Chapter 27: The Communalist Prophets

The Sixth Century brought to the Western populations [of Europe] a slight amelioration of the conditions of life, which demographic growth soon condemned to precarity. While the development of the cities introduced the air of liberty in the confined atmosphere of an agrarian system that was socially frozen according to the three orders of Rathier of Verona — soldiers, priests and farmers — , the economic growth of the towns, little by little, began to absorb the excess of manual labor produced by the countryside.

The swarming beggars, fomenting riots that were easily manipulated in the most diverse ways, were a common fund of laborers for those who learned to play the roles of lord or archbishop, guild-leader or popular agitator. Their violence also struck the masters as well as the rebels or the Jews, who were scapregoats for all kinds of fantastic resentments.

The first Crusade, launched 1095 by Pope Urban II — who counted among his motivations the desire to re-locate into the conquered countries the superabundance of disinherited people, ruined nobles, and people of uncertain fate — suddenly revealed in the designs of God and the Pope something that sanctified the thirst for ambition, cupidity and bloody desublimation [defoulements].

The influx of poor peoples into the towns posed a dilemma for the Church: how could it Christianize creatures reduced to the state of wild, starving dogs by extolling to them the holiness of the poor, while the high clergy lived in opulence?

“Insurrections occurred chiefly in episcopal cities,” notes Cohn.

Unlike a lay prince [Cohn continues], a bishop was a resident ruler in his city and was naturally concerned to keep his authority over the subjects in whose midst he lived. Moreover the attitude of the Church towards economic matters was profoundly conservative; in trade it could for a long time see nothing but usury and in merchants nothing but dangerous innovators whose designs ought to be firmly thwarted. The burghers for their part, if once they decided to break a bishop’s power, were quite capable of killing him, setting fire to his cathedral and fighting off any of his vassals who might try to avenge him. And although in all this their aims usually remained severely limited and entirely material, it was only to be expected that some of these risings should be accompanied by an outcry against unworthy priests. When the lower strata of urban society were involved such protests tended in fact to rise shrilly enough.[324]

The Patarin Movement

The Gregorian reform undertaken by the Clunisian monk Hildebrand, inaugurated pope under the name Gregoire VII, attempted to promote a politics of the moralization of the clergy, which would be of a nature to favor the Christianization of the masses. At the same time that it desired to free the Church from the temporal control of the Emperor of Germany, and thus the great feudal lords, Gregorian reform clashed with the very privileges of the ecclesiastical dignitaries, princes, bishops, and archbishops, nay, the parish priests who arrogated to themselves an excessive authority over rural communities or parishes.

“The purety of the life that the heretics preached became the second great goal of Gregoire VII, who, behind the sacramental office of priest, maintained the requirement of his personal dignity.”[325]

The Patarin movement in Milan and Florence conferred upon Gregoire’s reforms a popular basis, in which voluntary poverty was proposed as the model for an apostolic life and organized the communities of the faithful according to a mode of solidarity and mutual aid that was quite similar to that of the synagogues and churches of the Second Century.

The name Patarin probably derived from the neighborhood of Pataria in Milan, inhabited by salt-sellers and dealers in secondhand items. The Patarins, contrary to a confusion often made between cathari and patari, had nothing in common with the Cathars, since they were not preoccupied with the reform of the Church or even adhesion to Christianity.

In 1057, Guido, Archbishop of Milan, condemned the Patarin movement. Social insurrection was battering the authority of the men of the Church, with the consent of the pope, whose politics bet upon communal liberties so as to break the power of the feudal bishops. Nevertheless, “the union of the Pope and the Patarins was a union of means and not ends.”[326]

Tactically in solidarity with the reformers, the bourgeois and the weavers, who animated the movement, demanded liberties that the Church would combat from the moment that the aid of these allies lost its utility.

The patari rapidly spread to Tuscany. They would exist until 1110 in Florence, 1120 in Orvieto and the region of Treves. Nevertheless, the reaction did not wait. In 1075, the Patarins of Milan, accused of arson, were massacred.

The case of Ramihrdus, in Cambria, is exemplary in this sense. In 1077, an insurrection of bourgeois and weavers forced the bishop to enfranchise the town. Priest Ramihrdus, who was close the weavers — who especially propagated the most radical demands and doctrines — proclaimed that he would not receive communion from the hands of any of the abbeys or bishops who were thirsty for power and gain. Accused of heresy and burned alive, Ramihrdus would have the posthumous consolation of being honored as a martyr by Gregoire VII.[327]

So as to compete with the reformers who were too audacious, the hermits of Citeaux, under the leadership of Robert of Molesme, founded groups of ascetics and the voluntarily poor who renounced all personal property. “To possess the smallest amount of money was, for them, a flagrant infraction of this principle and a ‘grave’ sin.”[328]

In the same way, Robert of Arbrissel and his nomadic penitents, at the heart of the Church, defended one of the themes of the anti-clerical reformers: mankind only uses the riches of which God remains the unique owner. But were not Rome, the Churches and the abbeys instituted as the depositories of God’s presence? After twenty-five years of existence, Citeaux was no longer a rich monastery with a doctrine centered on the poor. The papacy would not delay in rendering to the Church what was the property of the Lord, whose glory it maintained.

Tanchelm Of Antwerp

Even when stripped of the calumnies made by the Archbishop of Utrecht, the person of Tanchelm differs from Ramihrdus and the Patarin movement in many ways. Tanchelm’s first step towards power inscribed itself in the framework of pontifical reforms to which Robert II, Count of Flanders, was attached; Tanchelm might have been the Count’s officer or notary. He assuredly took advantage of a conflict between the Count and the Archbishop of Utrecht to support the people of Antwerp against a corrupted clergy. Anecdote has it that the concubinage of a priest named Hilduin with his niece incited Tanchelm to fulminate against the ecclesiastical hierarchy.

Tanchelm went to Rome, where Pascal II, the Pope from 1099 to 1118, would influence his views. He then preached an anti-clerical doctrine, as well as the refusal to pay tithes and the rejection of the sacraments delivered by unworthy priests, in Antwerp, Utrecht, Bruges and Zeland.

To the church of clerics, Tanchelm opposed the church of simple people, whom he would guide in the name of the Spirit that was incarnated in him. It is hardly probable that, denouncing the “brothel of the church,” he surrendered himself to public debauchery, as was claimed by Norbert of Xantem, who became a saint following his fight against Tanchelm. On the other hand, the fact that Tanchelm called his companion Mary and favored marriages “according to the heart” reveals a conception that, perhaps, was propagated by Bogomilism, that is, if one supposes that an ideology is necessary to justify an on-going practice among the common people.

A communalist prophet, Tanchelm governed the city in the name of God, surrounded himself with a guard of armed and devoted ostentation, and multiplied sermons in the hysteria proper to this genre of ceremony. One of his friends, the blacksmith Manasse, led a fraternity of twelve men that recalled the apostles.

In a prelude to the Archbishop of Utrecht’s offensive, a priest stabbed Tanchelm in 1115. His adepts conserved power in Antwerp, until the armed forces, allied with the predictions of Norbert of Xantem (who preached to Tanchelm, as well, but in the framework of orthodoxy, that is, apostolic poverty), assured the clergy’s control over the town, the history of which signaled the continuing revolt against the Church.

Under the patronage of the Divine Spirit, Tanchelm united the function of a tribune and the mission of an apostle. The demand for freedom, exalted by communal independence, spontaneously wedded itself to a renewal of the Christian community, hostile to riches and to the useless pomp of the Church, and identified the true apostolic practice with poverty, fraternity and solidarity organized through the works of mutual aid and helping the starving. The idea that the goods of the rich and the clergy belonged to those whom poverty had sanctified would be reprized around 1250, and in Antwerp, by Willem Cornelisz, a kind of “worker priest” close to the weavers of the time.

Arnaud Of Brescia

Another communalist tribune and reformer, but without making explicit references to the Christ and the apostles, Arnaud (born in Brescia around 1100) had the status of a condottiere whose aspirations oscillated between a taste for power and a sincere attachment to the freedoms of the most unfavored.

A student in Milan, where he marked the Patarin movement, then in Bologna, Arnaud left for Paris so as to receive Abelard’s instruction.

In 1129, as the Superior of the regular Canons, Arnaud gained a popular audience by extolling evangelical asceticism, which was the antithesis of the oppressive hedonism of the clergy (deplorable in its spirit). He condemned the propriety of the priests and demanded more rigorous reforms. Thus, he did not delay in entering into conflict with the bishop of the town. Condemned by the Council of Lateran in 1139, though he professed neither the ideas of Pierre de Bruys nor those of Henri du Mans, Arnaud fell under the blow of an edict of banishment.

A refugee in France, close to Abelard, he incurred the threats of Bernard de Clairvaux, who pursued the master of his animosity. Persecuted by Bernard, Arnaud left for Constance, from which he [also] had to flee, denounced by an insiduous letter from the holy reformer. The troubles in Rome suddenly offered him the occasion to apply his ideas.

Upon the death of Innocent II (1143), a conflict of succession exploded, and was doubled by a schism caused by an Antipape, Anaclet II. The Roman bourgeoisie would soon profit by demanding the recognition of his rights. A crowd lynched Pope Lucius II. Arnaud survived as a mediator. He dealt with Eugene III, the successor to Lucius, and reestablished him in his functions, but did not succeed in keeping him under his control. The Pope, actually, estimated it more prudent to take refuge in Viterbe.

His hands free, Arnaud openly declared that he wished to destroy the power of the Church. His sermons preached the secularization of the clergy’s goods, the confiscation of the bishops’ and cardinals’ riches, and the abolition of their temporal power. Spiritual leader of the Roman revolution, he demanded a communal republic that would exclude the Pope’s govenment. His program offered to history the inconvenience of anticipating Garibaldi’s resolution by eight centuries.

On 15 July 1148, Eugune III — powerless to shake Arnaud’s power if the tribune’s politics did not tip over into delays and indecision — hurled an anathema upon Arnaud. Arnaud was mistaken when he appealed for rescue from Emperor Frederick, who was little inclined to tolerate the instauration in Rome of a popular and republican government. His partisans were divided upon the cogency of a frightening recourse. In 1155, Arnaud left Rome and fell into the hands of Frederick Barberousse, who, cutting across Tuscany, extended his tyrannical claws towards Rome. From then on, everything played out quickly. For the price of a tactical reconciliation, Arnaud was delivered up to Pope Adrian IV, who hastened to take him and burn him.

The Arnaudites, sometimes called the “poor of Lombardy,” sought refuge in France, where they enjoyed the adhesion of the partisans of Henri du Mans and Pierre de Bruys. Several years later, Pierre Valdo revived the dream of reform that implied the return to the evangelical community — historically speaking, that of the Second Century, but which Christian mythology and its sectarians back dated to Jesus and his apostles in an idyllic Palestine.

Ugo Speroni

Even if the presence of a particularly eloquent tribune or agitator brought a specific relief to the [necessity of] ideas of reform, the majority of communalist insurrections pell-mell brewed demands for independence, the appeal of commercial freedoms and the condemnation of the Catholic Church of dignitaries.

As discreet as it was, the work of Ugo Speroni, a jurist from Piacenza, was not less indicative of the popularity of ideas traditionally characterized as heretical and presented as the emanations of marginal or minoritarian small groups. In 1177, at the same time that Pierre Valdo seeded trouble in Lyon, Ugo Speroni led the struggle with equal brio on the political and religious fronts.

Ugo Speroni placed the accent on the importance of interiority, the intimate conviction of faith, which sufficed in itself, and he took exception to the Church and its sacramental arsenal. He rediscovered Pelagius when he assured [his followers] that the infant was born without sin and was thus saved, without baptism, if it should happen to die. The true Christian had no need to pass through the sacrifice of redemption to become chosen. The moral obstinacy to practice virtue was sufficient to fulfill the conditions of salvation. It was, moreover, from the force of conviction that the right of the Perfect Ones to unite, without submitting to the ecclesiastical ritual of marriage, derived.[329]