Europe's inner demons

This is the sum total of evidence concerning orgies, infanticides and cannibalistic beverages amongst the Fraticelli: for the rest, the records of the interrogations, which are unusually full and vivid, show only how utterly strange these stories seemed to the ordinary lay members of the sect. The reaction of one exceptionally strong character, Antonio of Sacco, is revealing. In August and again in October this man stood by his faith.⁽³⁵⁾ He refused to abjure, and he refused to kneel before the tribunal. Told that the “bishop” Nicholas himself had abjured, he remained unshaken; in that case, he replied, he would subordinate himself not to a heretical pope but to God alone. He admitted, and gloried in, every article of faith of the Fraticelli. At the same time he denied all knowledge of the barilotto

. So, at the renewed enquiry in October, Antonio de Sacco was tortured in the usual way; being hauled up by a rope around his wrists, which were tied behind him, and then suddenly dropped — a proceeding calculated to tear the muscles and dislocate the joints. After several applications of this torture Antonio admitted to taking part in the barilotto — but as soon as he was taken off the rope, he denied it. Tortured again, he confirmed his first statement — but when he was brought before the tribunal, he again denied everything.⁽³⁶⁾

In the end Antonio capitulated, like all the other accused, to the extent of abjuring his faith, asking to be received back into the Church, and promising to accept the pope as the true vicar of God on earth. Coming close up to the commissioners he said humbly: “My lords, forgive me.” But he also said: “My lords, you saw how yesterday, when I was being tortured, I said I had twice attended the barilotto. It’s not true. I have a young wife and a beautiful daughter, who are detained here in the prisons of Sant’ Angelo. I would never have permitted such things.”⁽³⁷⁾

The rest of the accused were no more helpful. Unlike Antonio of Sacco they all abjured very quickly, during the first series of interrogations — but even so, nobody supported Francis of Maiolati in his allegations. It was not simply that nobody confessed to taking part in such sinister practices — nobody knew anything at all about them. And the same happened when the interrogations were resumed in October. Apart from Nicholas, Catherine and Francis, nobody could throw any light on the matter — and Francis himself insisted that he had never seen any of these things himself. Indeed, as the proceedings continued he could no longer even recall the age at which he had heard, from outside a church, what he thought was a barilotto — perhaps it was ten, but then again perhaps it was fifteen.⁽³⁸⁾

The final picture, then, is paradoxical in the extreme. The tribunal really had investigated two groups of Fraticelli “de opinione”. It had found them to hold all those views — on the all-importance of absolute poverty, on the sublime merits of the Fraticelli, on the depravity of the Church of Rome — which were commonly attributed to them. That much can be regarded as established; and it was enough, by itself, to get the prisoners condemned as heretics. But beyond that point the case is submerged in a welter of implausibilities and contradictions. In the end the tribunal was left with two leading personalities — the “bishops” Nicholas of Massaro and his friend Catherine of Palumbaria — who admitted to organizing orgies and infanticides and cannibalistic communions on a massive scale; but not one member of the rank and file who had ever taken part in, or even witnessed, any of these activities. A couple of generals, in short, with no troops at all.

Moreover, the behaviour of the tribunal itself was full of paradoxes. With the means at its disposal, it certainly could have extracted confessions from the other prisoners, some of whom were adolescent boys and girls; but it did not insist. And when it came to sentence the prisoners, it revealed a similar uncertainty. It sentenced them for their real beliefs — banishing some for seven years, imprisoning others for life; but it also described them collectively as “murderers, adulterous, incestuous”. The explanation must surely be that the tribunal had a double task. In the first place it was concerned, as the Inquisition normally was, to reclaim repentant heretics for the Church and to punish the impenitent or relapsed. But it was also concerned to establish that the movement of the Fraticelli was a monstrous, anti-human conspiracy.

Yet it does not follow that the commission was a mere pack of cynics. It is quite possible that the eminent ecclesiastics who guided the interrogation believed that they were simply uncovering the truth. For by the time of the trial in 1466 these particular accusations formed part of the clergy’s stereotype of the Fraticelli. The story of how this came about has never been told, and it deserves to be.