Europe's inner demons

The Fraticelli “de opinione” were never very numerous, nor did they evolve a unified organization. Nevertheless, the popes felt these dissidents to be a menace, both on doctrinal and on social grounds. They made repeated efforts to eliminate them, by conversion if possible, by physical extermination if necessary; and in the end they succeeded. By the middle of the fifteenth century the sect had been reduced to a few obscure, clandestine groups, and the heresy had lost most of its importance. The papal onslaught of 1466 was directed against an already defeated foe.

The pope at that time, Paul II, was a man whose enthusiasm was more easily engaged by his magnificent collection of antiquities and works of art, and by the jewels which he assembled for his personal adornment, than by the ideal of absolute poverty. In 1466 it came to his ears that many Fraticelli “de opinione” would be making their way to Assisi, to attend the festival of Portiuncula that was to be held there in July. The little chapel of St Mary of the Angels, known as the Portiuncula, was the place where St Francis had received the revelation which determined his vocation; now it had become a favourite place of pilgrimage for the Fraticelli — and also a place where, amongst the crowds of pilgrims, they could meet without attracting notice. Not so, however, on this occasion: investigators sent specially by the pope seized a score of them, of both sexes and the most various ages.

It turned out that the prisoners had come a long way to Assisi: some from the area around Poli, not far from Rome; others from the area around Maiolati, in the mountainous, inland part of the March of Ancona. All were obscure inhabitants of obscure villages; but despite this, it was thought worthwhile to transport them all the way to Rome and to incarcerate them in the papal fortress itself. Moreover, the ecclesiastics who interrogated them there included an archbishop and two bishops, as well as the commandant of the fortress; and torture was used freely. Clearly, great expectations were attached to this mass interrogation and the confessions it might produce. They were not disappointed.

The first prisoner to be interrogated was a “priest” of the sect, called Bernard of Bergamo. His answers give a lively and convincing picture of Fraticelli life.⁽²⁸⁾ Bernard had spent his noviciate in Greece; for the Fraticelli, in flight from persecution in Italy, had established monasteries across the water, outside the bounds of Latin Christendom. After ordination Bernard had returned to Italy, to teach the doctrine of the Fraticelli at Poli: preaching against the errors of John XXII, condemning the Catholic clergy, exalting absolute poverty. Though his activity was clandestine, it evidently found some response. Even great nobles were favourably disposed. The overlord of the village, Count Stefano de Conti, protected the Fraticelli and treated Bernard as his father confessor — and in due course was imprisoned by the pope in the fortress of Sant’ Angelo for so doing. Bernard recalled, too, how a great lady of the Colonna family summoned him to her castle, so that she could make her confession to him instead of to a Catholic priest; she has been identified as Sueva, the mother of Stefano Colonna, count of Palestrina.

Such situations, where poverty-loving heretics were secretly patronized by rich and powerful families, were not uncommon in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. But the majority of Bernard’s flock consisted of ordinary villagers. He reckoned that twenty or thirty men and women of Poli attended when, secretly, he celebrated mass. One inhabitant had bequeathed his house so that Fraticelli “priests” could celebrate mass, hear confessions and ordain new “priests” in security. Even the Catholic priest of the parish seems to have been implicated to some extent; for when a Fraticelli “bishop” died, he allowed him to be buried in consecrated ground. (In the light of Bernard’s confession, the body was disinterred and burned.)

All this rings true, and it was confirmed and completed by the evidence of the “lay” prisoners. These people called themselves “the poor of Christ” and regarded themselves as God’s elect. Indeed — exactly like the Waldensians — they held that they were the only true Christians, for they alone imitated Christ and the apostles in their absolute poverty. Whole families lived and died in this faith, and had done for generations; children were born into it. From time to time inquisitors would descend on these remote villages and scare those whom they did not imprison or burn into abandoning their faith. But sooner or later the renegades were apt to decide that the poverty-loving brethren offered a surer way to salvation than a Church weighed down with possessions and riddled with simony; and they would drift back. So the Fraticelli communities survived, minute islands of asceticism in a sea of worldliness.