Chapter 35: The Fraticelles

The name “Fraticelles” (from the Italian fraticelli, sometimes translated in French as frerots or the “kid brothers”) designated the radical dissidents of the “Spiritual” faction that, in the Franciscan order, opposed to the “Conventual” or orthodox wing the strict vocation of poverty, as prescribed by Francis of Assisi.

Although John XXII applied the term to the Spirituals as a form of polemical malignity, he never seriously attacked the Fraticelles, who were blemished with the same spirit of freedom as the Beghards, Beguines, apostolics and Dolcinists.

Respectful for the original directives of Franciscanism, the Spirituals extolled — in addition to absolute poverty and the refusal of all ecclesiastical ownership — theses that were more and more embarrassing for the Church, which was engaged in the whirlpool of business affairs and already provided with the modern financial power that had hardly begun the decline of its political and spiritual authority in the Twentieth Century. Three men took the lead in the fight against pontifical politics: Angelo Clareno (Peter of Fossombrone), Pierre-Jean Olieu or Olivi, and Ubertino of Casale. Angelo Clareno gave an historical account of the conflict in his History of the Tribulations.

According to him, Crescentius — general of the order from 1244 to 1248 and successor of Elie of Cortone — showed “the same avidity for riches and science, the same aversion for the poor convents scattered in solitude, which he changed into sumptuous monasteries; around Crescentius, the brothers chased after testaments summoning their debtors to justice, devoted themselves to schools of dialectics, neglected prayer and Scripture in favor of the useless curiosities of Aristotle.”[402] Brother Bonadies, jurisconsulate and adjoint of the general, “drank fraud and lied like water.” He observed with a malevolent eye the growing sect of Spirituals “who do not walk, he thinks, according to the truth of the Gospel, scorning the rules of the order, believing themselves better than the others, living in their manner, relating everything to the Spirit and even wearing cloaks that are too short.”[403]

Innocent IV, then at war with Frederic II, would give Crescentius permission to pursue the dissidents and destroy to the roots “their occasions for schism and scandal in the order.” The ascension of John of Parme to the head of the order restored power to the Spirituals for a time, but their sympathies for Joachimite theories and the reforms of Segarelli offered their enemies the occasion to amalgamate the austere Spirituals and the “libertarian” party of the Fraticelles.

After exile in Armenia between 1290 and 1293, an autonomous group led by Liberat (Peter of Macerata) and Angelo Clareno obtained the protection of Pope Celestine V and, in 1294, they formed the Pauperes heremitae domini Caelestini. In vain, because Celestine’s successor, Boniface VIII, had the greatest interest in the temporal preoccupations of the Church. He condemned the Spirituals, threw into prison the poet Jaropone da Todi, who — converted to voluntary poverty after the accidental death of his wife (which did not prevent him from comparing women to serpents and Satan) — had joined Angelo Clareno’s friends.

Libertat and his adepts took refuge in Archaie, then Thessalia. Upon the death of Libertat, Angelo Clareno took the lead of the Spirituals and returned to Italy. One of his partisans, the physician and alchemist Arnaud of Villeneuve, convinced Clement V to reconcile the two rival tendencies.

Ubertino of Casale, leader of the Spirituals in Tuscanny, went to Avignon to confront the leaders of the Conventual faction, Bonagrazia of Bergamo and Raymond of Fronsac. It is not useless to recall that Ubertino estimated it good not to incur any reproach for having guilty sympathies for the Fraticelles, because as an Inquisitor he had raged against the Franciscan partisans of the Free-Spirit in the Spolete region. Arnaud himself did not disdain from anathematizing a doctrine so contrary to religion. The conciliation ran aground because the Conventuals did not know at what point the progress of the economy comforted the power of the Roman Church and its then-uncertain control over nations and principalities.

The ascension of John of Cahors, the redoutable businessman of the pontificat, under the name John XXII, gave the signal for the repression to begin. The same reprobation fell upon the Spirituals, Fraticelles, Dolcinists, Beghards and partisans of the Free-Spirit, who Clement V condemned at the Council of Vienna in 1311.

The Pope ordered that the sovereigns among whom the Spirituals had sought refuge expell them as heretics. The bull Sancta romana attributed the official denomination “Fraticelles” to them for the first time.

Arrested in Avignon and then freed, Angelo Clareno precipitously left for Italy, where in 1318 he rallied partisans to the thesis that the Christ and his disciples possessed nothing. At the Chapter of Perugia in 1322, he obtained important support in the person of Michel of Cesene, general minister of the Franciscan order, who held the absolute destitution of Jesus and the apostles to be “holy and Catholic” dogma. (To combat the thesis of the Spirituals using iconographic propaganda, the Church would recommend that painters represent Jesus and the apostles equipped with a purse.)

This directly challenged the interests of the Church, the tributary of capitalist development that slowly freed itself from the agrarian mode of production. Soon one saw the Joachimite legend return in force, rewritten and adapted for the people of the time. John XXII, leader of the “carnal Church,” was stigmatized as the “mystical Antichrist.”

The Antichrist, scorning the reformers and their preoccupation with the sordid aspects of life [miserabilisme], retorted with a very astute maneuver.

While Francis of Assisi prescribed that Saint-Siege retain all of the order’s furniture, the Pope decided to transfer it to the Franciscans, entrusting them with an arrangement that would also transform them willy-nilly into [property] owners. At the same time, his Bull dated 12 November 1323, Cum inter nonnullos, condemned as heretical the theses of Michel of Cesene, who also took refuge with his friends under the auspices of Emperor Louis of Bavaria.

Angelo Clareno went into exile in Basilicate, where he continued to lead his party until his death in 1337.

The Spirituals would remain active in the region of Naples, in Sicily (to which the Tuscan group of Henri of Ceva withdrew) and in Tabriz, Armenia.

It would be among the adepts of Monte Maiella that the Roman tribune Cola di Rienzo would be welcomed after his first failure.

In the eyes of the Church, there no longer existed a single Franciscanism, that of the “Observants.” The dissidents fell under the inquisitorial label “Fraticelles of Opinion,” opinion here designating the theses of voluntary poverty.

Bernard Delicieux

On 7 May 1318, the first victims of Franciscan orthodoxy perished on the pyres of Marseille. That same year, the Inquisition condemned to perpetual prison one of the rare, if not the only public and openly declared adversary of the Catholic and Roman police.

Born in Montpellier in 1260 and entered into the Franciscan order in 1284, Bernard Delicieux soon made himself the spokesman of the populations of Toulouse, Carcassonne and Razes, indignant about the machinations of the Inquisition and the barbarity of the Dominicans. In Carcassonne he led a riot that seized the citadel and freed the heretics held in the official “wall” or “prison.”

It was part of his intentions to appeal to the justice of the King of France, more generous in matters of faith but, implicated in a conspiracy (which was real or mere intrigue designed to bring him down), he would attract the disgrace of Philippe the Beautiful. The King had hanged the consuls of Carcassonne, Limoux and Razes; his despotic nature did not support the politics of communal autonomy. Reprieved in 1307, Bernard fell in 1313 into the net patiently woven by inquisitorial vindictiveness. He was accused of having attempted to poison the Pope with the complicity of Arnaud of Villeneuve. The crudeness of the accusation aroused reservations; he would only escape the pyre by dying in 1320, after two years of incarceration in the jail of God’s executioners, whose infamy he had denounced. It would only be in the Sixteenth Century, with Sebastian Castellion, that a second voice in the world concert would demand the abrogation of the death penalty for crimes of belief.

Prous Boneta

In 1325, the Inquisition seized Prous Boneta, venerated by the Spirituals for her courage and humanity. Imprisoned in 1315 in Montpellier, she resolved — as soon as she was freed — to give her help to the persecuted Spirituals with her sister Alissette.

In 1320, Prous was seized by visions, similar to those of Hadewijch, Mechtilde of Madgebourg and Teresa of Avila. Later, she had an ecstatic encounter with the Christ. Maundy Thursday, he breathed his pneuma into her and promised her she would give birth to the Holy Spirit that would inaugurate the Third Age. According to her own version of Joachimism, Elie was Francis of Assisi and Henoch was Olivi.

The power given to the Christ by God ended from the moment that Olivi was invested with the Holy Spirit: the papacy ceased to exist, the sacraments and confession fell into desuetude. Thenceforth, contrition effaced sin, without need of either penitences or priests.

Rising up against the massacre of the Spirituals and the lepers, unjustly accused of posioning water sources in 1321 and 1322, whom she compared to the Innocents (the alleged victims of Herod), Prous Boneta offered all the traits of a perfect victim to the eyes of the Inquisitor of Carcassonne, Henri of Chamay. She did not repudiate any of her convictions in front of the tribunal and was delivered to the flames in 1325.[404]

In Avignon, the celebrated troubadour Raimon of Cornet barely escaped the pyre in 1326. The same fate was narrowly escaped by Jean de la Rochetaillade (Juan de Pera Tallada, better known to alchemists as Rupescisse). Professing Joachimite opinions, this friend of Arnaud of Villeneuve and the Spirituals compared the Church to a bird born without feathers, which strips the plumage from all other birds so as to dress itself in pride and tyranny.

While the trials of the Spirituals multiplied in number, Free-Spirit and libertarian comportments were more often incriminated. Most often this meant the ordinary calumnies by which popes, ecclesiastical dignitaries and inquisitors imputed their own debauchery and erotic fantasms to the poor ascetics. The Spirituals had always fought the Fraticelles and nothing permits one to suspect the martyrs of Franciscan rigor — such as Francesco of Pistoia, burned in Venice in 1337, John of Castillon and Francis of Arquata, executed in Avignon in 1354, and Michel Perti, reduced to cinders in Florence in 1389 — of taking libidinous liberties.

In 1341, John XXII definitively confirmed the act of dissolution of the dissident group, doomed to extermination. Due to one of the aftershocks that often bring people penetrated by infamy to their downfall, this Pope, who was sensitive to the odor of burning fagots — he had the Bishop of Cahors (his home town) skinned alive and burned — , suddenly reiterated the doctrine of Pelage on the innocence of newborns and the uselessness of baptizing them. A council notified him of the silence concerning a matter so profitable for the Church’s interests, which he had always defended vehemently. Scared to hear from his mouth such manifestly heretical remarks, the conciliatory fathers deposed him and discretely put him to death.

Bentivenga Da Gubio

He became one of the members of the Franciscan Observance — an order invested at the beginning of the inquisitorial missions, the Franciscans being reputed to act with less ferocity than the Dominicans — so to impose a final solution to what John XXII called the “pestilential plague of Fraticellianism.”

Unlike the Spirituals accustomed to asceticism, the Fraticelles were most often confused with the Beghards and the apostolics of Free-Spirit. Such was the case with Bentivenga da Gubio.

In Parme, Bentivenga adhered to the apostolic group of Gerard Segarelli until the episcopal prohibition of 1281, which provoked the dispersion of the adepts. He then joined the Minorites (minor brothers or Franciscans) and in Ombria rallied the partisans of Free-Spirit, who were numerous in the region. Before his arrival, there was in Spolete, around a certain Ottonello, a Congregatio Libertatis that was fought by Jacopo da Bevagna, whom Claire of Montfaucon would much later suspect of [being] Free-Spirit. His influence was such that the Flagellants passing through the valley abandoned their procession to discover the effects of pleasure freed from suffering.

Conceit would incite Bentivenga to expound his theories to Claire of Montfaucon, then sanctified. She delivered him to the Inquisition with six other Minorites. Ubertino of Casale, part of the Spiritual current, had already taken him to task in his Arbor vitae crucifixae Jesu. He reproached him for ideas “inspired by the Devil to corrupt the spirit of the simple people.” He summarized those ideas thus:

1. Apathy: an impious deception has appeared, inspired by the Enemy, which corrupts the spirits of the simple people, according to which they must — under the pretext of serenity in the will of God — remain as insensitive to the Passion of the Christ as the suffering of anyone else, and rejoice only in the pleasure of God, without caring if one offends God or anyone else. And they say, ‘God guides all towards the best of the choices.’

2. Impeccability: they say that men who have the grace of God and charity can not sin. They affirm that those who sin in some fashion have never had charity nor the grace of God.

3. From the quite true principle of the death of the Son — we can do nothing good without grace — they infer that, whatever we do, it is through grace. For this reason, they say that eating and making love and other, similar things are not due to faults in us, because grace — they are assured — incites these things.[405]

In the summer of 1307, Bentivenga was condemned to life in prison in Florence.

Paolo Zoppo

In Rieti, the Inquisitor Simone da Spoleto began in 1334 a procedure against a group of Fraticelles united around Paolo Zoppo. Robert of Arbrissel called the ordeal that consisted in sleeping nude between two nude women and triumphing over the desire to make love the “white martyr”; Zoppo himself practiced with a widow and her servant a style of caresses in which delays imposed upon the “amor extaticus” were related to the tantric method of illumination obtained by sexual tension. The same delayed pleasure was practiced by the Homines Intelligentiae [Men of Intelligence] in Brussels and the Alumbrados or “Illuminati” of Spain. Paolo Zoppo and his companions paid with life in prison for wanting to substitute for the ordinary, cunning and brutal debauchery of the convents the refinement of amorous pleasure and the celebration of women, creators of all joy.[406]

At the time of the trial in Rieti, it appeared that the Fraticelles envisioned electing a Pope who would be opposed to the “Antichrist John XXII.” Angelo Clareno himself recommended giving the pontificat to Philippe of Majorca, which was attested to by Francis Vanni of Assisi.

In 1419, the Inquisitor Manfred of Verceil reported that the Fraticelles of Opinion — particularly numerous in Florence, Tuscanny and the region around Rome — refused to submit to Martin V because they had their own Pope. When Nicolas V tasked the Inquisition with proceeding against the Fraticelles who had taken refuge in Athens in 1451, he specially recommended the capture of the one who passed for Pope.

The Extermination Trial Of The Fraticelles

Tasked by Martin V in 1418 and 1426 and by Eugene IV in 1432 with pitilessly pursuing the Fraticelles, Jacques de la Marche and John of Capistrano — both honored with the title of saint for their good inquisitorial services — burned 36 rebel residences and multiplied bookburnings. The hatred that they aroused in the people was such that they had to ceaselessly protect themselves against assassination attempts.

In 1449, new pyres were lit in Florence. In 1452, the same year in which Jerome Savonarola was born, Jacques de la Marche published his Dialogue against the Fraticelles, in which he retraced the extermination-trial of Maiolati.

There had been a community of Fraticelles of Free-Spirit ever since 1410 or 1420. A bell at the church carried the inscription, dated 1429: “Brother Gabriel, Bishop of the Church of Philadelphia, (*) parish priest and general minister of the minor brothers.”

(*) A century earlier, a friend of Marguerite [Porete] called himself the angel of Philadelphia.

The minutes of the trial were inspired by the accusations Epiphanius once made against the Barbelites (the Inquisitors used it without scruple against the Vaudois and the Cathars): men and women meeting at night, chanting hymns, “extinguishing the candles and rushing to each other according to chance. The children issued from such commerce were brought before the assembly; one passed them hand-to-hand in a round until they died. The one in whose hands they died was elected the great pontiff. They burned one of the babies and threw the cinders in a vessel into which they poured wine; they made those initiated into their brotherhood drink from it. They fought against the ownership of goods and believed that the faithful did not need to engage any magistrates and that the souls of the fortunate would only see God after the resurrection.”[407] Thus did Pierre Bayle recount the trial in his Dictionary. He did not believe in a practice often used to justify the cruelest repressions and that the Inquisitors called the “barilotto” [keg or barrel]. The propaganda cunningly conducted so as to bring the discredit of pious souls upon the unfortunate Fraticelles would exercise its ravages upon public opinion with a durable effect, since popular language would for a long time afterwards conserve the insulting expression “Tu sei nato dal barilotto” (“You were born from a barilotto”).

For all that, Bayle estimated that a strong probability existed that this Fraticelle community led a joyous life for 30 years, managing a terrestrial existence as luxurious and luxuriant as possible, with the approval of the heavens, and in the absence of the guilt that gnawed at the tormented hedonism of the powerful. The rage of the two Holy Inquisitions was only exacerbated. A great expiatory blaze illuminated the sinister depths of their consciences.[408]

In 1466, a group of Fraticelles arrested and tortured in Assisi confirmed — upon the insistence of the inquisitors — the existence of the barilotto in Poli near Tivoli, in the Marches and in Maiolati. The sect, known under the name “The Truth,” which had anarchronistically Freemasonic connotations, propagated lampoons in which the ideas of the Free-Spirit were expounded.[409]

As among the Beghards of Cologne, the solicitation to love was expressed by the formula “Fac mihi caritatem” (“Give me charity”), caritas here re-finding its original meaning of “love of the next person,” carus, “beloved.”

The Fraticelles disappeared from the Inquisition’s registers, but a popular fable has it that, entrenched in the deep valleys and forests, they continued fantastic convents that haunted the tormented imaginations of the readers of de Sade, Lewis, Ann Radcliff, Walpole and the gothic novel.