We have seen astrology classed as one of the liberal arts by Alonso the

Wise of Castile, and the implicit belief universally accorded to it

throughout the Middle Ages caused it to be so generally employed that

its condemnation was difficult. I have alluded above to the confidence

reposed by Frederic II. in the science, and to the Dominican astrologer

who accompanied the Archbishop of Ravenna when as papal legate he led

the crusade against Ezzelin da Romano. Ezzelin himself kept around him a

crowd of astrologers, and was led to his last disastrous enterprise by

their mistaken counsel. So thoroughly accepted were its principles that

when, in 1305, the College of Cardinals wrote to Clement V. to urge his

coming to Rome, they reminded him that every planet is most powerful in

its own house. Savonarola assures us that at the end of the fifteenth

century those who could afford to keep astrologers regulated every

action by their advice: if the question were to mount on horseback or to

go on board ship, to lay the foundation of a house or to put on a new

garment, the astrologer stood by with his astrolabe in hand to announce

the auspicious moment--in fact, he says that the Church itself was

governed by astrology, for every prelate had his astrologer, whose

advice he dared not disregard. It is observable that astrology is not

included, as a forbidden practice, in the inquisitorial formulas of

interrogation during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. No books

on astrology seem to be enumerated in the condemnation pronounced in

1290 by the Inquisitor and Bishop of Paris and the Archbishop of Sens,

aided by the Masters of the University, on all books of divination and

magic--treatises on necromancy, geomancy, pyromancy, hydromancy, and

chiromancy, the book of the Ten Rings of Venus, the books of the Greek

and German Babylon, the book of the Four Mirrors, the book of the Images

of Tobias ben Tricat, the book of the Images of Ptolemy, the book of

Hermes the Magician to Aristotle, which they say Aros, or Gabriel, had

from God, containing horrible incantations and detestable

suffumigations. Astrology does not appear for condemnation in the

Articles of the University of Paris in 1398, and the great learning of

the irreproachable Cardinal Peter d'Ailly was employed in diffusing

belief in its truths. On the other hand, as early as the twelfth

century John of Salisbury, while asserting that the power of the stars

was grossly exaggerated, declares that astrology was forbidden and

punished by the Church, that it deprived man of free-will by inculcating

fatalism, and that it tended to idolatry by transferring omnipotence

from the Creator to his creations. He adds that he had known many

astrologers, but none on whom the hand of God did not inflict divine

vengeance. These views became virtually the accepted doctrine of the

Church as expounded by Thomas Aquinas in the distinction that when

astrology was used to predict natural events, such as drought or rain,

it was lawful; when employed to divine the future acts of men dependent

on free-will, it involved the operation of demons, and was unlawful.

Zanghino says that though it is one of the seven liberal arts and not

prohibited by law, yet it has a tendency to idolatry, and is condemned

by the canonists. There was, in fact, much in both the theories and

practice of astrologers which trenched nearly upon heresy, not only

through demoniac invocations, but because it was impossible that

astrology could be cultivated without denying human free-will and

tacitly admitting fatalism. The very basis of the so-called science lay

in the influence which the signs and planets exercised on the fortunes

and characters of men at the hour of birth, and no ingenious dialectics

could explain away its practical denial of supervision to God and of

responsibility to man. Even Roger Bacon failed in this. He fully

accepted the belief that the stars were the cause of human events, that

the character of every man was shaped by the aspect of the heavens at

his birth, and that the past and future could be read by tables which he

repeatedly and vainly sought to construct, yet he was illogical enough

to think that he could guard against it by nominally reserving human

free-will.[480] All astrologers thus practised their profession under

liability of being at any moment called to account by the Inquisition.

That this did not occur more often may be attributed to the fact that

all classes, in Church and State, from the lowest to the highest,

believed in astrology and protected astrologers, and some special

inducement or unusual indiscretion was required to set in motion the

machinery of prosecution.

We can thus understand the case of the celebrated Peter of Abano or

Apono, irrespective of his reputation as the greatest magician of his

age, earned for him among the vulgar by his marvellous learning and his

unsurpassed skill in medicine. We have no details of the accusations

brought against him by the Inquisition, but we may reasonably assume

that there was little difficulty in finding ample ground for

condemnation. In his _Conciliator Differentium_, written in 1303, he not

only proved that astrology was a necessary part of medicine, but his

estimate of the power of the stars practically eliminated God from the

government of the world. The Deluge took place when the world was

subject to Mars, in consequence of the conjunction of the planets in

Pisces; it was under the lead of the moon when occurred the confusion of

tongues, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and the exodus from

Egypt. Even worse was his Averrhoistic indifference to religion

manifested in the statement that the conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter

in the head of Aries, which occurs every nine hundred and sixty years,

causes changes in the monarchies and religions of the world, as appears

in the advent of Nebuchadnezzar, Moses, Alexander the Great, Christ, and

Mahomet--a speculation of which the infidelity is even worse than the

chronology.[481] It is not surprising that the Inquisition took hold of

one whose great name was popularizing such doctrines in the University

of Padua, especially as there was a large fortune to be confiscated. We

are told that he at first escaped its clutches, but this probably was

only through confession and abjuration, so that when he was prosecuted a

second time it was for relapse. That he would have been burned there can

be little doubt, had he not evaded the stake by opportunely dying in

1316, before the termination of his trial, for he was posthumously

condemned: according to one account his bones were burned; according to

another his faithful mistress Marietta conveyed them secretly away, and

an effigy was committed to the flames in his place. If Benvenuto da

Imola is to be believed, he lost his faith in the stars on his

death-bed, for he said to his friends that he had devoted his days to

three noble sciences, of which philosophy had made him subtle, medicine

had made him rich, and astrology had made him a liar. His name passed

into history as that of the most expert of necromancers, concerning whom

no marvels were too wild to find belief. It mattered little that Padua

erected a statue to him as to one of her greatest sons, and that

Frederic, Duke of Urbino, paid him the same tribute. Like Solomon and

Hermes and Ptolemy, so long as magic flourished his name served as an

attractive frontispiece to various treatises on incantations and the

occult sciences.[482]

Very similar, but even more illustrative, is the case of Cecco d'Ascoli.

He early distinguished himself as a student of the liberal arts, and

devoted himself to astrology, in which he was reckoned the foremost man

of his time. His vanity led him to proclaim himself the profoundest

adept since Ptolemy, and his caustic and biting humor made him abundance

of enemies. Regarding astrology as a science, he inevitably brought it

within Aquinas's definition of heresy. In his conception the stars ruled

everything. A man born under a certain aspect of the heavens was doomed

to be rich or poor, lucky or unlucky, virtuous or vicious, unless God

should interfere specially to turn aside the course of nature. Cecco

boasted that he could read the thoughts of a man or tell what he

carried in his closed hand by knowing his nativity and comparing it with

the position of the stars at the moment, for no one could help doing or

thinking what the stars at the time rendered inevitable. All this was

incompatible with free-will, it limited the intervention of God, it

relieved man from responsibility for his acts, and it thus was

manifestly heretical. So his numerous predictions, which we are told

were verified, as to the fortunes of Louis of Bavaria, of Castruccio

Castrucani, of Charles of Calabria, eldest son of Robert of Naples, won

him great applause in that stirring time, yet, as they were not revealed

by the divine spirit of prophecy, but were foreseen by astrologic skill,

they implied the forbidden theory of fatalism. Cecco became official

astrologer to Charles of Calabria, but his confidence in his science and

his savage independence unfitted him for a court. On the birth of a

princess (presumably the notorious Joanna I.), he pronounced that the

stars in the ascendant would render her not only inclined, but

absolutely constrained, to sell her honor. The unwelcome truth cost him

his place, and he betook himself to Bologna, where he publicly taught

his science. Unluckily for him, he developed his theories in

commentaries on the _Sphæra_ of Sacrobosco.[483] Villani tells us that

in this he taught how, by incantations under certain constellations,

malignant spirits could be constrained to perform marvels, but this

manifestly is only popular rumor; such practices were wholly

inconsistent with his conceptions, and there is no allusion to them in

the inquisitorial proceedings. Cecco's audacity, however, rendered the

book amply offensive to pious ears. To illustrate his views he cast the

horoscope of Christ, and showed how Libra, ascending in the tenth

degree, rendered his crucifixion inevitable; as Capricorn was at the

angle of the earth, he was necessarily born in a stable; as Scorpio was

in the second degree, he was poor; while Mercury in his own house in the

ninth section of the heavens rendered his wisdom profound. In the same

way he proved that Antichrist would come two thousand years after

Christ, as a great soldier nobly attended, and not surrounded by cowards

as was Christ. This was almost a challenge to the Inquisition, and Frà

Lamberto del Cordiglio, the Bolognese inquisitor, was not slow to take

it up. Cecco was forced to abjure, December 16, 1324, and was mercifully

treated. He was condemned to surrender all his books of astrology and

forbidden to teach the science in Bologna, publicly or privately; he was

deprived of his Master's degree and subjected to certain salutary

penance of fasting and prayer, together with a fine of seventy-five

lire, which latter may possibly explain the lightness of the rest of the

sentence. The most serious feature of the affair for him was that now he

was a penitent heretic who could expect no further mercy; it behooved

him to walk warily, for in case of fresh offence he would be a relapsed,

doomed inevitably to the stake. Cecco's temperament, however, was not

one to brook such constraint. He came to Florence, then under the rule

of Charles of Calabria, and resumed the practice of his art. He

circulated copies of his forbidden work, which he claimed had been

corrected by the Bolognese inquisitor, but which contained the same

erroneous doctrines; he advanced them anew in his philosophical poem,

_L'Acerba_, and he employed them in the responses given to his numerous

clients. In May, 1327, when all Italy was excited at the coming of Louis

of Bavaria, he predicted that Louis would enter Rome and be crowned, he

announced the time and manner of his death, and gave advice, which was

followed, not to attack him when he passed by Florence. Perhaps all this

might have escaped animadversion but for the personal enmity and

jealousy of Charles of Calabria's chancellor, the Bishop of Aversa, and

of Dino del Garbo, a renowned doctor of philosophy, esteemed the best

physician in Italy. Be this as it may, in July, 1327, Frà Accursio, the

Inquisitor of Florence, arrested him. There was ample evidence that he

had continued to teach and act on the fatalistic theories which were

subversive of free-will, but the Inquisition as usual required a

confession, and torture was freely used to obtain it. A copy of the

sentence and abjuration of 1324 was furnished by the Inquisitor of

Bologna, and there was no question as to his relapse. From the beginning

the end was inevitable, but there was a mockery of opportunity for

defence allowed him, and it was not until December 15 that sentence was

pronounced. In accordance with rule, the Bishop of Florence sent a

delegate to act with the inquisitor, and an assembly of high dignitaries

and experts was assembled to participate, including the Cardinal-legate

of Tuscany, the Bishop of Aretino, and Cecco's enemy, the chancellor of

Duke Charles. He was abandoned to the secular arm and delivered to

Charles's vicar, Jacopo da Brescia. All his books and astrological

writings were further ordered to be surrendered within twenty-four hours

to the bishop or inquisitor. Cecco was forthwith conducted to the place

of execution beyond the walls. Tradition relates that he had learned by

his art that he should die between Africa and "Campo Fiore," and so sure

was he of this that on the way to the stake he mocked and ridiculed his

guards; but when the pile was about to be lighted he asked whether there

was any place named Africa in the vicinage, and was told that that was

the name of a neighboring brook flowing from Fiesole to the Arno. Then

he recognized that Florence was the Field of Flowers and that he had

been miserably deceived.[484]

Astrology continued to hold its doubtful position with a growing

tendency to its condemnation. There were few who could take the

common-sense view of Petrarch, that astrologers might be useful if they

confined themselves to predicting eclipses and storms, and heat and

cold, but that when they talked about the fate of men, known only to

God, they simply proved themselves to be liars. Eymerich tells us that

if a man was suspected of necromancy and was found to be an astrologer

it went far to prove him a necromancer, for the two were almost always

conjoined. Gerard Groot denounced astrology as a science hostile to God

and aiming to supersede his laws. In Spain, in the middle of the

fourteenth century, both Pedro the Cruel of Castile and Pedro IV. of

Aragon kept many astrologers whom they constantly consulted, but in 1387

Juan I. of Castile included astrology among other forms of divination

subject to the penalties of the Partidas. Yet it continued to number its

votaries among high dignitaries of both State and Church. The only shade

on the lustre of Cardinal Peter d'Ailly's reputation was his earnest

devotion to the science, and it would have gone hard with him had

justice been meted out to him as to Cecco d'Ascoli, for it was

impossible for the astrologer to avoid fatalism. It was a curiously

erroneous prediction of his, uttered in 1414, that, in consequence of

the retrogression of Jupiter in the first house, the Council of

Constance would result in the destruction of religion, and peace in the

Church would not be obtained; that, in fact, the Great Schism was

probably the prelude to the coming of Antichrist. More fortunate was the

computation by which he arrived at the date of 1789 as that which would

witness great perturbations if the world should so long endure. The

tolerance which spared Cardinal d'Ailly did not proceed from any change

in the theory of the Church as to the heresy of interfering with the

doctrine of free-will. Alonso de Spina points out that the astrological

belief that men born under certain stars cannot avoid sinning is

manifestly heretical. None the less so was the teaching that when the

moon and Jupiter were in conjunction in the head of the Dragon any one

praying to God could obtain whatever he wanted, as Peter of Abano found

when he used this fortunate moment to secure stores of knowledge beyond

the capacity of the unassisted human mind. Sprenger, the highest

authority on demonology, held that in astrology there was a tacit pact

with the demon.[485] All this shows that in the increasing hostility to

occult arts astrology had gradually come under the ban, and the disputed

question as to its position was finally brought to a decision, at least

for France, by the case of Simon Pharees in 1494. He had been condemned

by the archiepiscopal court of Lyons for practising astrology, and was

punished with the light penance of Friday fasting for a year, with the

threat of perpetual imprisonment for relapse, and his books and

astrolabe had been detained. He had the audacity to appeal to the

Parlement, which referred his books to the University. The report of the

latter was that his books ought to be burned, even as others had

recently been to the value of fifty thousand deniers. All astrology

pretending to be prophetic, or ascribing supernatural virtue to rings,

charms, etc., fabricated under certain constellations, was denounced as

false, vain, superstitious, and condemned by both civil and canon law,

as well as the use of the astrolabe for finding things lost or divining

the future, and the Parlement was urged to check the rapid spread of

this art invented by Satan. The Parlement accordingly pronounced a

judgment handing over the unlucky Simon to the Bishop and Inquisitor of

Paris, to be punished for his relapse. Astrology, which is described as

practised openly everywhere, is condemned. All persons are prohibited

from consulting astrologers or diviners about the future, or about

things lost or found; all printers are forbidden to print books on the

subject, and are ordered to deliver whatever copies they may have to

their bishops, and all bishops are instructed to prosecute astrologers.

This was a very emphatic condemnation, but, in the existing condition of

human intelligence, it could do little to check the insatiable thirst

for impossible knowledge. Yet there were some superior minds which

rejected the superstition. The elder Pico della Mirandola and Savonarola

were of these, and Erasmus ridiculed it in the Encomium Moriæ.[486]

The question of oneiroscopy, or divination by dreams, was a puzzling

one. On the one hand there was the formal prohibition of the

Deuteronomist (XVIII. 10), which in the Vulgate included the observer

of dreams in its denunciations; on the other there were the examples of

Joseph and Daniel, and the formal assertion of Job "when deep sleep

falleth upon man, in slumberings upon the bed, then he openeth the ears

of men and sealeth their instruction" (Job XXXIII. 15, 16). In the

twelfth century the expounding of dreams was a recognized profession

which does not seem to have been forbidden. John of Salisbury endeavors

to prove that no reliance is to be placed on them; Joseph and Daniel

were inspired, and short of inspiration no divination from dreams is to

be trusted. This, at least, was a more sensible and practical solution

than the conclusion reached by Thomas Aquinas that divination from

dreams produced by natural causes or divine revelation is licit, but if

the dreams proceed from dæmonic influence it is illicit. Tertullian had

long before ascribed to the pagans the power of sending prophetic dreams

through the agency of demons, but unfortunately, no one could furnish a

criterion to distinguish between the several classes of visions, and as

a rule the dream-expounders were regarded as harmless.[487]

There was another class of cases which puzzled the casuists, for the

bounds which divided sacred from goetic magic were very vague. There was

a practice of celebrating mortuary masses in the name of a living man,

under the belief that it would kill him. As early as 694 the seventeenth

Council of Toledo prohibits this, under pain of degradation for the

officiating priest and perpetual exile for him and for his employer; and

in the middle of the fifteenth century the learned Lope Barrientos,

Bishop of Cuenca, condemns it unreservedly. Yet a MS. of uncertain date,

printed by Wright, while pronouncing it sin if done through private

malice, for which the officiating priest should be deposed unless he

purge himself with due penance, states that for a public object it is

not a sin, because it manifests humility in placating God. Somewhat

similar was a question which arose during a quarrel between Henry,

Bishop of Cambrai, and his chapter in 1500. As a mode of revenge the

dean, provost, and canons suspended divine service, for which they were

excommunicated by the Archbishop of Reims. Under this pressure they

resumed their holy functions, but varied them by introducing in the

canon of the mass a sort of imprecatory litany, composed of comminatory

fragments from the psalms and prophets, recited by the officiating

priest with his back to the altar, while the responses were given by the

boys in the choir. The frightened bishop appealed to the University of

Paris, which, after many months' deliberation, gravely decided that the

position of the priest and the responses of the boys rendered the

services suspect of incantation; that imprecatory services are to be

dreaded by those who give cause for them; that they are not lightly to

be used, especially against a bishop who is ready for settlement in the

courts, and that they ought not to be employed even against a

contumacious bishop except in case of necessity arising from extreme

peril.[488]

* * * * *

When, towards the close of the thirteenth century, the Inquisition

succeeded in including sorcery within its jurisdiction, its organizing

faculty speedily laid down rules and formulas for the guidance of its

members which aided largely in shaping the uncertain jurisprudence of

the period and gave a decided impulse to the persecution of those who

practised the forbidden arts. A manual of practice, which probably bears

date about the year 1280, contains a form for the interrogation of the

accused covering all the details of sorcery as known at the time. This

served as the foundation on which still more elaborate formulas were

constructed by Bernard Gui and others. If space permitted, a

reproduction of these would present a tolerably complete picture of

current superstitions, but I can only pause to call attention to one

feature in them. The earliest draught contains no allusion to the

nocturnal excursions of the "good women" whence the Witches' Sabbat was

derived, while the later ones introduce an interrogation concerning it,

showing that during the interval it was attracting increased attention.

It is further noteworthy that none of the formulas embrace questions

concerning practices of vulgar witchcraft, which in the fifteenth and

succeeding centuries, as we shall see, furnished nearly the whole basis

of prosecutions for sorcery.[489]

When sorcery thus came under the jurisdiction of the Inquisition it came

simply as heresy, and the whole theory of its treatment was altered. The

Inquisition was concerned exclusively with belief; acts were of interest

to it merely as evidence of the beliefs which they inferred, and all

heresies were equal in guilt, whether they consisted in affirming the

poverty of Christ or led to demon-worship, pacts with Satan, and

attempts on human life. The sorcerer might, therefore, well prefer to

fall into the hands of the Inquisition rather than to be judged by the

secular tribunals, for in the former case he had the benefit of the

invariable rules observed in dealings with heresy. By confession and

abjuration he could always be admitted to penance and escape the stake,

which was the customary secular punishment; while, having no convictions

such as animated the Cathari and Waldenses, it cost his conscience

nothing to make the necessary recantation. In the inquisitorial records,

in so far as they have reached us, we meet with no cases of hardened and

obdurate demon-worshippers. Inquisitorial methods could always secure

confession, and the inquisitorial manuals give us examples of the

carefully drawn formulas of abjuration administered and forms for the

sentences to be pronounced. It may perhaps be questioned whether the

fiery torture of the stake were not preferable to the inquisitorial

mercy which confined its penitents to imprisonment for life in chains

and on bread and water; but few men have resolution to prefer a speedy

termination to their sufferings, and there was always the hope that

exemplary conduct in prison might earn a mitigation of the penalty. It

was probably in consequence of this apparent lenity that Philippe le

Bel, in 1303, forbade the Inquisition to take cognizance of usury,

sorcery, and other offences of the Jews; and we shall see hereafter that

when it was forced to summon all its energies in the epidemics of

witchcraft, it was obliged to abandon the rule and find excuses for

delivering its repentant victims to the stake.[490]

About this time Zanghino gives us the current Italian ecclesiastical

view of the subject. In his detailed description of the various species

of magic, vulgar witchcraft finds no place, showing that it was unknown

in Italy as in France. All such matters are under episcopal

jurisdiction, and the Inquisition cannot meddle with them unless they

savor of manifest heresy. But it is heretical to assert that the future

can be foretold by such means, as this belongs to God alone; to receive

responses from demons is heretical, or to make them offerings, or to

worship sun, moon, or stars, planets or the elements, or to believe that

anything is to be obtained except from God, or that anything can be done

without the command of God, or that anything is proper and lawful which

is disapproved by the Church. All this falls within the jurisdiction of

the Inquisition, and it will be seen that the meshes of the net were

small enough to let little escape. The penalties of death and

confiscation, to be inflicted by the secular judge, doubtless refer to

the impenitent and relapsed, as the cases which savored of heresy were

punished as heresy by the inquisitor. Magic which did not thus savor of

manifest heresy was subject to the episcopal courts, and was punishable

by declaring the offender in mortal sin and debarred from communion; he

and those who employed him were infamous; he was to be warned to

abstain, with excommunication and other penalties, at the episcopal

discretion, in case of disobedience. Yet the secular power by no means

abandoned its jurisdiction over sorcery, which continued to be subject

to the lay as well as to the ecclesiastical courts. The time, moreover,

had not come for the pitiless extermination of all who dabbled in

forbidden arts. By the Milanese law of the period the punishment of the

sorcerer was left to the discretion of the judge, who could inflict

either corporal or pecuniary penalties proportioned to the gravity of

the offence.[491]

Sorcery was one of the aberrations certain to respond to persecution by

more abundant development. So long as its reality was acknowledged and

its professors were punished, not as sharpers, but as the possessors of

evil powers of unknown extent, the more public attention was drawn to it

the more it flourished. As soon as the Inquisition had systematized its

suppression, we begin to find it occupy a larger and larger share of

public attention. In 1303 one of the charges brought against Boniface

VIII., in the Assembly of the Louvre, was that he had a familiar demon

who kept him informed of everything, and that he was a sorcerer who

consulted diviners and soothsayers. About the same time the Bishop of

Coventry and Lichfield, treasurer of Edward I., was accused of murder,

simony, and adultery, to which was added that he consulted the devil, to

whom he had rendered homage and kissed on the posteriors. King Edward

intervened energetically in his behalf, and an inquisition ordered upon

him by Boniface reported that the common fame existing against him

proceeded from his enemies, so that he was allowed to purge himself with

thirty-seven compurgators. In 1308 the Sire d'Ulmet was brought to Paris

on the charge of endeavoring to kill his wife by sorcery, and the women

whom he had employed were burned or buried alive. We have seen how

nearly akin to these accusations were the charges brought against the

Templars, and the success of that attempt was suggestive as to the

effectiveness of the methods employed. When, after the death of Philippe

le Bel, Charles of Valois was resolutely bent on the destruction of

Enguerrand de Marigny, and the long proceedings which he instituted

threatened to prove fruitless, it was opportunely discovered that

Enguerrand had instigated his wife and sister to employ a man and woman

to make certain waxen images which should cause Charles, the young King

Louis Hutin, the Count of Saint-Pol, and other personages to wither and

die. As soon as Charles reported this to Louis, the king withdrew his

protection and the end was speedy. April 26, 1315, Enguerrand was

brought before a selected council of nobles at Vincennes and was

condemned to be hanged, a sentence which was carried out on the 30th;

the sorcerer was hanged with him and the sorceress was burned, the

images being exhibited to the people from the gallows at Montfaucon,

which Enguerrand himself had built, while the Dame de Marigny and her

sister, the Dame de Chantelou, were condemned to imprisonment. Thus

Enguerrand perished by the methods which he and his brother, the

Archbishop of Sens, had used against the Templars, and the further moral

of the story is seen in the remorse of Charles of Valois, ten years

later, when he lay on his death-bed and sent almoners through the

streets of Paris to distribute money among the poor, crying, "Pray for

the soul of Messire Enguerrand de Marigny, and of Messire Charles de

Valois!" One of the accusations against Bernard Délicieux was that he

had attempted the life of Benedict XI. by magic arts, and although this

failed of proof, he confessed under torture that a book of necromancy

found in his chest belonged to him, and that certain marginal notes in

it were in his own handwriting. In this he could not have been alone

among his brethren, for in the general chapter of the Franciscans in

1312 a statute was adopted forbidding, under penalty of excommunication

and prison, any member of the Order from possessing such books, and

dabbling in alchemy, necromancy, divination, incantation, or the

invocation of demons.[492]

The growing importance of sorcery in popular belief received a powerful

impetus from John XXII., who in so many ways exercised on his age an

influence so deplorable. As one of the most learned theologians of the

day, he had full convictions of the reality of all the marvels claimed

for magic, and his own experience led him to entertain a lively dread of

them. The circumstances of his election were such as to render probable

the existence of conspiracies for his removal, and he lent a ready ear

to suggestions concerning them. His barbarity towards the unfortunate

Hugues, Bishop of Cahors, has been already alluded to, and before the

first year of his reign was out he had another group of criminals to

dispose of. In 1317 we find him issuing a commission to Gaillard, Bishop

of Reggio, and several assessors to try a barber-surgeon named Jean

d'Amant and sundry clerks of the Sacred Palace on the charge of

attempting his life. Under the persuasive influence of torture they

confessed that they had at first intended to use poison, but finding no

opportunity for this they had recourse to figurines, in the fabrication

of which they were skilled. They had made them under the invocation of

demons; they could confine demons in rings and thus learn the secrets of

the past and of the future; they could induce sickness, cause death, or

prolong life by incantations, charms, and spells consisting simply of

words. Of course they were condemned and executed, and John set to work

vigorously to extirpate the abhorred race of sorcerers to which he had

so nearly fallen a victim. We hear of proceedings against Robert, Bishop

of Aix, accused of having practised magic arts at Bologna; and John,

regarding the East as the source whence this execrable science spread

over Christendom, sought to attack it in its home. In 1318 he ordered

the Dominican provincial in the Levant to appoint special inquisitors

for the purpose in all places subject to the Latin rite, and he called

upon the Doge of Venice, the Prince of Achaia, and the Latin barons to

lend their effective aid. He even wrote to the Patriarch of

Constantinople and the Oriental archbishops, urging them to assist in

the good work. Not satisfied with the implied jurisdiction conferred on

the Inquisition by Alexander IV., in 1320 he had letters sent out by the

Cardinal of S. Sabina formally conferring it fully on inquisitors and

urging them to exercise it actively. Subsequent bulls stimulated still

further the growing dread of magic by expressing his grief at the

constant increase of the infection which was spreading throughout

Christendom, and by ordering sorcerers to be publicly anathematized and

punished as heretics and all books of magic lore to be burned. When he

warned all baptized Christians not to enter into compacts with hell, or

to imprison demons in rings or mirrors so as to penetrate the secrets of

the future, and threatened all guilty of such practices that, if they

did not reform within eight days, they should be subject to the

penalties of heresy, he took the most effective means to render the

trade of the sorcerer profitable and to increase the number of his

dupes. Apparently he became dissatisfied with the response to these

appeals, for in 1330 he deplored the continued existence of

demon-worship and its affiliated errors; he ordered the prelates and

inquisitors to speedily bring to conclusion all cases on hand and send

the papers under seal to him for decision, and the inquisitors were

commanded to undertake no new cases without a special papal mandate.

Whatever may have been the motive of this last prohibition, it was not

allowed to take effect in France. We have seen how the royal power about

this time was commencing to exercise control over the Inquisition, and

we shall see how, at the close of his life, John XXII. was accused of

heresy as to the Beatific Vision, and was roundly threatened by Philippe

de Valois. It was probably an incident of this quarrel that led the

king, in 1334, to assume that the jurisdiction of the Inquisition over

idolaters, sorcerers, and heretics had been conferred by the crown, and

to order his seneschals to see that no one should interfere with them in

its exercise. This royal rescript seems to have been forgotten with the

circumstances which called it forth, for in 1374 the Inquisitor of

France applied to Gregory XI. to ask whether he should take cognizance

of sorcery, and Gregory replied with instructions to prosecute such

cases vigorously.[493]

The necessary result of all this bustling legislation was to strengthen

the popular confidence in sorcery and to multiply its practice. In

Bernard Gui's book of sentences rendered in the Inquisition of Toulouse

from 1309 to 1323, there are no cases of sorcery, but we meet with

several, tried in 1320 and 1321 in the episcopal Inquisition of Pamiers,

and the fragmentary records of Carcassonne in 1328 and 1329 show quite a

number of convictions. Inquisitors, moreover, commenced to insert a

clause renouncing sorcery in all abjurations administered to repentant

heretics, so that in case they should become addicted to it they could

be promptly burned for relapse.[494]

Under the influence of this efficient advertisement the trade of the

sorcerer flourished. In 1323 a remarkable case attracted much attention

in Paris. The dogs of some shepherds, passing a cross-roads near

Chateau-Landon, commenced scratching at a certain spot and could not be

driven off. The men's suspicions were aroused, and they informed the

authorities, who, on digging, found a box in which was imprisoned a

black cat, with some bread moistened with chrism, blessed oil, and holy

water, two small tubes being arranged to reach the surface and supply

the animal with air. All the carpenters in the village were summoned,

and one identified the box, which he had made for a certain Jean

Prevost. Torture promptly brought a confession inculpating the

Cistercian abbot of Sarcelles, some canons, a sorcerer named Jean de

Persant, and an apostate Cistercian monk, his disciple. The abbot, it

seems, had lost a sum of money, and had employed the sorcerer to recover

it and find the thief. The cat was to remain three days in the box, to

be then killed, and its skin cut into strips, with which a circle was to

be made. In this circle a man standing with the remains of the cat's

food thrust into his rectum was to invoke the demon Berich, who would

make the desired revelation. The Inquisitor of Paris and the episcopal

Ordinary promptly tried the guilty parties. Prevost opportunely died,

but his remains were burned with his accomplice de Persant, while the

ecclesiastics escaped with degradation and perpetual imprisonment. It is

evident that de Persant was not allowed the benefit of abjuration, while

the Cistercians were exposed to a penalty more severe than those imposed

by the rules of their Order. These had been defined in the general

chapter of 1290 to be merely incapacity for promotion, or for taking any

part in the proceedings of the body, the lowest seat in choir and

refectory, and Friday fasting on bread and water until released by the

general chapter. The intervening quarter of a century had, however,

wrought a most significant change in the attitude of the Church towards

this class of offences.[495]

The monastic orders evidently contributed their full share to this class

of criminals. We happen to have the sentence, in 1329, by Henri de

Chamay, of a Carmelite named Pierre Recordi, which illustrates the

effectiveness of inquisitorial methods in obtaining avowals. The trial

lasted for several years, and though the accused tergiversated and

retracted repeatedly, his endurance finally gave way. He adhered at last

to the confession that on five occasions, to obtain possession of women,

he had made wax figurines with invocations of demons, mixing with them

the blood of toads and his own blood and saliva, as a sacrifice to

Satan. He would then place the image under the threshold of the woman,

and if she did not yield to him she would be tormented by a demon. In

three cases this had succeeded; in the other two it would have done so,

had he not been suddenly sent by his superiors to another station. On

one occasion he pricked an image in the belly, when it bled. After the

images had done their work he would cast them into the river and

sacrifice a butterfly to the demon, whose presence would be manifested

by a breath of air. He was condemned to perpetual imprisonment on bread

and water, with chains on hands and feet, in the Carmelite convent of

Toulouse; out of respect to the Order he was not subjected to the

ceremony of degradation, and the sentence was rendered privately in the

episcopal palace of Pamiers. One peculiar feature of the sentence is the

apprehension expressed lest the officials of the convent should allow

him to escape.[496]

The trade of the magician received a further advertisement in the story

current at this time about Frederic of Austria. When, after his defeat

at Mühldorf in 1322, by Louis of Bavaria, he lay a prisoner in the

stronghold of Trausnitz, his brother Leopold sought the services of an

expert necromancer, who promised to release the captive through the aid

of the devil. In response to his invocation, Satan came in the guise of

a pilgrim, and readily promised to bring Frederic to them if he would

agree to follow him; but when he appeared to Frederic and told him to

get into a bag which he carried around his neck and he would bring him

to his brother in safety, Frederic asked him who he was. "Never mind who

I am," he replied: "Will you leave your prison, as I tell you?" Then a

great fear fell upon Frederic; he crossed himself and the devil

disappeared.[497]

Even to distant Ireland the persecution of sorcery was brought in 1325

by that zealous Franciscan, Richard Ledrede, Bishop of Ossory. The Lady

Alice Kyteler of Kilkenny had had four husbands, and their testamentary

dispositions not suiting her children by the last three, the most

efficient means of breaking their wills was to accuse her of having

killed them by sorcery, after bewitching them to leave their property

to her and to her eldest son, William Outlaw. Bishop Ledrede proceeded

vigorously to make inquisition, but Lady Alice and William were allied

to the leading officials in Ireland, who threw every difficulty in the

way, and, as the canons against heresy were unknown in the island, he

had an arduous task, being himself at one time arrested and thrown into

prison. A less indomitable spirit would have succumbed, but he triumphed

at last, though Lady Alice herself escaped his clutches and was conveyed

to England. The trials of her assumed accomplices would seem to have

been conducted without much respect to form, but with ample energy.

Torture being unknown in English law, the bishop might have failed in

eliciting confession had he not found an effective, if illegal,

substitute in the whip. Petronilla, for instance, one of Lady Alice's

women, after being scourged six times could endure no longer the endless

increase of agony, and confessed all that was wanted of her. She

admitted that she was a skilful sorceress, but inferior to her mistress,

who was equal to any in England, or any in the world. She told how, at

Lady Alice's command, she had sacrificed cocks in the cross-roads to a

demon named Robert Artisson, her mistress's incubus or lover, and how

they made from the brains of an unbaptized child, with herbs and worms,

in the skull of a robber who had been beheaded, powders and charms to

afflict the bodies of the faithful, to excite love and hatred, and to

make the faces of certain women, appear horned in the eyes of particular

individuals. She had been the intermediary between her mistress and the

demon; on one occasion he had come to Lady Alice's chamber with two

others, black as Ethiopians, when followed love-scenes of which the

disgusting details may be spared. The case is interesting as developing

a transition state of belief between the earlier magic and the later

witchcraft; and it illustrates one of the most important points in the

criminal jurisprudence of the succeeding centuries, which explains the

unquestioning belief universally entertained as to the marvels of

sorcery. Torture administered with unlimited repetition not only brought

the patient into a condition in which he would confess whatever was

required of him, but the impression produced was such that he would not

risk its renewal by retraction even at the last. It was so with this

poor creature, who persisted to the end with this tissue of absurdities,

and who was burned impenitent. Some others involved in the accusation

likewise perished at the stake, while some were permitted to abjure and

were punished with crosses--probably the only occasion in which this

penance was administered in the British Isles.[498]

While Bishop Ledrede was busy at this good work a trial occurred in

England which illustrates the difference in efficiency between the

ecclesiastical methods of trial by torture and those of the common law.

Twenty-eight persons were accused of employing John of Nottingham and

his assistant, Richard Marshall of Leicester, to make wax figures for

the destruction of Edward II., the two Despensers, and the Prior of

Coventry, with two of his officials who had tyrannized over the people

and had been sustained by the royal favorites. Richard Marshall turned

accuser, and the evidence was complete. The enormous sums of twenty

pounds to Master John and fifteen pounds to Richard had been promised,

and they had been furnished with seven pounds of wax and two ells of

canvas. From September 27, 1324, until June 2, 1325, the two magicians

labored at their work. They made seven images, the extra one being

experimental, to be tried on Richard de Sowe. On April 27 they commenced

operating with this by thrusting a piece of lead into its forehead, when

at once Richard de Sowe lost his reason and cried in misery until May

20, when the lead was transferred to his breast, and he died May 23. The

accused pleaded not guilty and put themselves on the country. An

ordinary jury trial followed, with the result that they were all

acquitted. A similar case came to light at Toulouse in June, 1326, when

some sorcerers were discovered who had undertaken to make way with King

Charles le Bel by means of figurines. They were promptly despatched to

Paris, and the matter was taken in hand by the secular court of the

Châtelet. It had all the resources of torture at its command, and its

speedy and vigorous justice undoubtedly soon consigned them to the

stake, although Pierre de Vic, a favored nephew of John XXII., who had

been inculpated in their confessions, was pronounced innocent. It was

probably not long after this that a similar attempt was made on the life

of John XXII., though the culprits escaped until 1337, when they were

tried and executed by Benedict XII. To shield themselves they implicated

the Bishop of Béziers as their instigator.[499]

Yet organized persecution seems to have died away with the withdrawal of

sorcery from the jurisdiction of the Inquisition by John XXII. in 1330,

while the stimulus which his proclamations had given to the trade of the

magician continued to extend it and render it profitable. The tendency

of popular thought is shown by the attribution, in some places, of the

Black Death to the incantations as well as to the poisons of the Jews.

Such an expedient as that of the Council of Chartres in 1366, which

ordered sorcerers to be excommunicated in mass every Sunday in all

parish churches, would only serve to impress the popular mind with the

reality and importance of their powers. During this period the study and

practice of magic arts were pursued with avidity, and in many cases

almost without concealment. Miguel de Urrea, who was Bishop of Tarazona

from 1309 to 1316, was honored with the title of _el Nigromantico_, and

his portrait in the archiepiscopal palace of Tarragona bears an

inscription describing him as a most skilful necromancer, who even

deluded the devil with his own arts. Gerard Groot himself, claimed by

the Brethren of the Common Life as their revered founder, was in his

youth an earnest student of the occult sciences, but during an illness

he solemnly abandoned them before a priest and burned his books. Many

years later he turned his knowledge to account by exposing a certain

John Heyden, who had long practised on the credulity of the people of

Amsterdam and its vicinity. On his coming to Deventer, Groot examined

him and found him ignorant of necromancy and its allied arts, and

concluded that he operated through a compact with Satan. Not willing to

incur the irregularity of shedding blood, Groot contented himself with

driving him away, and then, on learning that he had settled at

Harderwick, wrote to the brethren there giving them an account of him;

but the whole affair shows that such persons could count on practical

toleration unless some zealot chose to set the laws in motion. The

extent to which this toleration was carried, and the limitless credulity

to which the popular mind had been trained are shown in the accounts

given by grave historians of the feats of Zyto, the favorite magician of

the Emperor Wenceslas, who, in spite of the repeated condemnation of

magic by the Councils of Prague during the latter half of the century,

reckoned among his evil qualities a fondness for forbidden arts. When,

in 1389, he married Sophia, daughter of the Elector of Bavaria, the

latter, knowing his proclivities, brought to Prague a wagon-load of

skilful conjurers and jugglers. While the chief of these was giving an

exhibition of his marvels Zyto quietly walked up to him, opened his

mouth, and swallowed him entire, spitting out his muddy boots, and then

evacuated him into a vessel of water and exhibited him dripping to the

admiring crowd. At the royal banquets Zyto would bother the guests by

changing their hands into the hoofs of horses or oxen so that they could

not handle their food; if something attracted them to look out of the

window he would adorn them with branching antlers, so that they could

not withdraw their heads, while he would leisurely eat their delicacies

and drink their wine. On one occasion he changed a handful of corn into

a drove of fat hogs which he sold to a baker, with a caution not to let

them go to the river, but the purchaser disregarded the warning and they

suddenly became grains of corn floating on the water. Of course such a

character could not end well, and Zyto, when his time came, was carried

off by his demon. Not only are all these marvels recorded as

unquestionable facts by the Bohemian chroniclers, but they are

conscientiously copied by the papal historian Raynaldus.[500]

Although Gregory XI., in 1374, had authorized the Inquisition to

prosecute in all cases of sorcery, in France the Parlement included the

subject within its policy of encroachment upon the ecclesiastical

jurisdiction. In 1390 an occurrence at Laon, where a secular official

named Poulaillier arrested a number of sorcerers, gave it occasion to

intervene. As Bodin says, at that time Satan managed to have it

believed that the stories of sorcery were false, so the Parlement

stopped the proceedings, and thus having its attention drawn to the

matter, decreed that in future cognizance of such offences should be

confined to the secular tribunals, to the exclusion of the spiritual

courts.[501] Secular judges, however, were ready to treat these cases

with abundant sharpness. A case occurring at the Paris Châtelet in 1390

has much interest as affording us an insight into the details of

procedure, and as illustrating the efficacy of torture in securing

conviction. Except as regards the use of this expedient, now universal

in all criminal cases, we see that the process is much fairer to the

accused than that of the Inquisition, and we observe once more the

ineffaceable impression produced by torture, which leads the despairing

victim to adhere to the self-condemnation conducting him inevitably to

the stake. Marion l'Estalée was a young _fille de folle vie_, madly in

love with a man named Hainsselin Planiete, who deserted her, and, about

July 1, 1390, married a woman named Agnesot. Eager to prevent this, if

her confession is to be believed, she had applied to an old procuress

named Margot de la Barre, for a philtre to fix his wandering affection,

and when this failed Margot made for her two enchanted chaplets of

herbs, which she threw where the bride and groom would tread on them

during the festivities of the wedding-day, assured that this would

prevent the consummation of the marriage. The plot was unsuccessful, but

Hainsselin and Agnesot fell sick, leading to the arrest of the two

women.

On July 30 Margot was examined and denied all complicity. She was

promptly tortured on _le petit et le grand tresteau_--which I conjecture

to mean, the former, pouring water down the throat till the stomach was

distended and then forcing it out by paddling the belly; the latter, the

rack. This reduplicated torture produced no confession, and she was

remanded for further hearing. August 17 Marion was taken in hand, when

she denied, and was similarly tortured without result. On the 3d she was

again examined and denied, and on being again ordered to the torture,

she appealed to the Parlement; the appeal was promptly heard and

rejected, and she was tortured as before, then taken to the kitchen and

warmed, after which she was tortured a third time, but to no effect. On

the 4th she was brought in and refused to confess, but the indefinite

repetition of torment without prospect of cessation had produced its

effect on body and mind; the torture had been pitiless, for she is

subsequently alluded to as much crippled and weakened by it, and when

she was again bound on the _tresteau_, and the executioner was about to

commence his work, she yielded and agreed to confess. On being unbound

she detailed the whole story, and in the afternoon, on being brought in

again, she confirmed it "_sans aucune force ou constrainte_." Then

Margot was introduced, and Marion repeated her confession, which Margot

denied and offered the wager of battle, of which no notice was taken.

Margot then asserted her ability to prove an alibi on the day when she

was said to have made the chaplets. The parties whom she named as

witnesses were looked up for her and brought in the next day, when the

evidence proved rather incriminating than otherwise. Marion was then

made to repeat her confession, and not till then was Margot tortured a

second time, but still without result. On the 6th Marion was again made

to repeat her confession, after which Margot was brought in and bound to

the _tresteau_. Marion's youthful vigor had enabled her to endure the

torture thrice. Margot's age had diminished her power of resistance, and

the two applications sufficed. Her resolution gave way, and before the

torture commenced she promised to confess. Her story agreed with that of

Marion, except in some embellishments, which serve to show how

thoroughly untrustworthy were all such confessions, of which the sole

object was to satisfy the merciless ministers of justice. When she

enchanted the chaplets she invoked the demon by thrice repeating

"_Ennemi je te conjures au nom du Père, du Fils et du Saint Esperit que

tu viegnes a moy icy;_" then an "ennemi," or demon, promptly appeared,

like those she had seen in the Passion-play, and after she had

instructed him to enter into the bodies of Hainsselin and Agnesot he

flew out of the window in a whirlwind, making a great noise and throwing

her into mortal fear. The evidence was thus complete, and there would

seem to be nothing left but prompt sentence, yet the tribunal manifested

commendable desire to avoid precipitate judgment. Assessors and experts

were called in. On August 7, 8, and 9 Marion was thrice made to repeat

her confession, and Margot twice. On the latter day a consultation was

held, and the decision was unanimous against Margot, who was pilloried

and burned the same day; but three of the experts thought that the

pillory and banishment would suffice for Marion. Her case was postponed

till the 23d, when another consultation was held; opinions remained

unaltered, and as the majority was in favor of condemnation the_prévôt_

condemned her, and she was burned the next day. Both the victims may

have been innocent, and the whole story may have been invented to avoid

the repetition of the intolerable torture; but, inevitable as was the

result under the conditions of the trial, the judges manifested every

disposition to deal fairly with the unfortunates in their hands, and

could entertain no possible doubt as to the reality of the offence and

of the apparition of the demon as described by Margot.[502] It is

necessary to bear this in mind when estimating the conduct of the judges

and inquisitors who sent thousands of unfortunates to the stake in the

next two centuries, for offences which to a modern mind are purely

chimerical, for, according to the jurisprudence of the age, no evidence

could be more absolute than that on which rested the cruelly punished

absurdities of witchcraft.

Simultaneous with this case was the burning of a sorceress named

Jeanette Neuve or Revergade, August 6, 1390, in Velay. Although she was

tried and executed by the court of the Abbey of Saint-Chaffre, this was

in its capacity as _haut-justicier,_ and not as a spiritual tribunal. A

century later we should have found the case embroidered with full

accounts of the Sabbat and of demon-worship, but the time had not yet

arrived for this. Jeanette was a poor wandering crone who had come to

Chadron, within the abbatial jurisdiction, and earned a livelihood by

curing diseases with charms, to which she usually added the prescription

of a pilgrimage to some shrine of local renown. She must have gained

reputation as a wise-woman, for the Sire de Burzet, quarrelling with his

wife and desiring reconciliation, came to her for a philtre. She gave

him a potion of which he died, and her fate was sealed.[503]

About this period may be dated a fresh impulse given to the belief in

sorcery, whose continued growth during the fifteenth and sixteenth

centuries was destined to produce results so deplorable, and to present

one of the most curious problems in the history of human error. The

first indication of this new development is found in the action of the

University of Paris. September 19, 1398, the theological faculty held a

general congregation in the Church of St. Mathurin, and adopted a series

of twenty-eight articles which thenceforth became a standard for all

demonologists, and were regarded as an unanswerable argument to sceptics

who questioned the reality of the wickedness of the arts of magic. The

preamble recites that action was necessary in view of the active

emergence of ancient errors which threatened to infect society; the old

evils, which had been well-nigh forgotten, were reviving with renewed

vigor, and some positive definition was required to guard the faithful

from the snares of the enemy. The University then proceeded to declare

that there was an implied contract with Satan in every superstitious

observance, of which the expected result was not reasonably to be

anticipated from God and from Nature, and it condemned as erroneous the

assertion that it was permissible to invoke the aid of demons or to seek

their friendship, or to enter into compacts with them, or to imprison

them in stones, rings, mirrors, and images, or to use sorcery for good

purposes or for the cure of sorcery, or that God could be induced by

magic arts to compel demons to obey invocations, or that the celebration

of masses or other good works used in some forms of thaumaturgy was

permissible, or that the prophets and saints of old performed their

miracles by these means which were taught by God, or that by certain

magic arts we can attain to the sight of the divine essence. These

latter clauses point to a dangerous tendency of coalescence between the

arts of the sorcerer and of the theurgist, and indicate that in the

higher magic of the day there was a claim to be considered as

penetrating to the ineffable mysteries which surrounded the throne of

God; in fact, these adepts declared that their arts were lawful, and

they sought to prove their origin in God by pointing out that good

flowed from them, and that the wishes and prophecies of those using them

were fulfilled. All this the University condemned, and while on the one

hand it denied that images of lead or gold or wax, when baptized,

exorcised, and consecrated on certain days, possessed the powers

ascribed to them in the books of magic, on the other hand it was equally

emphatic in animadverting on the incredulity of those who denied that

sorcery, incantations, and the invocation of demons possessed the powers

claimed for them by sorcerers.[504]

Like all other efforts to repress sorcery, this of course only served to

give it fresh significance and importance. The declaration that it was

erroneous to doubt the reality of sorcery and its effects became a

favorite argument of the demonologists. Gerson declared that to call in

question the existence and activity of demons was not only impious and

heretical, but destructive to all human and political society. Sprenger

concludes that the denial of the existence of witchcraft is not in

itself heresy, as it may proceed from ignorance, but such ignorance in

an ecclesiastic is in itself highly culpable; such denial is sufficient

to justify vehement suspicion of heresy, calling for prosecution, and we

have seen what was the significance of "vehement suspicion" in

inquisitorial practice.[505]

With popular credulity thus stimulated, the insanity of Charles VI.

afforded a tempting opportunity for charlatans to market their wares. In

1397 the Maréchal de Sancerre sent to Paris from Guyenne two Augustinian

hermits who had great reputation for skill in the occult sciences, and

who promised relief. They pronounced the royal patient a victim of

sorcery, and after some incantations he recovered his senses, but it

proved only a lucid interval, and in a week he relapsed. This they

charged upon the royal barber and a porter of the Duke of Orleans, who

were arrested, but nothing could be proved against them, and they were

discharged. For months the two impostors led a joyous life with ample

fees, but at last they were compelled to name the author of the

sorceries, and this time they had the audacity to pitch upon the king's

brother, Louis of Orleans himself. This grew serious, and on being

threatened with torture they confessed themselves sorcerers, apostates,

and invokers of demons. They were accordingly tried, condemned, degraded

from the priesthood, and mercifully beheaded and quartered. Undeterred

by this example, in 1403 a priest named Ives Gilemme, who boasted that

he had three demons in his service, with some other invokers of demons,

the Demoiselle Marie de Blansy, Perrin Hemery, a locksmith, and

Guillaume Floret, a clerk, offered to cure the king, and were given a

trial. They asked to have twelve men loaded with iron chains placed at

their disposal; these they surrounded with an enclosure, and, after

telling them not to be afraid, proceeded with all the invocations they

could muster, but accomplished no results. They excused their failure by

alleging that the men had crossed themselves, but this availed them

nothing. Floret confessed to the Prévôt of Paris that the whole affair

was a deception, and on March 24, 1404, they were all duly burned. It

was probably this case which induced Cardinal Louis of Bourbon, in his

provincial synod of Langres, in 1404, to prohibit strictly all sorcery

and divination, and to warn his flock to place no trust in such arts, as

their practitioners were mostly deceivers whose only object was to trick

them out of their money. Priests, moreover, were strictly ordered, as

had already been done by the Council of Soissons the year before, to

report to the episcopal ordinaries all cases coming to their knowledge

and all persons defamed for such practices. Had this policy been carried

out, of treating sorcerers as sharpers, and of instituting an episcopal

police to replace the Inquisition, at this time rapidly falling into

desuetude, it might have averted the evils which followed, but the

well-meant effort of Cardinal Louis was followed by no results. The

belief in sorcery continued to strengthen, and when Jean Petit undertook

to justify Jean sans Peur for the assassination of the Duke of Orleans,

it was almost a matter of course that he should accuse the murdered

prince of encompassing the king's insanity by magic, of which the most

minute details were given, including the names of the two demons, Hynars

and Astramein, whose assistance had been successfully invoked.[506]

In England, sorcery, as we have seen, had thus far attracted little

attention. Even as late as 1372 a man was arrested in Southwark with the

head and face of a corpse in his possession, and a book of magic was

found in his trunk. Tried before the Inquisition he would infallibly

have confessed under torture a series of misdeeds and have ended at the

stake; but he was brought before Sir J. Knyvet, in the King's Bench. No

indictment even was found against him; he was simply sworn not to

practise sorcery and was discharged, but the head and book were burned

at Tothill at his expense. To the fair and open character of English law

is doubtless to be attributed the comparative exemption of the island

from the terror of sorcery, but when, at last, persecuting excitement

arose in the Lollard troubles, the Church used its influence with the

new Lancastrian dynasty to suppress the emissaries of Satan. In 1407

Henry IV. issued letters to his bishops reciting that sorcerers,

magicians, conjurers, necromancers, and diviners abounded in their

dioceses, perverting the people and perpetrating things horrible and

detestable. The bishops, therefore, were commissioned to imprison all

such malefactors, either with or without trial, until they should recant

their errors or the king's pleasure could be learned respecting them.

The placing of the matter thus in the hands of the Church, and depriving

the accused of all legal safeguards, is most significant as a

recognition that the ordinary forms of English law were not to be

depended upon in such cases, and that public opinion as yet was too

unformed for juries to be trusted. Under the regency the royal council

seems to have assumed jurisdiction over the matter. In 1432 a Dominican

of Worcester, Thomas Northfield, suspected of sorcery, was summoned

before it with all his books of magic. A few days later it heard the

celebrated Witch of Eye, Margery Jourdemayne, with the Dominican John

Ashewell and John Virby, a clerk, who had been confined at Windsor under

charge of sorcery, but they were discharged on giving bonds for good

behavior. The Witch of Eye did not fare so well when, in 1441, she was

implicated in the accusation brought against the Duchess of Gloucester,

of making and melting a wax figurine of Henry VI. The duchess confessed

and escaped with the penance of walking bareheaded thrice through the

streets with wax tapers of two pounds each, and offering them at the

shrines of St. Paul's, Christ Church, and St. Michael's in Cornhill,

after which she was imprisoned and finally banished to Chester. Her

secretary, Roger, was hanged, drawn, and quartered, and Margery was

burned--the whole affair being political. A similar endeavor to take

political advantage of the belief in sorcery occurred in 1464, in

connection with the marriage of Edward IV. and Elizabeth Woodville, when

his constancy to her was attributed to the magic arts of her mother,

Jacquette, widow of the Regent Bedford in first marriage. Jacquette did

not wait to be attacked, but turned upon her accusers, Thomas Wake and

John Daunger, who had talked about her using leaden images of the king

and queen, and had shown one of them broken in two and wired together.

They disclaimed responsibility, and endeavored to shift the burden each

on the other; but in 1483 Richard III. did not fail to make the most of

the matter, and in the act for the settlement of the crown described

Edward's "pretensed marriage" as brought about by "sorcerie and

witchcraft committed by the said Elizabeth and her moder, Jacquette

duchesse of Bedford." Thus England was gradually prepared to share in

the horrors of the witchcraft delusions.[507]

* * * * *

Perhaps the most remarkable trial for sorcery on record is that of the

Maréchal de Rais, in 1440, which has long ranked as a _cause celébre_,

although it is only of late that the publication of the records has

enabled it to be properly understood. The popular belief at the time is

indicated by Monstrelet, who tells us that the marshal was accustomed to

put to death pregnant women and children in order with their blood to

write the conjurations which secured him wealth and honors; Jean

Chartier alludes to his putting children to death and performing strange

things contrary to the faith to attain his ends, and in the next century

Gaguin speaks of his slaying children in order with their blood to

divine the future.[508] Curious as is the case in many aspects, perhaps

its chief interest lies in the psychological study which it affords as

an illustration of the extreme development of the current ecclesiastical

teaching with regard to the remission of sins.

In the France of the fifteenth century there was no career more

promising than that of Gilles de Rais. Born in 1404 of the noble stock

of Montmorency and Craon, grandson of the renowned knight, Brumor de

Laval, grandnephew of du Guesclin, of kindred with the Constable

Clisson, and allied with all that was illustrious in the west of France,

his barony of Rais rendered him the head of the baronage of Britanny.

His territorial possessions were ample, and when, while still a youth,

he married the great heiress, Catharine de Thouars, he might count

himself among the wealthiest nobles of France. His bride is said to have

brought him one hundred thousand livres in gold and movables, and his

revenue was reckoned at fifty thousand. At the age of sixteen he won the

esteem of his suzerain, Jean V., Duke of Britanny, by his courage and

skill in the campaign which ended the ancient rivalry between the houses

of de Montfort and de Penthièvre. At twenty-two, following the duke's

brother, the Constable Artus de Richemont, he entered the desperate

service of Charles VII., with a troop maintained at his own expense, and

he distinguished himself in the seemingly hopeless resistance to the

English arms. When Joan of Arc appeared he was charged with the special

duty of watching over her personal safety, and, from the relief of

Orleans to the repulse at the gates of Paris, he was ever at her side.

In the coronation ceremonies at Reims he received, though but

twenty-five years old, the high dignity of Marshal of France, and in the

September following he was honored with permission to add to his arms a

border of the royal fleurs-de-lis. There was no dignity beneath the

crown to which his ambition might not aspire, for he maintained himself

so skilfully between the opposing factions of the constable and of the

royal favorite, La Trémouille, that when the latter fell, in 1433, his

credit at the court was unimpaired.[509]

He was, moreover, a man of unusual culture. His restless curiosity and

thirst for knowledge led him to accumulate books at a time when it was

rare for knights to be able to sign their names. Chance has preserved to

us the titles of St. Augustin's "City of God,"--"Valerius Maximus,"

Ovid's "Metamorphoses" and "Suetonius," as fragments of his library; and

on his trial one of the reasons he gave for liking an Italian

necromancer was the choice Latinity of his speech. He delighted in rich

bindings and illuminations. On one occasion he is described, but a few

months before his arrest, as engaged in his study in ornamenting with

enamels the cover of a book of ceremonies for his chapel. Of music and

the drama he was also passionately fond. In these pursuits he was a fit

comrade for the good King René, as in the field he was the mate of

Dunois and La Hire.[510]

Yet the life which promised so much in camp and court was blighted by

the fatal errors of his training. The death of his father while he was a

child of eleven left him to the care of a weak and indulgent

grandfather, Jean de Craon, whose authority he soon shook off. His fiery

nature ran riot, and he grew up devoured with the wildest ambition,

abandoned to sensual excesses of every kind, and with passions

unrestrained and untamable. When on trial he repeatedly addressed the

wondering crowd, urging all parents to train their children rigidly in

the ways of virtue, for it was his unbridled youth that had led him to

crime and a shameful death.[511]

Although, in the charges preferred against him, his aberrations are said

to have commenced in 1426, he himself asserted that the fatal plunge was

not made until 1432, after the death of his grandfather. About that time

he began to withdraw from active life, and after 1433 he is no longer

heard of in the field, although the war of liberation offered its prizes

as abundantly as ever.[512]

Then commenced a strange and unexampled dual existence. To the outward

world he was the magnificent seigneur, intent only on display and

frivolity. His immeasurable ambition, diverted from its natural career,

found unworthy gratification in making the vulgar stare with his

gorgeous splendor. He affected a state almost royal. A military

household of over two hundred horsemen accompanied him wherever he went.

He founded a chapter of canons, with service and choir fit for a

cathedral, and this was his private chapel, likewise attached to his

person, costing him immense sums, including portable organs carried on

the shoulders of six stout serving-men. Not less extravagant was his

passion for theatrical displays. The drama of the age, though rude, was

costly, and when he exhibited freely to the multitude spectacular

performances, there were immense structures to be built and hundreds of

actors to be clad in cloths of gold and silver, silks and velvets, and

handsome armor, the whole followed by public banquets to the spectators,

in which rich viands were served in profusion and rare wines and

hippocras flowed like water. These were only items in his expenditure;

his purse and table were open to all and his artistic tastes were

gratified without regard to cost. In one visit to Orleans, where his

retinue filled every inn in the city, he was said to have squandered

eighty thousand gold crowns between March and August, 1435. This ruinous

prodigality was accompanied with the utmost disorder in his affairs. It

was beneath the dignity of a great seigneur to attend to business, and

all details were abandoned to the crowd of pimps and parasites and

flatterers attracted by his lavish recklessness, among whom the

principal were Roger de Briqueville and Gilles de Sillé. Gold must be

raised at any price; his revenues were farmed out in advance, the

produce of field and forest and salt-works was disposed of at low

prices, and he soon began to sell his estates at less than their value,

usually reserving a right of redemption within six years. In a short

time he is estimated to have consumed from this source alone not less

than two hundred thousand crowns. Already, in 1435 or 1436, his family

became alarmed at his mad career; they appealed to Charles VII., who

issued letters, in accordance with a legal custom of the time,

interdicting him from alienating lands and revenues, and all persons

from contracting with him. This was published with sound of trump in

Orleans, Angers, Blois, Machecoul, and elsewhere outside of Britanny.

Within the duchy, Jean V. prohibited its publication. Notwithstanding

his surname of le Bon and le Sage, he was a greedy and unscrupulous

prince, who, as one of the chief purchasers of the marshal's estates,

was interested in the ruin of his subject. He continued to secure

profitable bargains, subject always to the right of redemption, and

manifested for his dupe the greatest friendship, appointing him

lieutenant-general of the duchy, and entering into a brotherhood of arms

with him, while privately mocking and ridiculing him as a fool. As a

last resort, Gilles's younger brother, René de la Suze, and his cousin,

the Admiral de Loheac, captured and garrisoned the castles of Champtocé

and Machecoul, but in 1437 and 1438 Gilles retook them, with the aid of

the duke, to whom he had sold the former.[513]

Such was the external life of Gilles de Rais, to all appearance that of

a liberal, pious noble, whose worst foible was thoughtless extravagance.

Beneath the surface, however, lay an existence of crime more repulsive

than anything chronicled by Tacitus or Suetonius. There are some

subjects so foul that one shrinks from the barest allusion to them, and

of such are the deeds of Gilles de Rais. For the sake of human nature

one might hope that the charges which brought him to the gallows and

stake were invented by those who plotted his ruin, but an attentive

examination of the evidence brings conviction that amid manifest

exaggeration there was substantial foundation of fact. Ordinary

indulgence having palled upon the senses of the youthful voluptuary,

about the year 1432 he abandoned himself to unnatural lusts, selecting

as his victims children, whom he promptly slew to secure their silence.

At first their bodies were thrown into _oubliettes_ at the bottom of

towers in his ordinary places of residence. When Champtocé was about to

be surrendered to the duke, the bones of about forty children were

hastily gathered together and carried off; when René de la Suze was

advancing on Machecoul, the same number were extracted from their

hiding-place and burned. Scared by this narrow escape from detection,

Gilles subsequently had the bodies burned at once in the fireplace of

his chamber and the ashes scattered in the moats. So depraved became his

appetites that he found his chief enjoyment in the death agonies of his

victims, over whose sufferings he gloated as he skilfully mangled them

and protracted their torture. When dead he would criticise their

beauties with his confidential servitors, would compare one with

another, and would kiss with rapture the heads which pleased him most.

Not Caligula, when, to gain fresh appetite for his revels, he caused

criminals to be tortured by the side of his banquet-table, or Nero, when

enjoying the human torches illuminating his unearthly orgies, found

such delirium of delight in inflicting and in watching human agony.[514]

While such were his recreations, his serious pursuit was the search for

the philosopher's stone--the Universal Elixir which should place

unlimited wealth and power in his hands. To this end his agents were on

the watch to bring him skilled professors in the art, and he served as

the dupe of a succession of charlatans, whose promises kept him ever in

the hope that he was on the point of attaining the fulfilment of his

desires. He never ceased to believe that once, at his castle of

Tiffauges, the operation was about to be crowned with success, when the

sudden arrival of the Dauphin Louis forced him to destroy his furnaces;

for though, as we have seen, alchemy was not positively included in the

prohibited arts, its practice was ground for suspicion, and Louis, even

in his youth, was not one to whom he could afford to confide so

dangerous a secret. This confident hope explains the recklessness of his

expenditures and his careless alienations, in which he retained a right

of redemption, for any morrow might see him placed beyond the need of

reckoning with his creditors. Yet, as already stated, although alchemy

assumed to be a science, in practice it was almost universally coupled

with necromancy, and few alchemists pretended to be able to achieve

results without the assistance of demons, whose invocation became a

necessary department of their art. So it was with those employed by

Gilles de Rais, and no more instructive chapter in the history of the

frauds of magic can be found than in his confession and that of his

chief magician, Francesco Prelati. The latter had a familiar demon named

Barron, whom he never had any difficulty in evoking when alone, but who

would never show himself when Gilles was present, and in the naïve

accounts which the pair give of their attempts and failures, one cannot

help admiring the quick-witted ingenuity of the Italian and the facile

credulity of the baron. On one occasion, in answer to Prelati's earnest

prayer for gold, the tantalizing demon spread countless ingots around

the room, but forbade his touching them for some days. When this was

reported to Gilles he naturally desired to feast his eyes upon the

treasure, and Prelati conducted him to the chamber. On opening the door,

however, he cried out that he saw a great green serpent as large as a

dog coiled up on the floor, and both took to their heels. Then Gilles

armed himself with a crucifix containing a particle of the true cross,

and insisted on returning, but Prelati warned him that such expedients

only increased the danger, and he desisted. Finally the malicious demon

changed the gold into tinsel, which, when handled, turned into a tawny

dust. It was in vain that Gilles gave to Prelati compacts signed with

his blood, pledging himself to obedience in return for the three gifts

of knowledge, wealth, and power; Barron would have none of them. The

demon was offended with Gilles for not keeping a promise to make some

offering to him; if a small request were made it should be a trifle,

such as a pullet or a dove; if something greater it must be the member

of a child. Children's bodies were not scarce where Gilles resided, and

he speedily placed in a glass vessel a child's hand, heart, eyes, and

blood, and gave them to Prelati to offer. Still the demon was obdurate,

and Prelati, as he said, buried the rejected offering in consecrated

ground. Gilles has had the reputation of sacrificing unnumbered children

in his necromantic operations, but this is the only case elicited on his

trial, and the number of times it is brought into the evidence shows the

immense importance attached to it by the prosecution.[515]

It was impossible that a career such as this could continue for eight

years without exciting suspicion. Though for the most part Gilles

selected his victims from among the beggars who crowded his castle

gates, attracted by his ostentatious charities--children for whom there

was no one to make inquiry--yet he had his agents out through the land

enticing from parents the offspring whom they would see no more. Two

women, Etiennette Blanchu and Perrine Martin, better known as La

Meffraye, were the most successful of these purveyors, and it came to be

noticed that when he was in Nantes the children who frequented the gates

of his Hôtel de la Suze were apt to disappear unaccountably. His

confidential servants, Henri Griart, known as Henriet, and Étienne

Corillaut, nicknamed Poitou, when they saw a handsome youth would engage

him as a page without concealment, ride off with him, and he would be

heard of no more. It is rather curious, indeed, how tardily suspicion

was aroused, for up to within a year or two of the end there were

mothers who had no hesitation in confiding their children to the

terrible baron. At his castles of Tiffauges and Machecoul there was

little disguise. He was _haut-justicier_ in his lands: between him and

his villeins there was, as de Fontaines says, no judge but God; they

could not fly, for they were attached to the glebe, and they could only

rest silent in dread suspense as to where the next bolt would fall. Even

as far off as St. Jean-d'Angely, Machecoul had the name of a place where

children were eaten, and at Tiffauges they said that for one child that

disappeared at Machecoul there were seven at Tiffauges. Yet so far was

the truth from being guessed that the story ran among the peasantry that

Michel de Sillé, when a prisoner with the English, had been obliged to

promise, as part of his ransom, twenty-four boys to serve as pages, and

that when the tale was complete the disappearances would cease. Still

suspicion grew. One of the marshal's confidants, though not fully

initiated in his secrets, a priest named Eustache Blanchet, grew alarmed

and ran away from Tiffauges, taking up his residence at

Mortagne-sur-Sèvre. Here he learned from Jean Mercier, castellan of La

Roche-sur-Yon, that in Nantes and Clisson and elsewhere it was public

rumor that Gilles killed numbers of children, in order with their blood

to write a necromantic book which, when completed, would enable him to

capture any castle and prevent any one from withstanding him. This grew

to be the popular belief, as recorded by Monstrelet, and so impressed

was Blanchet's imagination with it that, after his return to Tiffauges,

at Easter, 1440, just before the catastrophe, when Gilles invited him

and another priest into his study to exhibit to them his ornamentation

of the binding of the ceremonial book of his chapel, some sheets of

paper written in red, lying on the desk, convinced him that the popular

report was true. In this little scene, the contrast between the peaceful

artistic labors of the marshal and the dread conjurations supposed to be

written with his own hand in innocent blood, is a type of his strange

career.[516]

What was the number of his victims can never be known. With the

exaggeration customary in such cases some writers have estimated them at

seven hundred or eight hundred. In his confession Gilles said that the

number was great, but he kept no count. In the civil process against him

it is stated at over two hundred, but in the articles of accusation in

the ecclesiastical court, which were elaborately drawn up after

obtaining all possible testimony, the figure is given as one hundred and

forty, more or less, and this is probably a full estimate.[517]

Yet, strange as were the crimes of Gilles de Rais, even stranger was his

profound conviction that he had in no way so incurred the wrath of God

that the Church could not readily insure his salvation at the cost of

some of the customary penances. He was solicitous about his soul in a

fashion very uncommon with demon-worshippers, and in all his projected

and rejected compacts with Satan he was careful to insert a clause that

he should not suffer in body or soul. He was regular in the observances

of religion. On the Easter previous to his arrest a witness describes

him as going behind the altar with a priest for confession, and then

taking the communion with the rest of the parishioners, and when these

latter, uneasy at their companionship with so great a lord, desired to

rise he bade them stay, and all remained together until the Eucharist

was administered to all. When he founded his chapter of canons and

dedicated it to the Holy Innocents, there might seem to be a grim

pleasantry in his choice of patron saints, yet there can be no doubt

that he felt that he was thus atoning for the massacre of the innocents

which he himself was constantly perpetrating. More than once he had a

transient emotion of repentance; he took vows to abandon his guilty

life, and by a pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre to obtain pardon for the

evil he had wrought--pardon which he never seems to have doubted could

be thus easily won, and reasonably enough, in view of the plenary

indulgences which were so lavishly distributed and sold. After making

his public confession, when he could have no further hope on earth, he

turned to the crowded audience and exhorted them to hold fast to the

Church and to pay her the highest honor. He had always, he said, kept

his heart and his affections on the Church, but for which, in view of

his crimes, he believed that Satan would have strangled him and carried

him off, body and soul. This trust in the saving power of the Church

gave him the absolute confidence in his salvation which is not the least

noteworthy feature in his strange character. When, after he and

Francesco Prelati had corroborated each other's confessions, and they

were about to part, he embraced and kissed his necromancer with sobs and

tears, saying, "_Adieu, Francoys, mon amy_; we shall see each other no

more in this world: I pray God to give you patience and knowledge: be

certain that if you have patience and hope in God we shall meet each

other in the great joy of paradise. Pray God for me, and I will pray for

you." There was none of the agonizing doubt that racked the tender

conscientiousness of the Friends of God, no mental struggle, but the

calm assurance, born of implicit belief in the teachings of the Church,

that a man might lead a life of unimaginable crime and at any moment

purchase his salvation.[518]

How long Gilles might have continued his devastating career it would be

hard to guess, had it not suited the interest of Duke Jean and of his

chancellor, Jean de Malestroit, Bishop of Nantes, to bring him to the

stake. Both of them had been purchasers of his squandered estates, and

might wish to free themselves from the equity of redemption, and both

might hope to gain from the confiscation of what remained to him. To

assail so redoubtable a baron was, however, a task not lightly to be

undertaken: the Church must be the leader, for the civil power dared not

risk arousing the susceptibilities of the whole baronage of the duchy.

Gilles's impetuous temper furnished them the excuse.

The marshal had sold the castle and fief of Saint-Étienne de Malemort to

Geoffroi le Ferron, treasurer of the duke--possibly a cover for the duke

himself--and had delivered seizin to Jean le Ferron, brother of the

purchaser, a man who had received the tonsure and wore the habit of a

clerk, thus entitling him to clerical immunity, even though he performed

no clerical functions. Some cause of quarrel subsequently arose, which

Gilles proceeded to settle in the arbitrary fashion customary at the

time. On Pentecost, 1440, he led a troop of some sixty horsemen to

Saint-Étienne, left them in ambush near the castle, and with a few

followers went to the church where Jean was at his devotions. Mass was

about concluded when the intruders rushed in with brandished weapons,

and Gilles addressed Jean: "Ha, scoundrel, thou hast beaten my men and

committed extortions on them; come out or I will kill thee!" It was with

difficulty that the frightened clerk could be reassured. He was dragged

to the gate of the castle and forced to order its surrender, when Gilles

garrisoned it and carried him off, finally imprisoning him in Tiffauges,

chained hand and foot.[519]

The offence was one for which the customs of Britanny provided a remedy

in the civil courts, but the duke zealously took up the cause of his

treasurer and summarily ordered his lieutenant-general to surrender the

castle and the prisoners under a penalty of fifty thousand crowns.

Indignant at this unlooked-for intervention, Gilles maltreated the

messengers of the duke, who promptly raised a force and recaptured the

place in dispute. Tiffauges, where the prisoners lay, was in Poitou,

beyond his jurisdiction, but his brother, the Constable de Richemont,

besieged it, and Gilles was forced to liberate them. Having thus

submitted, he ventured in July to visit the duke at Josselin: he had

some doubts as to his reception, but Prelati consulted his demon and

announced that he could go in safety. He was graciously received, and

imagined that the storm had blown over. So safe did he feel that while

at Josselin he continued his atrocities, putting to death several

children and causing Prelati to evoke his demon.[520]

While the powers of the State thus hesitated to attack the criminal, the

Church was busily preparing his downfall. He had been guilty of

sacrilege in the violence committed in the church of Saint-Étienne, and

he had violated its immunities in the person of Jean le Ferron. Yet, in

that cruel age, when war spared neither church nor cloister, these were

offences too frequent to justify his ruin, and in the earlier stages of

the proceedings they are not even alluded to. On July 30 Jean de

Malestroit, in whose bishopric of Nantes the barony of Rais was

situated, issued privately a declaration reciting that in a recent

visitation he and his commissioners had found that Gilles was publicly

defamed for murdering many children, after gratifying his lust on them,

of invoking the demon with horrid rites, of entering into compacts with

him, and of other enormities. Though in a general way synodal witnesses

were quoted in substantiation of these charges, only eight witnesses

were personally named, seven of them women, all residents of Nantes,

whose subsequent testimony shows us that they had lost children, whose

disappearance they thought they could connect with Gilles. The object of

this paper was doubtless to loosen the tongues of those to whom it might

be shown, but whatever diligence was used in gathering evidence was

fruitless, for when the trial opened, two months later, but two

additional witnesses had been procured, of the same indecisive kind as

the previous ones. The only charge they made was the abduction of

children, and this was in no sense a crime within the competence of the

ecclesiastical court. Evidently the awful secrets of Tiffauges and

Machecoul had not leaked out. It was necessary to hazard something, to

strike boldly, and when Gilles and his retainers were in the hands of

justice its methods could be relied upon to procure from them evidence

sufficient for their own conviction.[521]

The blow fell September 13, when the bishop issued a citation summoning

Gilles to appear for trial before him on the 19th. The recital of his

misdeeds in the previous letter was repeated, with the significant

addition of "other crimes and offences savoring of heresy." This was

served upon him personally the next day, and he made no resistance. Some

rumor of what was impending must have been in the air, for his two chief

instigators and confidants, Gilles de Sillé and Roger de Briqueville,

saved themselves by flight. The rest of his nearest servitors and

procurers, male and female, were seized, including Prelati, and carried

to Nantes. On the 19th he had a private hearing before the bishop. The

prosecuting officer, Guillaume Capeillon, cunningly preferred certain

charges of heresy against him, when he fell into the trap and boldly

offered to purge himself before the bishop or any other ecclesiastical

judge. He was taken at his word, and the 28th was fixed for his

appearance before the bishop and the vice-inquisitor of Nantes, Jean

Blouyn.[522]

The records are imperfect, and tell us nothing of what was done with the

followers of Gilles, but we may be sure that during this interval the

methods of the inquisitorial process were not spared to extract

information from them, and that it was spread among the people to create

public opinion, for already, by the 28th, some of the sorrowing parents

who came forward to confirm their previous complaints assert that since

La Meffraye had been in the secular prison they had been told that she

said their children had been delivered to Gilles. At this hearing of the

28th only these ten witnesses were heard, with their vague conjectures

as to the loss of their offspring. Gilles was not present, and

apparently the result of the torture of his servants had not yet been

satisfactory, for further proceedings were adjourned till October

8.[523]

In the succeeding hearings the rule of secrecy seems to have been

abandoned. There evidently was extreme anxiety to create popular opinion

against the prisoner, for the court-room in the Tour Neuve was crowded.

On October 8 proceedings opened with the frantic cries of the bereaved

parents clamoring for justice against him who had despoiled them and had

committed a black catalogue of crimes, which shows that since their last

appearance their ignorance had been carefully enlightened. Like the

chorus of a Greek tragedy, the same dramatic use was made of them on the

11th, after which, as the object was presumably accomplished, they

disappear.[524]

At the hearing of the 8th the articles of accusation were presented

orally by the prosecutor. Gilles thereupon appealed from the court, but

as his appeal was verbal it was promptly set aside, though no offer was

made to him of counsel, or even of a notary to reduce it to writing. If

anything could move us to commiseration for such a criminal it would be

the mockery of justice in a trial where, alone and unaided, he was

called upon to defend his life without preparation or the means of

defence. He doubtless was guilty, but if he had been innocent the result

would have been the same. Yet the trial was not carried on "_simpliciter

et de plano_" according to the forms of the Inquisition. There was a

semblance of a _litis contestatio_. The prosecutor took the _juramentum

de calumnia_, to tell the truth and avoid deceit, and demanded that

Gilles should do the same, as prescribed by legal form, but the latter

obstinately refused, though summoned four times and threatened with

excommunication. The only notice he would take of the proceedings was to

denounce all the charges as false.[525]

It was worse at the hearing of the 13th, when the accusations had been

reduced to writing in a formidable series of forty-nine articles. When

the bishop and inquisitor asked him what he had to say in defence,

Gilles haughtily retorted that they were not his judges; he had appealed

from them and would make no reply to the charges. Then, giving rein to

his temper, he stigmatized them as simoniacs and scoundrels, before whom

it was degradation for him to appear; he would rather be hanged by the

neck than acknowledge them as his judges; he wondered that Pierre de

l'Hôpital, president or chief judicial officer of Brittany, who was

present, would allow ecclesiastics to meddle with such crimes as were

alleged against him. In spite of his reclamations the indictment was

read, when he simply denounced it as a pack of lies and refused to

answer formally. Then, after repeated warnings, the bishop and

inquisitor pronounced him contumacious and excommunicated him. He again

appealed, but the appeal was rejected as frivolous, and he was given

forty-eight hours in which to frame a defence.[526]

The charges formed a long and most elaborate paper, showing by its

detail of individual cases that by this time Gilles's servitors must

have been induced to make full confessions. For the first time there

appear in it the sacrilege and violation of clerical immunity committed

at Saint-Étienne, and the charge of child-murder only figures as an

accessory to the other crimes to which it was connected. Everything,

however, that could be alleged against him was gathered together, even

to inordinate eating and drinking, which were assumed to have led to his

other excesses. His transient fits of repentance and vows of amendment

were utilized ingeniously to prove that he was a relapsed heretic and

thus deprived of all chance of escape. In the conclusion the prosecutor

apportioned the charges between the two jurisdictions. The bishop and

inquisitor conjointly were prayed to declare him guilty of heretical

apostasy and the invocation of demons, while the bishop alone was to

pronounce sentence on his unnatural crimes and sacrilege, the

Inquisition having no cognizance of these offences. It is worthy of note

that there is no allusion to alchemy; apparently it was not regarded as

an unlawful pursuit.[527]

It is not easy to understand what followed. When two days later, on the

15th, Gilles was brought into court he was a changed man. We have no

means of knowing what influences had meanwhile been brought to bear upon

him, but the only probable explanation would seem to be that he

recognized from the details of the charges that his servants had been

forced to betray him, that further resistance would only subject him to

torture, and, in his earnest care for the salvation of his soul, that

submission to the Church and endurance of the inevitable was the only

path to heaven. Still, he could not at once summon resolution to incur

the humiliation of a detailed public confession. While he humbly

admitted the bishop and inquisitor to be his judges, and on bended knee,

with tears and sighs, craved their pardon for the insults which he had

showered upon them, and begged for absolution from the excommunication

incurred by contumacy; while he took with the prosecutor the _juramentum

de calumnia_; while in general terms he acknowledged that he had no

objection to make to the charges and confessed the crimes alleged

against him, yet when he was required to answer to the articles

_seriatim_ he at once denied that he had invoked, or caused to be

invoked, any malignant spirits; he had, it is true, dabbled in alchemy,

but he freely offered himself to be burned if the witnesses to be

produced, whose testimony he was willing to accept in advance, should

prove that he had invoked demons or entered into pacts with them and

offered them sacrifices. All the rest of the charges he specifically

denied, but he invited the prosecutor to produce what witnesses he

chose, and he (Gilles) would admit their evidence to be conclusive.

Although in all this there is a contradiction which casts doubt upon the

frankness of the official record, it may perhaps be explained by

vacillation not improbable in his terrible position. He did not shrink,

however, when his servants and agents, Henriet, Poitou, Prelati,

Blanchet, and his two procuresses were brought forward and sworn in his

presence; he declined the offer of the bishop and inquisitor to frame

the interrogatories for their examination, and he declared that he would

stand to their depositions and make no exceptions to them or to their

evidence. It was the same when, on the 15th and 19th, additional

witnesses were sworn in his presence. The examinations of these

witnesses, however, were made by notaries in private. The depositions

made by Henriet and Poitou, which have been preserved to us, are hideous

catalogues of the foulest crimes, minute in their specifications, though

the identity between them in trifles, where omissions or discrepancies

would be natural, strongly suggests manipulation either of witnesses or

of records. That of Prelati is equally full in its details of

necromancy, and raises at once the question, not easily answered, why

the necromancer, who had richly earned the stake, seems to have escaped

all punishment; and the same may be said as to Blanchet, La Meffraye and

her colleague, and some others of those involved. It is worthy of note,

that in these confessions or depositions the customary formula that they

are made without fear, force, or favor is conspicuous by its

absence.[528]

At the hearing of October 20 Gilles was again asked if he had anything

to propose, and he replied in the negative. He waived all delay as to

the publication of the evidence against him, and when the depositions of

his accomplices were read he said he had no exceptions to make to them;

in fact, that the publication was unnecessary in view of what he had

already said, and what he intended to confess. One would think that this

was quite sufficient, for his guilt was thus proved and admitted, but

the infernal curiosity of the jurisprudence of the time was never

satisfied until it had wrung from the accused a detailed and formal

confession. The prosecutor, therefore, earnestly demanded of the bishop

and inquisitor that Gilles should be tortured, in order, as he said, to

develop the truth more fully. They consulted with the experts and

decided that torture should be applied.[529]

The proud man had hoped to be spared the humiliation of a detailed

confession, but this was not to be allowed. On the next day, October

21, the bishop and inquisitor ordered him to be brought in and tortured.

Everything was in readiness for it, when he humbly begged them to defer

it until the next day, and that meanwhile he would make up his mind so

as to satisfy them and render it unnecessary. He further asked that they

should commission the Bishop of Saint-Brieuc and Pierre de l'Hôpital to

hear his confession in a place apart from the torture. This last prayer

they granted, but they would only give him a respite until two o'clock,

with the promise of a further postponement until the next day, in case

he confessed meanwhile. When the confession made that afternoon, under

these circumstances, is officially declared to have been made "freely

and willingly and without coercion of any kind," it affords another

example of the value of these customary formulas.[530]

Before the commissioners he made no difficulty of accusing himself of

all the crimes wherewith he stood charged. Pierre de l'Hôpital found the

recital hard of credence, and pressed him vigorously to disclose the

motive which had led to their commission. He was not satisfied with

Gilles's declaration that it was simply to gratify his passions, till he

exclaimed, "Truly, there was no other cause, object, or intention than I

have said. I have told you greater things than that--enough to put ten

thousand men to death." The president pressed the matter no further, but

sent for Prelati, when the two accomplices freely confirmed each other's

statements, and they parted in tears with the affectionate farewell

already alluded to.[531]

There was no further talk of torture. Gilles was now fairly embarked in

his new course. Apparently resolved to win heaven by contrition and by

the assistance of the Church, this extraordinary man presents, during

the remainder of the trial, a spectacle which is probably without an

example. When, on the next day, October 22, he was brought before his

judges, the proud and haughty baron desired that his confession should

be read in public, so that his humiliation should aid in winning pardon

from God. Not content with this, he supplemented his confession with

abundant details of his atrocities, as though seeking to make to God an

acceptable oblation of his pride. Finally, after exhorting those

present to honor and obey the Church, he begged with abundant tears

their prayers, and entreated pardon of the parents whose children he had

murdered.[532]

On the 25th he was brought up for sentence. After the bishop and

inquisitor had duly consulted their assembly of experts, two sentences

were read. The first, in the name of both judges, condemned him as

guilty of heretical apostasy and horrid invocation of demons, for which

he had incurred excommunication and other penalties of the law, and for

which he should be punished according to the canonical sanctions. The

second sentence, rendered by the bishop alone, in the same form,

condemned him for unnatural crime, for sacrilege, and for violating the

immunities of the Church. In neither sentence was there any punishment

indicated. He was not pronounced relapsed, and therefore could not be

abandoned to the secular arm, and it was apparently deemed superfluous

to enjoin on him any penance, as a prosecution had been going on _pari

passu_ in the secular court, of which the result was not in doubt. The

ecclesiastical court had dropped the accusation of murder, after it had

served its purpose in exciting popular odium, and had left it to the

civil authorities to which it belonged. In fact, the whole elaborate

proceedings were a nullity, except so far as they served as a shield for

the civil process, and as a basis for confiscating his estates.[533]

After the reading of the sentences he was asked if he wished

reincorporation in the Church. He replied that he had not known what

heresy was, nor that he had lapsed into it, but as the Church had

declared him guilty, he begged on his knees, with sighs and groans, to

be reincorporated. When this ceremony was accomplished he asked for

absolution, which was granted. It shows the deceptive nature of the

whole proceedings, and how little the bishop and inquisitor thought of

anything but the secret object to be attained, that although Gilles was

condemned for heresy, he was absolved without subjection to the

indispensable ceremony of abjuration, and his request for a confessor

was promptly met by the appointment of Jean Juvenal, a Carmelite of

Ploermel.[534]

From the Tour Neuve, where the ecclesiastical court held its sittings,

Gilles was at once hurried before the secular tribunal in the Bouffay.

It had commenced its inquest on September 18, and had been busily

employed in collecting evidence concerning the child-murders, besides

which, its presiding judge, Pierre de l'Hôpital, had been present at

much of the ecclesiastical trial, and had personally received Gilles's

confession. It was thus fully prepared to act, and indeed had already

condemned Henriet and Poitou to be hanged and burned. When Gilles was

brought in and arraigned he immediately confessed. Pierre urged him to

confess in full, and thus obtain alleviation of the penalty due to his

sins, and he freely complied. Then the president took the opinions of

his assessors, who all voted in favor of death, although there was some

difference as to the form. Finally Pierre announced that he had incurred

the "_peines pecunielles_" which were to be levied on his goods and

lands "with moderation of justice." As for his crimes, for these he was

to be hanged and burned, and that he might have opportunity to crave

mercy of God, the time was fixed for one o'clock the next day. Gilles

thanked him for the designation of the hour, adding that as he and his

servants, Henriet and Poitou, had committed the crimes together, he

asked that they might be executed together, so that he who was the cause

of their guilt might admonish them, and show them the example of a good

death, and by the grace of our Lord be the cause of their salvation. If,

he said, they did not see him die they might think that he escaped, and

thus be cast into despair. Not only was this request granted, but he was

told that he might select the place of his burial, when he chose the

Carmelite church, the sepulchre of the dukes, and of all that was most

illustrious in Brittany. As a last prayer, he begged that the bishop and

clergy might be requested to walk in procession prior to his execution

the next day, to pray God to keep him and his servants in firm belief of

salvation. This was granted, and the morning saw the extraordinary

spectacle of the clergy, followed by the whole population of Nantes, who

had been clamoring for his death, marching through the streets and

singing and praying for his salvation.[535]

On the way to execution Gilles devoted himself to comforting the

servants whom he had brought to a shameful death, assuring them that as

soon as their souls should leave their bodies they would all meet in

paradise. The men were as contrite and as sure of salvation as their

master, declaring that they welcomed death in their unbounded trust in

God. They were all mounted on stands over piles of wood, with halters

around their necks attached to the gallows. The stands were pushed

aside, and as they swung the fagots were lighted. Henriet and Poitou

were allowed to burn to ashes, but when Gilles's halter was burned

through and his body fell, the ladies of his kindred rushed forward and

plucked it from the flames. It was honored with a magnificent funeral,

and it is said that some of the bones were kept by his family as relics

of his repentance.[536]

Under the Breton laws execution for crime entailed confiscation of

movables to the seigneur justicier, but not of the landed estates.

Condemnation for heresy, as we have seen, everywhere carried with it

indiscriminate confiscation and inflicted disabilities for two

generations. Gilles was convicted as a heretic, but the secular sentence

is obscure on the subject of confiscation, and in the intricate and

prolonged litigation which arose over his inheritance it is difficult to

determine to what extent confiscation was enforced. Some twenty years

later the "Mémoire des Héritiers" argues that death had expiated his

crimes and removed all cause of confiscation, which would seem to

indicate that it had taken place. Certain it is that, to assist the Duke

of Brittany, René of Anjou in 1450 confiscated Champtocé and Ingrandes,

which were under his jurisdiction, and ceded them to the duke to confirm

his title. Charles VII., on the other side, had already decreed

confiscation in order to help the heirs.[537]

No disabilities were inflicted upon the descendants, and the house was

still regarded as eligible to the noblest alliances. After a year of

widowhood, Catharine de Thouars married Jean de Vendôme, Vidame of

Chartres, and in 1442 Gilles's daughter, Marie, espoused Prégent de

Coétivy, Admiral of France and one of the most powerful men in the royal

court. He must have considered the match most desirable, for he

submitted to hard conditions in the marriage contract. He resolutely

set to work to recover the alienated or confiscated lands, and succeeded

in gaining possession of some of the finest estates, including Champtocé

and Ingrandes, though his death at the siege of Cherbourg, in 1450,

prevented his enjoying them. Marie not long after was remarried with

André de Laval, Marshal and Admiral of France, who caused her rights to

be respected, but on her death without issue in 1457 the inheritance

passed to Gilles's brother, René de la Suze. The interminable litigation

revived and continued until after his death in 1474. He left but one

daughter, who had been married to the Prince de Déols in 1446; they had

but one son, André de Chauvigny, who died without issue in 1502, when

the race became extinct. The barony of Rais lapsed into the house of

Tournemine, and at length passed into that of Gondy, to become

celebrated in the seventeenth century through the Cardinal de Retz.[538]

Admitting as we must the guilt of Gilles de Rais, all this throws an

uncomfortable doubt over the sincerity of his trial and conviction, and

this is not lessened by the fate of his accomplices. Only Henriet and

Poitou appear to have suffered; there is no trace of the death-penalty

inflicted on any of the rest, though their criminality was sufficient

for the most condign punishment, and the facility with which

self-incriminating evidence was obtainable by the use of torture

rendered unknown the device of purchasing testimony with pardon. Gilles

de Sillé, who was regarded as the worst of the marshal's instigators,

disappeared and was heard of no more. Next to him ranked Roger de

Briqueville. It is somewhat mysterious that the family seem to have

regarded this man with favor. Marie de Rais cherished his children with

tender care. In 1446 he obtained from Charles VII. letters of remission

rehabilitating him, which he certainly could not have procured had not

Prégent de Coétivy favored him, and the latter, in a letter to his

brother Oliver, in 1449, desires to be remembered to Roger.[539]

If the student feels that there is an impenetrable mystery shrouding the

truth in this remarkable case, the Breton peasant was troubled with no

such doubts. To him Gilles remained the embodiment of cruelty and

ferocity. I am not sufficiently versed in folk-lore to express an

opinion whether M. Bossard is correct in maintaining that Gilles is the

original of Bluebeard, the monster of the nursery-tale rendered

universally popular in the version of Charles Perrault. Yet, even

without admitting that the story is of Breton origin, there would seem

to be no doubt that in Brittany, La Vendée, Anjou, and Poitou, where the

terrible baron had his chosen seats of residence, he is known by the

name of Bluebeard, and the legend--possibly an older one--of cruelty to

seven wives, has been attached to him who had but one, and who left that

one a widow. Tradition relates how the demon changed to a brilliant blue

the magnificent red beard that was his pride; and everywhere, at

Tiffauges, at Champtocé, at Machecoul, for the peasant, Bluebeard is the

lord of the castle where Gilles ruled over their forefathers. Even yet,

when the dreaded ruins are approached at dusk, the wayfarer crosses

himself and holds his breath. In one ballad the name of Bluebeard and of

the Baron de Rais are interchanged as identical, and Jean de Malestroit,

Bishop of Nantes, is the champion who delivers the terrorized people

from their oppressor.[540]

* * * * *

Another phase of the popular belief in magic is illustrated in Don

Enrique de Aragon, commonly known as the Marquis of Villena. Born in

1384, uniting the royal blood of both Castile and Aragon, his

grandfather, the Duke of Gandia and Constable of Castile, destined him

for a military life, and forbade his instruction in aught but knightly

accomplishments. The child's keen thirst for knowledge, however,

overcame all obstacles, and he became a marvel of learning for his

unlettered companions. He spoke numerous languages, he was gifted as a

poet, and he became a voluminous historian. The occult arts formed too

prominent a portion of the learning of the day for him to neglect them,

and he became noted for his skill in divination, and for interpreting

dreams, sneezes, and portents--things, we are told, not befitting a

royal prince or a good Catholic, wherefore he was held in slight esteem

by the kings of his time, and in little reverence by the fierce chivalry

of Spain. In fact, he is spoken of in terms of undisguised contempt, as

one who with all his acquirements knew little that was worth knowing,

and who was unfit for knighthood and for worldly affairs, even for

regulating his own household; that he was short and fat, and unduly

fond of women and of eating. His astrological learning was ridiculed in

the saying that he knew much of heaven and little of earth. He left his

wife and gave up his earldom of Tineo in order to obtain the mastership

of the Order of Calatrava, but the king soon deprived him of it, and

thus, in the words of the chronicler, he lost both. After his death, at

the age of fifty, in 1434, the King Juan II. ordered all his books to be

examined by Fray Lope de Barrientos, afterwards Bishop of Cuenca, a

professor of Salamanca and tutor of the Infante Enrique. A portion of

them Fray Lope burned publicly on the plaza of the Dominican convent of

Madrid, where the marquis lay buried. He kept the rest--probably to aid

him in the books on the occult sciences which he wrote at command of the

king.

Don Enrique evidently was a man of culture despised by a barbarous age

which could see in his varied accomplishments only the magic skill so

suggestive to the popular imagination. He was no vulgar magician. In his

commentary on the Æneid he speaks of magic as a forbidden science, of

whose forty different varieties he gives a curious classification. The

only one of his writings that has reached us on a topic of the kind is a

treatise on the evil eye. In common with his age he regards this as an

admitted fact, but he attributes it to natural causes; and in the long

and learned catalogue of remedies employed by different races from

ancient times, he counsels abstinence from those which savor of

superstition and are forbidden by the Church. Had he seriously devoted

himself to the occult sciences he would scarce have written his "Art of

Carving," which was printed in 1766. In this work he not only gives the

most minute directions for carving all manner of flesh, fowls, fish, and

fruits, but gravely proposes that there shall be a school for training

youth of gentle blood in this indispensable accomplishment, with

privileges and honors to reward the most efficient graduates.

Yet of this unworldly scholar, neglected and despised during life,

popular exaggeration speedily made a magician of wondrous power. His

legend grew until there was nothing too wild to be attributed to him. He

caused himself to be cut up and packed in a flask with certain

conjurations, so as to become immortal; he rendered himself invisible

with the herb Andromeda; he turned the sun blood-red with the stone

heliotrope; he brought rain and tempest with a copper vessel; he

divined the future with the stone chelonites; he gave his shadow to the

devil in the cave of San Cebrian. Every feat of magic was attributed to

him; he became the inexhaustible theme of playwright and story-teller,

and to the present day he is the favorite magician of the Spanish stage.

From this example it is easy to trace the evolution of the myths of

Michael Scot, Roger Bacon, Albertus Magnus, Pietro d' Abano, Dr.

Faustus, and other popular necromantic heroes.[541]