Europe's inner demons

The “barbes” were simple, uneducated men, mostly of Italian origin. They functioned not as resident priests but — like Catholic friars — as itinerant preachers. Disguised as merchants or pedlars, they were constantly on the move and covered vast distances on foot. It was a dangerous, nerve-racking existence; and though the Waldensian communities sheltered them loyally, from time to time one of them would be captured. It seems that four perished at Grenoble in 1492;⁽²²⁾ and in the same year two more were caught in the mountains north of Briançon. One of these, an Italian from Spoleto called Francis of Girundino, otherwise known as the “barbe” Martin, was tried at Oulx (now on the Italian side of the frontier). His interrogation, which was carried out not by an inquisitor but by a canon of the abbey of Oulx, assisted by a councillor of the governor of Dauphiné and the chief magistrate of Embrun, provided new and picturesque details concerning the imaginary orgies.⁽²³⁾

Now it appeared that the orgy or “synagogue”^** was held only once a year, always in a different region; but it was very incestuous indeed. If the presiding “barbe” was not a local man, he had to withdraw after delivering his sermon, before the orgy began; for only a local man would have relatives available to mate with. One is reminded of Tertullian’s ironic comment some thirteen centuries earlier: “Be sure to bring your mother and sister. But what if... the convert has none? I suppose you cannot become a regular Christian if you have neither mother nor sister?” Martin added that a male child conceived at this incestuous orgy was regarded as pre-eminently suited to become a “barbe” in due course. As for Martin’s companion, the “barbe” Pietro de Jacopo, he was interrogated separately, by the episcopal commissary at Valence. He agreed about the orgies — and added that at these gatherings the Waldensians worshipped an idol called Bacchus!

Incredibly, the very transcript of Martin’s interrogation contains a phrase which makes nonsense of the whole story: in the Waldensian view the Catholic clergy, from the pope downwards, were no true clergy precisely because they broke their vows of virginity and chastity. Other prisoners, interrogated in other places, are recorded as maintaining that the sacrament of matrimony is to be faithfully and firmly kept. And indeed the moral strictness of the Waldensians, even at this late stage, is beyond all doubt.

The statements about orgies nevertheless served their purpose. Widely publicized, they brought the Waldensians into general disrepute, so that the sectarians came to be regarded as the worst enemies of society, against whom fresh pursuits could be launched with general approval. Moreover, as so often, economic motives contributed to the dynamism of the persecution. A Waldensian who recanted and was absolved could still see anything up to a third of his property confiscated; a Waldensian who refused to recant was either burned or imprisoned for life — and in either case all his property was confiscated. The total confiscations were massive — in some valleys the land confiscated amounted to a third of all taxable land. It is not surprising that the beneficiaries — the archbishop of Embrun in the first place, but also the various local lords — did everything possible to keep their gains.⁽²⁴⁾

Viewed from Paris things looked different. When Louis XII succeeded to the throne in 1499 he was not convinced that small groups of Waldensians in remote Alpine valleys really constituted a threat to French society; and with the pope’s agreement he sent his own confessor, the bishop of Sisteron, Laurent Bureau, to carry out an enquiry on the spot. It was the beginning of a gradual rehabilitation. In 1509 the grand council, sitting in Paris, annulled all the sentences passed by the late archbishop Jean Bade, the inquisitor Alberto Cattaneo and his successor Francois Plouvier, and restored all confiscated properties to the original owners or their heirs. This came about not because the persecuted were able to prove their orthodoxy — most of them certainly were Waldensians, not Catholics — but because the king had an overriding interest in establishing peace and unity within the kingdom, and was unimpressed by an inquisitorial institution which had lost almost all the power and prestige it had once possessed. Thereafter no more was heard of Waldensian “synagogues”.

For at least two and a half centuries tales of promiscuous and incestuous orgies and of Devil-worship had pursued this purely — indeed naively — Christian sect. Yet it so happens that in no single instance can one fill in all the details — who first voiced the charges, what sources he drew on, how much pressure was needed to obtain substantiation. However, the lacuna can be filled: one has only to examine the case of another group of poverty-loving Christians, the Fraticelli “de opinione” in fourteenth-century Italy.

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