Violence against Christian Heretics

If the violence that is the subject of this chapter depended upon the identity of its victims, that matter was more complex with heretics than it was with Jews or Muslims. The question of violence against heretics is inseparable from the troubled question of heresy's existence and categorisations in medieval Europe.

After the execution of Iberian bishop Priscillian of Avila for sorcery and heresy in 385, we see very little violence against heresy in Latin Europe for centuries. Heresy again appears as a concern of Christian clerics, authorities and chroniclers in the eleventh century, with loose, disparate and barely definable religious movements they deemed ‘heretical'. These groups were often reformist; were opposed to ‘accretions'; were anxious about clerical wealth and corruption (unchastity, simony); and showed dualist hints of mistrusting the fleshly and material. In the twelfth century, larger and more coherent movements arose, although we should remember that their designations as ‘heretical', and estimates of their size and power, resulted from clerical impressions and descriptions that are not necessarily reliable.

As soon as heresy in Latin Europe re-emerged (or, more precisely, as soon as groups were defined as heretics by clerics and authorities), so did violence against it. We glimpse very different kinds: king of France Robert II the Pious (r. 996-1031) formally burnt a number of supposed heretics at the stake, including members of the city's clerical elite, at Orleans in 1022. Yet other groups were the victims of what more closely resembled mob violence. A group was burned by city authorities in Milan in 1028, although the arch­bishop of Milan, Aribert, objected. In the 1070s, a northern French heretic called Ramihrd was burned by an angry crowd. Similarly, a heretical group led by two brothers, Clement and Evrard, in Soissons were seized and burned by a mob in 1114. In both of these cases, the crowds appear to have acted to ‘correct' the local authorities' reluctance to punish.

But as we move further into the twelfth century and its religious move­ments, we see violence on both sides in an environment of reform. The anti­clerical monk Henry of Lausanne, who took control of the city of Le Mans c. 1116, violently attacked clergy and ordered ‘unchaste' women to burn their clothes and hair. He was eventually imprisoned. Peter of Bruys (d. c. 1139), a wandering preacher in southern France, likewise saw religious reform as destruction; his followers forced monks to marry, and burned crucifixes and other church implements. Peter died when a mob pushed him into one of his bonfires. The Augustinian canon Arnold of Brescia (1100-55), a fierce critic of the church's wealth and temporal power, seized control of Rome for several years. After the election of Adrian IV as pope in 1154, Arnold was arrested and then burnt in Rome.

Also visible in the twelfth century is the building of a narrative that would ultimately justify violence, just as one formed for Jews in the same period. We see a greater concern about heresy in ecclesiastical writing, the resump­tion of antique language of insanity and pollution, and the careful weaving of present circumstance into past ecclesiastical history. As with Jews, rhetoric about diabolism and immorality became more heated, and polemical trea­tises, preaching tours, disputations and other strategies belied a panic about ‘heresies' that were not always detailed or clearly identified.

The supposed popularity of the Good Men in southern France, when combined with existing language of crusade and Christian universalism, produced an instance of anti-heretical violence unlike any experienced by Jews in Europe. Heretics did not have their own state. But Pope Innocent III railed against the secular rulers in this territory who neglected to pursue and to eradicate heresy. After the murder of Innocent's papal legate in 1208, the pope called a crusade, intending to replace dukes and counts putatively soft on heresy with Catholics more pious and eager to prosecute it. The Albigensian Crusade (1209-29) was the first conscious application of the holy violence of ‘crusade' to European Christians. The war was fought primarily by crusaders from the kingdom of France, who received the traditional crusade indulgence for their service. By the war's end in 1229, it was girded equally by the expansionist ambitions of France's ruling royal house, and the church's misguided belief that war could eradicate heresy.^[947] After an epilogue rebellion by count of Toulouse, Raymond VII (r. 1222-49), in 1244, the crusade's final victory was the royal army's seizure of the fortress at Montsegur, where ‘Good Men' had taken refuge.

Wars did not end heresy, and in partial response inquisitorial courts were installed wherever heresy seemed popular. While inquisitions have captured the post-medieval imagination as a symbol of violent repression and religious intolerance, most germane for a discussion of Christian violence is the organic way in which their violence developed from previous Christian norms, and the way in which it was described and understood by clerics. As was the case with anti-Jewish violence, the violence associated with inquisition took different forms; even more so, perhaps, it played different roles, with inquisition's explicit goal of returning heretics to orthodoxy. Suspected but recalcitrant heretics could be licitly tortured during interroga­tion in order to impel a cleansing confession. In 1252, Pope Innocent IV (r. 1243-54) allowed inquisitors to absolve each other for irregularities in procedure, a privilege often read by modern scholars as tacit permission to torture. This reflected the inquisitorial (indeed, general Christian) sentiment that vexatio dabit intellectum - ‘vexation will bring understanding' - as well as the observation that suspects for secular crimes were tortured.

State responsibility for executions in no way meant that Latin Christian clerics disapproved of them. Inquisitor Bernard Gui famously observed that there were two ways to eradicate heresy: by converting heretics back to orthodox Christianity, or by killing them.^[948] Yet the justification for the death penalty was not just tactical. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries - building upon rhetoric about heresy that clerics had begun to deploy in the eleventh century - inquisitors and popes used biblical exegesis, theology and church history to craft a tradition of God's own violence in which they placed execution. God would surely damn these self-condemned heretics in hell, making their deaths an apt preview and prologue. In a more banal appeal resembling that made about torture, clerics argued that heretics, as murderers of souls and traitors against God, surely deserved at least as much as earthly traitors and killers. This was partly analogous to justifications of violence against Jews - an ascription of guilt casting Christian violence as responsive, punitive and moral - but it also differed, by labouring even harder at con­structing theological foundations.

This points to a few peculiarities in anti-heretical violence. First is the possibility that it exceeded that against Jews and Muslims in its brutality.

Malcolm Barber has argued that even contemporaries saw the Albigensian Crusade as exceptionally violent and dehumanising, in part failing to distin­guish between ‘heretical' and orthodox residents of Languedoc.^[949] Bernard Gui noted approvingly that after heretic Dolcino of Novara and his lover Marguerite were captured by an inquisitorial army, ‘there was a deserved execution of justice... Marguerite was cut up limb by limb before Dolcino's eyes; next, Dolcino was cut through limb by limb; and the bones and limbs of both were burned together... as their crimes deserved.'^[950] It is not coinci­dental that vivid descriptions of graphic violence in both purgatory and hell - violence imposed by God on sinners - also arose in these centuries. Indeed, it was probably mutually influential.^[951] Second, and relatedly: as violence against heretics became more common and institutionalised, churchmen appealed more energetically to models in the Bible and church history to justify it. This is simply not as visible in the case of violence against Jews and Muslims, even when we acknowledge that anti-Jewish violence often invoked the crucifix­ion. One reason is that, unlike the cases of Jews and Muslims, mob violence against heresy ended in the mid thirteenth century, after the installation of inquisitions. (Popular violence turned instead against inquisitors themselves.) Clerics engineered and more directly imposed violence against heretics, which was generally formalised, demanding the cooperation of church and secular authorities. It required more theological spadework, more effort in preaching and teaching on the ground, to persuade European Christians that it was spiritually licit to kill their Christian neighbours, even the heretical ones.