Late Middle Ages

The major heresies of medieval Europe

The English Lollards and the Bohemian Hussites are treated in the companion articles John Wycliffe and the Lollard movement and Jan Hus and the Hussite Wars. This article surveys the other principal heretical currents of the long twelfth to fifteenth century: the Cathars of the Languedoc, whose challenge to the body of Christ and to the institution of the marriage bond is the most theologically radical of the medieval heresies; the Waldensians of the Alpine valleys of Piedmont, the oldest surviving pre-Reformation church in Europe; the Beguines and Beghards of the Low Countries and the Rhineland, whose lay devotional communities were suppressed at the Council of Vienne in 1311–12; and the Spiritual Franciscans of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century, the radical wing of the Order of Friars Minor whose dispute with the papacy on the meaning of evangelical poverty shaped the politics of the Avignon papacy. A closing section considers the Brethren and Sisters of the Free Spirit, the mystical antinomian current that the late medieval Inquisition combatted from Cologne to Carcassonne.

The Cathars and the Albigensian Crusade

The Cathars (the name is of uncertain etymology; the word cathar appears in the Latin sources from the 1160s and may be derived from the Greek katharoi, the pure) were a body of Christian dualists who appeared in the Rhineland and in the Languedoc in the second half of the twelfth century, in circumstances that are still debated. The older scholarship — Charles Schmidt, Histoire et doctrine de la secte des Cathares, 1849; Arno Borst, Die Katharer, 1953 — held that Catharism was an offshoot of the Balkan Bogomilism of the tenth and eleventh century; the more recent work, in the wake of R. I. Moore (The Birth of Popular Heresy, 1976, and The Origins of European Dissent, 1977) and of the documents published by the Sources Chrétiennes school in Lyon, has stressed the local, Western, twelfth-century origins of the movement and has been more cautious about Bogomil parentage. The Cathars held that the visible world is the work of an evil creator — Rex Mundi, the princeps huius mundi of the Vetus Testamentum — and that the good God, the father of Jesus, has no part in it. The body, the sacraments, the Old Testament, the sacrament of marriage, the procreation of children — all were the work of the evil creator, and the only good life was the life of the perfecti, the bons homines who had received the consolamentum, the spiritual baptism that bound them to chastity, fasting, vegetarianism, and the refusal of oaths.

The geography of Catharism was Languedoc: the cities of Toulouse, Albi (the diocese from which the Albigensian name comes), Béziers, Carcassonne, Foix, and the comital lands of the Trencavel viscounts of Béziers and the counts of Toulouse. The social profile of the credentes, the ordinary Cathar laity, was mixed: merchants and artisans of the cities, who gave money but not the consolamentum; nobles of the count’s household, the cathare de la maiso; the fils ainzat, the eldest son, who was often given to the perfect life; and a great many women, especially among the noble families. The bons homines were itinerant; the femmes parfaites lived in domus, the Cathar houses, of which the best-documented is Fontcouverte near Fanjeaux, founded c. 1206 and lasting until the Crusade.

The church’s response was two-pronged. The preachers of the new mendicant orders, especially the Dominicans founded in 1216 by the Castilian canon Dominic of Caleruega (1170–1221) and the Cistercians sent as legates by Innocent III (led by the abbot Arnaud Amaury of Cîteaux), tried the patient method of mission; the success of the Dominican mission of 1206–9 in converting the knight William Raymond of Montauban and the cathare de la maiso of the Trencavel household is recorded in the Vita of Dominic by Jordan of Saxony. The Cistercian legation, with the papal legate Peter of Castelnau, failed. Innocent III, in 1208, authorised a crusade, the Albigensian Crusade of 1209–29, in which a northern French baronial army under Simon de Montfort (c. 1160–1218) devastated the region. The sack of Béziers of 22 July 1209, in which the cathédrale Saint-Nazaire and the population of the city — Catholic and Cathar alike, the famous line of the legate Arnaud Amaury, “Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius”, “Slay them, the Lord knows who are his own,” is the chronicle’s, not Amaury’s — was carried out with a thoroughness that shocked even contemporary clergy. The Treaty of Meaux-Paris of 1229 brought the counts of Toulouse to terms. The Inquisition, the Inquisitio haereticae pravitatis established in Languedoc in 1233 by Gregory IX and staffed by the Dominican order, completed the destruction. The last bons homes, William Bélibaste, was taken and burned at Villerouge-Termenès in 1321. The standard account is now the Histoire des Cathares of Michel Roquebert (5 vols, 2002–2014); the documentary record is in the Sources Chrétiennes editions of the Cathar councils and in the records of the Inquisitor Bernard of Caux, edited by Jean Duvernoy.

The Waldensians

The Waldensians (also Vaudois, in the local patois of the Piedmont valleys; in the early Latin sources, Valdesii or Pauuperes de Lugduno, the poor of Lyon) were a movement of lay preachers founded in the late 1170s by a wealthy Lyon merchant named Peter Waldo (Petrus Waldus, Petrus Vaux de Passeribus in the older sources; d. c. 1205). The earliest account is the contemporary Anonymus of Lyon, edited by A. Dondaine in the Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum (1946), which records that Waldo, struck by the death of a friend, made a profession of poverty and began to preach in the streets of Lyon in the vernacular. The archbishop of Lyon, Guichard of Pontigny, condemned him c. 1177; the matter was brought to the Third Lateran Council of 1179, which forbade the Waldensians to preach without licence, and to the Council of Verona of 1184, which excommunicated them. The Waldensians split in the late twelfth century. The “poor Lombards” (pauperes Lombardi) and the “poor of Lyons” (pauperes Lugdunenses) followed separate lines; the Lombard line survived in the Alpine valleys, the Lyon line in the cities.

The theology of the Waldensians was simple and biblical, in the manner of the new vernacular preaching of the period. Waldo and his followers translated the gospels and the epistles of Paul into the Provençal (the Rhetorica, a sermon book based on a translation of the Libri Sententiarum of Peter Lombard, is the earliest surviving Waldensian book; the Novel Sermon and the Evanheli de li quatre semencz are twelfth-century). They rejected the wealth and the political power of the clergy. They held that the laity had the right to preach, and they went in pairs of barba and companho (an old man and a young man) to the country villages. They did not develop a sectarian alternative to the Roman church until the later middle ages, when the persecution in the Alpine valleys and the contact with the Bohemian Hussites produced a distinct Waldensian church with its own ministers, its own discipline (the consolamentum of the dying), and its own translation of the Bible into Provençal (the Bible Vaudoise of the 1530s is the printed descendant). The Waldensian church was given legal status by the Letter of the Duke of Savoy of 1848, the Libertà valdese of the new Italian state in 1848, and survives as a Protestant denomination in the valleys of the Chisone and the Germanasca, and in the city of Torre Pellice. The best introduction is now Peter Biller, The Waldenses, 1170–1530 (2001).

The Beguines, the Beghards, and the Council of Vienne (1311–1312)

The Beguines and their male counterparts the Beghards were a new thing in the twelfth and thirteenth century: a tertius ordo, a third order, neither monastic nor lay, of women and men who lived in small community houses and dedicated themselves to prayer, work, and charity without taking formal vows. The movement began in the 1170s and 1180s in Liège, Namur, and the Rhineland, and by 1250 there were perhaps ten thousand Beguines in the Low Countries alone; the great béguinage of Bruges, founded c. 1240, had a population of several hundred women. The Beguines’ most famous English sister was the anchoress Julian of Norwich (c. 1343–c. 1416), whose Revelations of Divine Love of c. 1393 is the most distinguished single work of late medieval English mysticism; on the continent, the Beguine houses of Cologne, Ghent, and Strasbourg were the centres of a female mystical writing of considerable depth, including the work of Meister Eckhart’s circle and the treatise The Flowing Light of the Godhead of Mechthild of Magdeburg (c. 1207–c. 1282/94).

The Beguines were always suspect. The mendicant orders, especially the Dominicans, saw them as both a potential source of vocations and a threat to their own control of the lay apostolate. The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 had, in canon 60, restricted the conversio of the laity; the Council of Vienne in 1311–12, summoned by Clement V to deal with the bonae literae of the Templars and the lands of the Holy Land, was the moment of attack. The theologian of the attack was the cardinal Jacques Duèse, the future John XXII; the doctrine attacked was the aparta oratio, the interior stillness, of the Beguine and Beghard devotional life. The decree Cum de quibusdam mulieribus, issued by the council and confirmed by the bull Cum inter nonnullos of 27 January 1317, condemned the doctrine of the quieti and the blokkares (the “blockheads,” a name given to the contemplative Beghards) as heretical, on the ground that they had held the being of God to be in re present in the vita unitiva of the contemplative to such a degree that the moral law was suspended. The decree was not, in the strict sense, a condemnation of the Beguine way of life; the vita beguinalis survived in the Low Countries, in the Rhineland, and in the city of Cologne. But the béguinages were forbidden in the diocese of Trier, in Strasbourg, and in the wake of the Black Death in many other places. The standard treatment is now the older McDonnell, The Beguines and Beghards in Medieval Culture (1969), and the recent synthesis of Lerner, Die Beguinen (2014), in German.

The Spiritual Franciscans and Peter of John Olivi

The most doctrinally and politically important of the later medieval heretical movements was the radical wing of the Franciscan order, the Spiritual Franciscans, whose dispute with the papacy on the meaning of the usus pauper — the very poor use of property — shaped the politics of the Avignon papacy and prepared the way for the Wycliffite and Hussite controversies. The movement derived its name from the Collationes de pauperibus spiritu of the legenda trium sociorum, the spiritual companions of Francis, and from the Speculum perfectionis of the Spiritual party, which edited the early legends to emphasise the absolute poverty of the regula bullata of 1223. The leading intellectual of the first generation was the Provençal friar Peter of John Olivi (c. 1248–1298), who had been the lector at the Franciscan studium of Narbonne and was the most influential of the thirteenth-century commentators on the Regula; the leading figure of the second generation was the Italian Petrus de Macerata (later Liberatus), and the leading figure of the third was the Catalan Peter John Olivi’s disciple Peter of Trabibus and the Tuscan Ubertino of Casale (1259–c. 1328), the author of the Arbor Vitae Crucifixae Jesu of 1305. The Spirituals were protected by the Spiritual popes Celestine V (r. July–December 1294) and the early Benedict XI, and were persecuted by the fraticelli de opinione of the Avignon papacy, the conventual Franciscans, and the Dominican theologians (Thomas Aquinas, Contra impugnantes religionem, against the Franciscan poverty doctrine; the determinatio of the Dominican master general, the theologian Aymeric of Plaisance, in 1322).

The decisive moment was the papal letter Quia nonnunquam of Clement V of 1310 and the constitution Exivi de paradiso of John XXII of 1312, which declared the absolute poverty of the Friars Minor to be impossibilis et absurda and forced the conventuals and the Spirituals to a settlement that none of them wanted. The Spirituals’ refusal of the Exivi was followed by the suppression of the order in Provence and Tuscany; four of the recalcitrant Spirituals of Béziers were burned in 1318 at the papal command of John XXII, and the processus of the trial, preserved in the Vatican archives, is one of the key documents of the late medieval Inquisition. The Spirituals’ ideas lived on in the pauperes heremitae of the Narbonnais and in the Tuscan Fraticelli of the Trecento, and were carried into the Devotio Moderna by the Italian disciples of Olivi and Ubertino. The modern work is in the monumental David Burr’s editions of the Olivi manuscripts, in the older Felicitas Sweezy, and in the Régamey essays (1930) and the more recent Michele Lodone and Clare Monagle.

The Brethren and Sisters of the Free Spirit

A brief word on the Free Spirit heresy is necessary, because the Haec sancta decree of the Council of Vienne of 1311–12 was the moment of its broad European condemnation. The Free Spirit heresy was a loose family of mystical antinomian groups in the Rhineland, in the Low Countries, in northern France, in the Languedoc, and in Thuringia, of which the ortus lay in the Beguine houses of Cologne and the speculative Schwester-Bücher of the Dominican women mystics. The most important document is the Processus contra Beginos of the Inquisitor Konrad of Marburg, c. 1309, which records the trial of the Beghards of Cologne and the theology of the summi montis civitas, the aparta oratio, and the susceptor dei. The most famous individual was the Cologne Beguine Blessed Margaret Porete (d. 1310), whose French treatise The Mirror of Simple Souls had circulated from c. 1290 and was burned at Paris with her body in 1310; she was beatified in 1906, and the rehabilitation process is now under way. The Free Spirit heresy was, in the strict sense, an antinomian current — the doctrine that the unio mystica annuls the moral law — and it was combatted by the Dominican Inquisitors Konrad of Marburg, the bishop of Strasbourg, and, in the Avignon papacy, by the bull In agro dominico of Clement V of 1312, which condemned the propositions of Meister Eckhart as “downright heresies” (March 1329). The standard treatment is now Robert Lerner, The Heresy of the Free Spirit in the Later Middle Ages (2nd ed., 1972), and Bernard McGinn, The Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart (2001), with the recent Margot Fassler and E. Colledge.

The legacy

The long story of medieval heresy is the story of an institution that learned, slowly and painfully, that it had to negotiate with the vernacular. The Waldensian Bible, the Wycliffite Bible, the first Czech and German Bible of the Hussite and the Upper-Rhine Deutschordensbibel, are the witnesses; the printing press of the mid-fifteenth century — Gutenberg, Fust, and Schöffer, working in Mainz c. 1452–55, with the 42-Line Bible of 1455 — is the technological consequence. The Reformers of the sixteenth century, and the Catholic Reformers, were working on materials that the medieval heresies had already made available; the historiographical task is to keep the continuity and the difference in view. R. N. Swanson, Church and Society in Late Medieval England (1989), and P. S. Lewis, Later Medieval France: The Polity (1968), are the two indispensable single-volume surveys.

References and further reading

  • Peter Biller, The Waldenses, 1170–1530: Between a Religious Order and a Church (Ashgate, 2001).
  • Michel Roquebert, Histoire des Cathares (5 vols, Perrin, 2002–2014).
  • David Burr, The Persecution of Peter Olivi (Philadelphia, 1976).
  • Robert E. Lerner, The Heresy of the Free Spirit in the Later Middle Ages (2nd ed., University of California Press, 1972).
  • Ernest W. McDonnell, The Beguines and Beghards in Medieval Culture (Rutgers, 1969).
  • Malcolm Lambert, Medieval Heresy: Popular Movements from the Gregorian Reform to the Reformation (3rd ed., Blackwell, 2002).