Europe's inner demons

In the above account that evil repute has at last been traced to its true source. This was found to lie not in anything the Fraticelli really did, nor even in popular rumour, but in a literary tradition which was known only to educated men.^*** Tales told long before, about quite different sects, and recorded in Latin writings, were applied by St John of Capestrano to the Fraticelli. And just as, in earlier centuries, Pope Gregory IX and Pope John XXII had been led, by Conrad of Marburg and Henry of Schönberg, to accept the most monstrous fantasies concerning the Waldensians, so Pope Nicholas V and Pope Paul II were led by Capestrano and his successors to accept these accusations against the Fraticelli. Both these fifteenth-century popes were cultured men — Nicholas indeed was one of the most learned scholars of his day.

The defamation of the Fraticelli, then, was the work of intellectuals in positions of authority. Also, it was carried out at a time when the Fraticelli no longer had any appreciable influence or importance. We have met this pattern before, and we shall be meeting it again.

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Again and again, over a period of many centuries, heretical sects were accused of holding promiscuous and incestuous orgies in the dark; of killing infants and devouring their remains; of worshipping the Devil. Is it conceivable that no sect ever did such things at all? In the past, historians have diverged over that question. But here the matter must be settled once and for all; for otherwise the whole argument of this book hangs in the air.

One of the charges can be dismissed without more ado. Normally, when heretics were tried and interrogated by inquisitors, transcripts of the proceedings were kept. Hundreds of these transcripts have survived, and they offer no evidence for the killing and eating of babies or children. Indeed, only one sect ever seems to have been formally charged with such offences — the Fraticelli “de opinione” at Fabriano and Rome; and as we have seen, the “evidence” produced even in that belated instance turns out to have been taken almost verbatim from polemical tracts and monastic chronicles, written centuries before. All the other accounts of child-eating derive from the same literary tradition. Weighed against the silence of the inquisitors, they have no authority whatever.

At first glance, the charge of holding promiscuous and incestuous orgies might seem to have rather more basis in real happenings. It is certain, for instance, that some of the heretical mystics known as the Brethren of the Free Spirit did claim to have attained a state of total oneness with God, in which all things were permitted to them; and it was widely believed at the time that they gave expression to this conviction by practising free love amongst themselves. There is also the case of the Dualist heretics known as Cathars. According to Catharist doctrine, all matter was evil, and human bodies were prisons from which human souls were struggling to escape; whence it followed that procreation was an abomination. Catholic polemics pointed out the logical consequences of such a view. If all procreation was utterly evil, no form of sexual intercourse was more reprehensible than any other; incest between mother and son was no worse than intercourse between man and wife. So long as no more souls were incarcerated in flesh, no harm was done; and to avoid that, abortion or even infanticide were legitimate.

However, on closer examination none of this really provides an explanation for the tales of promiscuous and incestuous orgies. There is no firm evidence that in practice Cathars ever drew libertine consequences from their hatred of the flesh.⁽⁵³⁾ Catharist morality was only meant to be followed by the elite of the sect, the perfecti

; and in general even the Catholic clergy, while attacking Catharist doctrine, paid tribute to the chastity of these people.⁽⁵⁴⁾ Nor is there any reason to think that the Brethren of the Free Spirit indulged in collective orgies; if any of them did indeed practise free love, they did it in private. Indeed, of all the innumerable stories of nocturnal orgies only one, concerning an incident which is supposed to have taken place in Cologne in 1326, could possibly refer to the heretical mystics of the Free Spirit; and even that has now been shown to be mythical.^†

Above all, there are the brute facts of chronology. Stories of heretics and their orgies were circulating in France already in the eleventh century — but there were no Cathars in the West before the middle of the twelfth century, and the Brethren of the Free Spirit are first heard of in the thirteenth. The beliefs and activities of these sectarians can no more account for the defamation of the Waldensians or the Fraticelli than the activities of the Carpocratians can account for the very similar tales told of the early Christians.⁽⁵⁵⁾