Chapter 37: The Men of Intelligence and the Pikarti of Bohemia

On 12 June 1411, Willem van Hildernissem of the Carmelite order was called before the Inquisitor Henri de Selles, acting on the behalf of the episcopal tribunal of Cambrai. Willem van Hildernissem was accused of playing an important role in a group of Free-Spirit known to Brussels under the name the Men of Intelligence. Formerly a reader of Holy Scriptures at the Carmel of Tirlemont, he found an inspired ally in Gilles of Canter (Gilles the Cantor, Aegidius Cantor), a sexagenarian layman (probably the son of a noble family) who was dead by the time of the trial.

Everything seems to indicate that they shared an interest in the theories of Bloemardine, whose memory remained more vivid than any inquisitor dared to imagine. Ironically, Henri de Selles — attached to the Abbey of Groenendael where Ruysbroeck, the enemy of Bloemardine, died in 1381 — barely escaped a premeditated assassination attempt at a crossing by the partisans of the Humines Intelligentiae. In the absence of an execution, a song ridiculing the Inquisitor circulated in Brussels.

The support that the group received from both the working class and the notables (their meetings were held in a tower owned by an alderman) was not foreign to their leniency of judgment. After three years in prison, Willem was allowed out, perhaps due to a conciliation in which he adjured and rejected the most subversive part of Gilles’ doctrine.

The Joachimite connotation was made straight off by the very name of the sect. The Third Age was that of the natural intelligence of beings and things, a “scholarly ignorance” in which the innocence of the child and the learning of the total man was joined, a union of gnosis and pistis, with pistis not meaning faith in God but faith in oneself. Gilles of Canter thus said that one day the Holy Spirit inspired him and said to him: “You have arrived at the stage of a child of three years.”

In the original, natural state of freedom, there was neither sin, nor guilt, neither spiritual nor temporal authority. The Church, the laws and the sacraments had no meaning; nor did penitence or redemption. The only important thing was the road to perfection on which amorous ecstasy translated the state of perfect humanity (and thus “divinity” in religious language). The adepts of Gilles and Willem thus traveled along — if they desired to — an initiatory road marked by the diverse degrees of amorous pleasure, but each person was free to remain chaste or to give him- or herself up to libertinage.

Well versed in the Holy Scriptures, Willem van Hildernissem was able to justify any behavior with appropriate quotations, because everything was intended by God.

In the “paradise” in which the sectarians reunited without distinction of class or wealth, Gilles of Canter taught a way of making love “that was that of Adam before the Fall.” This was probably a [form of] delayed orgasm, without ejaculation, ending up in tantric illumination and the removal of the fear of pregnancy for the women.

The absence of fear and guilt, allied with an art of coming [jouir] that authorized the most voluptuous quests in all domains, easily induced the feeling in the spirit of the adepts that they belonged to an elite, without common measure to the mass of contemporaries leading an absurd and frightened life under the shepherd’s crook of the lords and the priests.

The prudence employed during the trial, and the derisory rigor of the judgment, suggested the cleverness of the adepts in propagating their doctrines in complete safety, enjoying a great favor in the urban areas and the protection of the notables. Such were the doctrines that the “Pikarti,” who left Picardy to radicalize the Taborite revolution, attempted to implant in Bohemia.[415]

The Pikarti, Or The Adamites Of Bohemia

Who were the Pikarti who around 1418 flocked to Bohemia, where the Taborites had instaurated a kind of peasant collectivism? Contrary to the opinion that sees in the word Pikarti a translation of bagardi, Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini gave it the meaning “Picard, originally from Belgian Gaul.”[416] The Free-Spirit doctrine that they propagated suggests a close relationship with the Homines Intelligentiae, whose community in Brussels had been purged by the Inquisition.

In the manner of the Anabaptists tramping towards Munster a century later, the Pikarti converged on Bohemia, where the Hussite insurrection sent out glimmers of freedom and gave glimpses of the opportunity for an existence in accordance with the teachings of Willem van Hildernissem and Gilles of Canter.

The Picardian doctrine especially took hold in the regions that were badly controlled by the Taborites, such as Zatec, Plzen and Prague. It showed through under a watered-down form in the closed field of theological quarrels surrounding Sigmund of Repan and especially Martin Huska, called “Loquis,” who preached a kind of Dolcinism, which evoked the end of time and the reign of the saints. In the fashion of the times, Huska announced “if the Christians must always suffer thus, I would not want to be a servant of God.”

In February 1421, the chronicler Laurent of Brczova denounced the progression of the Free-Spirit among the Taborites: “Because of this heresy, alas! The brothers living in Tabor have split into two factions, one Picard[ian], the other Taborite. The most faithful party, the Taborites, expelled more than 200 men and women who were infected by the Picardian heresy.”[417]

In the Eighteenth Century, Beausobre would attribute to the Pikarti the name Adamites, due to the Edenic innocence that they claimed for themselves. According to Laurent: “Traveling through forests and over hills, several of them fell into such madness that men and women disencumbered themselves of their clothes and went around nude, saying that clothing had been adopted because of the sins committed by the first parents, but they were in a state of innocence. Through a similar madness, they imagined that there was no sin if one of the brothers had commerce with one of the sisters. And, if the woman gave birth, she would say that she had conceived through the Holy Spirit. (Baptism was not practiced because) children of parents living in holiness (that is to say, the members of the community) were conceived without the original, mortal sin (...). They prayed to God whom they possessed inside them by saying: Our Father who is inside us ...”[418]

Aloof from Picardian radicalization, Martin Huska remained loyal to the apostolic tradition and was inspired by more moderate demands so as to instaurate a religious modernism in matters of the eucharist.

The autonomy of the Picardian community would last two months, from December 1420 to January 1421. Its spokesperson, Peter Kanis, seconded by men and women of the people such as Rohan the Blacksmith, Nicolas also known as Moses, Adam, and Mary preached in the taverns and celebrated the free weddings of love that the clergy and the Taborites called fornication or sexual license.

Soon enough, the persecutions of the Pikarti began. Nicolas of Pehlrimov published a treatise against Kanis as a prelude to the attack that, around mid-April, military chief Jan Zizka launched against those expelled from Tabor. Fifty prisoners, including Peter Kanis, were burned at Klokoty.

The survivors then organized their resistance under the leadership of Rohan the Blacksmith. On 20 April, after violent fighting, Zizka crushed the Pikarti and sent 25 prisoners to the pyre. Others were executed in Prague.

On 21 October 1421, the partisans of Kanis who had taken refuge in a forest outside of Bernatice succumbed and were exterminated, except for one person who was spared so that he could report upon the Picardian doctrine. A small number of Adamites occupied the fortress of Ostrov for a while before winning the south by conducting subsistance raids against the villages, which gave them a reputation for brigandage.

The terror by which Zizka’s Taborites exonerated themselves from their own difficulties made an expiatory victim of Martin Huska. Although Huska was no longer in solidarity with the Pikarti and had abjured, Zizka vowed that he would be burned in Prague, along with his friend Procope the Blind. Frightened by the troubles in the capital, where Martin enjoyed great sympathy, the magistrates preferred to send their executioner to Roudnica. Martin and Procope were put to death in a refinement of tortures that the Inquisition used to punish the Taborite heretics, inspired by the same God, it is true.