weapons against heresy, and indeed against other groups, were words. In twelfth-century Languedoc, when the Cathar heresy held sway, the initial reaction was to send powerful orthodox preachers to the area, Bernard of Clairvaux (1091-1153) being the most famous of their number. In sermon collections, and in polemical texts that informed preachers, twelfth-century theologians propounded a theory of ecclesiastical dominion that encompassed not only Christianity itself, but also claimed a kind of governance over Judaism, and declared Islam to be a form of Christian heresy. Such ideas entered canon law in the thirteenth century, particularly under Innocent IV (1243-54).682 Abstract argument was moreover supplemented with rhetoric. A variety of tropes depicting heretics became common: heretics were mad and deluded, and their heresy spread like a cancer or disease; heresy was a poison, insidious in its workings; behind a veil of false piety, the worst sexual and spiritual transgressions were committed.683 For example, heretics were accused of holding secret orgies at which children were murdered and the devil kissed on the anus - a charge made in whole or part at various times and places across the Middle Ages, including in one chronicler's report of those persecuted by Conrad of Marburg.684
These fantasies of evil formed a necessary preparation for the violence that followed. Rhetorics of demonisation worked to make people fear those they deemed outsiders, and hence to place them beyond the bonds of community. The hostile imagery bleeds over from one group to another: there is an obvious similarity between stories of heretical orgies and child-slaying, and the fantasies (also born in the twelfth century) of Jewish ritual murder of children; and in the fifteenth century, witchcraft too began in some areas to be associated with child murder. Heresy was a poison; Jews and lepers were feared as poisoners (particularly in 1321, when a well-poisoning plot was 'discovered' in France, the lepers supposedly paid by the Jews to administer the poison). Fear of sexual pollution - between Jews and Christians, between lepers and the healthy, between prostitutes and their clients, between sodomites and other men - was a recurrent theme. Heresy, Judaism, witchcraft, sodomy; at certain points the supposed threat was conflated, particularly in the fifteenth century, perhaps most ludicrously when certain commentators alleged that Host-desecrating Jews were joining forces with Hussite heretics. At some level, the rhetoric suggested, these transgressors were linked, conjoined in one satanic plot to attack Christendom.
The church did not dispense only rhetoric, however, but also law. One can track the institutionalisation of repression via certain legislative milestones. Responses to heresy in the eleventh century were essentially localised and specific, in both conception and practice. One bishop might write to another, asking what to do about a particular group of heretics troubling his diocese, but there was little sense of a 'church policy'; indeed, it was precisely the lack of one that prompted the search for advice. Actions thus varied from withdrawing communion but tolerating for a while the presence of heresy (advice given by Bishop Wazo of Liege around 1048), to debating with the dissenters (as at Arras in 1025), to summary execution, apparently at the hands of the laity (Monforte, around 1028). Things changed, however, in the later twelfth century. At the Third Lateran Council (1179) various named heretical groups were anathematised, using measures designed to enlist the aid of local secular powers against them. The papal buUs Ad abolendam (1184) and Vergentis in senium (1199) established, respectively, that the laity had to co-operate with the church in pursuing heretics, and that heresy was in itself a kind of treason, and hence a threat to secular as well as ecclesiastical authority. Later glosses on Ad abolendam took Jesus' words to John as instruction on what 'condign punishment' should be meted out to heretics: 'If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned' (John 15.6). The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 framed its opening definition of Christian faith with a lengthy condemnation of heresy and introduced measures symbolically separating Jewish people from the Christian communities within which they lived. Lateran IV's measures regarding heretics, Jews and the formal requirements for orthodox Christian practice (such as annual attendance at confession) were expounded and expanded in diocesan councils across Europe over the following decades and into the fourteenth century.
Measures specifically regarding religious dissent developed in the midthirteenth century, most notably inquisition. Inquisition against heresy first appeared in the early 1230s, making use of a new legal procedure (inquisitio) developed during the first years of Innocent III's papacy and formalised at the Fourth Lateran Council. The first inquisitions were, like Conrad of Marburg's efforts, ill-disciplined and unfocussed. But more refinements soon appeared. The influential canon lawyer Raymond de Penafort (d. 1275) provided detailed definitions of heretical transgression at the council of Tarragona in 1242, the councils of Narbonne (1243) and Beziers (1246) added further instructions, the first proper inquisition manual was written around 1248, and in 1252 the bull Ad extirpanda gave papal blessing to the use of torture. In the early 1320s the famous Dominican inquisitor Bernard Gui compiled his Practica inquisitionis, which, along with the later manual by Nicholas Eymerich, formed the template for inquisitorial activities for several centuries to come. Papal inquisitors initially directed their efforts against Cathar and Waldensian heretics, principally in southern France, parts of Germany, and northern Italy. But over the following centuries, the gaze of the inquisitorial eye wandered over a wider field, suppressing the Spiritual Franciscans, harassing the beguines (lay people, particularly women, who spontaneously adopted a quasi-monastic lifestyle), famously eradicating the Templars, arguably inventing and then persecuting the so-called 'Free Spirits' in fourteenth-century Germany, and by the fifteenth century directing some of its attention to witchcraft, whilst continuing to pursue the surviving Waldensians in Germany and Piedmont. The occasional Jew, sodomite and mystic was also caught up and interrogated.
At the very end of the fifteenth century, the separate, state-sponsored Spanish Inquisition began its work against the suspect Jewish and Islamic converses of the Iberian peninsula.
This crescendo of dates and practices may mislead a little, through depicting a programmatic ascent of repression. The developments were not planned that way: there was no long-term scheme to produce a persecuting society, the papacy only intermittently took the lead in directing what took place in its name, and the church remained a heterogeneous entity throughout those centuries, sometimes embracing in one area that which it prosecuted in another. Although torture was allowed (as in secular law), its use was fairly limited before the fifteenth century, not least because canonists were well aware that it could produce false confessions. There was no central institution of repression: 'The Inquisition', as a permanent papal office, was established only in the sixteenth century. Medieval inquisitors did however collaborate in their task, collate the extensive trial records that they kept, and write manuals outlining the job that they shared. Many, but not all, were drawn from the Dominican order, though inquisition into heresy was only one of their monastic tasks (Bernard Gui, for example, spent much of his time writing histories of his order). At the same time, however, other mechanisms of persecution existed beyond papal inquisition: bishops could and did use inquisitio against heretics in their dioceses for example, and moreover there were episcopal and archdeaconal parochial visitations that sometimes prosecuted various 'abuses' against the faith, from sexual transgression to the use of magic. Moreover, the particular instances of repression could have wider reverberations beyond the punishment of the few. Once again we may wonder whether we are looking at something clearly black-and-white, or cast in various shades of grey. It is legitimate to ask, how repressive was the medieval church? But the question might be put slightly differently: what kind of power did the church exercise over the currents of faith?
World History
