Rögnvald’s wrong-doing being thus betrayed, Harald lost no time in despatching Eric Blood-Axe, his son by another wife, who promptly burned his half-brother in a house, along with eighty other sorcerers—a piece of practical justice which we are told met with general popular applause.[448]

Such were the beliefs and practices of the races with which the Church had to do in its efforts to obliterate paganism and sorcery. There was little difference between the provinces which had belonged to the empire and the regions over which Christianity began for the first time to spread, for in the former the conquerors and the conquered were imbued, as we have just seen, with superstitions nearly akin. The exchange of imperial for barbarian rule worked the same result as to sorcery as that related in a former chapter with regard to the persecution of heresy, though it must be borne in mind that, while heresy almost disappeared in the intellectual hebetude of the times, sorcery grew ever more vigorous. Its suppression was practically abandoned. As mentioned above, the earliest text of the Salic law provides no general penalty for it. In subsequent recensions, besides the fine imposed for cannibalism, some MSS. have clauses imposing fines for bewitching with ligatures and killing men with incantations—in the latter case, with the alternative of burning alive—but even these disappear in the Lex Emendata of Charlemagne, possibly in consequence of the legislation of the Capitularies described below. The Ripuarian code only treats murder by sorcery like any other homicide, to be compounded for by the ordinary wer-gild, or blood-money, and for injuries thus inflicted it provides a fine of one hundred sols, to be avoided by compurgation with six conjurators. The other codes are absolutely silent on the subject.[449]

As under the Frankish rule laws were personal and not territorial, the Gallo-Roman population was still governed by the Roman law, but evidently there was no attempt made to enforce it. Gregory of Tours relates for us several miracles to prove the superiority of the Christian magic of relics and invocation of saints over the popular magic of the conjurer, which indicate that the first impulse of the people in case of accident or sudden sickness was to send for the nearest ariolus, or practitioner of forbidden arts, and that the profession was exercised openly and without fear of punishment, in spite of repeated condemnations by the councils of the period. How little such persons had to fear is seen in the case of a woman of Verdun, who professed to be a soothsayer and to discover stolen goods. She was so successful that she drove a thriving trade, purchased her freedom of her master, and accumulated a store of money. At length she was brought before Bishop Ageric, who only treated her for demoniacal possession with exorcisms and inunctions of holy oil, and finally discharged her.[450]

Occasionally, of course, cases occurred in which the unrestrained passions of the Merovingians wreaked savage cruelty on those who had incurred their ill-will, but these were exceptional and outside of the law. When Fredegonda lost two children by pestilence, her stepson Clovis was accused of causing it by sorcery. The woman designated as his accomplice was tortured until she confessed, and was burned, although she retracted her confession, after which Chilperic delivered his son Clovis to Fredegonda, who caused him to be assassinated. When, subsequently, another son, Thierry, died in 584, Mummolus, the royal favorite, whom Fredegonda disliked, was accused of having caused it by incantations. Thereupon she seized some women of Paris, and by scourging and torture forced them to confess themselves sorceresses who had caused numerous deaths, including that of Thierry, whose soul was accepted in place of that of Mummolus. Some of these poor wretches were simply put to death, others she burned, and others she broke on the wheel. Chilperic then caused Mummolus to be tortured by suspension with his arms tied behind his back, but he only confessed to having obtained from the women philtres and ointments to secure the favor of the king and queen. Unluckily he said to the executioner on being taken down, “Tell the king that I feel no ill from what has been done.” On hearing this Chilperic exclaimed, “Is he really a sorcerer that this does not hurt him?” and had him stretched on a rack and scourged with leathern thongs till the executioners were exhausted. Mummolus finally begged his life of Fredegonda, but was stripped of his possessions and sent in a wagon to his native city, Bordeaux, where he died on his arrival. Cases like this throw light on the beliefs of the period, but not upon its judicial routine.[451]

The Lombards in Italy fell to a greater degree under Roman influence, and towards the close of their domination adopted general laws of some severity against the practice of sorcery, irrespective of the injury committed. The sorcerer was to be sold as a slave beyond the province, and the price received was divided between the judge and other officials, according to their respective merits in the prosecution: if through bribes or pity the judge refused to condemn, he was mulcted in his whole wer-gild, or the amount of his blood-money, and half as much if he neglected to discover a sorcerer who was found out by another. The penalty for consulting a sorcerer, or for not informing on him, or for performing incantations, was half the wer-gild of the offender. At the same time the grosser superstitions were rejected, and Rotharis forbade putting sorceresses to death, under the popular belief that they could devour men internally.[452]

In the long anarchy which accompanied the fall of the Merovingians, all respect for the Church, its precepts and observances, was well-nigh lost throughout the Frankish kingdoms. One of the incidents of reconstruction, as the Carlovingian dynasty slowly emerged, and as St. Boniface, under papal authority, sought to restore the Church, was the suppression of Bishop Adalbert, who taught the invocation of the angels Uriel, Raguel, Tubuel, Inias, Tubuas, Sabaoc, and Simiel. Adalbert was venerated as a saint, and the clippings of his nails and hair were treasured as relics. Repeated condemnations at home had no effect on this false worship of angels, and Pope Zachary held, in 745, a synod in Rome which declared it to be a worship of demons, as the only angels whose names are known are Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael. Yet this superstition took so firm a hold upon the people that it was long before it could be eradicated; indeed, it seems to be alluded to, even in the middle of the tenth century, by Atto of Vercelli.[453] When such was the condition of the Church, no suppression of sorcery was to be looked for.

Among the instructions to Boniface and his fellow-missionaries was the eradication of all pagan observances, including divination, sorcery, and cognate superstitions. As the Church became reorganized, councils were held in 742 and 743, in which Church and State united in prohibiting them, although only a moderate fine was threatened, but the ecclesiastical jurisdiction over such offences was established by ordering the bishops to make yearly visitations of their sees to suppress paganism and the forbidden arts. Boniface, however, complained to Zachary that when the Frank or German visited Rome he saw there, openly practised, the things which they were laboriously endeavoring to suppress at home. The first of January was celebrated with pagan dances; women wore amulets and ligatures, and publicly offered them for sale. The pope could only reply that these things had long ago been prohibited, but as they had broken out afresh he had forbidden them again—but we may be assured without success.[454]

In the Carlovingian reconstruction which followed, efforts were made to suppress all superstitious arts, and they were treated with gradually increasing severity, but still with comparative lenity. The most vigorous legislation was an edict of Charlemagne in 805, which confides the matter to the Church, and orders the archpriest of each diocese to investigate all who were accused of divination or sorcery, apparently permitting moderate torture to obtain confession, and keeping the culprits in prison until they amend. In his efforts to christianize Saxony, on the one hand Charlemagne punished with death all who burned witches and ate them, under the belief so widely spread that they ate men, and on the other hand all soothsayers and sorcerers were made over to the Church as slaves. During this period, moreover, and for a couple of centuries following, the parallel legislation of the Church, inflicting spiritual penalties, was singularly mild, although the different penitentials vary so much that it is impossible to deduce any system from them. That which passes under the name of Theodore of Canterbury, and was of general authority, only prescribes a penance of twoscore days or a year for sorcery, or, if the offender is an ecclesiastic, three years, but it orders seven years for placing a child on a roof or in an oven to cure it of fever, and Ecbert of York indicates five years for the same practice. There evidently was no settled rule, but the most systematic code is that of Gaerbald, who was Bishop of Liége about the year 800. He orders all offenders to be brought before him for trial, and enacts seven years’ penance and liberal almsgiving for committing homicide by means of sorcery, seven years without almsgiving for rendering the victim insane, five years and almsgiving for consulting diviners or practising augury from birds, seven years for sorcerers who bring on tempests, three years and almsgiving for honoring sorcerers, one year for sorcery to excite love, provided it did not result in death, but if the offender was a monk, the penalty was increased to five years. Another penitential of the period prescribes twoscore days or a year for divination or diabolical incantations, but seven years if a woman threatens another with sorcery, to be reduced to four if she is poor. In 829 the Council of Paris attributes the misfortunes of the empire to the prevalence of crime, and especially of sorcery; it quotes the savage provisions of the Mosaic law, and enumerates at considerable length the evil deeds of the offenders—how men are rendered insane by philtres and love-potions, how tempests and hail are induced, how harvests and milk and fruits are transferred from their lawful owners, and how the future is predicted, but it indicates no penalties, and only asks the secular rulers to punish these crimes sharply. Similarly Erard, Archbishop of Tours, in 838 uttered a general prohibition, but only threatened public penance without indicating details. All that we can gather from this confused legislation, from the collections known as the Capitularies, and from the speculations and arguments of Rabanus Maurus and Hincmar of Reims, is that every species of divination and sorcery, Roman and Teutonic, was rife; that it was held to derive its power directly from Satan; that the Church was wholly unable to deal with it; that secular legislation threatened only moderate penalties, and that these were for the most part wholly unenforced.[455]

Yet, outside of the organized machinery of the Church and State, there was a rough popular justice—a sort of Lynch law—which handled individual offenders with scant ceremony. A chance allusion about this period to Gerberga, who was drowned by the Emperor Lothair in the river Arar, “as is customary with sorcerers,” indicates that much was going on not provided for in the Capitularies. The same is seen in a curious statement by St. Agobard, Archbishop of Lyons, who waged such ineffectual battle with many of the superstitions of the time. One of these, as we have seen, was that tempests could be caused by sorcery—a belief which the Church at first pronounced heretical because it inferred the Manichæan dualistic theory, which placed the visible world under the control of Satan, but which it finally accepted as orthodox, and Thomas Aquinas proved that, with the permission of God, demons could bring about perturbations of the air. Agobard tells us that the belief in his province was universal, among all ranks, that there was a region named Magonia, whence ships came in the clouds and carried back thither the harvests destroyed by hail, the Tempestarii, as these sorcerers were called, being paid by the Magonians for bringing on the storms. Whenever the rumbling of thunder was heard it was a customary remark that a sorcerer’s wind was coming. These Tempestarii carried on their nefarious trade in secrecy, but there was a recognized class of practitioners who professed to be able to neutralize them, and were regularly paid for doing so with a portion of the crops, which came to be known as the “canonical portion,” and men who paid no tithes and gave nothing in charity were regular in contributing to these impostors. On one occasion three men and a woman were seized, charged with being Magonians who had fallen from one of their aerial ships. A meeting of the people was summoned, before whom the prisoners were brought in chains, and they were promptly condemned to be stoned to death, when Agobard himself came to the rescue, and after prolonged argument succeeded in procuring their liberation. A similar instance of extra-judicial action was seen when a destructive murrain invaded the herds, and the story spread that it was caused by Grimoald, Duke of Benevento, who, out of enmity to Charlemagne, sent emissaries to scatter a magic powder on the mountains and fields and streams. As Agobard says, every inhabitant of Benevento, with three wagons apiece, could not have sprinkled a territory so extensive as that affected, but nevertheless large numbers of wretches were captured and put to death on the charge of being concerned in the matter. When he adds that it was marvellous that these persons confessed their pretended crime, and could not be prevented from bearing false witness against themselves, either by scourging, torture, or the fear of death, we learn the means adopted to secure conviction; and in this early and irregular instance of the use of torture we see a foreshadowing of the time when all the extravagant absurdities of the Witches’ Sabbat were, by the same efficacious methods, eagerly confessed, and the confessions persisted in to the stake. We see also what an atmosphere of superstitious terror pervaded the life of Europe.[456]

Carlovingian civilization was but a brief episode in the darkness of those dreary centuries. In the disorder which accompanied the breaking-up of the empire, the organization of feudalism, and the founding of the European monarchies, although the Church was quietly attributing to itself the functions and the jurisdiction on which were based its subsequent claims of theocratic supremacy, it took no efficient steps to destroy the kingdom of Satan, though his agents the diviners and sorcerers were as numerous as ever. The Council of Pavia in 850 merely prescribed penance during life for sorceresses who undertook to provoke love and hatred, leading to the death of many victims. There may have been an occasional explosion of popular cruelty, such as indicated by the brief mention in a doubtful MS. of the burning of a number of sorcerers in Saxony in 914, but in fact the Church came almost virtually to tolerate them. About the middle of the tenth century Bishop Atto of Vercelli felt it necessary to revive and publish anew a forgotten canon of the Fourth Council of Toledo, which threatened with degradation and perpetual penance in a monastery any bishop, priest, deacon, or other ecclesiastic who should consult magicians or sorcerers or augurs. Atto, however, was a puritan, who endeavored to resist the general demoralization of the age. How little repugnance was felt for the forbidden arts is seen in the fact that the reputation for necromantic skill gained in Spain did not prevent the election of Gerbert of Aurillac to the archiepiscopal sees of Reims and Ravenna, and finally to the papacy itself; while as late as 1170 we have seen an archbishop of Besançon have recourse to an ecclesiastic skilled in necromancy to aid him in detecting some heretics.[457]

In fact, the Church occupied an inconsistent attitude. Occasionally it took the enlightened view that these beliefs were groundless superstitions. An Irish council of the ninth century anathematizes any Christian who believes in the existence of witches, and forces him to recant before admitting him to reconciliation. Similarly, in 1080, Gregory VII. in writing to Harold the Simple of Denmark, strongly reproves the custom of attributing to priests and women all tempests, sickness, and other bodily misfortunes: these are the judgments of God, and to wreak vengeance for them on the innocent is only to provoke still more the divine wrath. More generally, however, the Church admitted their truth and sought, though with little energy, to repress them with spiritual censures. This halting position is well illustrated by the canons of Burchard, Bishop of Worms, in the early part of the eleventh century, where sometimes it is the belief in the existence of sorcery that is penanced, and sometimes it is the practice of the art. If confessors, moreover, followed Burchard’s instructions and interrogated their penitents in detail as to the various magic processes which they might have performed, it could only result in disseminating a knowledge of those wicked arts in a most suggestive way. At the same time Burchard, like the other canonists, Regino of Pruhm and Ivo of Chartres, gave an ample store of prohibitory canons drawn from the early councils and the writings of the fathers, showing that the reality of sorcery was freely admitted as well as the duty of the Church to combat it. So implicit was the belief in magic powers that the Church conceded the dissolution of the indissoluble sacrament of matrimony when the consummation of marriage was prevented by the arts of the sorcerer, and exorcisms and prayers and almsgiving and other ecclesiastical remedies proved powerless for three years to overcome the power of Satan. Guibert of Nogent relates, with pardonable pride, that although this occurred when his father and mother were married, through the malice of a stepmother, yet his mother resisted all persuasion to avail herself of a divorce, although the impediment continued for seven years, and the spell was broken at last, not by priestly ministrations, but by an ancient wise-woman. Such a cause was alleged when Philip Augustus abandoned his bride, Ingeburga of Denmark, on their marriage-day, and Bishop Durand, in his Speculum Juris, tells us that these cases were of daily occurrence. Even so enlightened a man as John of Salisbury airs his learning in describing all the varieties of magic, and is careful to define that if sorcerers kill men with the violence of their spells it is through the permission of God; while Peter of Blois, if he shows himself superior to the vulgar belief in omens, admits the potency of Satanic suggestiveness in the darker forms of magic.[458]

With this universal belief in sorcery and in its diabolic origin, there seems to have been no thought of enforcing the severity of the laws. About 1030, Poppo, Archbishop of Trèves, sent to a nun a piece of his cloak of which to make him a pair of shoes to be worn in saying mass. She bewitched them so that when he put them on he found himself dying of love for her. He resisted the desire and gave the shoes to one of his chief ecclesiastics, who experienced the same effect. The experiment was tried with like result on all the principal clergy of the cathedral, and when the evidence was overwhelming the fair offender was condemned simply to expulsion from the convent, while Poppo himself expiated his transient passion by a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. It was felt, however, that the discipline of the nunnery must be dangerously lax, and the other nuns were given the option of adopting a stricter rule or of dispersion. They chose the latter, and were replaced with a body of monks. When, in 1074, a revolt in Cologne forced the archbishop to fly, it is related among the excesses of the triumphant rebels that they threw from the walls and killed a woman defamed for having crazed a number of men by magic arts. That was regarded as a crime which three centuries later would have been a manifestation of praiseworthy zeal. About the same time a council in Bohemia warns the faithful not to have recourse in their troubles to sorcerers; but it only prescribes confession and repentance and to abstain from a repetition of the offence.[459]

Still, the accusation of sorcery was felt to be damaging, and as it was easy to bring and hard to disprove, it was bandied about somewhat recklessly. It was not enough for Berenger of Tours to be compelled to abjure his notions concerning transubstantiation, but he was stigmatized as the most expert of necromancers. In the bitter strife of Gregory VII., with the empire, when, in 1080, the Synod of Brescia deposed him and elected Wiberto of Ravenna as antipope, one of the reasons alleged against him was that he was a manifest necromancer—an art which he was supposed to have learned in Toledo. The manner in which partisanship availed itself of this method of attack is curiously illustrated by the opposing accounts given of Liutgarda, niece of Egilbert, Archbishop of Trèves, at this period. He was a resolute imperialist, and accepted his pallium from Wiberto, after which he made Liutgarda abbess of a convent in his diocese. The account of his episcopate is written by a contemporary; one MS., which is doubtless the genuine one, describes her as a cultured and exemplary woman, who ruled her nunnery in the service of God for forty years, leaving a happy memory behind her; another MS. of the same chronicle calls her a blasphemous witch and sorceress, under whose government the convent was almost ruined. After the Church had triumphed over the empire, it is easy to understand why such an interpolation should have been made.[460]

While thus the ancient laws against sorcery were practically falling into desuetude on the Continent, the legislation of the Anglo-Saxons shows that in England lyblac or witchcraft was the object of greater solicitude. About the year 900 the laws of Edward and Guthrum class witches and diviners with perjurers, murderers, and strumpets, who are ordered to be driven from the land, with the alternatives of reforming, of being executed, or of paying heavy fines—a provision which was repeatedly re-enacted by succeeding monarchs to the time of Cnut. Athelstan soon after decreed that when death was caused by lyblac, and the perpetrator confessed it, he should pay with his life; if he denied, he underwent the triple ordeal: failing in this he was imprisoned for four months, after which his kinsmen could release him on paying the wer-gild of the slain, the heavy fine of one hundred and twenty shillings to the king, and giving security for his good behavior. Towards the middle of the tenth century, Edward the Elder denounced perpetual excommunication for lyblac unless the offender repented. In the compilation known as the Laws of Henry I. murder by sorcery forfeited the privilege of redemption by paying wer-gild, and the perpetrator was handed over to the kinsmen of the slain, to be dealt with at their pleasure. For minor injuries thus caused, redemption was allowed as in other cases. When the accused denied, he was tried before the bishop, thus subjecting this offence to ecclesiastical jurisdiction. This severity seems to have changed with the Norman Conquest, for William the Conqueror, when besieging the Island of Ely, by advice of Ivo Taillebois placed at the head of his army a sorceress whose incantations were expected to paralyze the resistance of the defenders. Unluckily for the scheme, Hereward of Burgh made a flank attack on the invaders, and, setting fire to the reeds, burned the sorceress and all who were with her.[461]

When Olaf Tryggvesson, early in the eleventh century, endeavored to christianize Norway, he recognized the sorcerers as the most formidable enemies of the faith, and handled them unsparingly. At a Thing, or assembly, in Viken, he proclaimed that he would banish all who could be proved to deal with spirits or in witchcraft, and this he followed up with proceedings somewhat rigorous. He ransacked the district and had all the sorcerers brought together; he gave them a great feast with plenty of liquor, and when they were drunk he had the house fired, so that none escaped save Eyvind Kellda, a grandson of Harald Harfaager, and a peculiarly obnoxious wizard, who climbed through the smoke-hole in the roof. In the spring Olaf celebrated Easter on Kormt Island, when thither came Eyvind in a long ship fully manned with sorcerers. Landing, they put on caps of darkness, which rendered them invisible, and surrounded themselves with a thick mist, but when they came to Augvaldsness, where King Olaf lay, it became clear day and they were stricken with blindness, so that they wandered helplessly around till the king’s men seized them and brought them before him. He had them bound and placed on a rock which was bare only at low water, and Snorri Sturlason says that in his time it was still known as the Skerry of Shrieks. Another pious act related of Olaf illustrates both the methods requisite to spread the gospel among the rugged heroes of Norway and one of the explanations given by the Christians of the powers of sorcerers. Olaf captured Eyvind Kinnrif, a noted sorcerer, and sought to convert him, but in vain. Then a pan of fire was placed upon his belly, which he stoically endured until he burst asunder before asking its removal. Regarding this tardy request as a sign of yielding, Olaf asked him “Eyvind, wilt thou now believe in Christ?” “No,” replied Eyvind, “I can take no baptism, for I am an evil spirit placed in a man’s body by Lapland sorcery, because in no other way could my father and mother have a child,” and with that he died. Yet in the earliest Icelandic code, the Grágás, compiled probably in 1118, there is no mention of sorcery, which seems to have been left to the spiritual courts; while in the contemporary ecclesiastical body of law the punishment of magic arts is only three years’ exile, unless injury or death to man or beast has been wrought, when it is perpetual. In either case the accused is entitled to trial before twelve good men and true.[462]

Elsewhere throughout Europe, by the end of the twelfth century, the repression of sorcery seems to have been well-nigh abandoned by both secular and ecclesiastical authorities. This was not because its practice had been either given up or rendered lawful. In 1149 we find Abbot Wibald of Corvey accusing Walter, one of his monks, of using diabolical incantations. The cause which led Alexander III., in 1181, to monopolize for the Holy See the canonization of saints was that the monks of the Norman abbey of Gristan were addicted to magic, and by its means endeavored to gain the reputation of working miracles; during the absence in England of the abbot, the prior one day got drunk at dinner and struck with a table-knife two of his monks, who retaliated by beating him to death, and he perished unhouselled, yet by evil arts the monks succeeded in inducing the people to adore him as a saint until Bishop Arnoul of Lisieux reported the truth to Alexander. So easily were such offences condoned that in the case of a priest who, to recover something stolen from his church, employed a magician and looked into an astrolabe, Alexander only ordered the punishment of a year’s suspension, and this decision was embodied by Gregory IX. in the canon law as a precedent to be followed. This method of divination involved the invocation of spirits, and was wholly unlawful, yet it was employed without scruple. John of Salisbury, who died in 1181, relates that when he was a boy he was given to a priest to be taught the psalms. His instructor mingled with his sacred functions the practice of catoptromancy, and once made use of his pupil and an older scholar to look into the polished basin, after due conjurations and the use of the holy chrism. John could see nothing, and was relieved from further service of the kind, but his comrade discerned shadowy forms and thus was a more useful subject. Thus the forbidden arts flourished with but slender repression, and in this period of virtual toleration they worked little evil, save perhaps an occasional case of poisoning in a love-potion.[463]

It might be expected that this toleration would cease as the human mind awakened and in its gropings began to cultivate with increased assiduity the occult sciences, in the endeavor to penetrate the secrets of nature; as scholastic theology developed itself into a system which sought to frame a theory of the universe; as the revived study of the Roman law brought again into view the imperial edicts against sorcery, and as the spiritual courts became effectively organized for their enforcement. Yet the development of persecution was wonderfully slow. The Church had a real and a dangerous enemy to combat in the threatening growth of heresy, and had little thought to bestow on a matter which did not endanger the power and privileges of the hierarchy. An occasional council, like those of Rouen in 1189 and of Paris in 1212, denounced the practitioners of magic, but there was no defined penalty, and only excommunication was threatened against them. Yet there was a popular idea that, like heresy, burning was the appropriate punishment, as in the case, about the same period, of a young cleric of Soest named Hermann, who, when vainly tempted by an unchaste woman, was accused by her of magic arts, was condemned and burned. In the flames he sang the Ave Maria until silenced by a blazing stick thrust into his mouth by a kinsman of the accuser; but his innocence shone forth in the miracles wrought at his grave, and a chapel was built over it which stood as a warning against such inconsiderate zeal.[464]

Cæsarius of Heisterbach, to whom we owe this incident, has an ample store of marvels which show that superstition was as active as ever, that men were eager to gain what advantage they could from intercourse with Satan, and that such practices were virtually unrepressed. He tells of a certain ecclesiastic named Philip, a celebrated necromancer, dead only a few years previous, apparently without trouble from Church or State. A knight named Henry of Falkenstein, who disbelieved in demons, applied to him to satisfy his doubts. Philip obligingly drew a circle with a sword at a cross-roads and muttered his spells, when, with a tumult like rushing waters and roaring tempests, the demon came, taller than the trees, black, and of a most fearful aspect. The knight kept within the charmed circle and escaped immediate ill, but lost his color, and remained pallid during the few years in which he survived. A priest undertook the same experience, but became frightened and allowed himself to be dragged out of the circle; he was so injured that he died on the third day, whereupon Waleran of Luxembourg piously confiscated his house, showing that immunity was not always to be reckoned on.[465]

Compacts with Satan were also not infrequent. The heretics burned at Besançon in 1180 were found to have such compacts inscribed on little rolls of parchment under the skin of their armpits. It would be difficult to find any historical fact of the period apparently resting on better authority than the story of Everwach, who was still living as a monk of St. Nicholas at Stalum when Cæsarius described his adventures as related by eye-witnesses. He had been steward of Theodoric, Bishop of Utrecht, whom he served faithfully. Accused of malversation, he found some of his accounts missing, and in despair he invoked the devil, saying, “Lord, if thou wilt help me in my necessity I will do homage to thee and serve thee in all things.” The devil appeared, and Everwach accepted his conditions of renouncing Christ and the Virgin and paying him homage, after which the accounts were proved without difficulty. Thenceforth Everwach was in the habit of openly saying, “Those who serve God are wretched and poor, but they who believe in the devil are prosperous,” and he devoted himself to the study of magic arts. It shows how lax was the discipline of the time, when, in his zeal for Satan, he bitterly opposed Master Oliver, the Scholasticus of Cologne, who preached the cross in Utrecht, and on being reproved sought to slay him, being only prevented by a sickness of which he died. He was plunged into hell and subjected to the indescribable torments of the damned, but the Lord pitied him, and he returned to life on the bier at his own funeral. Thenceforth he was a changed man. In company with Bishop Otto of Utrecht he made the pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre, inflicting on himself all manner of austerities, and on his return gave his property to the Church and entered the convent at Stalum. There is another story, of a spendthrift young knight near Liége, who, after squandering his fortune, was induced by one of his peasants to appeal to Satan. On the promise of wealth and honors he renounced allegiance to God and rendered regular feudal homage to Satan; the latter, however, required him to also renounce the Virgin, and this he refused to do, wherefore, on his repenting, he was pardoned at her intercession.[466]

These instances, which could readily be multiplied, will suffice to show the tendency of popular thought and belief at this period. It is true that Roger Bacon, who was in so many things far in advance of the age, argued that much of magic was simply fraud and delusion; that it is an error to suppose that man can summon and dismiss malignant spirits at will, and that it is much simpler to pray directly to God because demons can influence human affairs only through God’s permission. Even Bacon, however, in asserting the uselessness of charms and spells, gives as his reason that their efficacy depended on their being made under certain aspects of the heavens, the determination of which was very difficult and uncertain. Bacon’s partial incredulity only indicates the universality of the belief in less scientific minds, and, in view of the activity assigned to Satan in seeking human agents and servitors, and the ease with which men could evoke him and bind themselves to him, the supineness of the Church with regard to such offences is remarkable. The terrible excitement aroused by the persecution of the Stedingers and of Conrad of Marburg’s Luciferans must indubitably have given a stimulus to the belief in demonic agencies. Thomas of Cantimpré tells us that he had from Conrad, the Dominican provincial, as happening to one of Conrad of Marburg’s Luciferans, the well-known story that the heretic, endeavoring to convert a friar, conducted him to a vast palace where the Virgin sat enthroned in ineffable splendor surrounded by innumerable saints; but the friar, who had provided himself with a pyx containing a consecrated host, presented it to the Virgin with a demand that she should adore her Son, when the whole array vanished in darkness. Yet this excitement left behind it a reaction which rather created indisposition to further persecution. Pierre de Colmieu, afterwards Cardinal of Albano, when Archbishop of Rouen, in 1235, included invoking and sacrificing to demons and the use of the sacraments in sorcery only among the cases reserved to the bishops for granting absolution; and the cursory allusion to the subject by Bishop Durand in his Speculum Juris shows that, for at least a half-century later, the subject attracted little attention in the ecclesiastical courts. A synod of Anjou, in 1294, declares that according to the canons priests should expel from their parishes all diviners, soothsayers, sorcerers, and the like, and laments that they were permitted to increase and multiply without hindrance, to remedy which all who know of such persons are ordered to report them to the episcopal court, in order that their horrible malignity may be restrained.[467]

Still more remarkable is the indifference of secular jurists and lawgivers during the thirteenth century, when the jurisprudence of Europe was developing and assuming definite shape. In England there is a strong contrast with the Anglo-Saxon period in the silence respecting sorcery in Glanvill, Bracton, the Fleta, and Britton. The latter, in describing the circuits of the sheriffs, gives an elaborate enumeration of the offences about which they are to make inquisition, including renegades and misbelievers, but omitting sorcery, and the same omission is observable in the minute instructions given by Edward I. to the sheriffs in the Statute of Ruddlan in 1283, although Peter, Bishop of Exeter, in his instructions to confessors in 1287, mentions sorcerers and demon-worshippers among the criminals to whom they are to assign penance. It is true that Horn’s Myrror of Justice classes sorcery and heresy together as majestas, or treason to the King of Heaven, and we may assume that both were liable to the same penalty, though neither were actively prosecuted. It is the same with the mediæval laws of Scotland as collected by Skene. The Iter Camerarii embodies detailed instructions for the inquests to be held by the royal chamberlain in his circuits, but in the long list of crimes and misdemeanors requiring investigation there is no allusion to sorcery or divination.[468]

It is nearly the same in French jurisprudence. The Conseil of Pierre de Fontaines and the so-called Établissements of St. Louis contain no references to sorcery. The Livres de Jostice et de Plet, though based on the Roman law, makes no mention of it in its long list of crimes and penalties, although incidentally an imperial law is said to apply to those who slay by poisons or enchantments. Beaumanoir, however, though he seems only to know of sorcery employed to excite love, tells us that it is wholly under ecclesiastical jurisdiction; its practitioners err in the faith, and thus are justiciable by the Church, which summons them to abandon their errors, and in case of refusal condemns them as misbelievers. Then secular justice lays hold of them and inflicts death if it appears that their sorcery may bring death on man or woman, while if there is no danger of this, it imprisons them until they recant. Thus sorcery is heresy cognizable by the Church only, and punishable when abjured only by penitence; yet, when the obstinate sorcerer is handed over to the secular arm, in place of being burned like a Waldensian refusing to swear, the character of his heresy is weighed by the secular court, and if its intent be not homicide he is simply imprisoned until he recants, showing that sorcery was treated as the least dangerous form of heresy. Beaumanoir’s assertion of ecclesiastical jurisdiction is confirmed by a contemporaneous decision of the Parlement of Paris in 1282, in the case of some women arrested as sorceresses in Senlis and tried by the maire and jurats. The Bishop of Senlis claimed them, as their offence pertained to his court; the magistrates asserted their jurisdiction, especially as there had been cutting of skin and effusion of blood, and the Parlement, after due deliberation, ordered the women delivered to the spiritual court. Yet, though this was the law at the time, it did not long remain so. Under the ancestral systems of criminal practice, when conviction or acquittal in doubtful cases depended on the ordeal or the judicial duel or on compurgation, the secular courts were poorly equipped for determining guilt in a crime so obscure, and they naturally abandoned it to the encroachments of the spiritual tribunals. As the use of torture, however, gradually spread, the lay officials became quite as competent as the ecclesiastical to wring confession and conviction from the accused, and they speedily arrogated to themselves the cognizance of such cases. At the South, where the Inquisition had familiarized them with the use of torture at an earlier period, we already, in 1274 and 1275, hear of an inquest held and of wizards and witches put to death by the royal officials in Toulouse. In the North, the trials of the Templars accustomed the public mind to the use of torture, and demonstrated its efficiency, so that the lay courts speedily came to have no hesitation in exercising jurisdiction over sorcery. In 1314 Petronille de Valette was executed in Paris as a sorceress. She had implicated Pierre, a merchant of Poitiers, and his nephew Perrot. They were forthwith put to the ban and their property sequestrated, but at the place of execution Petronille had exculpated them, declaring them innocent on the peril of her soul. They hastened to Paris and purged themselves, and the Parlement, May 8, 1314, ordered the Seneschal of Poitou to withdraw the proceedings and release the property. Sorcery was now beginning to be energetically suppressed, and henceforth we shall see it occupy the peculiar position of a crime justiciable by both the ecclesiastical and secular courts.[469]

Spain had been exposed to a peculiarly active infection. The fatalistic belief of the Saracens naturally predisposed them to the arts of divination; they cultivated the occult sciences more zealously than any other race, and they were regarded throughout Europe as the most skilled teachers and practitioners of sorcery. In the school of Cordoba there were two professors of astrology, three of necromancy, pyromancy, and geomancy, and one of the Ars Notoria, all of whom lectured daily. Arabic bibliographers enumerate seven thousand seven hundred writers on the interpretation of dreams, and as many more who won distinction as expounders of goetic magic. Intercourse with the Saracens naturally stimulated among the Christians the thirst for forbidden knowledge, and as the Christian boundaries advanced, there was left in the conquered territories a large subject population allowed to retain its religion, and propagate the beliefs which had so irresistible an attraction. It was in vain that, in 845, Ramiro I. of Asturias burned a large number of sorcerers, including many Jewish astrologers. Such exhibitions of severity were spasmodic, while the denunciation of superstitions in the councils occasionally held indicate the continued prevalence of the evil without the application of an effective remedy. Queen Urraca of Castile, in the early part of the twelfth century, describes her former husband, Alonso el Batallador of Aragon, as wholly given to divination and the augury of birds, and about 1220, Pedro Muñoz, Archbishop of Santiago, was so defamed for necromancy that by order of Honorius III. he was relegated to the hermitage of San Lorenzo. The ancient Wisigothic Law, or Fuero Juzgo, was for a time almost lost sight of in the innumerable local fueros which sprang up, until in the eleventh century it was rehabilitated by Fernando I. of Castile. In Aragon, Jayme I., el Conquistador, in the thirteenth century, when recasting the Fuero of Aragon and granting the Fuero of Valencia, introduced penalties for sorcery similar to those of the Fuero Juzgo.[470] Thus the Wisigothic legislation was practically in force until, about 1260, Alonzo the Wise, of Castile, issued his code known as the Siete Partidas, in which all branches of magic are treated as completely under the secular power and in a fashion singularly rationalistic. There is no allusion to heresy or to any spiritual offence involved in occult science, which is to be rewarded or punished as it is employed for good or evil. Astrology is one of the seven liberal arts; its conclusions are drawn from the courses of the stars as expounded by Ptolemy and other sages; when an astrologer is applied to for the recovery of lost or stolen goods, and designates where they are to be found, the party aggrieved has no recourse against him for the dishonor inflicted, because he has only answered in accordance with the rules of his art. But if he is a deceiver, who pretends to know that whereof he is ignorant, the complainant can have him punished as a common sorcerer. These sorcerers and diviners who pretend to reveal the future and the unknown by augury, or lots, or hydromancy, or crystallomancy, or by the head of a dead man, or the palm of a virgin, are deceivers. So are necromancers who work by the invocation of evil spirits, which is displeasing to God and injurious to man. Philtres and love-potions and figurines, to inspire desire or aversion, are also condemned as often causing death and permanent infirmity, and all these practitioners and cheats are to be put to death when duly convicted, while those who shelter them are to be banished. But those who use incantations for a good purpose, such as casting out devils from the possessed, or removing ligatures between married folk, or for dissolving a hail-cloud or fog which threatens the harvests, or for destroying locusts or caterpillars, are not to be punished, but rather to be rewarded.[471]

Italy affords us the earliest example of mediæval legislation on the subject. In the first half of the twelfth century the Norman king of the two Sicilies, Roger, threatened punishment for compounding a love-potion, even though no injury resulted from it. The next recorded measure is found in the earliest known statutes of Venice, by the Doge Orlo Malipieri in 1181, which contain provisions for the punishment of poisoning and sorcery. Frederic II. was accused by his ecclesiastical adversaries of surrounding himself with Saracenic astrologers and diviners, whom he employed as counsellors, and who practised for his benefit all the forbidden arts of augury by the flight of birds and the entrails of victims, but though Frederic shared the universal belief of his age in keeping in his service a corps of astrologers with Master Theodore at their head, and was addicted to the science of physiognomy, he was too nearly a sceptic to have faith in vulgar sorcery. His reputation merely shared the fate of that of his protégé, Michael Scot, who translated for him philosophical treatises of Averrhoes and Avicenna. In his collection of laws known as the Sicilian Constitutions, he retained indeed the law of King Roger just alluded to, and added to it a provision that those who administer love-potions, or noxious, illicit, or exorcised food for such purposes, shall be put to death if the recipient loses his life or senses, while if no harm ensues they shall suffer confiscation and a year’s imprisonment, but this was merely a concession to current necessities, and he was careful to accompany it with a declaration that the influencing of love or hatred by meat or drink was a fable, and he took no note in his code of any other form of magic. In the Latin kingdoms of the East the Assises de Jerusalem and the Assises d’Antioch are silent on the subject, unless it may be deemed to be comprised in a general clause in the former, declaring that all malefactors and all bad men and bad women shall be put to death. Yet, that sorcery was punished throughout Italy, and was regarded as subject to the secular tribunals, is shown by an expression in the bull Ad extirpanda of Innocent IV. in 1252, ordering all potentates in public assembly to put heretics to the ban as though they were sorcerers.[472]

In German legislation the Treuga Henrici, about 1224, contains the earliest reference to sorcery, classing it with heresy and leaving the punishment to the discretion of the judge; but the Kayser-Recht, the Sächsische Weichbild, and the Richstich Landrecht contain no allusion to it. In the Sachsenspiegel it is curtly included with heresy and poisoning as punishable with burning, and there is the same provision in the Schwabenspiegel, while in a later recension of the latter the subject is developed by providing that whoever, man or woman, practises sorcery or invokes the devil by words or otherwise, shall be burned or exposed to a harsher death at the discretion of the judge, for he has renounced Christ and given himself to Satan. In this it is evident that the spiritual offence is alone kept in view, without regard to evil attempted or performed, and it would further seem that the matter was within the competence of the secular courts. The earliest legislation of the Prussian marches, about 1310, specifies for sorcerers the loss of an ear, branding on the cheek, exile, or heavy fines, but says nothing of capital punishment. Among the Norsemen the temper of legislation on the subject is to be found in the Jarnsida, compiled in 1258 by Hako Hakonsen for his Icelandic subjects, and the almost identical Leges Gulathingenses, issued by his son, Magnus Hakonsen, in 1274, which for five hundred years remained the common law of Norway. Magic, divination, and the evocation of the dead are unpardonable crimes, punished with death and confiscation; but the accused can purge himself with twelve compurgators, according to the Jarnsida, and with six, according to the code of Gula, thus showing that the crime was subject to the secular courts.[473]

In Sweden there is no allusion to sorcery in the laws compiled early in the thirteenth century by Andreas, Archbishop of Lunden; but in those issued by King Christopher in 1441, attempts on life by poison or sorcery are punished with the wheel for men and lapidation for women, and are tried by the Nämd—a sort of permanent jury of twelve men selected in each district as judges. In Denmark the laws in force until the sixteenth century were singularly mild. The accused had the right of defence with selected compurgators; the punishment for a first offence was infamy and withdrawal of the sacraments; for relapse, imprisonment, and finally death for persistent offending. In Sleswick the ancient code of the thirteenth century makes no provision for sorcery, nor does that of the free Frisians in the fourteenth. That this leniency was not the result of outgrowing the ancient superstitions we learn from Olaus Magnus, who characterizes the whole Northern regions as literally the seat of Satan.[474] In all this confused and varying legislation we can trace a distinct tendency to increased severity after the thirteenth century.

The slight attention paid in the thirteenth century by the Church to a crime so abhorrent as sorcery is proved by the fact that when the Inquisition was organized it was for a considerable time restrained from jurisdiction over this class of offences. In 1248 the Council of Valence, while prescribing to inquisitors the course to be pursued with heretics, directs sorcerers to be delivered to the bishops, to be imprisoned or otherwise punished. In various councils, moreover, during the next sixty years the matter is alluded to, showing that it was constantly becoming an object of increased solicitude, but the penalty threatened is only excommunication. In that of Trèves, for instance, in 1310, which is very full in its description of the forbidden arts, all parish priests are ordered to prohibit them; but the penalty proposed for disobedience is only withdrawal of the sacraments, to be followed, in case of continued obduracy, by excommunication and other remedies of the law administered by the Ordinaries; thus manifesting a leniency almost inexplicable. That the Church, indeed, was disposed to be more rational than the people, is visible in a case occurring in 1279 at Ruffach, in Alsace, when a Dominican nun was accused of having baptized a waxen image after the fashion of those who desired either to destroy an enemy or to win a lover. The peasants carried her to a field and would have burned her, had she not been rescued by the friars.[475]

Yet, as the Inquisition perfected its organization and grew conscious of its strength, it naturally sought to extend its sphere of activity, and in 1257 the question was put to Alexander IV. whether it ought not to take cognizance of divination and sorcery. In his bull, Quod super nonnullis, which was repeatedly reissued by his successors, Alexander replied that inquisitors are not to be diverted from their duties by other occupations, and are to leave such offenders to their regular judges, unless there is manifest heresy involved, and this rule, at the end of the century, was embodied in the canon law by Boniface VIII. The Inquisition being thus in possession of a portion of the field, rapidly extended its jurisdiction. There was no limitation expressed when the pious Alfonse of Toulouse and his wife Jeanne, in 1270, at Aigues-mortes, when starting on the crusade of Tunis, issued letters-patent conceding that their servants and household should be answerable to the Inquisition for abjuration of the faith, heresy, magic, sorcery, and perjury. It is doubtless to this extension of the inquisitorial jurisdiction that we may attribute the increasing rigor which henceforth marked the persecution of sorcery.[476]

Alexander’s definition, it is true, had left open for discussion a tolerably wide and intricate class of questions as to the degree of heresy involved in the occult arts, but in time these came all to be decided “in favor of the faith.” It was not simply the worship of demons and making pacts with Satan that were recognized as heretical by the subtle casuistry of the inquisitors. A figurine to be effective required to be baptized, and this argued an heretical notion as to the sacrament of baptism, and the same was the case as to the sacrament of the altar in the various superstitious uses to which the Eucharist was put. Scarce any of the arts of the diviner in forecasting the future or in tracing stolen articles could be exercised without what the inquisitors assumed to be at least a tacit invocation of demons. For this, in fact, they had the authority of John of Salisbury, who, as early as the twelfth century, argued that all divination is an invocation of demons; for if the operator offers no other sacrifice, he sacrifices his body in performing the operation. This refinement was not reduced to practice, but in time the ingenious dilemma was invented that a man who invoked a demon, thinking it to be no sin, was a manifest heretic; if he knew it to be a sin he was not a heretic, but was to be classed with heretics, while to expect a demon to tell the truth is the act of a heretic. To ask of a demon, even without adoration, that which depends upon the will of God, or of man, or upon the future, indicated heretical notions as to the power of demons. In short, as Sylvester Prierias says, it is not necessary to inquire into the motives of those who invoke demons—they are all heretics, real or presumptive. Love-potions and philtres, by a similar system of exegesis, were heretical, and so were spells and charms to cure disease, the gathering of herbs while kneeling, face to the east, and repeating the Paternoster, and all the other devices which fraud and superstition had imposed on popular credulity. Alchemy was one of the sept ars demonials, for the aid of Satan was necessary to the transmutation of metals, and the Philosopher’s Stone was only to be obtained by spells and charms; although Roger Bacon, in his zeal for practical science, assumes that both objects could be obtained by purely natural means, and that human life could be prolonged for several centuries.[477] In 1328 the Inquisition of Carcassonne condemned the Art of St. George, through which buried treasure was sought by spreading oil on a finger-nail with certain conjurations, and making a young child look upon it and tell what he saw. Then there was the Notory Art, communicated by God to Solomon, and transmitted through Apollonius of Tyana, which taught the power of the Names and Words of God, and operated through prayers and formulas consisting of unknown polysyllables, by which all knowledge, memory, eloquence, and virtue can be obtained in the space of a month—a harmless delusion enough, which Roger Bacon pronounces to be one of the figments of the magicians, but Thomas Aquinas and Ciruelo prove that it operates solely through the devil. A monk was seized in Paris in 1323 for possessing a book on the subject; his book was burned, and he probably escaped with abjuration and penance.[478]

The most prominent and most puzzling to the lawgiver of all the occult arts was astrology. This was a purely Eastern science—the product of the Chaldean plains and of the Nile valley, unknown to any of the primitive Aryan races, from Hindostan to Scandinavia. When the dominion of Rome spread beyond the confines of Italy it was not the least of the Orientalizing influences which so profoundly modified the original Roman character; and after a struggle it established itself so firmly that in great measure it superseded the indigenous auguries and haruspicium, and by the early days of the empire some knowledge of the influences of the stars formed an ordinary portion of liberal education. The same motives which led to the prohibition of haruspicium—that the death of the emperor was the subject most eagerly inquired into—caused the Chaldeans or astrologers to be the objects of repeated savage edicts, issued even by monarchs who themselves were addicted to consulting them, but it was in vain. Human credulity was too profitable a field to remain uncultivated, and, as Tacitus says, astrologers would always be prohibited and always retained. Although the complexity of the science was such that it could be grasped in its details only by minds exceptionally constituted, through lifelong application, it was brought in homely fashion within the reach of all by restricting it to the observation of the moon, and applying the results by means of the diagram and tables known as the Petosiris, a description of which, attributed to the Venerable Bede, shows how the superstitions of pagandom were transmitted to the Northern races, and were eagerly accepted in spite of the arguments of St. Augustin to prove the nullity of the influence ascribed to the heavenly bodies.[479]

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]