The Free Spirit: Did the Cathars Fight Back?
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated:Thursday, 12 December 2002
Did the Cathars Fight Back?
The so-called “Master of Hungary” was a sixty year old ascetic called Jacob, said to have been a monk. He spoke eloquently in Latin as well as German and French, and told crowds of shepherds he had been commisioned by the Virgin Mary to summon them to help S Louis (Louis IX of France) to free the holy sepulchre after the latter’s set backs in the Holy Land. The gang he assembled were called the Pastouraux. There were said to have been sixty thousand of them. This was the Shepherd’s Crusade.
The Pastouraux worshipped Jacob, and many more followers worshipped the Pastouraux. Supposedly, anyone who did not venerate them were robbed because Jacob really led an armed gang of bandits, made up mainly of criminals and prostitutes, according to the monks who wrote about them. Jacob, in his speeches, according to the same sources, attacked the clergy, the mendicant orders and the papacy. He taught his followers the familiar heretical teachings of disregarding the sacraments as worthless, and regarding the assembly of heretics as being the true Church. He claimed certain powers, and supposedly “married” eleven men and a women, standing for the faithful disciples and either Maty Magdalene or the Virgin Mary. Together, then, they formed the usual coven. Evidently he took himself to be a type of living Christ, and people knelt before him, at Amiens, giving up their belongings to him in apostolic fashion.
Jacob took a group to Paris where he received gifts from the Queen Mother, Blanche, who was regent while her son was away. There, he dressed as a bishop, taught in churches and sprinkled holy water. If these are not just monkish inventions, this man was not a Cathar Perfect, but the Church chroniclers tried always to depict the heretics as insane megalomaniacs. Perhaps Jacob was. Meanwhile, his followers were allegedly killing any priests they found in Paris by drowning them in the Seine.
At Tours, the population supported the band in desecrating the host, and humiliating the Franciscans and Dominicans. At Orleans, the clerics were drowned in the Loire, and some, who had barricaded themselves into houses, were burnt out, or burnt to death. It was the hatred of the Pastouraux for priests and the sacrements that made them popular. At Bourges, Jacob supposedly preached against Jews, killed a public critic, and had the burghers turn against him. The Queen Mother also abandoned the Pastouraux, and many began to desert.
Finally, Jacob was killed by the burghers, and the rest of the group scattered, though many were caught and hanged, including some at Bordeaux by Simon de Montfort’s English soldiers. The movement looked a lot like a deliberate counter attack by heretics against the Church, and its main occupation seemed to have been to kill priests. Another rising of Pastouraux in 1320 was excommunicated by John XXII then scattered by the Senechal of Beaucaire.
The famous Flagellants of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries fairly come under the same heading. The world and Church were so corrupt that they expected a speedy end of them, and they did penance for their sins and those of others. The Fratricelli, a detachment from the Franciscan Order whom the clerical corruption drove into heresy, belong to the same period, and were fiercely persecuted.
Self-flagellation seems to have started as a response to the impending millennium (c 1030) early in the eleventh century by some monastic hermits in Italy. Their idea was to punish themselves in the hope that God would not. Because Christ had been scourged, the Flagellant felt like him, and it became a method of inducing this Christ-like feeling. The Joachite forgery had numbered the year 1260 as the date of the Parousia, and, in that year thousands of Flagellants turned out in Italy, ravaged as it had been by civil war, famine and plague, begging the Virgin Mary to intercede with her son on their behalf. Salimbene, who was a Joachite, reported that the processions themselves were seen as signs of the dawning spiritual age.
At the year end, the enthusiasm evaporated in Italy but transferred to Germany where, a year later, the same phenomenon appeared, and evidently organized. The leaders boasted one of those heavenly messages which listed human sin and demanded atonement—a procession of flagellance for 33½ days, matching the number of years in Christ’s life, as theologians believed. In Germany, the poor artisans—the smiths, cobblers, combers, weavers and dyers—joined the processions and lent them their anti-clerical views, believing that the Chist-like feeling brought on by the flagellation showed they were being absolved of sin, and were becoming Christs like the Cathar Perfects. Soon, princes and bishops had to unite in opposition to the processions.
For over two centuries, Flagellants were common in central and southern Europe, but whereas in Italy, they were orthodox Catholics, the ultra montanes were heretical. The German heretics certainly continued underground when necessary, as it often was, emerging from time to time in response to famine and oppression with the same uniform, songs and ritual as before—and the same heavenly letter in justification.
The greatest Flagellant processions were almost 100 years later in 1348-49, triggered by the Europe wide plague called the Black Death, when a third of all people died. The Flagellants went in procession before the plague struck, in the hope of being spared from it. Their uniform was a white smock with a cross before and behind, and a similarly marked hat or hood. Each group was led by a layman called a “Father” or “Master” who heard confessions and granted absolution.
Flagellation was twice daily in public, and once at night in private for the 33½ days, following a set ritual. If a woman or priest interfered, the ritual had to begin again. The Flagellants saw themselves as martyrs atoning for all human sin, and so the people saw them, and treated them with every favour. They dipped cloths in their blood and preserved them as miraculous holy relics.
When the pope finally decided to issue a bull against the Flagellants, he made it plain that he regarded the majority as simple folk who had been led astray by the heretics.N Cohn
Yet, Chroniclers (Gerta Abbatum Trudonensium) say explicitly that the German Flagellants aimed to destroy the Church and its clergy. These various heresies were part of the counter attack by primitive Christianity against the Church’s earlier crusade—the Cathar crusade about 150 years before—against it. The Flagellants repudiated the supernatural authority of the Church. They denied the sacraments. They claimed the superior direct revelation of the Holy Spirit. Like the Fraticelli, they thought the Roman Church had ended, but when did it happen? The Flagellant heretics at Sangerhusen, who called themselves Brethren of the Cross, asserted that the true revelation had been handed down only through them, having been lost in Christendom since 343…
…when the Donation of Western Europe by Constantine to S Sylvester made the Church a property-owning body.
These Flagellants, therefore, saw themselves as part of a centuries old tradition opposed to the establishment of the Church. Peter Lucensis, a Spaniard who belonged to Dolcino’s Apostolic Brethren added:
That when poverty was changed from the Church by S Sylvester, then sanctity of life was taken from the Church, and the Devil entered into the companions of S Sylvester in this world… That there is a double Church, the Spiritual and the Carnal. That the Spiritual Church is in those men who live in perfect poverty… that the Carnal Church is of those who live… in riches and honours… such as are the bishops and prelates of the Church of Rome… This Church he says is that carnal Church of which John speaks in the Revelation, which he calls Babylon.
It sure sounds to be the same heretical root, but these Flagellants were far in distance and time from Languedoc where the Cathars had tolerated Jews. Cohn says they sought to please God by killing Jews. God, it seems, had sent the Black Death to kill Christians for allowing Jews to live with them.
It is curious how followers of the patriarchal God always end up killing other followers of the same God. A God of love could not have been bent so easily into His opposite, but the Church never taught the God of Love. Constantine had adopted a God of War, and the biblical God of war was the tribal totem of the Jewish scriptures who made no pretence of being loving to anyone, even His own. The Christian God is never satiated by the blood He is fed, and Christians have never had a defendable reputation for love or justice.
The Jews who survived fled to the east. The plague was now endemic in Europe, breaking out at regular intervals, each being accompanied by Flagellant processions. In 1396, the Flagellants of Spain, the Languedoc and Italy were led by a Dominican, S Vincent Ferrer.
Like the apostolic era of Christianity, they held all their material possessions in common. John of Leyden (Jan Bockelson) wrote that, come the New Jerusalem, “all things were to be in common, there was to be no private property and nobody was to do any more work, but simply trust in God”. The dream of never working, Cohn highlights as part of the Roman Stoics’ legend of the Golden Age, in which, in the words of Seneca:
No labourers ploughed up the soil, nobody was allowed to mark out or divide the ground; when men put everything into a common store, and the earth bore all things more freely because none demanded it.
Heretical sects did refuse to work. The Flagellants of Thuringia in the 1360s, the Beghards of Cologne in the fourteenth century, the radical Taborites in 1419-1420, all refused to work, becoming destitute and having to beg for bread “for God’s sake”.
These were short-lived and unable to bear the weight of hope and expectation that people tended to place on them. They seemd to be trying to copy the mainstream heresy from within the Church by reforming it. The generation of the millennium in southern France initially, then in most of France and the francophone Lowlands, saw two waves of millennial enthusiasm which carried with them the whole culture, even the warlords attended the councils and took the oaths. The most radical turned against the church, rejecting its institutions, substituting as a medium of salvation a community in which the egalitarianism and mutual love of those committed, replaced the need for a eucharist at mass. In short, they turned to the alternative—to Catharism.
Europe’s misfortune in the Middle Ages was that the leaders of the established Church saw their opponents as enemies to be annihilated, whether they were apocalyptic leaders or apostolic evangelists. It is plain enough who were not “Christian” among them!
Reference
- Georgi Vasilev, Dualist Ideas in the English Pre-Reformation and Reformation (Bogomil-Cathar Influence on Wycliffe, Tyndale, Langland and Milton), Sofia. 2005
