Heresy And Citizenship: Persecution Of Heresy In Late Medieval German Cities [1st Edition] 0367415275, 9780367415273, 0367555573, 9780367555573, 0367815052, 9780367815059, 100019311X, 9781000193114, 1000193098, 9781000193091, 1000193101, 9781000193107

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Heresy and Citizenship

Heresy and Citizenship examines the anti-heretical campaigns in late medieval Augsburg, Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Strasbourg, and other cities. By focusing on the unprecedented period of persecution between 1390 and 1404, this study demonstrates how heretical presence in cities was exploited in ecclesiastical, political, and social conflicts between the cities and their external rivals, and between urban elites. These anti-heretical campaigns targeted Waldensians who believed in lay preaching and simplified forms of Christian worship. Groups of individuals identified as Waldensians underwent public penance, execution, or expulsion. In each case, the course and outcome of inquisitions reveal tensions between institutions within each city, most often between city councils and local bishops or archbishops. In such cases, competing sides used the persecution of heresy to assert their authority over others. As a result, persecution of urban Waldensians acquired meaning beyond mere correction of religious error. By placing the anti-heretical campaigns of this period in their sociopolitical and religious context, Heresy and Citizenship also engages with studies of social and political conflict in late medieval towns. It examines the role the exclusion of religiously and socially deviant groups played in the development of urban governments, and the rise of ideologies of good citizenship and the common good. It will be of interest to scholars and students interested in medieval urban and religious history and the history of heresy and its persecution. Eugene Smelyansky is Postdoctoral Fellow in the Roots of Contemporary Issues Program at Washington State University. His research interests focus on the history of religious persecution in medieval Europe, and the history of late medieval urban culture, society, and the environment.

Studies in Medieval History and Culture

Recent titles include Margaret’s Monsters Women, Identity, and the Life of St Margaret in Medieval England Michael E. Heyes Supernatural Encounters Demons and the Restless Dead in Medieval England, c.1050–1450 Stephen Gordon Ancestor Worship and the Elite in Late Iron Age Scandinavia A Grave Matter Triin Laidoner Warfare and the Making of Early Medieval Italy (568–652) Eduardo Fabbro Rethinking Medieval Margins and Marginality Edited by Ann E. Zimo, Tiffany D. Vann Sprecher, Kathryn Reyerson and Debra Blumenthal English Readers of Catholic Saints The Printing History of William Caxton’s Golden Legend Judy Ann Ford Early Medieval Venice Cultural Memory and History Luigi Andrea Berto Heresy and Citizenship Persecution of Heresy in Late Medieval German Cities Eugene Smelyansky For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Studies-in-Medieval-History-and-Culture/book-series/SMHC

Heresy and Citizenship Persecution of Heresy in Late Medieval German Cities

Eugene Smelyansky

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Eugene Smelyansky The right of Eugene Smelyansky to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Smelyansky, Eugene, author. Title: Heresy and citizenship : persecution of heresy in late medieval German cities / Eugene Smelyansky. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York : Routledge, 2020. | Series: Studies in medieval history and culture | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020017659 (print) | LCCN 2020017660 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367415273 (hbk) | ISBN 9780367815059 (ebk) Subjects: LCSH: Germany—Church history—843–1517. | Waldenses— Germany—History—To 1500. | Christian heresies—Germany— History—To 1500. | Persecution—Germany—History—To 1500. Classification: LCC BR854 .S55 2020 (print) | LCC BR854 (ebook) | DDC 272/.3—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020017659 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020017660 ISBN: 978-0-367-41527-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-81505-9 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of figures Acknowledgements On names List of abbreviations Introduction

vi vii viii ix 1

1

Culture and society in late medieval German cities

15

2

Persecution of German Waldensians, 1390–1404

36

3

Inquisition, violence, and urban order in Augsburg

65

4

Elite identity, urban competition, and inquisition in Rothenburg ob der Tauber

86

5 6

“Shame and dishonor”: municipal authority and persecution of heresy

111

Communication, resistance, and recovery

139

Epilogue

160

Bibliography Index

167 181

Figures

0.1 4.1

Map of German-speaking Central Europe, c. 1400 Topplerschlösschen, 2013

xi 93

Acknowledgements

While working on this monograph, which grew out of my doctoral dissertation, I have acquired over a decade worth of debts. I owe a lot to my advisor, James B. Given, whose generous, insightful, and patient comments, ample encouragement, and tremendous expertise guided me throughout every stage of my graduate training and beyond. Nancy McLoughlin provided me with plentiful advice, opportunities for professionalization, pedagogical training, and friendship that helped me grow as a teacher and a scholar. Ulrike Strasser introduced me to the world of early modern Germany, its towns and religious tensions, which largely defined the focus of my research. I am grateful to Michael Greenwood of Routledge for his support of this study and his patience. Anonymous reviewers at different stages of this project provided valuable suggestions which, I hope, made this book better and more useful to its readers. I am equally thankful to my colleagues, friends, and mentors, who, over the years, provided assistance, advice, and good cheer: Carl Feibusch, Björn Gebert, Michelle Mann, Benjamin Nobbs-Thiessen, Patrick J. O’Banion, Melissa Ryckman, Jesse Spohnholz, Adam Thomas, Robin Vose, Gary Waite, Sarah Walsh, and many, many others. Keen eyes of Abigail Gibbs helped to improve and polish the manuscript near its completion. In Germany, Herzog-August-Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, allowed me to use its rich manuscript resources twice during my research. I also owe many thanks to Prof. Dr. Eva Schlotheuber for her help at the early stages of this project, and to Prof. Dr. Martin Kaufhold for his hospitality and introduction to the history of medieval Augsburg. Angelika Tarokic of Stadtarchiv Rothenburg ob der Tauber welcomed me at her institution and helped to navigate its holdings. During my graduate studies, this project received vital support from the Fritz Thyssen Foundation and the Chancellor’s Club Fellowship at the University of California, Irvine. Additionally, organizers and participants at the California Medieval History Seminar and the Medieval Seminar at the German Historical Institute, London provided me with venues to present my research and with priceless feedback. My biggest debt, as always, is to my family, for their unflinching support of my dreams and aspirations, their patience with me, and their love. And to my wife, Amanda, for her constant love and companionship, and for enduring my endless ramblings about heresy.

On names

Whenever possible, this study uses German forms of personal names, instead of Latinized or Anglicized forms sometimes used by scholars, combined with English grammar (for example, Jakob Twinger of Königshofen). For Czech names, correct orthography in Czech was followed whenever possible (e.g., “Jan Milíč of Kroměříž”). Names of well-known historical figures are given in their best-known form (e.g., “Emperor Charles IV”) for the sake of recognition and consistency. For place names, local forms are used, except in cases where English versions are more familiar to the reader, such as Nuremberg or Prague. Where historical place names are preserved (for example, Stettin instead of Szczecin), their modern-day equivalents are clarified in parentheses the first time they are used.

Abbreviations

“Bericht des Inquisitors Petrus” = Wilhelm Preger, ed., “Bericht des Inquisitors Petrus über die österreichischen Waldesier. 1398,” Abhandlungen der Historischen Klasse der Königlich bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 13, no. 1 (1877): 246–50. BHRR = Erwin Gatz, ed. Die Bischöfe des Heiligen Römischen Reiches 1198 bis 1448. Ein biographisches Lexikon (Berlin, 2001). Biller, The Waldenses = Peter Biller, The Waldenses, 1170–1530: Between a Religious Order and a Church (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001). BSB = Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek. Cameron, Waldenses = Euan Cameron, Waldenses: Rejections of Holy Church in Medieval Europe (Malden: Blackwell, 2000). CDH= “[Pseudo]-Petri de Pilichdorf contra Haeresin Waldensium Tractatus,” in Lucae Tudensis episcopi, scriptores aliquot succedanei contra sectam Waldensium, ed. Jakob Gretser (Ingolstadt: Angermarius, 1613); reprinted in Maxima Bibliotheca Veterum Patrum, ed. Margarine de La Bigne, 27 vols. (Lyon: Anissonios, 1677), vol. 25, 277F-299G. CsSA = Karl Hegel, ed., Die Chroniken der schwäbischen Städte. Augsburg (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1865–1929). Döllinger, BZSG = Johann Joseph Ignaz von Döllinger, ed. Beiträge zur Sektengeschichte des Mittelalters. Zweiter Teil: Dokumente vornehmlich zur Geschichte der Valdesier und Katharer (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1890). Isenmann, Deutsche Stadt = Eberhard Isenmann, Die Deutsche Stadt im Mittelalter, 1150–1550: Stadtgestalt, Recht, Verfassung, Stadtregiment, Kirche, Gesellschaft, Wirtschaft (Cologne: Böhlau, 2012). Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy = Richard Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy in Medieval Germany (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979). Kurze, “Zur Ketzergeschichte” = Dietrich Kurze, “Zur Ketzergeschichte der Mark Brandenburg und Pommerns vornehmlich im 14. Jahrhundert. Luziferianer, Putzkeller und Waldenser.” Jahrbuch für die Geschichte Mittel- und Ostdeutschlands, 16/17 (1968): 50–94. Kurze, Quellen = Dietrich Kurze, ed. Quellen zur Ketzergeschichte Brandenburgs und Pommerns. Veröffentlichungen der Historischen Kommission zu Berlin 45 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1975).

x Abbreviations Lambert, Medieval Heresy = Malcolm Lambert, Medieval Heresy: Popular Movements from the Gregorian Reform to the Reformation. 3rd ed. (Malden: Blackwell, 2002). Kungstein, Chronicon Moguntinum = Johannes Kungstein, Chronicon Moguntinum, ed. Karl von Hegel (Hannover: Hahn, 1885). Mair, “Nördlingani brevis Historia” = Andreas Felix Oefele, ed., Rerum Boicarum Scriptores Nusquam Antehac Editi, vol. 1, 619–21 (Augsburg, 1763). Modestin, Ketzer in der Stadt = Georg Modestin, Ketzer in der Stadt: der Prozess gegen die Strassburger Waldenser von 1400. Monumenta Germaniae Historica (Hannover: Hahn, 2007). Modestin, Quellen = Georg Modestin, ed., Quellen zur Geschichte der Waldenser von Strassburg (1400–1401). Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Quellen zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters 22 (Hannover: Hahn, 2007). ÖNB = Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek. Patschovsky, Quellen = Alexander Patschovsky, ed., Quellen zur böhmischen Inquisition im 14. Jahrhundert. Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Quellen zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters 11 (Weimar: Böhlau, 1979). Ro StA = Rothenburg ob der Tauber Stadtarchiv. RTA = Julius Weizsäcker, ed. Deutsche Reichstagsakten unter König Wenzel, 3 vols. (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1877). Schnurrer, “Der Fall Hans Wern” = Ludwig Schnurrer, “Der Fall Hans Wern. Ein spätmittelalterlicher Elitenkonflikt in der Reichsstadt Rothenburg ob der Tauber.” Jahrbuch für fränkische Landesforschung 61 (2001): 9–53. Tyler, Lord of the Sacred City = J. Jeffrey Tyler, Lord of the Sacred City: The “Episcopus Exclusus” in Late Medieval and Early Modern Germany (Leiden: Brill, 1999). URR = Ludwig Schnurrer, ed., Die Urkunden der Reichsstadt Rothenburg o.d.T. 1182–1400. 2 vols. (Neustadt: Degener, 1999). Utz Tremp, “Multum abhorrerem” = Kathrin Utz Tremp, “‘Multum abhorrerem confiteri homini laico’. Die Waldenser zwischen Laienapostolat und Priestertum, insbesondere an der Wende vom 14. zum 15. Jahrhundert,” in Pfaffen und Laien—ein mittelalterlicher Antagonismus? Freiburger Colloquium 1996, ed. Eckart Conrad Lutz and Ernst Tremp, 153–189. Scrinium Friburgense 10 (Fribourg: Universitäts Verlag, 1999). Utz Tremp, Quellen = Kathrin Utz Tremp, ed., Quellen zur Geschichte der Waldenser von Freiburg im Üchtland (1399–1439). Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Quellen zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters 18 (Hannover: Hahn, 2000). Välimäki, Heresy in Late Medieval Germany = Reima Välimäki, Heresy in Late Medieval Germany: The Inquisitor Petrus Zwicker and the Waldensians (York: York Medieval Press, 2019).

Figure 0.1 Map of German-speaking Central Europe, c. 1400 Source: Drawn by the author. Based on a map by Sémhur (CC-BY-SA-3.0).

Introduction

Between 1390 and 1404, urban governments and local clergy across the Germanspeaking lands discovered, some to their surprise, sizable heretical communities living in cities. In the ensuing chain of anti-heretical persecutions—unprecedented for central Europe in their intensity and geographic range—members of these communities were tried, uprooted, forced to abjure their beliefs, and even executed. Rural Waldensian communities did not fare much better; hundreds of heretics were uncovered and punished in the Mark of Brandenburg (1392–94) and Upper Austria (c. 1397–1400). Despite sharing religious ideas and even listening to the same Waldensian ministers, Waldensians living in cities were considerably different from their rural brethren.1 Many of the men and women put on trial during this period were relatively (some even remarkably) wealthy, engaged in urban crafts and long-distance trade. Many were members of ruling councils in their cities or occupied other positions of power. As a rule, Waldensian communities were well integrated into the fabric of urban society, and each anti-heretical persecution constituted a crisis of citizenship, which had to be navigated and negotiated by municipal governments. Despite the large number of rural Waldensian communities in German-speaking central and eastern Europe, Provence, and Piedmont, the roots of Waldensianism lie in urban life.2 In this regard, the German Waldensians put on trial in Mainz, Augsburg, Strasbourg, Bern, Fribourg, and other cities had more in common with their religious movement’s origins. According to the established account, the religious movement began with a wealthy citizen of Lyon named Valdes. Valdes lived in the late twelfth century, at a time when cities, like his native Lyon, were experiencing growth and prosperity. His wealth, however, came with a sense of guilt and anxiety about the afterlife. According to the account from the Anonymous Chronicle of Laon, Valdes was inspired by a life of St. Alexius, a saint from Late Antiquity who renounced his wealth for a life of pious begging. Valdes followed suit, but his decision to give away his property proved to be too disruptive for twelfth-century Lyon, its urban elites, and its archbishop.3 Contrary to the acceptable venue for renouncing the world, Valdes did not enter a monastery but insisted on remaining on the streets of his city, begging for food and possibly even preaching.4 The life of begging was unconventional and alarmed his peers and the

2 Introduction city officials: one of Valdes’s rich friends even attempted to save him from a life of begging by becoming his sole benefactor, while Valdes’s wife petitioned the archbishop of Lyon to put Valdes under her care. It was lay preaching, however, understood by the Church as a usurpation of clerical duty to preach, that put Valdes and his future followers on a collision course with Lyon’s archbishop.5 Echoes of Waldensianism’s urban origins can be heard over two centuries later in the German Waldensian communities that faced inquisitorial scrutiny at the close of the fourteenth century. Just like Valdes, many of their members were either merchants or urban artisans reliant upon long-distance trade. Just like Valdes’s unorthodox behavior, the Waldensian communities—when their existence became known to the ruling elites—were perceived as an afront to urban stability and hierarchy. And if Valdes’s message and preaching were understood as an attack on the authority of the Church, the persecution of his fourteenth-century followers became weaponized by ecclesiastical elites in an attempt to restore their political authority in late medieval cities. Despite the similarities, in the two centuries after Valdes, medieval cities underwent a dramatic transformation. In German-speaking central Europe in particular, many late medieval cities had won at least some degree of political independence and continued to expand their political autonomy throughout this period. Growing increasingly wealthy from crafts and long-distance trade, cities gained in political importance as crucial allies (and reliable sources of income) of the Holy Roman Emperors. At the same, the higher German cities climbed in their power and influence, the more precarious their position. Even the cities that acquired the right to rule themselves in the thirteenth century—for example, Augsburg, Nuremberg, and Strasbourg—were constantly at risk of losing these privileges to ambitious bishops or local princes. Imperial favor, which guaranteed the cities their political and economic privileges, was fickle and contingent on the ruler’s needs. This political uncertainty underpinned the cities’ tireless ambition in trade, territorial expansion, diplomacy, and self-representation. Urban growth and success, moreover, produced an ideology that privileged urban communities over any other. Scholars have pointed out that medieval cities—along with other institutions— imagined themselves as bodies. Composed of distinct parts, each existing for a purpose, these bodies were nevertheless self-sufficient. This can be seen from late medieval depictions of cityscapes, with cities drawn within the protective walls surrounded by more or less empty countryside.6 The walls, skin of the urban “body,” defined the urban space and its inhabitants within, just as they protected them from the outside threats. Although the surviving examples of such paintings—the variety of cityscapes created by Michael Wolgemut for The Nuremberg Chronicle (1493) are among the best known—were made in the late fifteenth century, the self-enclosed image of the city would have been familiar to their inhabitants a century earlier. In reality, of course, urban existence did not end at the city walls; indeed, most cities were surrounded by manufacturing suburbs, shrines, inns, farms, and other buildings with an undeniable connection to the city itself. During this period, many imperial cities also controlled an impressive territory stretching far beyond their walls.7

Introduction 3 Within the urban body, encircled by walls, late medieval cities developed and argued over political institutions and systems of government; in the fourteenth century, urban revolts were common, if not always bloody. City councils, of various composition but invariably dominated by the wealthy elites, shaped urban policy within the walls and beyond them. In the capitals of dioceses like Strasbourg, Augsburg, or Mainz, municipal governments had to contend with the lasting influence of the bishops, who used to own the cities and still controlled some aspect of their existence. Although these bishops had long been expelled from their capitals, their symbolic presence remained in the cathedrals, various clerical institutions, and numerous members of the clergy who continued to reside there.8 To use the body metaphor, clergy—immune to taxation or the control of the ruling council—was a foreign object; it could be either expelled or incorporated. Although neither solution could be implemented fully until the Reformation era over a century later, late medieval cities attempted to limit the influence of the Church by developing municipal ideology. This ideology involved the gradual formation of a worldview rooted in urban political autonomy that saw each community in charge of matters both secular and religious to a point where the two merged into one concept of civic spirituality. The term “civic spirituality” should not be understood as a weakening of the role of religion in cities; in fact, the opposite was true. In their attempt to weaken the influence of regional ecclesiastical elites, municipal governments and patrician families increasingly dominated ecclesiastical institutions within their cities, formed religious confraternities, and sponsored processions. Over the course of the fourteenth century, Strasbourg’s council steadily expanded its control over the cathedral’s building project and the Cathedral Foundation that oversaw it.9 During the same period, in Augsburg urban elites began to support the Benedictine abbey of Sts. Ulrich and Afra and joined the confraternity of St. Ulrich as a counterweight to the influence of the Cathedral of the Virgin Mary, still in the hands of the bishop.10 Thus, as Andrew Brown points out, late medieval cities saw increased municipal investment in religious ceremony and in clerical services used to construct a more sacred city . . . [as t]he men who ran city governments sought to demonstrate more insistently than before that the goals of the governing few and those of the urban many were one and the same at a moral and sacred level.11 This spirituality, coupled with rapid economic growth, turned late medieval German cities into important participants in imperial politics; over a century later, urban spiritual concerns also made German cities important sites of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations. The notion of “citizenship” in this study’s title refers to an ideal of citizenship, rather than the legal status of having one. While many inhabitants of medieval cities were not their citizens—in that they did not have the rights and privileges associated with this category—all were expected to adhere to the rules and obligations of urban communities. Just as good citizenship was the urban dream,

4 Introduction bad citizenship was its opposite.12 As late medieval urban communities were inspired to become the New Jerusalem, they were also keenly aware of the fate of those biblical cities that fell short of godliness: Babylon, Sodom, and Gomorrah.13 Such distinctive ideology, which equated moral and spiritual well-being of individuals with the well-being of the community as a whole, produced particular tensions when it came to the city’s others, namely, social and religious groups, like the Waldensian communities, that did not conform to or that chose not to share this vision of urban life. Moreover, because the civic ideology fused sociopolitical concerns with religious ones, late medieval authorities began to pay more attention to religious as well as social deviancy, often blurring the boundaries between the two. Using the need to protect the cities’ external reputation and to promote the common good within them as justifications, the ruling councils sought to establish a degree of social control over their residents. The groups whose very existence undermined urban spirituality were made into a social and political threat. City governments asserted their political authority by policing symbolic boundaries between their communities and the outside world as they persecuted anyone deemed detrimental to the communal health of their cities. The relationship between the rise of urban political and cultural autonomy and the persecution of heresy—as well as other marginalized groups—follows a similar pattern to the ones outlined by R. I. Moore in his foundational study The Formation of the Persecuting Society: Authority and Deviance in Western Europe, 950–1250.14 Institutionalization of urban political authority promoted marginalization and persecution of heretics as the demonized opposites of good citizenship. Moreover, anti-heretical persecutions allowed city councils to emphasize their adherence to religious orthodoxy at the time when blanket accusations of heresy were used as powerful political weapons leveled against the cities by their external competitors, including local bishops (the cities’ former lords) and other cities in the region.15 By analyzing major persecutions of urban heretical communities between 1390 and 1404, this study examines the role that heresy and its repression played in social, political, and religious conflicts in late medieval cities. These anti-heretical campaigns targeted a particular kind of heresy, Waldensianism, in free and imperial towns in Upper Germany, as well as in the neighboring Swiss lands; groups of individuals identified as Waldensians underwent—depending on the ecclesiopolitical context of each trial—public penance or were executed or expelled. While most studies of heresy and its persecution have pointed this out, it still worth stating that medieval inquisition was a process, a methodology, rather than an institution. By the later fourteenth century, inquisitorial methods were adopted by various agents as standard for investigating heresy, as well as other “hidden” crimes.16 This was particularly true in central Europe, where often fragmented and conflicting ecclesiopolitical authorities precluded any systematic persecution of heresy.17 With the lack of papal interest in pursuing German Waldensians, their repression was left to a broad range of agents, including itinerant “freelance” inquisitors, judges appointed by local bishops and archbishops, mendicant inquisitors, and city councils.18

Introduction 5 Why focus on persecutions of German Waldensians in particular? Unlike other groups proclaimed heretical and repressed in the late Middle Ages, Waldensians possessed several features that make their study in urban settings particularly illuminating. First, in addition to being the largest heretical movement in the Middle Ages, Waldensian communities existed throughout central and eastern Europe. Found by the late Middle Ages in cities and rural areas from the Rhine to the Baltic, from the Swiss valleys to the Hungarian Plain, Waldensians remained relatively free of persecution for most of the fourteenth century.19 However, from 1390 to 1404, German Waldensians became the target of intensified persecutions, described by Richard Kieckhefer as “one of the most important repressive endeavors of fourteenth-century Europe, and surely one of the most vigorous anti-heretical campaigns of all medieval Germany.”20 The presence of Waldensian communities and their persecution in multiple cities in just a little over a decade allows this study to observe common patterns as well as the influence of local social, political, and ecclesiastical contexts on each trial. Moreover, unlike their rural brethren, urban Waldensian communities were well integrated into the larger community of their cities, participated in municipal government, and belonged to the ranks of economic and social elites. This made the discovery of heretical presence in cities at the end of the fourteenth century into crises that had to be navigated and negotiated by urban governments. Shaped by the specific sociopolitical situations within their respective cities, these urban anti-heretical campaigns did not occur in isolation. The timing of this period of intensified anti-Waldensian persecution is important. First, the earliest persecutions occurred little over a decade after the beginning of the Schism between rival popes in Rome and Avignon in 1378. With the election of Boniface IX (r. 1389–1404) in Rome, it became clear the Schism could be perpetuated, leading some to believe that the ecclesiastical allegiance of Western Christendom would remain split forever.21 Moreover, in the 1380s, following the death of Emperor Charles IV in 1378, the Holy Roman Empire witnessed a decade of intermittent warfare between cities and alliances of aristocratic and ecclesiastical elites in Swabia and on the Rhine. The conflicts that pit urban communities against bishops resulted in the rise of anticlericalism in cities; in two extreme cases, the residents of Mainz and Worms even intimidated the clergy into ceasing the performance of divine services or expelled the clerics outright.22 Religious uncertainty brought about by the Schism and the rise of urban anticlericalism in the 1380s helps to explain why the persecutions of 1390–1404 specifically targeted Waldensian communities. Having originated in twelfth-century Lyon, Waldensians believed in lay preaching, simplified forms of Christian worship, and apostolic poverty. However, the most important characteristic—in the view of their persecutors—was the Waldensian belief that the Catholic clergy was sinful and lacked the power to perform sacraments. In addition to large-scale crises in German-speaking central Europe, internal fissures within the Waldensian communities made them vulnerable to repression. In 1391, over twenty Waldensian ministers converted to Catholicism in Erfurt and presumably cooperated with the inquisitors Martin of Amberg and Peter

6

Introduction

Zwicker.23 The information divulged by these converts—previously responsible for ministering to the dispersed Waldensian communities across central Europe—allowed these communities to be systematically investigated. While Martin of Amberg pursued urban Waldensian communities in Würzburg, Bamberg, and Nuremberg, Zwicker focused primarily on large-scale persecutions of rural Waldensians in the Mark of Brandenburg and Upper Austria.24 In addition to his inquisitorial activity, Peter Zwicker was also an author of anti-Waldensian polemic Cum dormirent homines (c. 1395), titled after its incipit from the Gospel of Matthew: “While the men were asleep, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat” (Matt. 13:25).25 Described by Peter Biller as “the single most important text on the Waldensians from the later middle ages,” this text methodically criticizes Waldensian history and religious beliefs.26 Written by one of the most prolific inquisitors of his age, Cum dormirent homines reflects its author’s understanding of late medieval Waldensians and the reasons for their persecution.27 With each new trial, Waldensian communities acquired a malleable meaning that made them into convenient targets that could be exploited during internal or external political struggles. The earliest known persecution of Waldensians during this period in Mainz (1390) was organized by the archbishop of Mainz in an attempt to reassert his authority over the city that rebelled against his predecessor in the 1380s; this inquisition and its focus on Waldensians set the tone for the ones that followed across the region.28 For example, in Augsburg, the investigation of a Waldensian community (1393) became the focal point in a power struggle between the city council and the bishop of Augsburg, while the trial of just one individual accused of harboring Waldensian beliefs in Rothenburg ob der Tauber (1394–95) was used as a weapon in a political conflict between the city’s merchant elites.29

German Waldensians: a historiographical sketch German Waldensians—because of evident similarities between their and later Protestant religious beliefs—have long been adopted into the ranks of martyrs and forerunners of the Protestant Reformation, alongside the Czech Hussites, by the early modern Protestant historians and polemicists. Most notably, Flacius Illyricus (1520–1575), in his influential Catalogue of Witnesses to the Truth (1556), devoted a great deal of attention to Waldensianism; later scholars followed his example.30 The Protestant appropriation of medieval Waldensianism elicited a diametrically opposite response from the Catholic side. If Flacius Illyricus labored to demonstrate that the Protestant movement had its forerunners centuries ago, Jesuit scholar Jacob Gretser (1562–1625) published editions of late medieval polemical treatises against the Waldensians and other heretics. Both embarked on a search for anti-heretical texts, including Peter Zwicker’s anti-Waldensian polemic Cum dormirent homines.31 Large-scale studies of heresy and its persecution in late medieval Germany began to appear in the later nineteenth century, as monumental publishing efforts by German archivists and medievalists made collections of inquisitorial documents

Introduction 7 from regional archives accessible to the wider academic community. This sourcedriven approach revealed the scope of the wave of anti-Waldensian persecutions at the end of the fourteenth century. Although the works produced by Herman Haupt (1854–1935), Johann Joseph Ignaz von Döllinger (1799–1890), and others contain a bird’s-eye view of these inquisitorial campaigns and are lacking in nuance or historical context, this generation of scholars was the first to establish a narrative of—and publish sources for—the anti-Waldensian persecutions in late medieval Germany.32 In the English-speaking academy, a monumental study in three volumes on the history of medieval inquisition by Henry Charles Lea followed the same model in cataloging many inquisitions that took place during the period.33 In the twentieth century, the history of Waldensianism (and of heretical movements in general) developed in two broad directions. First, Herbert Grundmann’s pioneering work on medieval religious movements—mainstream and heterodox— invited scholars to observe parallels between them. Grundmann’s study of the topos of the heretic coupled with a critical reading of inquisitorial sources as a genre inspired later historians to consider the “reality” of heresy and to ask about the ways in which inquisitors and Catholic polemicists invented certain heretical movements by projecting their social and religious anxieties onto their targets. As part of the same intellectual movement, scholars of medieval heresies began to question the most basic assumptions about them, from heretical literacy to the social structure of heretical communities to the cultural differences between “popular” heretical culture and the “elite” culture of its persecutors.34 In a similar vein, Marxist interpretations provided a materialist vision of heretical communities as proto-revolutionary organizations of the oppressed peasants, urban craftsmen, and the poor who expressed their class grievances in religious terms.35 The second major contribution of the twentieth-century scholarship lies in the development of important studies of local inquisitorial campaigns and of the persecution of Waldensians specifically. Building upon the collections of sources first identified by the nineteenth-century historians, these studies re-examined and re-evaluated them in the vein of social and cultural approaches to heresy and its persecution. In the late 1960s, Dietrich Kurze examined the history of antiheretical persecutions in Brandenburg and Pomerania, including Peter Zwicker’s large-scale inquisition of Waldensians around Stettin (modern-day Szczecin) in 1392–1394. Kurze followed his initial article by a volume of published sources, which made the relatively obscure interrogation records available to the wider community of scholars.36 Similarly, a study of Bohemian inquisitions of the 1330s–1350s (also accompanied by a volume of sources) by Alexander Patschovsky expanded our knowledge of Waldensian communities in that part of the Empire, revealing the large number of Bohemian Waldensians and their diverse social standing.37 In English, Richard Kieckhefer’s seminal Repression of Heresy in Medieval Germany—although it focuses on Waldensianism only in part—has shaped this field of study for many decades. In particular, Kieckhefer’s observations about Waldensianism becoming understood and punished as a “civil disorder” influenced and inspired the approach of the current study.38

8 Introduction Another direction in studies of late medieval repression of German Waldensians focused on the personalities and methods of the itinerant inquisitors active during this period and their influence on the “wave of persecution” (Verfolgungswelle), to use Kathrin Utz Tremp’s term, in the 1390s and the early 1400s.39 The most prolific of these men, Peter Zwicker and his anti-Waldensians polemic Cum dormirent homines (c. 1395), became the focus of studies by Peter Biller (the first to demonstrate conclusively Zwicker’s authorship of this polemic), Georg Modestin, and, most recently, by the first monograph study of Zwicker’s activity and his writings by Reima Välimäki.40 Zwicker, as well as his mentor and associate Martin of Amberg, and another itinerant inquisitor, Heinrich Angermeier, were responsible for initiating the majority of anti-Waldensian campaigns during the period. Zwicker and Martin of Amberg were also involved in the conversion of Waldensian ministers in Erfurt in 1391 and used them as sources of information about the heretical communities throughout German-speaking central Europe.41 Zwicker, moreover, in both his writings and prolific inquisitorial activity, contributed to the change in perception of heresy by the Church. Described as “the pastoralization of heresy” by Välimäki, this process saw heresy, and Waldensianism in particular, understood as not only a legal but also a pastoral problem that needed to be addressed by preaching, conversion, and education of the laity.42 Until relatively recently, most studies of German Waldensians characterize them as a predominantly rural phenomenon. Influenced by the availability of sources uncovered by Kurze and Patschovsky, scholars of Waldensianism explored the heretical communities in the Mark of Brandenburg, Upper Austria, and Bohemia. As Jennifer Kolpacoff Dean points out, such near-exclusive focus on rural heretical communities can “obscure the significance, size, and longevity of urban heretical communities in Germany.”43 For example, in an in-depth examination of Waldensian religious communities from a sociological perspective, Lutz Kaelber observes Waldensianism’s transformation from a charismatic urban movement to a rural one.44 Accurate for other parts of central Europe, this chronology does not take into account the persistence of urban Waldensians in free and imperial cities across Upper Germany and the Swiss lands.45 Other studies of urban heresy have argued that Waldensians in cities lacked the resilience and commitment of their rural brethren; once they faced persecution at the close of the fourteenth century, urban Waldensian communities soon disappeared.46 While it may be true that the rural Waldensians probably outlasted their urban brethren—as is the case in other parts of Europe as well—it is worth considering the increased scrutiny and the degree of social control exerted upon the residents of late medieval cities as possible explanations for this. In particular, instrumentalization of anti-Waldensian persecution in political struggles in the late fourteenth century made it harder for heretical communities to thrive in cities. In recent decades, studies by Kathrin Utz Tremp, Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane, and Georg Modestin, focused on Fribourg, Mainz, and Strasbourg respectively, have brought attention to urban Waldensians living on the western border of the German-speaking lands.47 These studies demonstrated a somewhat unexpected social make-up of the heretical communities: Waldensians in Fribourg and

Introduction 9 Strasbourg were predominantly members of urban merchant and craftsman elites, with connections to the political structures of their cities. In other words, regional and case studies of both rural and urban Waldensians revealed an unusual variety among heretical communities across central and eastern Europe, which invites a reconsideration of some of the preexisting paradigms. The same can be said about the patterns of anti-Waldensian persecution in cities. While some urban inquisitions were part of the series of trials catalyzed by Martin of Amberg and Heinrich Angermeier, others involved more traditional Dominican inquisitors or, as was the case in Strasbourg (1400), remained in the hands of the city council.48 How can we explain why so many German Waldensian communities faced repression during this brief period of time, while taking into consideration the diversity of agents of anti-heretical persecution in cities?

Structure of this study Building upon the earlier studies of urban Waldensian communities, this book explores the changing role of heretical communities in late medieval cities. Analysis of anti-Waldensian persecutions serves as a window into political struggles between different factions within cities and between urban communities and their external competitors. In addition to their anticlericalism, Waldensian communities acquired a malleable meaning that made their persecution expedient for different parties. The course and outcome of each persecution reveals tensions between institutions within each city and beyond their walls—most often between city councils and local bishops or archbishops. To the ecclesiastical elites who were frequently in conflict with urban governments over political and economic matters, the presence of heresy provided an opportunity to intervene, thereby reminding the cities of their political power. The city councils, on the other hand, saw heresy as detrimental to city-centric civic religion and a stain on the honor of the whole community. The mere existence of religiously heterodox groups put into question both the good citizenship of those harboring heretical beliefs and the city council’s ability to rule their communities. Growing attention to heresy and its association with dishonor was also exploited in inner-city political struggles among urban elites. Instrumentalized in these conflicts, urban heretical presence—real or even alleged—was used by all sides to assert their authority over others. As a result, during the anti-Waldensian persecutions in the 1390s, urban governments became more proactive in navigating and negotiating the threat of heretical presence within their cities by integrating repentant heretics into the urban community, excluding them from it, avoiding a persecution altogether, or remaining in control of its memory. The first two chapters open the discussion on the persecutions of late medieval German Waldensians by setting the stage and introducing the principal themes of this study. Chapter 1 will discuss the political and religious transformations taking place in late medieval cities, including the development of urban governments, the intensification of conflicts between ruling councils and ecclesiastical elites during the anticlerical revolts of the 1380s, and the formation of the civic religion

10

Introduction

with an emphasis on good citizenship and the pursuit of the common good. These developments in cities provide background information for the monograph’s main argument that anti-heretical persecutions during the 1390s were a product of these internal and external processes. Chapter 2 provides an overview of German Waldensianism and its persecution during the 1390s and the early years of the fifteenth century that took place in both urban and rural parts of German-speaking central and eastern Europe. Chapter 3 analyzes the new meaning the persecutions of heretics acquired in late medieval towns during the 1390s, as German free and imperial cities struggled for a greater political autonomy. Using the anti-Waldensian inquisition in Augsburg (1393) as a case study, this chapter examines the changing perception of heretical communities during the 1390s. Throughout the decade, urban antiheretical trials emphasized the inherently violent and anti-social nature of the religiously deviant; inquisitorial records and urban chronicles habitually portrayed heretics not only as bad Christians, but also as bad citizens. This understanding of heresy and heretics contrasted sharply with the development of a city-centric ideology among the urban elites, which stressed crucial connections between the political and religious aspects of urban life. The inquisition in Augsburg, catalyzed by the arrival of an itinerant inquisitor, became a focal point for the contest of political authorities between Augsburg’s city council and the bishop of Augsburg. As a result, Augsburg’s Waldensian community was instrumentalized in the contest between the internal (urban) and the external (ecclesiastical) authorities over the right to persecute religious heterodoxy and, ultimately, over the definition of an urban other. Chapter 4 focuses on the political conflict and ensuing inquisition in Rothenburg ob der Tauber (1394–95). This chapter demonstrates the process of the instrumentalization of heresy from a different angle from Chapter 3: while in Augsburg, the city government and the bishop used the presence of heretics in a power struggle between them, accusations of Waldensianism in Rothenburg were used by its burgomaster Heinrich Toppler to marginalize the leading member of the city’s merchant elite, Hans Wern. As in Augsburg, the inquisition in Rothenburg also involved the itinerant inquisitor, Heinrich Angermeier, as an outside expert. Together, Chapters 3 and 4 demonstrate the complexities of antiWaldensian persecutions in late medieval towns and the influences of regional and local political elites, as well as conflicts between them, on these persecutions. The last two chapters analyze the persecutions of Waldensian communities in the Upper Rhine and in the Swiss Lands at the turn of the fifteenth century. Chapter 5 focuses on the brief inquisition in Strasbourg during the spring of 1400. Uniquely for this period, the anti-heretical trial was organized by the city council, with minimal ecclesiastical involvement. As a result, members of the city’s Waldensian community were punished, untypically for heresy, by being expelled from Strasbourg. By analyzing the social composition of the Waldensian community and Strasbourg’s relationship with its bishop, this chapter will place this unusual persecution in its context. Urban heretical presence in cities could be damaging to a city’s reputation, and Strasbourg’s council took measures to deal

Introduction 11 with this crisis of citizenship swiftly and to minimize the Waldensians’ significance in the aftermath of the trial. Two contemporary inquisitions in Bern (1399–1400) and Fribourg (1399) are the subject of Chapter 6, with particular attention paid to the place of heresy in late medieval political competition and cooperation between cities and their ruling elites. By the late 1390s, the presence of a heretical community in a city became a shameful fact that could tarnish the image that a city projected beyond its walls to its rivals and allies alike. As a result, cities had to react either by eradicating the shameful heretical communities or by hiding their existence. Unlike the inquisition in Strasbourg, the trials in both Swiss cities involved more traditional Dominican inquisitors. Despite the mendicant involvement, municipal governments in these cities acted to influence the course, outcome, and memory of the anti-Waldensian trials in an attempt to reduce the damage heretical presence posed to urban honor and reputation.

Notes 1 Peter Biller, “Heretics and Long Journeys,” in Freedom of Movement in the Middle Ages: Proceedings of the 2003 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. Peregrine Horden (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2007), 99–100; Modestin, Ketzer in der Stadt, 2–3. 2 For accessible studies of late medieval Waldensians outside of German-speaking central Europe, see Biller, The Waldenses, 1–23; Cameron, Waldenses, 151–231; Lambert, Medieval Heresy, 158–64, 181–89; Gabriel Audisio, The Waldensian Dissent: Persecution and Survival, c.1170-c.1570, trans. Claire Davison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 40–109; Gabriel Audisio, Preachers by Night: The Waldensian Barbes (15th–16th Centuries), trans. Claire Davison (Leiden: Brill, 2007). 3 Lambert, Medieval Heresy, 70–71; Cameron, Waldenses, 11–14. 4 Lambert, Medieval Heresy, 71–74. 5 Chronicon Universale Anonymi Laudunensis. Von 1154 bis zum Schluss (1219), eds. Alexander Cartellieri and Wolf Stechele (Leipzig: Dyk, 1909), 20–22. For an English translation of the excerpt related to Valdes, see Walter L. Wakefield and Austin P. Evans, trans., Heresies of the High Middle Ages (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 201–02. 6 Nicholas Terpstra, Religious Refugees in the Early Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 25–26. 7 Tom Scott, The City-State in Europe, 1000–1600: Hinterland, Territory, Region (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 148–54. 8 Tyler, Lord of the Sacred City, 4, 18. 9 Charlotte A. Stanford, Commemorating the Dead in Late Medieval Strasbourg: The Cathedral’s Book of Donors and Its Use (1320–1521) (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), 137–38. 10 Tyler, Lord of the Sacred City, 101; Rolf Kießling, “Bürgertum und Kirche im Spätmittelalter,” in Geschichte der Stadt Augsburg: Von der Römerzeit bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Günther Gottlieb (Stuttgart: K. Theiss, 1984), 211–12. 11 Andrew Brown, “Civic Religion in Late Medieval Europe,” Journal of Medieval History 42, no. 3 (2016), 355. 12 Andrew Brown, “Medieval Citizenship: Bruges in the Later Middle Ages,” in The Citizen: Past and Present, ed. Andrew Brown and John Griffiths (Auckland: Massey University Press, 2017), 107; Marc Boone, “The Desired Stranger: Attraction and Expulsion in the Medieval City,” in Living in the City: Urban Institutions in the Low

12

13 14

15

16

17

18

19 20 21 22 23 24 25

26 27

28

Introduction Countries, 1200–2010, ed. Leo Lucassen and Wim Willems (New York: Routledge, 2012), 38–39. Brown, “Medieval Citizenship,” 103. Robert Ian Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Authority and Deviance in Western Europe, 950–1250, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007; 1st ed. 1987). For a recent reflection, see John H. Arnold, “Persecution and Power in Medieval Europe: The Formation of a Persecuting Society, by R. I. Moore,” The American Historical Review 123, no. 1 (February 2018), 165–74. For an earlier discussion of political function of heresy accusations and persecution, see Alexander Patschovsky, “Heresy and Society: On the Political Function of Heresy in the Medieval World,” in Texts and the Repression of Medieval Heresy, ed. Caterina Bruschi and Peter Biller (York: York Medieval Press, 2003), 23–41. Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 3–10; Richard Kieckhefer, “The Office of Inquisition and Medieval Heresy: The Transaction from Personal to Institutional Jurisdiction,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 46 (1995), 36–61; Henry Ansgar Kelly, “Inquisition and the Prosecution of Heresy: Misconceptions and Abuses,” Church History 58 (1989), 439–51; Henry Ansgar Kelly, “The Fourth Lateran Ordo of Inquisition Adapted to the Prosecution of Heresy,” in A Companion to Heresy Inquisitions, ed. Donald Prudlo (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 75–107; Välimäki, Heresy in Late Medieval Germany, 1–2. Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 22–23; Klaus-Bernward Springer, “Dominican Inquisition in the Archdiocese of Mainz (1348–1520),” in Praedicatores Inquisitores, vol. 1: The Dominicans and the Mediaeval Inquisition: Acts of the 1st International Seminar on the Dominicans and the Inquisition, Rome 23–25 February 2002 (Rome: Insituto Storico Domenicano, 2004), 312–19. For a brief overview of the persecution of German Waldensians in the late fourteenth century, see Cameron, Waldenses, 139–44; Modestin, Ketzer in der Stadt, 1–12. For a broader overview of late medieval persecution of heresy, see Robin Vose, “Heresy Inquisitions in the Late Middle Ages,” in A Companion to Heresy Inquisitions, ed. Donald Prudlo (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 141–72. Robert E. Lerner, “Waldensians,” in Dictionary of the Middle Ages, ed. Joseph A. Strayer (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1989), vol. 12, 508; Lambert, Medieval Heresy, 165; Cameron, Waldenses, 125–27. Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 55. Robert N. Swanson, “A Survey of Views on the Great Schism, c. 1395,” Archivum Historiae Pontificiae 21 (1983), 79–80. Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane, “Archiepiscopal Inquisitions in the Middle Rhine: Urban Anticlericalism and Waldensianism in Late Fourteenth-Century Mainz,” Catholic Historical Review 92 (July 2006), 208. Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 57–58; Cameron, Waldenses, 140–41; Biller, The Waldenses, 233–36; Välimäki, Heresy in Late Medieval Germany, 30–31. Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 56–57; Välimäki, Heresy in Late Medieval Germany, 32–33. Biller, The Waldenses, 237–69, 271–91; Georg Modestin, “The Anti-Waldensian Treatise Cum Dormirent Homines: Historical Context, Polemical Strategy, and Manuscript Tradition,” in Religious Controversy in Europe, 1378–1556: Textual Transmission and Networks of Readership, ed. Michael Van Dussen and Pavel Soukup (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), 211–29; Välimäki, Heresy in Late Medieval Germany. Biller, The Waldenses, 237. Kurze, “Zur Ketzergeschichte,” 71–72; Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 55–57; Lambert, Medieval Heresy, 175–77; Cameron, Waldenses, 139–44; On the relationship between Zwicker’s polemic and its author, see Biller, The Waldenses, 271–91; Välimäki, Heresy in Late Medieval Germany. Deane, “Archiepiscopal Inquisitions,” 206, 222–24.

Introduction 13 29 These inquisitions are discussed in Chapters 3 and 4, respectively. 30 Matthias Flacius Illyricus, Catalogus testium veritatis (Basel: Oporinus, 1556). On the use of the Waldensians in works of Flacius Illyricus and Jacob Gretser, see Peter Biller, The Waldenses, 241–42. For a discussion about the historiographical connection between “heresy” and religious reform, see Howard Kaminsky, “Problematics of ‘Heresy’ and ‘The Reformation’,” in Häresie und vorzeitige Reformation im Spätmittelalter, ed. František Šmahel and Elisabeth Müller-Luckner (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1998), 1–22. 31 Jakob Gretser, ed. Lucae Tudensis episcopi, scriptores aliquot succedanei contra sectam Waldensium (Ingolstadt: Angermarius, 1613). On Gretser’s discovery of the manuscript of Cum Dormirent Homines and his attribution of it (now disproven) to Peter of Pilichdorf, see Biller, The Waldenses, 241–45. 32 Döllinger, BZSG; Herman Haupt, Waldenserthum und Inquisition im südöstlichen Deutschland (Freiburg: J. C. B. Mohr, 1890); Herman Haupt, Die religiösen Sekten in Franken vor der Reformation (Würzburg: A. Stuber, 1882). 33 Henry Charles Lea, A History of the Inquisition in the Middle Ages, 3 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1887–88). 34 Herbert Grundmann, Religious Movements in the Middle Ages: The Historical Links between Heresy, the Mendicant Orders, and the Women’s Religious Movement in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Century, with the Historical Foundations of German Mysticism, trans. Steven Rowan (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995); Herbert Grundmann, “Ketzerverhöre des Spätmittelalters als quellenkritisches Problem,” Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters 21 (1965); Herbert Grundmann, “Der Typus des Ketzers in mittelalterlicher Anschauung,” in Kultur- und Universalgeschichte. Walter Goetz zu seinem 60. Geburtstag (Leipzig: Teubner, 1927); Robert E. Lerner, The Heresy of the Free Spirit in the Later Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972); to some extent, Mark Gregory Pegg, Corruption of Angels (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); R. I. Moore, The War on Heresy (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2012). Pertaining to Waldensianism, Grado G. Merlo argues that the use of the term “Waldensianism” implies coherence between historically independent, in his opinion, branches of this religious movement. He proposes to use the term “Waldensianisms” for differentiation between multiple regional forms of Waldensian belief. Grado G. Merlo, Valdesi e Valdismi medievali: Itinerari e proposte di ricerca (Turin: Claudiana, 1984). For a counterargument, see Peter Biller, “Goodbye to Waldensianism?” Past and Present 192 (August 2006), 3–33. 35 Ernst Werner, “Ideologische Aspekte des deutsch-österreichischen Waldensertums im 14. Jahrhundert,” Studi medievali 3, no. 4 (1963), 220–24; Martin Erbstößer, Sozialreligiöse Strömungen im späten Mittelalter. Geissler, Freigeister und Waldenser im 14. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1970), 119–20. 36 Dietrich Kurze, “Zur Ketzergeschichte der Mark Brandenburg und Pommerns vornehmlich im 14. Jahrhundert. Luziferianer, Putzkeller und Waldenser,” Jahrbuch für die Geschichte Mittel- und Ostdeutschlands 16/17 (1968), 50–94; Dietrich Kurze, ed. Quellen zur Ketzergeschichte Brandenburgs und Pommerns (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1975). 37 Alexander Patschovsky, Die Anfänge einer ständigen Inquisition in Böhmen: Ein Prager Inquisitoren-Handbuch aus der ersten Hälfte des 14. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1975); Alexander Patschovsky, ed., Quellen zur böhmischen Inquisition im 14. Jahrhundert (Weimar: Böhlau, 1979). 38 Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 75. 39 Utz Tremp, “Multum abhorrerem,” 166. 40 Peter Biller, “Aspects of the Waldenses in the Fourteenth Century, Including an Edition of Their Correspondence,” Ph.D. diss. (University of Oxford, 1974); Biller, The Waldenses, 237–69, 271–91; Georg Modestin, “The Anti-Waldensian Treatise,”

14

41 42 43 44 45 46

47

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Introduction 211–29; Välimäki, Heresy in Late Medieval Germany. See also, Eugene Smelyansky, “Self-Styled Inquisitors: Heresy, Mobility, and Anti-Waldensian Persecutions in Germany, 1390–1404,” PhD diss. (University of California, Irvine, 2015). Kurze, “Zur Ketzergeschichte,” 70–71; Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 57–58; Utz Tremp, “Multum abhorrerem,” 166; Cameron, Waldenses, 139–40; Biller, Waldenses, 233–36; Välimäki, Heresy in Late Medieval Germany, 116–18. Välimäki, Heresy in Late Medieval Germany, 5–6. Deane, “Archiepiscopal Inquisitions,” 205. Lutz Kaelber, Schools of Asceticism: Ideology and Organization in Medieval Religious Communities (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), 133–35. Deane, “Archiepiscopal Inquisitions,” 207. Susanna K. Treesh, “Europe’s Peasant Heretics: The Waldensians, 1375–1550,” PhD diss. (Rutgers University, 1988), 120–28. As Euan Cameron points out in his analysis of rural Waldensians (primarily in the Mark of Brandenburg), the realities of leading a clandestine existence wore down heterodox beliefs in both rural and urban settings. Cameron, Waldenses, 132–36. Utz Tremp, Quellen; Kathrin Utz Tremp, Waldenser, Wiedergänger, Hexen und Rebellen: Biographien zu den Waldenserprozessen von Freiburg im Üchtland (1399 und 1430) (Fribourg: Universitätsverlag Freiburg, 1999); Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane, “Archiepiscopal Inquisitions”; Jennifer M. Kolpacoff, “Papal Schism, Archiepiscopal Politics and Waldensian Persecution (1378–1396): The Ecclesio-Political Landscape of Late Fourteenth-Century Mainz.” PhD diss. (Northwestern University, 2000); Modestin, Ketzer in der Stadt; Modestin, Quellen. Modestin, “The Anti-Waldensian Treatise,” 213; Välimäki, Heresy in Late Medieval Germany, 36.

1

Culture and society in late medieval German cities

In late April of 1399, Martin of Amberg, an itinerant inquisitor whose activity in the 1390s and the early years of the fifteenth century was primarily focused on pursuing German Waldensian communities, arrived in Nuremberg. The inquisitor’s visit to the city was a not a mere stopover on the road to somewhere else. He arrived with a purpose. Acting with permission of the bishop of Bamberg (the ecclesiastical lord of Nuremberg), Inquisitor Martin presided over a prosecution of heretics in the city. On Tuesday, April 29, Martin condemned seven individuals (six of them women) to be burned at the stake and probably witnessed their execution. In addition to these seven, out of the unknown number of men and women put on trial, eleven were condemned to wear crosses of yellow fabric on their chest and back—a visible sign of their penance for adhering to heretical teachings—while a few more were banned from the city. Nineteen others took matters into their own hands and fled the city before the trial.1 Despite destroying lives and livelihoods of more than thirty-seven men and women, Martin of Amberg was well received in the city, especially by its ruling council. Around that time, “lord Martin the inquisitor” (meister Mertin ketzermeister) appears in the records as the recipient of a municipal gift of six quarts of wine from Nuremberg’s city council, worth seventeen shillings heller.2 The gift was unlikely a mere formality and represents the city council’s support for the persecution of heresy. Wine was frequently used to welcome arriving dignitaries, and Martin was evidently considered to be one.3 It is impossible to know if the gift was a symbolic reward for a job well done or, perhaps, an attempt to soften the inquisitor’s fervor. However, the seventeenth-century Annals of Nuremberg, a chronicle written by Johannes Müllner, reports that one year later, in 1400, the city council appointed one of Nuremberg’s own citizens to investigate heresy within its walls in an attempt to assume full control over the persecution of religious deviance typical of late medieval cities.4 Martin of Amberg’s activity and its reception in Nuremberg is one of many examples of the evolving urban culture in the second half of the fourteenth century. As the economic prominence of towns continued to grow, so did their political aspirations. Emblematic of and integral to this process were the changes in urban culture taking place during the later Middle Ages. Since the thirteenth

16 Culture/society late medieval German cities century, urban communities gradually began to develop a new city-centric worldview that emphasized the city’s autonomy in matters secular and religious.5 Living in a city and for a city became an ideology best summarized in a foundational essay by the German historian Bernd Moeller. Writing about the role of German imperial cities in accepting and spreading the Reformation, Moeller observed that by the later fourteenth century, over a century prior to Martin Luther, the development of urban ideology made city-dwellers perceive their communities as self-governed and self-sufficient units. Moeller explains: Material welfare and eternal salvation were not differentiated and thus the borders between the secular and spiritual areas of life disappeared. We can grasp the essential trait of the late medieval urban community if we characterize it as a “sacred society.” . . . Elsewhere, even the lower classes of the urban population . . . were embued with the communal spirit. . . . [The urban communities] united not only to defend their economic interests, but also to work for the eternal salvation of their members by controlling morals and justice, by supporting altars and masses for the souls of the dead, and so forth.6 Scholarship on social stratification and urban conflict has challenged Moeller’s claim that this city-centric ideology was shared by all levels of urban society, and therefore served as a catalyst for the “Reformation from below.”7 However, despite being criticized for not taking divisive social and economic conflicts in late medieval towns into account, Moeller’s thesis is still relevant, in particular for the study of urban political culture over a century before the Reformation. Although clearly not shared by every member of an urban community, the view of a town as a “miniature corpus christianum” was prevalent among the urban elites, and therefore influenced their policies, the ways in which they justified their authority, and their broader worldview.8 Political claims, an ambitious worldview, and, in some cases, territorial expansion, were simultaneously celebrated by city-dwellers, all while creating a deeply seated anxiety.9 Late medieval German cities were still in the process of shoring up and securing their independence; most had their origins as properties of either aristocratic or, more often, episcopal lords, and their former overlords were only too eager to hold on to any vestiges of power over their defiant subjects. In Upper Germany, many capitals of bishoprics were able to gain autonomy as either free or imperial cities, but the presence of cathedrals and other ecclesiastical institutions within the city walls served as ubiquitous reminders of the past.10 Urban governments were able to erode these institutions of outside control only gradually. In Strasbourg, the city council spent most of the fourteenth century acquiring control over the Cathedral of Our Lady building project (Oeuvre de Notre-Dame or fabrica); simultaneously the cathedral itself became the ceremonial backdrop for rituals of urban governance and loyalty, including the swearing in of the new members of Strasbourg’s government (Schwortag).11 In Augsburg, on the other hand, the urban merchant elites used the Benedictine abbey of Sts. Ulrich and Afra on the opposite side of the city from the cathedral as a counterweight to

Culture/society late medieval German cities 17 episcopal influence.12 Late medieval Nuremberg, too, expanded in the region by purchasing the lands of its former overlord, the Zollern burgraves. In 1427, as a final act of “expelling” the Zollern, the city council even bought the burgrave’s castle, around which the city itself was once founded.13 J. Jeffrey Tyler, in his study of the relationship between bishops and their (former) cities in late medieval and early modern Upper Germany, demonstrates that the process of gradual marginalization of bishops in the cities that were traditionally seats of their power was taking place nearly simultaneously in many cities during the thirteenth and fourteenth century. One important marker of episcopal exclusion was the transfer of their residences from cathedral cities to new bases of episcopal power in the countryside. In the thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries alone, thirteen bishops were forced to find new residences (the archbishop of Mainz and bishops of Strasbourg and Augsburg among them), while still retaining crucial links to the cathedrals, and thus never truly severing their ties with the cities that expelled them.14 The gradual process of reducing the bishops’ control over the cities coincided with the rise of political autonomy and often resulted in cities and bishops finding themselves on the opposite sides of various conflicts. These conflicts became particularly important during over a decade of anti-Waldensian persecutions, as the existence of heretical communities in cities allowed some bishops and archbishops to reassert their pastoral duties and political influence on the rebellious capitals of their dioceses. For most large cities in southern Germany, crucial sources of support lay in their close ties to the imperial court. The relationship between the imperial cities (Reichsstädte) and the emperors came with mutual benefits. Frequently cashstrapped, Holy Roman Emperors saw cities as convenient sources of taxes and financial support; in return, imperial privileges and charters allowed the cities to act with full autonomy within their walls.15 For those cities, like Augsburg, that were initially founded and controlled by bishops, imperial patronage meant a dramatic change in status. In Augsburg’s case, the progress towards self-rule began in the second half of the twelfth century. In 1156, Emperor Frederick I (r. 1155–90) defined the contours of the bishop’s rule in the city with a set of laws (Stadtrecht); while confirming the bishop’s authority over Augsburg, they formed the first constitution for the city, articulating the extent—and, importantly, the limits— of episcopal authority. Only a decade later, the emperor also seized the vacant office of an administrator (vogt), appointing his own representative and securing the imperial influence in Augsburg.16 Within a century, the bishop’s power suffered a precipitous decline; in 1276 Emperor Rudolf I of Habsburg, upon his visit to the city, granted it the right to elect a city council and collect taxes. The bishop nevertheless retained significant administrative and fiscal powers until the further grant of imperial privileges by Emperor Ludwig IV moved the city completely under imperial authority in 1317.17 Other imperial cities experienced a similar trajectory that saw the gradual granting of political and economic autonomy by emperors from the thirteenth century onward. During the same period, in the second half of the thirteenth and in the fourteenth centuries, those cities that remained episcopal property were nevertheless able to

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gain rights to govern themselves—often after a more violent struggle—and became known as the free cities.18 For cities like Strasbourg, Worms, Speyer, and Mainz, this status came with a more contentious relationship with the bishop and was often a result of extraordinary circumstances. For example, in 1263, Strasbourg won a charter after the bishop’s forces suffered military defeat, while Mainz received its rights to self-rule in 1244, when Archbishop Sigfrid III of Eppstein attempted to gain the city’s loyalty during a war with Emperor Frederick II.19 These hard-won privileges were by no means set in stone. Although this was exceptionally rare, a free city could also lose its freedoms completely to its former lord as happened in 1462 in Mainz, when the archbishop besieged and conquered the city, reasserting his rule.20 For the most part, both free and imperial cities (or free imperial cities, as they became known collectively later on) followed a similar path towards increasing political autonomy, expanding territory, and growing economically. However, the example of Mainz losing its independence in the fifteenth century demonstrates that the free or even imperial status of each city was not a fixed constitutional fact. As Peter Moraw points out, changes in imperial favor or military conquest could reduce the rights of a city to rule itself and “the situation could change from one decade to another as a function of fluctuating interests.”21 The right for the free and imperial cities to rule themselves came with ample opportunities for internal political struggles between the various socio-economic groups of their residents. As the cities continued to expand the power vested in the city council, various factions within the city began to make demands to be included in the wielding of this power. Early institutions of urban governance were remarkably restrictive—albeit they probably seemed like a step towards a more inclusive system of government at the time—and consisted predominantly of the wealthiest citizens. In Strasbourg, the families of major landowners, merchants, and bankers became the city’s political elite in the decades after its emancipation from the bishop’s control. This new urban patriciate was called the Constofler, from Latin constabularii, a reminder that they were expected to provide horses for Strasbourg’s defense. Free from property taxes and other onerous civic duties, such as the requirement to keep watch on the city walls, the Constofler remained largely in control of the city until the artisan-led revolts of the mid-fourteenth century.22 In a parallel process, in Augsburg, by the late thirteenth century, the control over the city’s affairs was in the hands of the council consisting of twelve members from the urban elites. Nuremberg, by 1256, had a city council with thirteen members in addition to a panel of judges (scabini) of the same size.23 Over time, the restrictive and oligarchic nature of the city government and the privilege claimed by its members led to resentment and strife in the cities. In most cases, these longstanding social tensions erupted by the middle of the fourteenth century and led to the expansion of the city council and to the inclusion of guild representatives in government. It is tempting to imagine the urban strife as a struggle between wealthy oligarchic elites and the poor craftsmen seeking representation. In reality, even when representatives from guilds were allowed a seat on the city council, they still often belonged to the cities’ economic elites, with merchant guilds proving to be

Culture/society late medieval German cities 19 particularly dominant. Among the guilds, too, there were vast differences in the amount of wealth and power each could wield. In Strasbourg, since the artisan revolt of 1349, the butcher’s guild—due its leading role in the revolt—retained dominance in city politics for decades.24 The revolt itself was sparked by the fear of the plague, which had yet to reach the city, and the widely-believed conspiracy theory that blamed Jewish communities for spreading the disease. These anxieties proved to be particularly expedient for mobilizing Strasbourg’s residents in an uprising that pursued distinct goals: to expel the Jews from the city, confiscate their goods, and “dethrone” the reigning government. The fact that Strasbourg’s government initially refused to expel the Jews only furthered the latter goal of the revolt, triggering violence.25 Was the revolt truly the result of socio-economic tension? As Samuel K. Cohn Jr. argues, the uprising was dominated by the elites, while the idea of a popular pogrom is not evident from the contemporary sources.26 The revolt’s leaders proved to be surprisingly organized. Indeed, shortly after the revolt turned into a riot led by the butchers and the tanners, the ringleaders of the uprising promptly composed the new constitution for the city government that benefited them: it provided an equal number of city council seats for guilds’ representatives and limited the burgomaster’s term in office—previously held for life—to just one year. The new constitution had dark and tragic beginnings, as the butcher-led mob broke into the Jewish quarter and plundered it, causing the deaths of an estimated 2,000 men and women (most were burned alive).27 That the attack was brought about by greed was obvious even to near-contemporary observers. As chronicler Jakob Twinger of Königshofen wrote a generation later, had the Jews been poor, they would not have become the targets of such violence.28 Between the anxiety brought about by the approaching epidemic and the greed, the artisans’ violent reshaping of Strasbourg’s government succeeded in opening it up to the wealthy members of merchant and artisan guilds, although the Constofler held on to the equal number of council seats in an attempt to strike a power balance on the council. In reality, since the Constofler constituted only a tiny fraction of the city’s population, the twenty-nine council seats they occupied gave them an outsized role in the government.29 Artisan revolts, however, were not always as violent or as successful. In Augsburg, the guilds, roused by the resentment over increased taxation, were able to reach an agreement with the city government in 1368; the bloodless revolt led to the new, expanded council with twenty-nine seats for the guild masters and fifteen spots for the representatives of the patriciate.30 The opposite took place in Nuremberg in 1348. There, a rival urban faction attempted to seize power in the city during the interregnum and the struggle for the imperial throne between two contenders: Ludwig of Bavaria and Charles IV of Luxemburg. The imperial struggle for power found its reflection in urban politics; a faction within the patriciate succeeded in seizing control with the help of the artisan and merchant guilds and partially expelled representatives of the old regime from the city. This event is misleadingly called the Artisan’s Revolt, although—as in Strasbourg—this term obscures the key role urban elites played on both sides of this conflict. By 1349

20 Culture/society late medieval German cities the imperial election was settled and Charles IV crowned emperor in Aachen; with his new power, he proclaimed all decisions of the new “artisan” city council null and void and restored the old government to power.31 In another similarity to the tragic events in Strasbourg, the restored city council received an imperial pardon for any future violence undertaken against Nuremberg’s Jewish community by the “common folk” (gemeinen volke).32 Armed with the pardon, the city council promptly led an attack against Nuremberg’s Jews, massacring over 500 men and women and expelling the rest.33 Moreover, in memory of the guilds’ participation in the unsuccessful revolt of 1348–49, Nuremberg’s government forbade any political involvement of the artisans’ guilds in city politics. Instead, the city council remained in the hands of the patricians. Even when the council was expanded to forty-two seats in 1370 and included some representatives from merchant and artisan guilds, the new members were only allowed to serve as witnesses, rather than active participants.34 Even the openly oligarchic city governments that restricted political participation still relied on rituals for lending legitimacy to their rule. These included a yearly swearing-in ceremony (Schwortag) for new city officials, usually performed in front of assembled citizens. The swearing-in represented the urban community in its most ideal form: public servants taking an oath of loyalty in front of the community itself, while the citizens echoed the councilmembers’ vows with their own oaths of loyalty to the city’s constitution. Mutual vows (coniuratio) were meant to serve as ties that bound citizens, residents, and their government together on an emotional level; these regular ritual professions of loyalty stressed the love and fraternity shared by everyone in the city.35 As Kiril Petkov argues in his study of rituals in medieval society, in order for the urban community to exist as one, it required a renewal of the vows which strengthened communal bonds by repeating the same ritual over and over.36 These events were carefully staged, too, in order to underscore elements important to the community as a whole. For example, in Strasbourg, the ceremony was instituted in 1334, shortly after the city began to allow some limited guild participation in the government—albeit still within a political system dominated by the patriciate—as a rite of loyalty. Held during the first week of January, the ceremony took place in a square in front of the cathedral (once a symbol of the bishop’s power, but now increasingly under control of the city itself). The Schwortag, held almost yearly between 1334 and 1789, reenacted the city’s struggle against its former lord and reinforced Strasbourg’s self-fashioned image as a pious and sacred community with God as an additional witness to the councilmembers’ and citizens’ oaths.37 Greater Councils, as the expanded assemblies of citizens were often called, served a similar purpose. Devoid of the actual political and decision-making power of the Small Council (as the city council was sometimes known), the greater assembly performed the symbolic function of witnesses and reinforced the notion that the city council represented all citizens and residents. Depending on the location, Greater Councils varied in numbers of seats: from forty in Vienna to over 200 members in Augsburg and Nuremberg.38 The Greater Council assembled periodically and could not be summoned by its members, but only upon the demand of

Culture/society late medieval German cities 21 the Small Council; in short, the Greater Council was a mechanism of legitimation that regularly represented the unity of its members in support of the city council’s decisions.39 That such assemblies were an instrument used by a small number of urban oligarchs sitting on the city council was sometimes surprising to outsiders unfamiliar with this structure. In 1382, when Rothenburg’s burgomaster, Heinrich Toppler, visited Nuremberg in an attempt to persuade the city council to join the Swabian City League (Schwäbischer Städtebund), he attempted to bring his proposal in front of the full assembly of citizens. The city council declined in the strongest possible terms, unwilling to even consider such a breach of the established status quo.40

German cities and the Great Schism The gradual increase of urban autonomy and the internal struggles between different layers of urban society for a more inclusive system of government did not occur in a vacuum. In order to understand the context for these changes and for the period of intensified anti-heretical persecutions, we have to consider two crucial historical processes that informed this decade. Various crises of the fourteenth century, including periodic outbreaks of the plague, influenced each other, creating an environment in which persecution of heresy was instrumentalized and exploited by a variety of agents, including city councils.41 The first process involved the gradual dismantling of the networks of administrative and political authority that Emperor Charles IV (d. 1378) developed by means of forging a union between regional nobility, powerful bishops, and key cities in his realm.42 His son and successor, Wenceslas IV (r. 1376–1400), who was less apt than his father at administration and diplomacy, had a harder time maintaining these networks. As a result, most of his reign was marked by urban strife, conflicts between cities and the nobility, and the unprecedented wave of inquisitorial activity of the 1390s.43 The second defining historical process was the Great Schism between Rome and Avignon. The Schism began before the death of Charles IV in 1378. Following the long-awaited return of the papal court to Rome after its seventy-year stay in Avignon and the death of Pope Gregory XI (d. 1377), the cardinals elected Urban VI as the next pontiff. Some of the cardinals later contested the election, claiming that they were forced to elect Urban by the raging Roman mob. The dissenting cardinals left the papal court and met at Fondi, where thirteen of them elected Clement VII as the “true” pope, splitting the ecclesiastical loyalties between two rival popes.44 Evidently, the aging emperor recognized the importance of the Schism and even attempted to remedy it by embarking on a personal visit to Paris during the fall of 1378. Unable to reason with the king of France, Charles V (1338–1380), and, exhausted by his journey, the emperor died in November of that year.45 Shortly before the emperor’s death, the king of France proclaimed his allegiance to the Avignonese Pope Clement VII, thereby turning the Schism into a feature of the ecclesiastical landscape for nearly forty years (1378–1417).46 The split between rival popes, which put France and the Empire into opposing ecclesiastical camps, not only complicated politics, but also created a distinct sense of uncertainty about correct allegiance. This uncertainty was particularly

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pronounced in the western part of the Holy Roman Empire, where the bishops and archbishops were especially prone to shift their loyalties between the rival popes. For example, the archbishop of Mainz, Adolf of Nassau (r. 1379–90), earned his position at Mainz (one of the most important archbishoprics in the Empire) by first promising allegiance to Avignon and then shifting it to Rome only two years later (1381). It is hard to overestimate the damage Adolf’s actions caused; the See of Mainz was not only presiding over the largest ecclesiastical province in the empire, but its archbishop was the archchancellor of Germany (cancellariatus Germanicus) and one of seven princes charged with electing the new emperor.47 Clearly not concerned with the possible theological implications of vacillating between popes, Adolf demonstrated the kind of shrewd political maneuvering that undermined the authority of the Church in the eyes of his subjects.48 Indeed, as a contemporary anonymous questio that circulated in the Rhineland in the 1380s advised, if one was asked which rival pontiff was the true pope, the safest position was to feign either ignorance or indifference.49 Not everyone, however, could claim such an ambivalent position. Governments of the cities on the Rhine retained their obedience to the pope in Rome, ending up on the opposite side of the Schism from the ecclesiastical lords of the region. The Schism and the death of Emperor Charles IV soon afterwards only exacerbated the uncertain political status of German cities. By the late fourteenth century, German free and imperial cities became crucial powerhouses of economic activity, with their governments acting with increasing autonomy. However, despite their economic power and Charles IV’s reliance on their support, the cities remained relatively marginal in imperial politics. While the key achievement of Charles’s reign, the Golden Bull (1356), codified the privileges of the clergy and the nobility, especially of the secular and ecclesiastical princes whose support Charles needed to ensure the political success of his dynasty, the cities did not fare well in that document.50 At the heart of the new imperial “constitution” were the princes: they elected the new emperor, upheld peace, and, in effect, wielded the imperial power in their respective territories. A crime against a prince of the empire was lèse-majesté, tantamount to a crime against the emperor himself. Cities, unless they were crucial imperial allies or ceremonial centers like Frankfurt, Aachen, and Nuremberg, were viewed as detractors from princely rule. Among other restrictions, towns were forbidden from joining forces by forming defensive unions or leagues.51 Moreover, during the later years of Charles’s reign, as he attempted to acquire the electors’ votes for his heir, Wenceslas, urban privileges were also frequently ignored, taxes collected from the imperial cities raised, and the towns themselves used as pledges to regional lords to ensure their cooperation or to raise funds. Emperor Charles’s policy of ensuring the election of his son to the imperial throne at any cost created a feeling of crisis among the imperial cities. If high taxes endangered a city’s prosperity, the practice of pledging whole cities to an imperial ally undermined the very notion of urban autonomy. These pledges were not empty threats either; in June 1376, Charles IV pledged the Swabian city Donauwörth to Dukes Friedrich and Stephan III of Bavaria-Landshut for 60,000

Culture/society late medieval German cities 23 guldens. The emperor’s action spurred the cities in Swabia into action, catalyzing the formation of a defensive league the following month (July 4, 1376). The notion of urban leagues was not new: between 1330 and 1370, cities in Upper and Lower Swabia, as well as around Lake Constance, had formed temporary leagues for various reasons. The league formed in the summer of 1376, however, differed in terms of its proclaimed purpose, which was to protect the rights and autonomy of the imperial cities and their imperial status, even if this included opposing the emperor himself.52 Although the emperor’s goal of securing the throne for Wenceslas succeeded, it came at a price left to be paid by his rather less politically savvy successor.53 If the Golden Bull’s prohibition on city leagues was rarely enforced even during Charles IV’s lifetime, his death ushered in a decade of tension—even open warfare—between long-distance unions of the free and imperial cities and the regional nobility. Already in the summer of 1376, when Wenceslas was elected as King of the Romans and the co-ruler of the aging emperor, the cities of the newly formed Swabian City League refused to offer homage to their new ruler. As Duncan Hardy observes in his study of late medieval associations in the Holy Roman Empire, this act of defiance was a calculated move intended to force the emperor and King Wenceslas to reassure the cities that their liberties were safe from imperial encroachment. Instead, it triggered a brief war between the League and the forces led by Count Eberhard of Württemberg and other nobles in the region. The war ended with a peace treaty and an imperial pardon for the cities but nevertheless set a model for subsequent conflicts in the decade to follow.54 In the 1380s, during the initial turmoil created in the wake of the death of Charles IV and the ecclesiopolitical uncertainty of the Schism, regional associations became an instrument of stabilizing relations between various political actors, including the cities, bishops or archbishops, and the nobility. Membership in these associations was not always clear cut. In 1379, for example, the Swabian City League entered a six-year alliance with the Counts Palatine, the Margraves of Baden, and the Dukes of Bavaria-Landshut. On the other hand, the newly-formed princely Society of the Lion, which included the archbishop of Mainz, his suffragan bishops of Strasbourg and Augsburg, the Count of Nassau, and other nobility, succeeded in recruiting the city of Basel to its side. However, as the conflict evolved, growing hostilities between cities and the knightly societies in Upper Germany led free and imperial cities in Rhineland, Swabia, and Franconia to join forces by the summer of 1381.55 Within months of his father’s death, Wenceslas attempted to relieve the mounting pressure by reaffirming the Public Peace (Landfried)—an ad hoc agreement that obligated its signatories to abstain from the use of violence in solving their disputes—in January of 1379. While this tactic had proved effective under Charles, the new king failed to ensure the enforcement of his Peace and its longevity. In early 1380, the noble association Society of the Lion confronted the defensive force of the Rhenish cities under the walls of Frankfurt, pushing the cities to establish even stronger defensive ties among themselves.56 Naturally, the noble leagues were also growing and by the early 1380s included all of the Rhineland electors;

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the ensuing years of conflicts sapped the area of its economic resources and further weakened royal power. In 1384, Wenceslas succeeded in bringing the warring sides to an agreement at Heidelberg; although also short-lived, this peace treaty is viewed as one of the principal achievements of the king’s reign. However, by 1385 the conflict resumed and lasted until 1389, when the cities suffered a number of crushing defeats by their enemies, both secular and ecclesiastical princes. Finally, the bloody and anarchic decade came to an end with the signing of the Peace of Eger in 1389, where the defeated cities were saddled with financial penalties of thousands of guldens (60,000 in reparations to Count Palatine alone!) and forced to disband their leagues.57 Multiple conflicts between the leagues of cities and their opponents can create an illusion of urban solidarity. This admittedly heroic image of cities banding together in pursuit of common good against their more powerful princely and aristocratic detractors was certainly fostered and promoted by the urban leagues themselves. Already in 1377, in its founding charter, the Swabian City League proclaimed that its members came together to act in defense of “common good and peace” (gemaynen nutze und friede).58 An even more dramatic description of the conflict was offered by Heinrich Toppler, long-serving burgomaster of Rothenburg ob der Tauber, in an inscription carved on the side of his suburban fortified house. According to the inscription, Toppler’s house was built “in the year of the arduous war between princes and all the nobility on one side, and all the cities, which were bound together [by a treaty] on the other side, in the German lands.”59 As the abovementioned example of Basel demonstrates, Toppler was exaggerating the all-encompassing character of the war. Temporary shared interests drove the cities and their opponents to align as they did, not any particular feelings of solidarity. Moreover, some members of the princely associations were also citizens of imperial cities.60 A lack of solidarity can be particularly visible towards the end of the 1380s, when the joint Swabian and Rhineland City League suffered defeat and was forced to pay heavy reparations. In a letter, the city council of Strasbourg attempted to make the case that its share of the reparations should be reduced since the city only participated in the war because it was bound by a treaty.61 The Schism complicated already strained relationships between cities and their ecclesiastical lords. Uncertainty was exploited not only by the enterprising prelates, but also by their direct competitors: urban governments in search of more political independence. A notable example of such use of the Schism in a conflict between an urban government and its bishop comes from Würzburg, which throughout the 1380s and 1390s was trying to achieve self-rule or at least to expand its autonomy. In the 1380s, the city was pitted against the bishop of Würzburg, Gerhard of Schwarzburg (r. 1372–1400).62 Würzburg’s struggle was part of the decade of intermittent conflicts between regional city leagues in Upper Germany, and princely leagues consisting of the nobility and the Church elites. During the 1380s, Würzburg entered a defensive league with neighboring imperial cities Schweinfurt and Windsheim in order to resist the attempts of the bishop to restrict its rights and to raise taxes.63 For Würzburg, the confrontation worsened after the imperial Peace of Eger (1389), where the cities that had previously

Culture/society late medieval German cities 25 suffered a military defeat were once again prohibited from uniting into defensive leagues and forced to pay heavy reparations. In response, the city council of Würzburg appealed to the Roman pope Boniface IX seeking the reaffirmation of old privileges granted to the city in 1260 by his predecessor. Although the pope granted the city’s plea, he entrusted Bishop Gerhard with providing the required document to the city council; the bishop of Würzburg withheld it. In response, in 1392 the magistrates reached out across the lines of the Schism and sought a similar affirmation from Pope Clement VII in Avignon, essentially recognizing his authority over Boniface’s.64 The example of Würzburg clearly demonstrates that—despite repeated outcries over the loss of ecclesiastical unity in Western Christendom from a wide range of theologians and clerical writers—on a more pragmatic level, the Schism created a sense of hierarchical ambiguity, which was exploited by political agents.65 Urban strife and conflicts between the free and imperial cities and the bishops, often their former overlords, proved to be a defining characteristic of the period. Large German towns and their governments during this period were involved in a long-term transformation. Economic development in the cities was correlated with the rise of a peculiar urban worldview that saw urban communities as selfcontained systems and argued for a greater control of oligarchic city councils over urban affairs. The cities, formerly possessions of members of the landed aristocracy or the higher echelons of the Church, gained the right to govern themselves, to engage in diplomacy, and to interact with the rulers of the Empire. In exchange, the free and imperial cities promised their financial support to emperors in times of political instability.66 Although this was a gradual process and large cities in Upper Germany had gained a significant degree of independence in the later thirteenth century, a hundred years later the struggle was still underway. For example, in the second half of the fourteenth century, urban communities turned their attention to less obvious signs of their dependence on outside magnates. A drive for greater control over church property and the right to tax the clergy became controversial issues of the day, especially in the capitals of bishoprics (Augsburg, Mainz, or Würzburg) where clerical presence was particularly overwhelming. For example, in Augsburg (which counted around 15,000 residents in the later fourteenth century), there was the cathedral, seven monasteries, ten mendicant houses, seven beguinages, and four parishes—a veritable city-within-a-city that remained immune to urban taxation and control.67 While the Swabian and the Rhineland leagues conducted warfare outside of the city walls, within the cities the citizens aimed their ire at the clergy. In addition to clerical privileges being a burden on urban economies, participation of the highest echelons of the German clergy in the war between cities and nobles on the side of the latter exacerbated the antagonism between the urban and the clerical authorities. With the archbishop of Mainz and his suffragan bishops of Strasbourg, Augsburg, and Würzburg fighting against their former capitals, clerical privileges and freedom from taxation within these and other cities became an intolerable sign of the aggressive external rule. In response, an anticlerical revolt in Worms erupted in 1384, at the height of the war between the cities and the Society of the Lion, forcing the city’s

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clergy to flee the city and to abandon its possessions there. In the same year, similar anticlerical violence caused the clergy in Mainz to cease the performance of divine services. Most canons of the cathedral also left the city.68 When Bishop Burkhard of Augsburg joined the Society of the Lion in 1379, bands of residents vandalized his property in Augsburg and, later in the conflict, forced all clergy to swear an oath of loyalty to the city. Furthermore, in 1387, in response to the bishop’s seizure of the goods carried by Augsburg’s merchants on their way from Venice, an angry mob of residents once again ransacked the episcopal properties in the city: his palace, mint, warehouse, and the domicile of the cathedral’s dean.69 Although the grievances against urban clergy were political and economic in nature, they were often portrayed in negative religious terms by the ecclesiastical authors. Images of citizens assaulting the clergy were depicted as acts of un-Christian lawlessness. When the residents of Mainz ignored the archbishop’s interdict of 1384, which forbade the performance of divine services in the city, the ecclesiastical chronicler and vicar of the Mainz Cathedral, Johannes Kungstein, observed that “the citizens were not perturbed [by the interdict], even mocked [it] because they were wallowing in heresy.”70 Moreover, by equating any crime against the prince-electors to lèse-majesté, the Golden Bull turned urban resistance and self-defense into signs of their perpetrators’ questionable status as imperial subjects, Christians, or even humans. Remarking on the Swiss cities’ victory in the Battle of Sempach (1386), where the urban militia routed an army of Austrian knights and killed Duke Leopold of Austria, the same chronicler calls the Swiss “beastly lordless men” (bestiales homines sine domino).71 Harsh rhetoric inspired actions. In an act of remarkable cruelty, Count Palatine Rupert II burned sixty prisoners of war from the Rhineland City League in a giant brick oven, an act of mass incineration that probably reminded its witnesses of the similar burning of the Jews in Strasbourg and Basel after the plague pogroms of 1349; public burning of the captives was also highly reminiscent of the prescribed punishment for heresy.72 The decade of anti-Waldensian persecutions that came after a period of weaker monarchy, the Schism, urban unrest, anticlericalism, and open warfare between cities and princes embodied elements of all of these crises. The rule of Wenceslas IV, at first indecisive, then disengaged, did little to alleviate the vacuum of political authority left after Charles IV’s death in 1378. Although most of the Empire remained in the pro-Roman camp, the Schism compounded the problem by creating a sense of religious uncertainty and by severely undermining the status of the Church. Struggles for political and economic independence and the growing power of the princes catalyzed the development of a peculiar city-centric worldview that imagined cities as idealized sacred communities in charge of their secular as well as spiritual affairs.73

City-centric worldview: ideologies of common good and urban honor Development of a city-centric ideology provided an additional tie that bound the urban communities together and allowed them to overcome social and economic

Culture/society late medieval German cities 27 tensions between various groups of citizens and residents. As the socio-economic gap between the rich and the poor grew wider, there was a proliferation of language emphasizing a kind of solidarity between the masses and the elites, the ruled and the rulers. This vision saw each city as a commune of members sworn to mutual alliance, with each citizen bound by the obligation to contribute to communal well-being.74 The commitment to mutual loyalty became an unwritten “social contract,” often expressed in religious terms. As late medieval urban governments sought more political and economic authority, they began to develop the notion of civic religion, a complex blend of religious, civic, and communal values. According to Andrew Brown’s overview of this process, municipal authorities did so “by developing the values inherent in the commune as a religious fraternity; but they also did so, in the process of dealing with the problems of urban life, by developing areas of jurisdiction that inherently had a religious dimension.”75 But how religious was this civic religion and how did it correspond to religion more generally? The very term “civic” implies a sense of secularization that is anachronistic; it might suggest that late medieval cities became less interested in religious teachings of the Church. This picture is far from reality; the “civic” part of “civic religion” should not be understood in opposition to ecclesiastical religion but rather as its city-centric manifestation. In this sense, “civic” has to be understood as a synonym of “urban” or “municipal”; although all three terms do not represent the complexity of the phenomenon of civic religion perfectly.76 A critical body of literature about the rise of civic religion in the German context comes from historians of Reformation-era central Europe. Studies of urban culture (including religious culture) provided, for example, key explanations for the success of the Protestant Reformation in free and imperial cities. Although focused primarily on the cities in the late fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries, most studies of the urban Reformation trace the rise of civic self-consciousness and urban religious culture back to the second half of the fourteenth century or even further. Of course, for Bernd Moeller, Thomas A. Brady, Jr., Peter Blickle, and many others, late medieval civic religion demonstrates the mechanism that brought about the Reformation by leading city councils to assume greater control over religious services and teachings within the city walls. This approach is very useful but is also largely teleological.77 It is important, however, to consider the rise of the civic religion in the fourteenth century on its own, without necessarily treating it as a seed that would eventually blossom into the Reformation. The perception of late medieval cities as a “sacred society” shaped urban politics, society, and religion over a century before Luther. Civic religion involved the use of religious ideas in urban governance; instead of secularization of religion within late medieval cities, we can observe the opposite: sacralization of urban institutions and the functions performed by municipal governance. Administration of cities became framed as pastoral care, with the notion of common good acquiring religious meaning. As secular urban institutions became more sacred, city councils were able to claim “to rule for a sacred common good.”78 In its political dimension, the notion of common good became the city’s civic religion that represented the gradual transfer of religious values

28 Culture/society late medieval German cities from the Church—especially if the upper echelons of the Church were recognized as external opponents of free and imperial cities—and into the hands of the city council. Variations of the phrase “common good” (bonum commune, gemeiner Nutz) appear in laws regulating urban life and on constitutional documents defining urban governments, on justifications for joining cities into defensive leagues and on the oaths of civic officials.79 In Lucerne, at the semiannual Schwortag, the citizens swore “to foster the good and honor of our city, to keep it from harm, to uphold the city’s laws, liberties, and customs and to obey the charter, as it has come down to us, and to obey the magistrates.”80 Thus, common good became a goal of good governance, its concern for the well-being of the community and harmonious relationship between its members. It was a powerful ideological tool, propagated through rituals, legislation, and the suppression of behaviors that went against this ideal. The duties of citizens to uphold the common good came at a price of bearing collective responsibility for their community’s well-being. Thomas A. Brady observes that: Civic culture’s principal message taught the burgher that he and his fellows stood before God in the world as one body, the health of which . . . depended on their common devotion to unity, peace, justice, and the promotion of God’s honor. This civic gospel of the common good bombarded the burghers from all sides through official ideology, popular myth, and oppositional visions.81 Such distinctive ideology, which equated the moral and spiritual well-being of individuals with the well-being of the community as a whole, produced particular tensions when it came to the city’s Others, namely, social groups that did not conform to or that chose not to share this vision of urban life. Locked in a competition with the Church—whether consciously or unconsciously—urban governments used their administrative powers to police the cities, watching out for any behavior that could undermine their self-proclaimed sacred status or detract from urban honor. As a result, city councils passed regulations against swearing, adultery, excessive merrymaking, and even laws dictating the organization of baptisms, weddings, and funerals. Control of anti-social behavior, gambling, prostitution, minor acts of violence (such as brawling), illicit forms of sexuality, and vagrancy became an integral part of governance, of the so-called “good politics” (gute Policey).82 A community’s attention to achieving and maintaining the common good contributed to the honor of the city. Honor was an important category, since it constituted a recognition of good governance. An honorable city was harmonious, well-governed, prosperous, and God-fearing; just like the ideology of the common good, appeals to preserve the city’s honor were repeated and reproduced often.83 For example, Cologne’s new constitution of 1396, the result of the guild revolution against the patrician rulers of the city, specifies that the goal of this foundational document was to ensure the preservation of “honour and freedom of the city” and of the common good; subsequently, this principle was enshrined in

Culture/society late medieval German cities 29 the oaths taken by city councilors and represented on the walls of the city council’s meeting chamber.84 The honor of a city, much like personal honor among its ruling elites, allowed for a competition between cities and other external actors; a city’s honor “rubbed off” on its citizens and vice versa. Conversely, in times of crisis, information that could potentially stain a city’s honor could be hidden from public knowledge (especially from those outside of the city). For example, in 1400, Strasbourg’s city council organized an inquisition of a heretical Waldensian community in the city. After the inquisition, however, the magistrates downplayed the extent of heretical presence in the city in order to minimize the damage to the city’s honor and reputation.85 Moreover, damage to communal honor by one or some of its members constituted an important breach of the sacred bond between the citizens; as with any other crimes that endangered the common good, those that damaged the communal honor could not be tolerated. As a 1345 statute from Ulm states categorically, an individual who damaged the city “with words or with actions” forfeited his life and goods to the community.86 The notions of the common good and shared urban honor emphasized the unity of citizens and residents as members of one community. This feeling of shared destiny was particularly keen during the times of crisis, when the survival of the community meant the survival of its members as well. As Bernd Moeller points out, threats to a city were often perceived by its citizens as divine punishments for various transgressions of its citizens and demanded a communal response to them: Natural catastrophes and disastrous fires were God’s punishment for the sins of the town, and the citizens sought a remedy by uniting in an oath to forswear Sin or by having the whole town undertake a solemn procession of repentance with the relics of the town’s patron saint.87 Such communal reaction (albeit instituted by the city council) can be seen in response to an earthquake that hit Strasbourg in 1356, destroying several houses and damaging the city hall. The natural disaster’s effect on the seat of Strasbourg’s council was probably perceived as particularly symbolic—was it a sign of divine wrath prompted by actions of the council itself? That year, the city council responded by instituting a yearly religious procession on St. Luke’s day (October 18) and introduced a set of strict sumptuary laws; both responses used communal actions to placate God. The procession began at Strasbourg’s Cathedral (also the location of the city’s annual swearing-in ceremony), a site imbued with civic religious ritual.88 Religious processions—responses to disasters or celebrations of feasts, such as Corpus Christi—as public displays of autonomy, civic unity, and hierarchy, were particularly useful in demonstrating communal health before onlookers from the city and before God himself.89 The sumptuary laws, on the other hand, stressed the moral nature of the community and eliminated excessive displays of wealth. The notion of shared responsibility for maintaining the common good made late medieval cities, their residents, and especially their ruling elites interested in maintaining social order. Their population size and the realities of urban life made

30 Culture/society late medieval German cities cities into sites of intensive social interaction between residents, which needed to be regulated by the municipal authorities. In terms of their administrative and legal institutions, late medieval cities can be considered to be the forerunners of the modern administrative state.90 The administrative output aimed at social regulation and control may appear surprisingly high to a modern eye but carried a deep meaning. In addition to regulations concerning the practice of various crafts and trades, urban governments were particularly concerned with controlling morals. These laws—especially as a result of the rise of civic religion—were supplementing or even supplanting the role of the Church in providing moral instruction while citing both God and the preservation of urban honor and the common good as justifications.91 Conversely, any behavior that undermined the community and could potentially provoke God’s anger was to be outlawed. For example, immodest consumption (the reason for sumptuary laws) was connected to the sin of pride, while gambling was often accompanied by violence and blasphemy; all were bad for the community and its honor, but also had religious significance. The notion of civic religion that tied the well-being of the community to the piety of all of its members helps to explain the surprisingly harsh punishments for such transgressions. Nuremberg’s city council appears to have been particularly strict in its punishment of blasphemers, prescribing both fines and mutilations for the crime.92 Similarly, from the late fourteenth century on, late medieval German cities begin to punish sodomy, another “crime” believed to provoke divine punishment.93 How does the persecution of heresy at the close of the fourteenth century fit in this paradigm of the rise of civic religion? Since the civic ideology fused sociopolitical concerns with religious ones, later medieval towns began to pay more attention to religious deviancy as well as social or sexual deviancy, often blurring the boundaries between these categories.94 If questionable and sinful behaviors could be seen as undermining the community’s claim to being pure and godly “miniature corpus christianum,” existence of a heretical community within the city contradicted the very notion of civic religion.95 Beyond that, moreover, the existence of a heretical community in a city undermined urban honor, stained the reputation of its ruling elites, and left the city open to an inquisition by a hostile bishop eager to remind the city of his pastoral duties. In other words, heresy endangered the city’s piety, governance, and independence. This made heretical presence in late medieval cities into a crisis that demanded action from their governments. Taking place at the end of a century marked by famine, plague, wars, and during an ongoing Schism between rival popes in Rome and Avignon, persecutions of the German Waldensians can be interpreted as local manifestations of these large-scale crises. Waldensian communities across German-speaking central Europe—overlooked for most of the fourteenth century—became a focal point of systematic anti-heretical campaigns in which attacks on religious heterodoxy were viewed as solutions to a range of problems. The chapter that follows will discuss the history of Waldensianism and of Waldensian communities in Germanspeaking central Europe and provide an overview of the individual persecutions of Waldensians taking place between 1390 and 1404. Unprecedented intensification of anti-heretical persecutions in Germany during this fifteen-year period

Culture/society late medieval German cities 31 created a political and religious environment in which heresy was instrumentalized in cities to a point at which individual city councils could no longer leave its existence without attention. Anti-Waldensian inquisitions became important components of imperial cities’ struggles for political independence, useful pretexts for conflicts between members of urban elite, and crucial acts for maintaining the city-centric ideology of the common good. In short, late medieval Waldensians— real or imaginary—could be used for too many purposes by their persecutors to remain ignored.

Notes 1 Werner Schultheiß, ed., Die Acht-, Verbots- und Fehdebücher Nürnbergs von 1285–1400 (Nuremberg: Selbstverlag des Stadtrats, 1960), 158–59 (the inquisition is mistakenly recorded for the year 1379, instead of 1399); Herman Haupt, Die religiösen Sekten in Franken vor der Reformation (Würzburg: A. Stuber, 1882), 27–28; “Chronik aus Kaiser Sigmund’s Zeit bis 1434 mit Fortsetzung bis 1441,” in Die Chroniken der fränkischen Städte. Nürnberg, ed. Karl von Hegel (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1862), vol. 1, 362. 2 “Propinavimus meister Mertin ketzermeister 6 qr.; summa 17 sh. hll.,” RTA, vol. 3, 88. 3 On political functions performed by official gifts of wine, see Valentin Groebner, Liquid Assets, Dangerous Gifts: Presents and Politics at the End of the Middle Ages, trans. Pamela E. Selwyn (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 23–27. See also Mario Damen, “Giving by Pouring: The Function of Gifts of Wine in the City of Leiden (14th–16th Centuries),” in Symbolic Communication in Late Medieval Towns, ed. Jacoba van Leeuwen (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2006), 83–100. 4 Johannes Müllner, Die Annalen der Reichsstadt Nürnberg von 1623. Vol. 2: Von 1351– 1469, ed. Gerhard Hirschmann (Nuremberg: Selbstverlag des Stadtrats, 1984), 175. 5 Origins of the gradual change from portraying cities as the antithesis of Christian life to seeing them as the embodiment of holiness can be traced back at least to the thirteenth century. Lester K. Little, Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), 197–217. See also, Alfred Haverkamp, “‘Heilige Städte’ im hohen Mittelalter,” in Mentalitäten im Mittelalter: Methodische und inhaltliche Probleme, ed. František Graus (Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 1987), 119–56. 6 Bernd Moeller, Imperial Cities and the Reformation: Three Essays, trans. H. C. E. Midelfort and M. U. Edwards, Jr. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1972), 46–47. 7 For a historiographic overview, see, R. Po-Chia Hsia, “The Myth of the Commune: Recent Historiography on City and Reformation in Germany,” Central European History 20, no. 3/4 (1987), 203–15. 8 Moeller, Imperial Cities and the Reformation, 49. 9 On the formation of Upper German and Swiss city-states and on their relationship with their hinterland, see Tom Scott, The City-State in Europe, 1000–1600: Hinterland, Territory, Region (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 148–92. 10 Tyler, Lord of the Sacred City, 121–23. 11 Charlotte A. Stanford, Commemorating the Dead in Late Medieval Strasbourg: The Cathedral’s Book of Donors and Its Use (1320–1521) (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), 125–37. 12 Tyler, Lord of the Sacred City, 101. 13 Herbert Eiden and Franz Irsigler, “Environs and Hinterland: Cologne and Nuremberg in the Later Middle Ages,” in Trade, Urban Hinterlands and Market Integration c.1300–1600, ed. James A. Galloway (London: Centre for Metropolitan History, 2000), 51–52.

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14 Tyler, Lord of the Sacred City, 4, 18. 15 For an overview of the term “imperial cities” and its historiography, see Carla MeyerSchlenkrich, “The Imperial City: The Example of Nuremberg,” in The Origins of the German Principalities, 1100–1350: Essays by German Historians, ed. Graham A. Loud and Jochen Schenk (London: Routledge, 2017), 68–70. See also, Isenmann, Deutsche Stadt, 295–311. 16 Tyler, Lord of the Sacred City, 82–86. 17 Wolfgang Zorn, Augsburg: Geschichte einer deutschen Stadt (Augsburg: Mühlberger, 1972), 109, 121. 18 Peter Moraw, “Cities and Citizenry as Factors of State Formation in the Roman-German Empire of the Late Middle Ages,” Theory and Society 18, no. 5 (1989), 641. 19 Friedhelm Jürgensmeier, “Siegfried (III.) von Eppstein (Eppenstein) (um 1195–1249),” BHRR, 400. 20 Isenmann, Deutsche Stadt, 295; Tyler, Lord of the Sacred City, 19–20. 21 Moraw, “Cities and Citizenry,” 642. See also, Meyer-Schlenkrich, “The Imperial City,” 82. 22 Stanford, Commemorating the Dead, 124–26. 23 Isenmann, Deutsche Stadt, 347; Meyer-Schlenkrich, “The Imperial City,” 75. 24 Stanford, Commemorating the Dead, 134–35. 25 Jakob Twinger of Königshofen, “Chronik des Jakob Twinger von Königshofen,” in Die Chroniken der oberrheinischen Städte: Strassburg, ed. Karl von Hegel (Lepizig: S. Hirzel, 1871), vol. 2, 760. 26 Samuel K. Cohn, Jr., “The Black Death and the Burning of Jews,” Past & Present 196, no. 1 (August 2007), 18–20. 27 Stanford, Commemorating the Dead, 134–35. 28 Twinger of Königshofen, “Chronik,” 763–64. 29 Stanford, Commemorating the Dead, 137–38. 30 Dean Phillip Bell, Sacred Communities: Jewish and Christian Identities in FifteenthCentury Germany (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 35. 31 Meyer-Schlenkrich, “The Imperial City,” 77–78. 32 Regesta Imperii VIII, no. 1173, in Regesta Imperii Online, www.regesta-imperii.de/ regesten/8-0-0-karl-iv/nr/1349-10-02_4_0_8_0_0_1350_1173.html. 33 David C. Mengel, “Emperor Charles IV, Jews, and Urban Space,” in Christianity and Culture in the Middle Age: Essays to Honor John Van Engen, ed. David C. Mengel and Lisa Wolverton (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015), 299–300. 34 Meyer-Schlenkrich, “The Imperial City,” 78; Isenmann, Deutsche Stadt, 347; Alfred Wenderhorst, “Nuremberg, the Imperial City: From Its Beginning to the End of Its Glory,” in Gothic and Renaissance Art in Nuremberg, 1300–1550, ed. Rainer Kahsnitz and William D. Wixom (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1986), 17. 35 Isenmann, Deutsche Stadt, 30, 210–14. 36 Kiril Petkov, The Kiss of Peace: Ritual, Self, and Society in the High and Late Medieval West (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 281. 37 Stanford, Commemorating the Dead, 132–33. 38 Isenmann, Deutsche Stadt, 343. 39 Isenmann, Deutsche Stadt, 375. 40 Wenderhorst, “Nuremberg, the Imperial City,” 18. 41 On the crises of the fourteenth century, see: Peter A. Dykema and Heiko A. Oberman, Anticlericalism in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 1993); Joëlle Rollo-Koster and Thomas M. Izbicki, eds., The Companion to a Great Western Schism (1378–1417) (Leiden: Brill, 2009); William Chester Jordan, The Great Famine: Northern Europe in the Early Fourteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); John Aberth, From the Brink of the Apocalypse: Confronting Famine, War, Plague and Death in the Later Middle Ages (London: Routledge, 2000). On late

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42

43

44 45 46

47 48

49

50 51

52 53 54 55

56

medieval Germany: Joachim Leuschner, Germany in the Late Middle Ages, trans. Sabine MacCormack (Amsterdam: North-Holland Pub. Co., 1980); F. R. H. Du Boulay, Germany in the Later Middle Ages (London: Athlone Press, 1983); Tom Scott, Society and Economy in Germany, 1300–1600 (New York: Palgrave, 2002); Len Scales, The Shaping of German Identity: Authority and Crisis, 1245–1414 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Charles IV, as a ruler, was unrivaled in his ability to create alliances. While his capital was in Prague, where the emperor spent roughly a third of his reign, Charles regularly traversed his empire. Scholars count 1,227 known stays in 438 locations across his realm; only Friedrich Barbarossa exhibited a similar level of mobility. Scales, The Shaping of German Identity, 83, 83n.153. Recent scholarship has attempted to reconsider Wenceslas’s tumultuous reign by tracing its crucial problems—namely, the political fallout of privileges and concessions given to the Church and regional nobility—to the later years of Charles’ rule. Still, even a more balanced portrayal of Wenceslas’ rule depicts him as lacking the penchant for administration and diplomacy that defined his father’s ability to leave a lasting legacy on the political structure of the Holy Roman Empire. Ivan Hlaváček, “The Luxemburgs and Rupert of the Palatinate, 1347–1410,” in The New Cambridge Medieval History, ed. Michael Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), vol. 6, 556–57; Scales, The Shaping of German Identity, 84. Joëlle Rollo-Koster, “Civil Violence and the Initiation of the Schism,” in The Companion to a Great Western Schism (1378–1417) (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 9–13. Hlaváček, “The Luxemburgs,” 555–56. Howard Kaminsky, “The Great Schism,” in The New Cambridge Medieval History, ed. Michael Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), vol. 6, 678. For a general introduction to the Schism, see Rollo-Koster and Izbicki, eds., The Companion to a Great Western Schism (1378–1417) (Leiden: Brill, 2009). Die Goldene Bulle, ed. Wolfgang D. Fritz (Weimar: Böhlau, 1972), 57. See also, Scales, The Shaping of German Identity, 182–83. Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane, “Archiepiscopal Inquisitions in the Middle Rhine: Urban Anticlericalism and Waldensianism in Late Fourteenth-Century Mainz,” Catholic Historical Review 92 (July 2006), 209; Friedhelm Jürgensmeier, “Adolf von Nassau (um 1345/46–1390),” in BHRR, 412. Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Cod. 5064, fols. 104–06. Cited in Jennifer M. Kolpacoff, “Papal Schism, Archiepiscopal Politics and Waldensian Persecution (1378–1396): The Ecclesio-Political Landscape of Late Fourteenth-Century Mainz,” PhD diss. (Northwestern University, 2000), 78–79. Hlaváček, “The Luxemburgs,” 557–58; Leuschner, Germany in the Late Middle Ages, 163. This prohibition was largely ignored even before Charles’ death, but its existence in the Bull is reminiscent of the emperor’s attention to the needs of the imperial elites. See Geoffrey Barraclough, The Origins of Modern Germany (New York: Capricorn Books, 1963), 317–18; Hlaváček, “The Luxemburgs,” 554; Isenmann, Deutsche Stadt, 317. Duncan Hardy, Associative Political Culture in the Holy Roman Empire: Upper Germany, 1346–1521 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 181–82. Hlaváček, “The Luxemburgs,” 555–56. Hardy, Associative Political Culture, 182–83. Hardy, Associative Political Culture, 184; Moraw, “Cities and Citizenry,” 644; Björn Forsén, “Was There a South-West German City-State Culture?” in A Comparative Study of Six City-State Cultures, ed. Mogens Herman Hansen (Copenhagen: The Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, 2002), 95. Kolpacoff, “Archiepiscopal Politics and Waldensian Persecution,” 85–86. On the German tradition of using Landfrieden as instruments for curbing violence, see Warren Brown, Violence in Medieval Europe (New York: Routledge, 2014), 223–25.

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57 Hlaváček, “The Luxemburgs,” 556–57; Forsén, “Was There a South-West German City-State Culture?” 95–96; Kolpacoff, “Archiepiscopal Politics and Waldensian Persecution,” 96. 58 Wilhelm Vischer, Geschichte des schwäbischen Städtebundes der Jahre 1376–1389 (Göttingen: Dieterich, 1862), 189. 59 Ludwig Schnurrer, “Heinrich Toppler,” in Rothenburg im Mittelalter. Studien zur Geschichte einer fränkischen Reichsstadt, ed. Ludwig Schnurrer (Rothenburg ob der Tauber: Verein Alt-Rothenburg, 1997), 31: “in dem jor, do der beswerlich krieg [was] zwischen fursten und allen edeln uff einer seit und auch allen stetten, die zusamen verbunden woren, uff der ander seit in teutschen landen,” (my emphasis). 60 Hardy, Associative Political Culture, 184. 61 RTA, vol. 2, 92n.1. 62 Gerlinde Schlenker and Helmut Flachenecker, “Gerhard von Schwarzburg (1313– 1400),” in BHRR, 900–02. 63 Schlenker and Flachenecker, “Gerhard von Schwarzburg,” 901. 64 Herman Haupt, “Zur Geschichte der revolutionären Bewegungen in Würzburg unter Bischof Gerhard von Schwarzburg,” Archiv des Historischen Vereins für Unterfranken und Aschaffenburg 34 (1891), 28. 65 On the reactions to the Schism, see Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Poets, Saints, and Visionaries of the Great Schism, 1378–1417 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006). 66 Hlaváček, “The Luxemburgs,” 557; Moraw, “Cities and Citizenry as Factors of State Formation,” 642–43. 67 Isenmann, Deutsche Stadt, 624–25; Tyler, Lord of the Sacred City, 90–92. Thus, although many bishops or archbishops did not reside in their capitals themselves, opting to establish their residences in smaller towns where they could exercise their full authority (for example, the bishops of Augsburg resided in Dillingen; the archbishops of Mainz, in Bingen), their presence was still unavoidably felt in the cathedral cities. For a detailed overview of episcopal powers wielded (with varying degrees of success), see Tyler, Lord of the Sacred City, 21–30. 68 Johannes Kungstein, Chronicon Moguntinum, ed. Karl von Hegel (Hannover: Hahn, 1885), 53–54; Deane, “Archiepiscopal Inquisitions,” 208. 69 Tyler, Lord of the Sacred City, 91–93. 70 Kungstein, Chronicon Moguntinum, 54: “quod cives minime curabant, ymmo deridebant, quia pullulabant in heresi.” 71 Kungstein, Chronicon Moguntinum, 57. 72 Kungstein, Chronicon Moguntinum, 60; Kolpacoff, “Archiepiscopal Politics and Waldensian Persecution,” 94. Six hundred Jewish men and women in Basel were burned inside a house, built for this purpose, on January 16, 1349; a month later, a similar fate befell the Jewish community of Strasbourg, where an unknown number of victims was also burned inside a wooden structure. Aberth, From the Brink of the Apocalypse, 158–59. For an overview of the massacres of Jews during and after the Black Death pandemic, and of the current state of scholarship, see Cohn, “Black Death and the Burning of Jews,” 3–36. 73 Moeller, Imperial Cities and the Reformation, 44–46. 74 Marc Boone, “The Desired Stranger: Attraction and Expulsion in the Medieval City,” in Living in the City: Urban Institutions in the Low Countries, 1200–2010, ed. L. A. C. J. Lucassen, W. H. Willems (London: Routledge, 2012), 33; Bell, Sacred Communities, 51. The notion of medieval cities as self-regulating communes of members sworn to mutual loyalty was first formulated by Max Weber in Die Stadt (published posthumously in 1921), see Max Weber, The City, trans. D. Martindale and G. Neuwirth (New York: The Free Press, 1958), 102–03, 105, 109–10.

Culture/society late medieval German cities 35 75 Andrew Brown, “Civic Religion in Late Medieval Europe,” Journal of Medieval History 42, no. 3 (2016), 355. 76 For a recent overview of civic religion in late medieval cities, see Brown, “Civic Religion.” See also, Bell, Sacred Communities, 51–52. 77 Moeller, Imperial Cities and the Reformation; Thomas A. Brady, Jr. “Rites of Autonomy, Rites of Dependence: South German Civic Culture in the Age of Renaissance and Reformation,” in Religion and Culture in the Renaissance and Reformation, ed. Steven Ozment (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth-Century Journal Publishers, 1989); Peter Blickle, Communal Reformation: The Quest for Salvation in Sixteenth-Century Germany (Leiden: Brill, 1992). 78 Brown, “Civic Religion,” 346. 79 Eberhard Isenmann, “The Notion of the Common Good, the Concept of Politics, and Practical Policies in Late Medieval and Early Modern German Cities,” in De Bono Communi. The Discourse and Practice of the Common Good in the European City (13th–16th c.): Discours et pratique du Bien Commun dans les villes d’Europe (XIIIe au XVIe siècle), ed. Elodie Lecuppre-Desjardin and Anne-Laure Van Bruaene (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), 125–27. 80 Quoted in Brady, “Rites of Autonomy, Rites of Dependence,” 13. 81 Brady, “Rites of Autonomy, Rites of Dependence,” 12. 82 Blickle, Communal Reformation, 81; Isenmann, “The Notion of Common Good,” 110, 136–40; Laura Stokes, Demons of Urban Reform: Early European Witch Trials and Criminal Justice, 1430–1530 (New York: Palgrave, 2011), 133–37. 83 Isenmann, “The Notion of Common Good,” 115–16. 84 Isenmann, “The Notion of Common Good,” 123–24. 85 The inquisition in Strasbourg is discussed in Chapter 5. 86 Karl Mollwo, ed., Das rote Buch der Stadt Ulm (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1905), 27; Isenmann, “The Notion of Common Good,” 115. 87 Moeller, Imperial Cities and the Reformation, 45. 88 Stanford, Commemorating the Dead, 138. 89 Brady, “Rites of Autonomy, Rites of Dependence,” 13. 90 Eberhard Isenmann, “Norms and Values in the European City, 1300–1800,” in Resistance, Representation, and Community, ed. Peter Blickle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 187. 91 Isenmann, “Norms and Values in the European City,” 214–15; Isenmann, “The Notion of Common Good,” 139–40. 92 Stokes, Demons of Urban Reform, 141–43. 93 Helmut Puff, Sodomy: Sodomy in Reformation Germany and Switzerland, 1400–1600 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 22–24. In medieval understanding, “sodomy” included a wide range of sexual acts between humans as well as bestiality. See Stokes, Demons of Urban Reform, 155–57. 94 Richard Kieckhefer observes that heresy began to be perceived as a civil disorder, similar to vagrancy, rioting, and sexual deviancy. Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 77–78. A recent study by Laura Stokes also places the intensification of urban persecutions of witchcraft from the early fifteenth century within the context of urban reform. Stokes, Demons of Urban Reform, 129–53. 95 Moeller, Imperial Cities and the Reformation, 49.

2

Persecution of German Waldensians, 1390–1404

By the late Middle Ages, Waldensians have been described by historian Robert E. Lerner as “the most geographically widespread and the longest-lived of all medieval popular heresies.”1 Despite this, Lerner pointed out in 1986, late medieval German Waldensians remained “the Middle Ages’ forgotten heretics.”2 Their relative absence in scholarship, in part, was due to the fact that as far as medieval heretics went, Waldensians were not very memorable: Waldensian doctrines, wherever they were taught, were not sensational. There is no hint in Waldensian thought of Zoroastrian-like struggles between flesh and spirit, no hint of Zen-like mysticism, no hint of piquant sexual precepts, and no hint of revolutionary millennialism.3 Lerner’s assessment is accurate. Compared to other medieval heresies, such as the Cathars or the esoteric and largely fictional heresy of the Free Spirit (the latter was invented whole cloth by medieval polemicists and inquisitors), Waldensians, in their desire to practice a “pure,” strictly Scripture-based form of Christianity, may appear somewhat pedestrian.4 To some extent, that lack of radicalism contributed to their large numbers and to the Waldensian survival into the early modern period, the Reformation, and, in smaller communities, to the present. As seemingly lacking in radicalism as late medieval German Waldensians may appear to the modern eye, for over a decade at the end of the fourteenth century and into the early 1400s, they were a cause of great anxiety among rulers of Germanspeaking central Europe, both secular and ecclesiastical. Persecuted only in some parts of central Europe and in relatively short and isolated bursts before the 1390s, German Waldensians seem to have been everywhere during that decade. They were the knife-wielding assassins in Augsburg and Strasbourg, the anticlerical rebels in Mainz, and the terrorist-like arsonists in Upper Austrian Steyr. Meanwhile, cunning but predatory Waldensian ministers roamed the land, stealing the best Christians from the fold and seducing them with their false holiness.5 German Waldensianism was a crisis, an epidemic even, that required immediate attention. Starting in 1390, Waldensian communities across the Holy Roman Empire began to attract the attention of persecutors in response to the perceived danger they posed. How can we reconcile these two images of the same religious community?

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Persecutions of German Waldensians between 1390 and 1404 demonstrate remarkable intensification of inquisitorial activity across German-speaking central Europe. This relatively brief spike in the repression of Waldensianism stands out against the relative lack of interest toward these heretical communities during the period and the only sporadic and regional persecutions before. This chapter will provide an overview of anti-Waldensian campaigns taking place during this period in order to illustrate the degree of intensification and the widespread nature of persecutions, as well as the decentralization and deregulation of persecution (although the persecution of heresy in Germany was never truly centralized or regulated).6 The majority of earlier persecutions of heresy in the fourteenth century took place at the hands of ecclesiastical authorities, including Dominican inquisitors, who were assigned to a specific archdiocese. However, the list of persecutors and their patrons grows significantly more diverse in the 1390s and the early years of the fifteenth century. For example, in 1400 the city council of Strasbourg took it upon itself to investigate and expel Waldensians from the city; in the same year or soon after, we hear of Nuremberg’s city council appointing one of its officials to perform similar functions (although with unclear success).7 In the meantime, highly mobile non-mendicant inquisitors—Heinrich Angermeier, Martin of Amberg, and Peter Zwicker—investigated Waldensian communities in the Mark of Brandenburg, Swabia, Franconia, Austria, and the Kingdom of Hungary; these itinerant inquisitors usually acted with permission of local bishops and archbishops.8 Finally, mendicant inquisitors—Dominican and Franciscan—continued to pursue heresy, at times with support from city governments.9 Such decentralization of persecution allowed for a wider range of anti-heretical campaigns; various agents involved in persecuting Waldensians did so for many different reasons, as heresy and heretical presence in regions—and especially in cities—became instrumentalized in internal and external conflicts. In the process, a new discourse about heresy emerged out of anti-Waldensian polemics, public sermons, and the inquisitors’ activity. Heresy came to be viewed as dangerous to urban order and an antithesis to good citizenship while its mere presence cast a shadow over the authority and reputation of the rulers who left it unpunished. As a result, it became increasingly harder for the authorities to avoid persecuting Waldensians during this period. The disruptions of Waldensian communities and the news of seemingly ubiquitous inquisitions catalyzed further trials in new locations with each persecution shaped by local political, religious, and social factors that dictated the degree of its success, scope, duration, participants, and victims.

Medieval Waldensianism: origins, beliefs, and practice A byproduct of the reform of lay spirituality, inspired by the attempt to lead an apostolic lifestyle, Waldensianism had its origins in twelfth-century Lyon. There is little certainty about the origins of this religious movement, as the sources for its early history, the Anonymous Chronicle of Laon being the most detailed among them, draw on a number of tropes encountered in medieval hagiographies. According to the text, the movement’s founder was a wealthy resident of Lyon named Valdes.10 Later in

38 Persecution of German Waldensians, 1390–1404 his life, he experienced a moment of personal religious conversion while listening to the life of St. Alexius narrated by a wandering performer. Alexius, a fifth-century saint, who left his wealthy bride for a life of prayer and ascetic existence in the Syrian desert, provided Valdes with a model of religious life that called out to him. Inspired by a gospel quote, “If you wish to be perfect, go and sell everything that you possess” (Matt. 19:21), Valdes first engaged in charitable works, using his wealth to provide food and shelter to the poor and the ailing. Crucially for the development of his later movement, after giving his wealth away, Valdes did not enter a monastic order but chose to remain a layperson, living off alms in the streets of Lyon.11 Another source for Waldensianism’s origins (albeit, written by an inquisitor, Etienne de Bourbon) points out that from the early days of his conversion, Valdes was interested in reading passages from the Scripture in their vernacular translations. Eventually, he began to preach the contents of these passages publicly.12 If the abandonment of wealth and voluntary poverty made Valdes and his early followers a troubling sight for Lyon’s clergy, public lay preaching was an actual transgression of the divide between the priests and the laity. Having been forbidden to preach by the archbishop of Lyon, Valdes and his companions appealed to the highest authority in Christendom, Pope Alexander III (r. 1159–1181). According to both the Anonymous Chronicle of Laon and the account of Walter Map, an English cleric at the papal curia, some of Valdes’s supporters traveled to Rome during the Third Lateran Council (1179) and tried to acquire papal permission to preach. Map’s description of the “Waldensians” (Valdesii) is particularly acerbic; to him, they were naïve and unlearned pretenders, whose assertion that Christianity was somehow better off in the “ancient” (i.e., apostolic) times appeared arrogant and dangerous. The Waldensians’ visit to Rome, however, was remembered differently by the movement’s supporters. The Anonymous Chronicle of Laon relates, contrary to Map, that Valdes was received well by the pope, but that Alexander III left the ultimate decision regarding the Waldensian preaching to the archbishop of Lyon. The archbishop—whose lack of support brought the Waldensians to Rome in the first place—remained unmoved.13 At this crucial juncture in Waldensianism’s early history, Valdes and his followers were probably perfectly orthodox, aside from their desire to engage in lay preaching. Possibly in order to defend themselves from accusations of heresy, Valdes and his followers composed a “profession of faith and proposal of a way of life,” which outlined their support for all major doctrines of Catholicism, including its creed, the Trinity, and both Testaments. Valdes’s “profession of faith” ends with a call for a new way of life, which included strict poverty and a literal reading of the guidelines for apostolic life from the Gospels; lay preaching was not explicitly allowed, nor was it forbidden. This ambiguity led to a major rift between the Waldensians and the Church. At some point after 1182, the archbishop of Lyon expelled Valdes’s followers from the city. Finally, on November 4, 1184, Waldensianism was officially condemned alongside Catharism in the papal bull Ad abolendam. The new heresy was created.14 Heretical Waldensianism represented an outpouring of lay piety at a time when the Church was already facing increasing pressure to reform itself. Valdes’s

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insistence on poverty and apostolicism was perceived as an affront by the affluent clergy in Lyon and beyond. His vernacular preaching threatened to unseat the primacy of the Church’s religious guidance. Finally, Valdes’s lack of interest in taking monastic vows was equally problematic for the Church, which did not have a structure that could accommodate this model of lay spirituality.15 At the same time, as fledgling Waldensian communities began to be persecuted, the new religious movement started to shift further away from orthodoxy. Rejected by the Church, later Waldensianism acquired distinct Donatist as well as Biblicist features. The clergy, from the pope to a parish priest, were sinful and therefore powerless, their sacraments ineffective.16 In response to persecution, the Waldensians found themselves divided into two groups: the ministers, who practiced the apostolic lifestyle of poverty, itinerancy, and preaching; and their more numerous followers, whose participation in religion was limited.17 Gradually, as far as we can observe, Waldensians began to limit preaching only to particular members of their communities. It has been argued that in this process of “churchification” (Verkirchlichung) only male ministers emerged as preachers, while women were relegated to secondary roles. However, one must be careful not to take these descriptions for granted, as most of them were written by hostile clerical authors, who may have projected their own understanding of religious organization onto the Waldensian communities.18 By the fourteenth century (and possibly in the early thirteenth), Waldensianism had spread eastward into the German-speaking lands. The first Waldensian communities in the Holy Roman Empire appeared along the Rhine, in the borderlands between the French and German-speaking regions. For example, we hear about a heretical community (of an uncertain kind) in Toul and Metz at the end of the twelfth century.19 Gradually, the Waldensian networks spread further eastward, with religious ideas being carried into eastern Europe by German colonists who settled in Bohemia, Prussia, Silesia, and Hungary.20 Living in relatively small and well-integrated urban and rural communities spread throughout German-speaking central and eastern Europe, late medieval Waldensians adhered to the “cutting away of what were seen to be the excrescences of orthodox belief in purgatory, in images, in pilgrimages.”21 Cults of the saints and the Virgin Mary were attacked as lacking Biblical origins; Waldensian preachers insisted on praying to God alone, and eschewed all prayers except for the Lord’s Prayer.22 Other Biblicist practices and beliefs, such as a reluctance to swear oaths and an avoidance of violence, which anti-heretical writers have long associated with Waldensianism, may have been practiced by some, if not all believers.23 While the eastward migration of German colonists of the thirteenth century allowed new Waldensian communities to appear on the eastern fringes of the German-speaking world, their pastoral approaches remained relatively unchanged. Now spread out across the Empire and beyond, Waldensian communities still relied on visiting itinerant ministers, whose preaching circuits had to stretch accordingly. By the late fourteenth century, the same Waldensian ministers—Nikolaus of Solothurn and Konrad of Saxony—visited communities in Strasbourg and in Brandenburg, on the opposite edges of the Empire.24 Frequent long-distance travel

40 Persecution of German Waldensians, 1390–1404 made pastoral visits rarer and the ministers correspondingly less accessible to their followers. A woman from Brandenburg interrogated in 1393 claimed, probably hyperbolically, that she had not been able to hear a minister preach in the forty years since she became a Waldensian!25 Long-distance journeys exposed traveling ministers to the dangers of premodern travel, exacerbated by secrecy and the risk of capture. This may also explain why only a relatively small number of individuals undertook the apostolic mission and why some ministers reverted to Catholicism at the end of the fourteenth century, with a tremendous impact on the German Waldensian communities. Since only a small circle of preachers attended to the Waldensian communities across the German-speaking lands, each minister possessed knowledge of a large number of heretical communities. This information, if extracted (not necessarily by force), could provide persecutors with a list of leads to pursue.26 This risk was evidently understood by the Waldensian followers themselves, who used violence to silence renegade ministers as a method of self-defense.27 While Waldensian reliance on a close-knit communal structure linked by itinerant preachers was “both a safeguard and a liability,” this structural weakness was never fully exploited before the 1390s.28 Indeed, until the end of the fourteenth century, the Waldensian communities in the German-speaking lands attracted little attention from inquisitors. Unlike the Waldensian communities in southern France and northern Italy, where Waldensian ministers and followers alike were frequently persecuted alongside Cathar “good men and women” and their supporters, German Waldensians benefited from the relative reluctance of local prelates to eradicate heresy.29 The two-year inquisitorial career of Konrad of Marburg (d. 1233), whose anti-heretical rampage and indiscriminate accusations led to his assassination, provides the notorious exception. Overall, aside from Konrad’s activity and a brief period of anti-heretical persecution in the 1260s, there were only sporadic attempts to combat any heresy, including Waldensianism until the early fourteenth century.30 This lull in inquisitorial activity, however, should not be mistaken for indifference towards heterodoxy in Germany. On the contrary, Waldensianism was condemned repeatedly in the sermons of Berthold of Regensburg (c. 1220–1272) and in the anonymous text against heretics, Jews, and the Antichrist, the socalled “Anonymous of Passau” (c. 1266). This text primarily addresses Waldensians living in Austria and presents a picture of a heretical movement thriving in small towns and villages there.31 Investigated repeatedly in 1311, 1313–15, and 1360–70, Austrian Waldensians nevertheless remained strong enough in the face of persecution to show resistance during the inquisition of the late 1390s.32 The mountainous terrain they inhabited may have helped these communities survive into the fourteenth century and beyond. Bohemian and Moravian Waldensians also became a focus of inquisitions in the mid-fourteenth century, lasting from 1335 to 1355. Dominican friar Gallus of Neuhaus appears to have been the main agent of the two decades of persecution involving over 2,000 Waldensians (with as many as 220 of them burned at the stake). Only a fragment of the evidence for Gallus’s inquisitorial activity in the Czech lands survives (containing names of 180 heretics, fifteen of whom

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were executed), and the approximate total numbers are extrapolated from these records.33 This was the most aggressive attempt to eradicate Waldensianism in German-speaking central and eastern Europe before the 1390s, but it was also short-lived. In 1355, Friar Gallus was either assassinated or at least heavily wounded, thus ending his ambitious crusade against heresy.34 In absence of zealous persecutors, local campaigns against the German Waldensians lacked interest in seeing their mission through. However, even the memory of these sporadic persecutions made Waldensian followers cognizant of the need to live in hiding, trying to blend in with their orthodox neighbors. The necessities of clandestine existence strained Waldensian beliefs as well, especially in farflung communities across central Europe where visits by itinerant ministers were relatively rare. A number of crucial transformations followed the inception of the Waldensian movement in later twelfth-century Lyon. The key tenets appear to have been expanded and elaborated, both as a result of the conflict with the Church and under influence of the long history of periodic persecution (over 200 years by the 1390s). Forced to define itself in opposition to mainstream Christianity, Waldensianism became rooted in scriptural fundamentalism, shunning every aspect of Christian belief and practice absent from the Gospels. Other beliefs appear mostly in the anti-heretical tracts or in the lists of errors compiled during inquisitorial proceedings; much information in these comes from a long textual tradition of writing about heresy and heretics, rather than from the actual Waldensians.35 While such elaboration on what Waldensians did not believe may have been expressed by a few, if not imagined wholesale by clerical writers in an attempt to portray Waldensians as irredeemable radicals, most lists of errors compiled in the 1390s tend to emphasize a bare minimum of the most crucial points of departure from orthodoxy.36 Perhaps the most pressing concern was the validity of the sacraments performed by the clergy and their effect on one’s salvation. The direct result of the Waldensian criticism of clerical sinfulness and misbehavior was the worry that sinful clergy cannot hear confessions, absolve sins, or perform other sacraments. These neo-Donatist views on one hand, and unyielding belief in the spiritual power of the itinerant ministers on the other, were expressed by most individuals questioned during the last decade of the fourteenth century. Thus, the Waldensians in Strasbourg admitted that they “have no faith in priesthood” and therefore did not attend the mass or only went to church to avoid attracting the attention of their non-Waldensian neighbors.37 Only their sect’s ministers, they claimed, could hear confessions in order to absolve a believer’s sins. This ability remained the main service a minister could provide to his flock and the most valuable one. Given the fact that most Waldensians did not believe in purgatory and eschewed prayers for the dead, receiving a timely absolution of one’s sins remained a crucial priority for most believers. In fact, in some of the lists of “errors,” the two beliefs are mentioned in proximity to each other. For example, in the lists from both Strasbourg and Augsburg, disbelief in purgatory and the statement about confessions to the ministers are mentioned one after another; the list from Augsburg and the list

42 Persecution of German Waldensians, 1390–1404 composed by inquisitor Peter Zwicker (probably informed by his earlier inquisition in the Mark of Brandenburg but exaggerated for polemic effect) open with the statement on confessions as well.38 Generally speaking, there appears to be little difference in terms of belief between the urban Waldensians and their rural brethren, which comes from a degree of communication—mediated through itinerant ministers—between communities across the German-speaking lands. If we are to find any distinction between urban and rural Waldensianism, it lies in the practice of these beliefs, in the way “errors” recorded in inquisitorial documents translated into religious observance. As in any religious system, Waldensian religious practice was shaped by the needs of its adherents’ existence in a particular environment. Thus, it appears that the Waldensians in rural Brandenburg and Pomerania tended to combine the teachings of the wandering ministers with some of the beliefs from mainstream Catholicism, often colored by a patina of popular superstition. Two Waldensians questioned by Peter Zwicker in Brandenburg (1392–1394) claimed that although they did not believe in the power of holy water, as Waldensian ministers taught, they still believed it to have special qualities, saying that it remained fresh longer.39 Some held beliefs that were in diametrical opposition to each other. A Waldensian woman from Brandenburg admitted that she simultaneously believed that the holy water washed away sins, as the Church taught, and that it did not, as the Waldensian preachers told her. Perhaps the rare visits of the ministers and the relatively constant exposure to mainstream Catholicism made it easier to believe both.40 This brings up another crucial aspect of Waldensian religious practice—the necessity to practice religion in accordance with both mainstream Christianity and Waldensianism. Over time, the resulting dual religion created intriguing syncretic beliefs, aimed at maximizing the chances for salvation for individuals and their family members. Although the lists of Waldensian tenets often claimed that heretics considered each other to be among the elect number of “those in the know” (notos or Kunden) and claimed that orthodox Christians, whom they called “strangers” (alienos or Fremden), could not be saved, in reality, the lines between Waldensianism and orthodoxy were often blurred.41 Theoretical disbelief in purgatory was often questioned by individual followers, as they wondered how a not wholly good person could go straight to heaven or pondered whether they should pray for the dead. Similarly, although Waldensianism proclaimed disbelief in the power of the saints, some still admitted to having a personal saintly patron to whom they prayed; some explained that they had acquired the patron before their conversion to Waldensianism. Some went on pilgrimages, even as far as Rome, for the sake of liberating the souls of dead family members or ordered masses for the dead. Although many Waldensian followers claimed that they did these things in order to blend in, one has to wonder at what point pretending to be an orthodox Christian became reality, especially considering that most acts of blending in contradicted major tenets of Waldensianism. At any rate, the attempts to pass as orthodox demonstrate that by the later fourteenth century German Waldensians were not as strongly opposed to lying as some of the authors of anti-heretical texts

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imagined them to be; the need to survive was a clear priority, even in the absence of organized persecution.42

Persecutions of Waldensians, 1390–1404 Scholars writing about the anti-Waldensian persecutions of 1390–1404 agree that this period saw unprecedented levels of anti-heretical activity in central Europe.43 There is less certainty, however, about the origins of such intensification of persecution and about the relationship between the anti-Waldensian campaign taking place in this fifteen-year period and the inquisitions of Waldensians—primarily in Austria and Bohemia—that took place earlier in the fourteenth century.44 Recently, Reima Välimäki has suggested that intensification of attention towards Germanspeaking Waldensians began around 1368. Its origins lay in the conversion of the Waldensian ministers and followers in Austria, the increase in polemic activity by clerical authors, and the ensuing inquisitorial campaigns of Heinrich of Olomouc in Austria and Hungary. Around the same time (definitely before 1390), an anonymous treatise Attendite a falsis prophetis appears as a polemic response to the Waldensian beliefs.45 Beyond Heinrich of Olomouc’s campaigns, however, Waldensians remained on the margins of the anti-heretical efforts of the 1370s; in the first half of that decade, beguines and beghards remained the most frequent targets of persecution across German-speaking central Europe.46 While it is very probable that the roots of the more systematic late fourteenth-century antiWaldensian campaigns took hold in the 1360s, other factors contributed to the intensification of the inquisition of Waldensianism that specifically began in 1390. While some Waldensians faced persecution during the 1380s, these were very sporadic attempts at targeting heretics in general, rather than any particular type of heresy. It can be argued that even if some high-ranking members of the clergy tried to spearhead more organized anti-heretical campaigns, there was relatively little local enthusiasm for these efforts. In 1381, the archbishop of Prague, Jan of Jenštejn, wrote letters to the bishops of Bamberg, Regensburg, and Meissen, ordering them to pay more attention to the presence of heresy in their dioceses, or to expect the archbishop to send in his own inquisitors.47 The fact that Jenštejn felt the need to make such a threat suggests that it may have been necessary to stimulate local ecclesiastical authorities to comply. The archbishop himself imprisoned heretics—Waldensians, judging by the list of their alleged beliefs—while theologian of the University of Prague and preacher, Matthew of Krakow, delivered a sermon about their errors to the inhabitants of Prague in early 1384.48 However, below the episcopal level and further away from Prague, persecutions of heresy sometimes devolved into halfhearted attempts or plain pretexts for extortion. For example, in 1384, five prominent members of the Waldensian community from Brandenburg were arrested on the suspicion of heresy. They were first sent to Kolberg, where a canon attempted to extort three marks from each one of them with threats of execution (although he was eventually paid off with only a mark from each suspect). The unfortunate five men were then taken to Stettin, where they denied all charges to an official of the local bishop and were

44 Persecution of German Waldensians, 1390–1404 subsequently released. Soon the same men found themselves under suspicion again, now accused of worshipping the devil, but—after being shuttled between Camin, Gramzow, and Prenzlau—were eventually able to purge themselves of all charges under oath.49 As Richard Kieckhefer points out, the fact that the five men were constantly being sent from one Church official to another demonstrates the general lack of interest in systematic persecutions of heresy.50 Despite the lack of systematic persecutions, some Waldensians did find themselves in front of inquisitorial judges. We know of at least three Waldensians who had abjured their heresy and were absolved by the inquisitor Martin of Amberg in Regensburg during his activity in that city in the 1380s. It has been suggested that Martin was sent to Regensburg from Prague by Archbishop Jenštejn, as promised in his aforementioned letter from 1381, presumably because the bishop of Regensburg was lax on heresy.51 At the very end of the decade, Waldensians in Strasbourg also attracted some inquisitorial attention from the Dominican inquisitor for the Archdiocese of Mainz, Johannes Arnoldi. In late 1389 or even early 1390, Arnoldi attempted to investigate the Waldensians in Strasbourg, but this inquisition came to a sudden end when one of the leaders of the Strasbourg Waldensians, Johannes Blumstein, threatened Arnoldi’s life. Reasonably frightened, the inquisitor resigned on April 4, 1390. His successor, Nikolaus Böckeler, did undertake an inquisition, which culminated with a secret mass abjuration of the Waldensian community in the early years of the 1390s, organized by Blumstein in his own house. Considering that the Strasbourg Waldensians threatened the life of Böckeler’s predecessor and fellow inquisitor, he assigned relatively mild penance to the heretics. Notably, the Waldensian community in Strasbourg continued its existence after the abjuration, which remained secret until 1400, while Böckeler focused on persecution of heresy elsewhere.52 Just a few months after Arnoldi’s resignation, a protracted anti-Waldensian inquisition began in Mainz, lasting with interruptions from September 1390 to March 1393, and which possibly set the tone for all anti-heretical campaigns of that decade. The proceedings against the Waldensians began within a few months of the election of its new archbishop, Konrad II of Weinsberg (r. 1390–1396).53 Konrad II was a somewhat unlikely figure to occupy this position in that he was not a member of one of the influential noble dynasties in the region (unlike his shrewd predecessor, Adolf of Nassau), but rather a former scholastic of the Mainz Cathedral. While the new archbishop was certainly a “dark horse,” his election was enabled by Count Palatine Rupert II to ensure that the influential archdiocese remained loyal to the Roman pope in the Great Schism. If Rupert II was looking for an archbishop concerned with orthodoxy and correct obedience (a crucial departure from Adolf of Nassau’s interest in imperial politics), Konrad was a perfect candidate.54 As Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane has demonstrated in her study of the inquisition in Mainz, the new archbishop took control of his province ravaged by a decade of urban strife, conflicts between cities and the nobility, and anticlerical revolts in its large cities (including Mainz itself).55 In part, to restore ecclesiastical power to its former levels, Konrad II—whose previous position as

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a scholastic of the Mainz Cathedral allowed him to observe the earlier hostilities firsthand—unleashed an inquisition on the city’s Waldensian community.56 Fragmentary sources for the campaign do not allow for a detailed reconstruction. It is clear, however, that the inquisition consisted of a number of stages. The first stage began in late September 1390, according to the list of heretical errors of the unspecified number of Waldensians discovered (inventi sunt) in Mainz on the feast of St. Michael (September 29).57 At least initially, the proceedings against the Waldensians of Mainz were spearheaded by the Dominican inquisitor Nikolaus Böckeler. By the end of November, Böckeler punished eighteen individuals who recanted their beliefs by having them wear crosses of blue cloth as a sign of their repentance—a traditional punishment for heresy. In accordance with another traditional measure associated with inquisitions of heresy, the bodies of the deceased Waldensians were exhumed and, possibly, burned. Others fled the city—another frequent outcome of a large-scale inquisition.58 However, in 1392 Archbishop Konrad II issued a new inquisitorial commission, designating three representatives of the secular clergy—Bishop Friedrich of Toul, Nikolaus of Sauwelnheim, dean of the church of St. Stephan, and Johannes Wasmod, altar chaplain of the Mainz Cathedral—as inquisitorial judges.59 The commission ordered these men to pursue heresy within the city and throughout the diocese, both among the laity and the clergy. This time, Nikolaus Böckeler— possibly absent from Mainz at the time—appears to have been relegated to a secondary role, although the text of the commission reminds the three archiepiscopal inquisitors to cooperate with him.60 Whether the choice of inquisitors influenced the outcome of the proceedings or not, the second round of the inquisition resulted in thirty-six men and women being burned at the stake during the same year in Bingen, a nearby town and the archbishop’s residence. Three more Waldensians, this time from Bingen itself, were sent to the stake on March 10, 1393. With their execution, the inquisitorial campaign, engineered as a show of force on the part of the archbishop, came to a close.61 It took the lives of at least thirty-nine men and women, but affected many more in the heretical community, which had probably existed in the city undisturbed for decades. Since this was the first in a long chain of anti-Waldensian persecutions during the 1390s, it is tempting to consider Archbishop Konrad II (d. 1396) as the main agent behind over a decade of repressions of German Waldensians. His direct influence was probably not as great. Still, the inquisition against the Waldensians of Mainz set an example for later persecutions of heresy in several crucial ways. First, the inquisition in Mainz exclusively targeted Waldensians, possibly because of their disregard for clerical and even papal authority that was only too familiar to the new archbishop and reminiscent of the anticlerical revolts of the 1380s.62 Second, aside from the three Waldensians from Bingen, the inquisition in Mainz focused on the heretical community in Mainz itself as a way for the archbishop to assert his authority over the recently rebellious capital. Throughout the decade, other bishops in the Holy Roman Empire would adopt anti-heretical campaigns as a weapon against their detractors and, in particular, defiant free and imperial cities. Third, the campaign targeted a well-established urban Waldensian

46 Persecution of German Waldensians, 1390–1404 community. According to the chronicler, the Waldensians even owned at least one property dedicated to their communal meetings, called in the chronicle the “Spiegelberg house” (domus Spiegelberg).63 Lastly, the inquisition, at least in its second and more violent stage, involved non-mendicant inquisitors appointed by the archbishop himself; this practice would become the defining characteristic of the majority of anti-Waldensian persecutions between 1390 and 1404. While it is hard to know how far the news of the Waldensian persecution in and around Mainz in 1390–1393 spread throughout the empire, the fact that German Waldensians became the target of one of the most influential ecclesiastical figures in the realm may have inspired other prelates to follow suit. Although causality is hard to prove here, anti-Waldensian inquisitions in Erfurt—part of the Diocese of Mainz—and in Würzburg in 1391 demonstrate that this particular kind of heresy began to attract attention. Moreover, campaigns against the German Waldensians during this period took place against the background of relative indifference towards this heresy on the part of the papacy. As Richard Kieckhefer rightly points out, there is no evidence that the pope was aware of the Waldensians in Germany, let alone willing to prompt the bishops or the Dominican inquisitors to combat this heresy.64 Many scholars have pointed out that the unprecedented inquisitorial interest in Waldensians was prompted by internal issues within the heretical communities themselves. By 1391, a number of Waldensian ministers converted to Catholicism, abandoning their followers and serving as crucial informants for the Church.65 What prompted over thirty ministers to convert? Kathrin Utz Tremp suggests that by the late fourteenth century, Waldensianism experienced a crisis of its lay apostolate, while Alexander Patschovsky argues that the decline of literacy among the late medieval Waldensian ministers hampered intellectual development of their religious movement.66 Some of these internal fissures were undoubtedly caused by the realities of leading a clandestine preaching lifestyle. As Gabriel Audisio points out, the need to exist in hiding could have led to the deterioration of Waldensian belief systems and religious practices. Forced to preach and worship in secrecy since the later twelfth century, Waldensian communities throughout western and central Europe had to change their ways in order to avoid detection. In response to even sporadic persecutions, recourse to violence and lying—two acts distinctly prohibited by the earlier Waldensian teachings—became more widespread in this struggle for survival. Such “long slow ebbing of the spirit and energy with which the doctrine was taught and implemented,” in Peter Biller’s words, may have weakened the ties between Waldensian ministers and their communities.67 Gone were public preaching and open reverence towards the Waldensian preachers. In their stead came an environment of suspicion, furtive meetings, and security measures that were, in turn, sharply criticized by the Catholic polemicists.68 Finally, long preaching circuits undertaken by at least some ministers—at times spanning the empire itself—added to the hardship in the lives of the itinerant ministers. For example, two ministers—Nikolaus of Solothurn and Konrad of Saxony—are mentioned in the depositions of Waldensians in both Brandenburg and Strasbourg, on the opposite sides of the Holy Roman Empire.69 Evidence of the two ministers attending to the spiritual needs of the communities nearly 500 miles

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apart suggest that their preaching circles included Waldensian communities in other regions, as well, possibly in southern Germany and Upper Austria. Other ministers probably preached on similarly ambitious routes. Travel across central Europe was a crucial part of a minister’s life, aptly described by Peter Zwicker as “wheeling around the world.”70 Regular travel, moreover, was complicated by the problem of having to rely on local communities for guidance and shelter—could they be trusted to protect the ministers from the persecutors? This implicit but quotidian psychological pressure may have been taxing enough to prompt some of the ministers’ fateful decision to break with Waldensianism altogether. Since virtually nothing is known about the course of the inquisition in Erfurt (1391) that coincided with the initial conversions of a large number of Waldensian ministers, one can only analyze the main result of this campaign: two lists with names and other information about these converts written by the inquisitors Martin of Amberg and Peter Zwicker.71 The lists of over thirty converted Waldensian ministers raise an important question: did all of them convert at the same time? The name of one of the ministers, Konrad Waythoff, described in the document, along with a few others, as killed for turning away from Waldensianism, is particularly intriguing. It has been suggested that Konrad Waythoff was a possible alias of Hans Weidenhofer, a Waldensian minister who was murdered in Strasbourg around 1374, allegedly for reverting to Catholicism and betraying his followers.72 Crucially, this murder very likely took place during the anti-beguine inquisition in Strasbourg in 1374, a time of heightened danger for any heterodox group in the city. It also coincided with the presence of Martin of Amberg—one of the principal anti-Waldensian persecutors of the 1390s—in Strasbourg, where he was sent by the archbishop of Prague to assist in the inquest.73 Even if Weidenhofer was silenced before he could betray his Waldensian followers to the inquisitors, it is possible that the fact of his conversion and murder did not escape Martin’s attention. Seventeen years later, while compiling the list of converted ministers, Martin decided to include Weidenhofer as well. While this mention itself does not prove that Martin knew Weidenhofer personally, it hints at that; otherwise, why would the list include a minister who had converted and died over a decade earlier? If Martin did indeed learn about the renegade minister’s conversion and assassination in 1374, this might have suggested to him that Waldensian ministers were sometimes willing to convert, posed a threat to their community (to the point of prompting their assassination), and could be mined for information. Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the lists of the converted Waldensian ministers is the relative leniency of punishments assigned to them. Based on the information contained in the lists of converts, Waldensian ministers in later fourteenth-century Germany tended to face lesser punishments, possibly as a reward for their cooperation. None of the ministers listed by Martin of Amberg and Peter Zwicker in 1391 are described as imprisoned or executed.74 Notably, in addition to providing information about German Waldensian communities to the inquisitors, some of the converts personally participated in that decade’s antiheretical campaigns. Two former Waldensian ministers, Hans of Styria and Konrad of Erfurt subsequently returned to Erfurt to convert their former brethren to

48 Persecution of German Waldensians, 1390–1404 Catholicism. The document notes that this mission produced no converts with the exception of Konrad’s sister, and one can imagine—keeping in mind the fate of the minister killed in Strasbourg—that this task was rather dangerous as the converted ministers attempted to preach to the very community they had betrayed to the inquisitors.75 Even more remarkably, we encounter mentions of recent converts being allowed to join a monastic order or even become priests. The succinct list of converts does not provide any explanation for this, mentioning only that five converts— Johannes of Vienna, Claus of Brandenburg, Friedrich of Hardeck, Heinrich of Ingolstadt, and Peter of Siebenbürgen (Transylvania)—“became priests of the Catholic Church after conversion.”76 Another convert, Hans of Mainz, became a monk instead.77 It stands to reason that particularly valuable converts were rewarded with a chance to join the priesthood. For example, the aforementioned Claus of Brandenburg, also known as Nikolaus Gottschalk of Brandenburg, was from a region with a large Waldensian community, which he had recently visited. As a result, the information divulged by the convert allowed Peter Zwicker, one of the inquisitors active in Erfurt, to embark on a large-scale inquisitorial campaign in Brandenburg and Pomerania in 1392–94. In return, Nikolaus Gottschalk joined the priesthood in Vienna—possibly after a brief stay in Prague—only months after his conversion.78 His name even appears in the records of a later inquest in Vienna in 1404, where now a “canon Nicholas Gottschalk” (Nicolao Gottschalk canonico) is noted as one of the clerics in attendance.79 Mass conversion of Waldensian ministers around 1391 became a turning point in the history of the anti-heretical persecutions in German-speaking central Europe. The availability of reliable information about Waldensian communities in the region allowed the two inquisitors involved in the Erfurt campaign to penetrate Waldensian networks and—once sufficient patronage was secured—to persecute heresy in large-scale, well-organized campaigns.80 As a result, one can observe a period marked by a remarkable intensification of persecution of Waldensians specifically. The rest of this chapter will provide an overview of the known persecutions that occurred during this period as well as brief information about the three most active persecutors of Waldensians between 1390 and 1404. Two of them, Martin of Amberg and Peter Zwicker, were the principal beneficiaries of the mass conversion of the Waldensian ministers in Erfurt; the third, Heinrich Angermeier, had a brief but influential career in Swabia and Franconia in 1393–95. These mobile individuals with access to reliable information about Waldensian communities and a talent for aligning themselves with powerful patrons served as catalysts behind nearly a decade and a half of anti-Waldensian inquisitions, even if they were not involved in all of them. Later in the decade, Waldensians in Strasbourg and in the Swiss lands were persecuted by city councils and more traditional, mendicant inquisitors from 1399 to 1400. Together, itinerant inquisitors, their Dominican and Franciscan colleagues, city council tribunals, and episcopal judges created an environment in which Waldensians became almost the sole targets of anti-heretical efforts in central Europe, with each new trial adding to the intensification and deregulation of persecution in Germany.

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Itinerant inquisitors and their campaigns, 1391–1404 Martin of Amberg and Peter Zwicker We know surprisingly little about Martin of Amberg’s life before his collaboration with Peter Zwicker in the 1390s and the early years of the fifteenth century. Judging by his name, he originated from Amberg, a town in the Upper Palatinate, about 30 miles east of Nuremberg. Martin’s name, common in medieval Germany, was probably even more common among the inhabitants of Amberg, where a late gothic parish church of St. Martin still graces the market square. Unfortunately, because of the name’s popularity, it is hard to pinpoint the inquisitor’s origins or his life’s trajectory before his move to Prague in the 1360s or 1370s. Indeed, the ubiquity of Martin’s name has even complicated his identification since the sources frequently alternate between calling him “Martin of Amberg” and “Martin of Prague.” This led earlier scholars to assume that these were references to different individuals, although this misconception has been remedied in more recent scholarship in light of considerable evidence for the two Martins being the same person.81 Martin of Amberg has been long known to scholars of late medieval German literature as the author of Mirror of Conscience (Gewissensspiegel, c. 1380), one of the early vernacular German catechisms. The breadth of Martin’s education is hard to gauge, but he was clearly well-versed in a wide range of literature, including the Latin catechistic manuals as well as classical and patristic texts. Known more as a preacher and an author than as an inquisitor during his early career, Martin appears to have been part of the literary circles in Prague patronized by Johann of Neumarkt (c. 1310–1380), bishop of Olomouc and a chancellor to Emperor Charles IV.82 Bishop Johann, a member of the budding Humanist movement, was an author in his own right and possibly Martin’s early patron. Martin’s connections to the highest echelons of secular and ecclesiastical power in Prague proved to be important in his later inquisitorial career as well. Moreover, Reima Välimäki has argued that even if Martin’s early writings were not related to or directed against heresy, they can still be seen within the same pastoral tradition that led him and Peter Zwicker to focus on converting Waldensians instead of merely eradicating them.83 Even before writing the Mirror of Conscience, Martin of Amberg probably possessed the trust of the archbishop of Prague. In 1374, Martin—described in the sources as “a priest from Bohemia”—was sent to Strasbourg to assist the local bishop, Lambert of Brunn (r. 1371–74), in his campaign against the mendicant tertiaries and the beguines in the city.84 His involvement in the Strasbourg campaign proved his ability to persecute heresy and in the second half of the 1380s, we find him as an inquisitor in Regensburg, possibly sent there by the archbishop of Prague.85 There Martin accepted the abjurations of at least three Waldensians, the first recorded instance of his involvement in the persecution of this type of heresy. Although it is unclear how long Martin remained in Regensburg, his activity there was remembered a decade later, when Konrad Huter, who abjured Waldensianism

50 Persecution of German Waldensians, 1390–1404 to Martin, was accused of relapsing into heresy in 1395–96.86 Thus, by 1391, Martin of Amberg was already a veteran inquisitor, with some experience in pursuing Waldensians specifically. In other words, Martin of Amberg was a perfect inquisitorial mentor for Peter Zwicker. If known biography of Martin of Amberg remains largely fragmentary and uncertain, comparatively more can be learned about the life of his associate. A description of Peter Zwicker’s career reads like a remarkable example of late medieval social mobility. Born on the northeastern frontier of the Germanspeaking lands, Zwicker was first a university student and a school teacher, then a Celestine monk, abbot, and the order’s provincial prior.87 Finally, during the last fourteen or so years of his life, Zwicker was the most determined persecutor of German Waldensians of his time period.88 Just during this later phase of his life he conducted inquisitions across German-speaking central Europe from Thuringia and the Mark of Brandenburg to Austria and the Kingdom of Hungary. In addition to his inquisitorial activity, Zwicker composed a polemical anti-Waldensian treatise, Cum dormirent homines (c. 1395), and a dossier of more practical documents aimed to aid future inquisitors.89 Peter Zwicker first became involved in an inquisition as a junior associate of Martin of Amberg during a trial in Erfurt in 1391, which involved conversion of a number of Waldensian ministers to Catholicism and their collaboration with the inquisitors.90 After the inquisition in Erfurt, Martin of Amberg conducted a trial in nearby Würzburg, where the information acquired from the converted Waldensian ministers earned Martin the support of a local bishop, Gerhard of Schwarzburg (r. 1372–1400). According to the brief list of the nine convicted Waldensians from the city and their alleged beliefs, Martin arrived in Würzburg armed with information about the Waldensian community there, which he learned “from other heretics in different parts of the world.”91 There might have been an additional motive for the bishop’s support of Martin’s investigation of heresy in the city. At the time of the inquisition, the bishop of Würzburg had a very strained relationship with the city and its government.92 An itinerant inquisitor like Martin could serve as an important asset in a conflict between a bishop and a city council. An anti-heretical inquisition was a powerful weapon in the hands of a bishop, who could aim it at his defiant subjects, while also formally staying within the realm of his pastoral duties. On the other hand, for the itinerant inquisitors, cooperation with powerful bishops allowed them to acquire important patrons and the authority to persecute heresy. Left to pursue Waldensians on his own, from November 1392 to March 1394, Peter Zwicker was active in Brandenburg and Pomerania, in the Baltic northeast of the Empire. Armed with a mandate to proceed against the Waldensians in the region by the archbishop of Prague and the bishops of Brandenburg, Cammin, and Lebus, Zwicker embarked on systematic inquisition in the region.93 Using the city of Stettin (modern-day Szczecin) as his base of operations, the inquisitor managed to investigate suspects across the whole region, as far as forty miles south from the city. Stettin itself was an important center of Waldensian activity in the region and Zwicker clearly used the existence of a robust Waldensian community in the city itself to unravel the whole heretical network in the Mark of Brandenburg. At least

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443 individuals were interrogated during the whole campaign; most were allowed to recant their heterodox beliefs in exchange for enduring a relatively mild penance and providing information about fellow Waldensians in the region.94 While the ambitious anti-Waldensian campaign in Brandenburg clearly contributed to Zwicker’s reputation as expert persecutor of this particular heresy, interrogations of over 400 Waldensians allowed him to learn a great deal about their beliefs and practices. A year after leaving Brandenburg, Zwicker used these interrogation records—along with other sources—to compose his anti-Waldensian polemical treatise and to acquire future patrons.95 After spending over a year pursuing the Waldensians in the Mark of Brandenburg, Zwicker shifted his attention to Upper Austria, another region known for its well-established Waldensian communities. In 1395 both Zwicker and Martin of Amberg received a commission to proceed against heresy from the bishop of Passau, Georg of Hohenlohe (r. 1389–1423), although it appears that Martin did not participate in that campaign. Instead, Zwicker used Friedrich, a local parish priest from Steyr, as his deputy.96 However, the Austrian Waldensians, who had faced inquisitors before, proved to be more resilient and resistant in the face of persecution, to the point of using violence to dissuade an overly zealous inquisitor. It is very probable that Zwicker himself was nearly burned alive when someone set fire to a barn of Steyr’s parish priest, where Zwicker and his associates were spending the night. Whether the attack took place (and whether Zwicker was indeed the inquisitor attacked), he used it to appeal to the secular and ecclesiastical authorities in Austria to persuade them to support his inquisitorial campaign.97 After a period of political uncertainty in Austria following the death of Duke Albert III of Austria (d. 1395), Zwicker was only able to begin his persecution in earnest in 1397.98 In the end, Zwicker’s inquisition prevailed, reportedly resulting in over a hundred death sentences in addition to other punishments.99 Also in Upper Austria, Zwicker composed a treatise named after its gospel incipit Cum dormirent homines (“While the men slept . . .”; Matt. 13:25), completed around 1395. In the words of one of its principal scholars, Peter Biller, the treatise is “the single most important literary text on the Waldensians from the later middle ages.”100 In the process of his “disputation” with the Waldensian ministers, Zwicker undertakes a thorough refutation of individual Waldensian tenets as well as a critique of the spiritual and organizational problems related to the mode of clandestine Waldensian preaching practiced by the ministers.101 Somewhat surprisingly, the text does not discuss the practical matters of persecution, examination, or sentencing of actual Waldensians directly. Indeed, Cum dormirent homines does not even identify its author as an inquisitor (arguably, this task was performed by the Processus Petri, a collection of more practical inquisitorial documents, which was nearly always distributed along with the treatise).102 Instead, Zwicker used the only authority respected by both the Waldensians and the Church—the Bible—to criticize heretical beliefs in defense of orthodox belief and practice. The polemic contributed to changing attitudes towards heresy that saw lay education, persuasion, and conversion as methods for “healing” the Christian community during the age of the Schism.103

52 Persecution of German Waldensians, 1390–1404 While Peter Zwicker was engaged in the pursuit of Waldensians in the Mark of Brandenburg and Upper Austria, Martin of Amberg appears to have been residing in Prague, where he served as an altar priest at the Church of the Virgin Mary before Týn. This was an important parish church in the heart of Prague’s Old Town and one associated with the reform movements in the Bohemian capital, including the earlier reform-minded preachers Konrad Waldhauser (d. 1369) and Jan Milíč of Kroměříž (d. 1374).104 We first hear about Martin occupying this position in the spring of 1396, but he served as the priest there for most of the decade.105 Even after resuming his inquisitorial duties in 1399, Martin continued to describe himself as a priest as well as an inquisitor. In the sources from the inquisition in Bamberg, Martin is described as the “altar priest in the church of the Blessed Virgin Mary before Týn . . . inquisitor of heretical depravity.”106 In 1399, Martin appears to have resumed his activity as an inquisitor and was involved in anti-Waldensian inquisitions in Nuremberg and Bamberg from April to June of 1399. As a result, out of an unknown number of suspects prosecuted, six women and one man were condemned to death in Nuremberg, eleven others were forced to wear penitential crosses, several were banned from the city, and nineteen more fled the persecution.107 While Martin acted in the city on the authority of his old patron, the bishop of Bamberg (formerly of Strasbourg), Lambert of Brunn, he was received well by the local magistrates, and even welcomed to the city with a generous gift of wine.108 The inquisitor probably acted in Nuremberg with the support of its city council, which saw heresy as detrimental to the city’s social order and reputation. Martin did not stay in Franconia for long: the anti-heretical trials in Nuremberg and Bamberg overlapped with the death of Bishop Lambert, his long-time patron. In 1400 we find Martin of Amberg in Tyrnau (modern-day Trnava, Slovakia), where he rejoined Peter Zwicker for yet another series of anti-Waldensian campaigns.109 In early January of 1401, Peter Zwicker and Martin of Amberg held a trial of a group of Waldensian men and women further east in Ödenburg (presentday Sopron, Hungary). The condemned were told to wear penitential crosses on their clothing and ordered to perform public penance.110 The anti-heretical campaign left a lasting imprint on Ödenburg’s urban landscape. After the trial, the inquisitors—acting on the authority of the archbishop of Esztergom and his local suffragan bishop of Györ—ordered the houses where the Waldensian community once congregated to be demolished and converted into a communal waste dump: “so that there would forever be a waste-heap, where once before was a hidingplace of heretics.”111 Over a month later, on February 27, both Martin of Amberg and Zwicker condemned three women to be executed for relapsing into heresy in Hartberg, Styria (Lower Austria).112 The aging inquisitor’s trek from Franconia to Trnava, Ödenburg, and Styria—it is very probable that by 1401 Martin of Amberg was in his sixties—perhaps serves as the best demonstration of his personal passion for the persecution of heresy and the willingness to collaborate with Peter Zwicker once again.113 These inquests were Martin’s last as his name disappears from the records after the inquisition in Hartberg, and subsequent trials in the same region mention only Zwicker.114

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After conducting inquisitions in Trnava, Ödenburg, and Hartberg, Zwicker headed—without Martin—to Vienna (1403), where he presided over the trial of a certain Andreas Hesel, a priest from the parish church of St. Stephen, who appears to have espoused some partially Waldensian beliefs.115 The following year, Zwicker investigated the Waldensians at the easternmost point on his itinerary in Buda, the capital of the Kingdom of Hungary, before returning to Vienna in the same year.116 The evidence for these inquisitions is preserved in the most fragmentary form, and we know little more than their date, location, and occasionally the names of the individuals involved. Still, it is clear that in Hungary and Lower Austria, Zwicker pursued the German-speaking Waldensians who had fled earlier persecutions. Thus, in Buda, Zwicker accepted the abjuration of Elisabeth Sneyder, who had been previously converted in Ungarisch Brod (present-day Uherský Brod, Czech Republic) earlier in the century by inquisitor Heinrich of Olomouc (c. 1365–80) and presumably relapsed later.117 Trials in Buda and Vienna in 1404 mark the end of Zwicker’s career, as far as the evidence allows us to tell. It is possible that the inquisitor returned to the Benedictine abbey at Garsten, near Steyr, where—according to early modern accounts rooted in local tradition—he died and was buried.118 Heinrich Angermeier Heinrich Angermeier began his known inquisitorial career in Augsburg in 1393, when his arrival in the city initiated a persecution of Waldensians by the bishop of Augsburg.119 An anonymous author of a city chronicle states that a cleric—later identified as Heinrich Angermeier—arrived in the city as a traveling preacher, a “priest from Bamberg.” This may suggest that he was in some way connected to the bishop of Bamberg, Lambert of Brunn, known for his interest in the persecution of heresy and associations with Martin of Amberg.120 There is no evidence to support this speculation, however. Considering Angermeier’s mobility, he could have simply passed through Bamberg before arriving in Augsburg. Upon his arrival, Angermeier delivered a sermon against heresy, possibly as a first step towards launching an investigation of heresy in the city. Shortly after the sermon, contemporary chronicle account reports that Angermeier was nearly attacked by a presumed heretic; the failed attack served as a catalyst for a persecution that allowed the bishop of Augsburg to show his power over the defiant city council. Varying accounts of the inquisition claim that it involved between thirty-four and forty-six Waldensians, who were condemned in the presence of the bishop himself and had to perform public penance. Urban chronicles mention that Angermeier participated in the inquisition alongside the Dominican Peter Engerlin, indicating that Angermeier may have lacked the inquisitorial experience to act on his own.121 The inquisition in Augsburg earned Angermeier the trust of the bishop of Augsburg, who entrusted the inquisitor to pursue Waldensians in his diocese. In the fall and early winter of 1393, Heinrich Angermeier was involved in a swift succession of smaller inquisitorial campaigns in which he acted as a representative of the bishop of Augsburg and his inquisitor. In early November, Angermeier oversaw a trial in Wemding that ended with the burning of ten men and women at the

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stake.122 Almost simultaneously, the inquisitor presided over a trial in Dinkelsbühl, where an unknown number of men and women were accused of following Waldensianism, but only two were burned.123 A month later, in Donauwörth, as many as forty Waldensians were condemned to various punishments (including the execution of as many as twenty-six).124 Unlike in Augsburg, where Angermeier had to cooperate with a local Dominican inquisitor, in later inquisitions he was entrusted with full episcopal authority. The Dinkelsbühl trial records, for example, call the inquisitor a “venerable and circumspect man, lord and master Heinrich, called Angermeier . . . deputy of the bishop of Augsburg in the matter of the Waldensian sect.”125 Having proved his ability to persecute in Augsburg, Angermeier was given free rein in the surrounding region. The intensity of Heinrich Angermeier’s persecutions of Waldensians in the diocese might have been inspired by the interests of his patron. Describing the wave of inquisitions, Hans Mair, a contemporary chronicler from Nördlingen, another town in the region, quipped that the bishop received the property of those who were executed. As a result, his persecutors tended to spare the poor and send the wealthy to the stake.126 Accusations of venality could have been simply a response to the threatening progress of inquisitions in the region; Mair, a member of the merchant elites and urban government, could have feared for the fate of his own city. It is clear, however, that outside of Augsburg, Angermeier’s authority to persecute originated with the bishop. Conversely, Heinrich Angermeier’s attempt to conduct an inquisition in the neighboring diocese of Würzburg resulted in a spectacular failure when he accused a merchant from Rothenburg ob der Tauber of being a Waldensian but failed to prove it during the trial. Left without episcopal support, Angermeier disappeared into obscurity.127 In 1403 his name appeared in the municipal records of Lucerne in the Swiss Lands, where Angermeier attempted to find heretics (perhaps in an attempt to replicate his earlier success in Augsburg) but once again could not find any.128

Inquisition and urban honor: Bern, Fribourg, and Strasbourg In addition to the anti-Waldensian campaigns involving Martin of Amberg, Peter Zwicker, and Heinrich Angermeier, several important inquisitions took place in the southwest of German-speaking central Europe, on the Rhine and in the Swiss Lands. As Georg Modestin and Reima Välimäki argue, by focusing exclusively on the three itinerant inquisitors, one risks misunderstanding the full extent of the persecution of German Waldensians. The trials which took place in Bern (1399–1400), Fribourg (1399), and Strasbourg (1400) add to the complex set of meanings heresy acquired in urban settings; they also feature a different set of persecutors than most other inquisitions from this period.129 By the close of the century, large cities in Upper Germany began to realize that the presence of heresy posed a significant threat to the stability of their self-rule. Possibly prompted by the inquisitorial campaigns in Upper Austria and Swabia, where urban Waldensian communities came under attack between 1393 and 1398, the city council of Bern conducted an inquisition that involved a Dominican friar, Nikolaus of Landau from Basel. In addition to

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preserving the city from an external inquisition, the trial also proved to be lucrative for Bern’s magistrates. Although the actual inquisitorial records did not survive, the chronicle account of Konrad Justinger relates that the inquisitor found 130 Waldensians in the city and succeeded in collecting a staggering 3,000 guldens in fines from the accused.130 Although the inquisition in Bern involved a Dominican inquisitor from Basel, the initiative for conducting the inquest seems to have come from the city council itself, a fact that may help to explain its aftermath. Even while the antiheretical trials were still underway, the representatives of the city council of Bern met with their counterparts from nearby Fribourg in November of 1399, in a clear attempt to initiate a similar inquisition in the neighboring town as well.131 Whether this action was an attempt on the part of Bern to project its influence or merely a way of dealing with those Waldensians who had escaped persecution by fleeing the city, the pressure from Bern forced the magistrates of Fribourg to conduct an antiWaldensian inquest of their own. Surprisingly, however, the inquisitions in Fribourg ended in full acquittal of the men and women on trial by the Dominican inquisitor appointed by the bishop of Lausanne.132 By Christmas of 1399, the inquisitors found no presence of Waldensianism in Fribourg and issued the city a document (meticulously reproduced in the municipal records) that proclaimed Fribourg’s status as heresy-free.133 Crucially, we know that Fribourg did have a thriving Waldensian community in 1399 as well as in 1430, when another inquisition brought its existence to light.134 Still, in 1399 the magistrates of Fribourg were able to resist the pressure of their neighboring city by carefully organizing an inquest that was meant to produce a convenient outcome. Another city in the region and its Waldensian community were not so fortunate. Just as the city councilors of Bern pressured Fribourg into conducting an inquest, they also sent a letter to the magistrates of Strasbourg, suggesting that the city had a significant Waldensian presence. In March of 1400, the city council of Strasbourg reacted by conducting a swift inquisition that uncovered the city’s Waldensian community; twenty-seven of its members were expelled from the city as a result.135 In early April, mere days after the expulsion of the heretics, the city council wrote a response to their Bernese colleagues. In that letter, they minimized the size of the Waldensian community and the social status of its members in an attempt to present their city in the best possible light.136 Even after removing the problematic residents from the city, the magistrates of Strasbourg did not risk admitting that some of its well-respected and affluent citizens were part of the Waldensian community. Instead, the magistrates claimed that the heretics in the city were, for the most part, recent immigrants and “insignificant people” (unahtber lúte).137 Indeed, after a decade of intense persecutions, even admitting to ever having a robust, well-integrated Waldensian community in the city was not merely inconvenient, but also shameful and dangerous for its reputation and autonomy. *** The intensification of anti-Waldensian persecution which began in 1390 and lasted into the early years of the fifteenth century was a result of a number of important

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factors. As Reima Välimäki has argued recently, this intensification did not appear without decades of smaller-scale persecutions of heresy, initially brought about by the conversion of Austrian ministers and their followers in the late 1360s.138 In a way, history repeated itself at the beginning of the 1390s when another group of Waldensian ministers sought conversion and collaborated with the persecutors. These conversions provided those interested in pursuing Waldensianism—inquisitors Martin of Amberg and Peter Zwicker, in particular—with a list of “leads” to pursue. For instance, the conversion of Nikolaus Gottschalk, a Waldensian minister from Brandenburg, explains Zwicker’s decision to pursue heretics in Brandenburg and Pomerania. While this move was undoubtedly helped by Zwicker’s access to important patrons with connections to Brandenburg—including Johannes Brunonis, imperial chancellor and de facto bishop of Cammin—at the Luxemburg court in Prague, information about Waldensian communities in the region allowed Zwicker to descend on the whole Baltic region with a large-scale systematic inquisition.139 It is also very probable, for example, that the availability of information about the Waldensians in eastern Europe prompted Peter Zwicker and Martin of Amberg to investigate Waldensians in the Kingdom of Hungary (present-day Hungary and Slovakia) in the early years of the fifteenth century: at least a few of the ministers mentioned in the Erfurt lists from 1391 were from Hungary and therefore could have been used as informants about the heretical communities there.140 Beyond the inquisitorial itineraries of Zwicker and his associate, disruptions to the Waldensian communities caused by the conversion of the ministers in Erfurt and by more systematic persecutions of heresy contributed to further intensification of anti-Waldensian campaigns across central Europe. After the 1380s, a decade marked by ecclesiastical disarray and anticlerical revolts in Upper German cities, Waldensianism—with its staunch anticlericalism and the refusal to recognize the authority of the Church—certainly seemed a more dangerous form of heresy. The ongoing Schism, too, inspired some contemporary authors to see persecution of heresy as one of the ways of controlling or even healing the damage from the conflict of rival popes in Rome and Avignon.141 Moreover, anti-heretical inquisition in cities—as the example of Mainz demonstrates—became weaponized by bishops and archbishops eager to reassert their authority over rebellious urban communes. Finally, the municipal governments themselves came to see heretical communities as dangerous to the reputation of their cities as self-governing and sacred societies steeped in the ideology of common good. As the chapters that follow will demonstrate, anti-Waldensian inquisitions became crucial components of imperial cities’ struggles for political independence, useful pretexts for conflicts between members of the urban elite, and important elements of diplomatic relations between cities.

Notes 1 Robert E. Lerner, “Waldensians,” in Dictionary of the Middle Ages, ed. Joseph A. Strayer (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1989), vol. 12, 508. 2 Robert E. Lerner, “A Case of Religious Counter-Culture: The German Waldensians,” American Scholar 55 (1986), 234.

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3 Lerner, “Religious Counter-Culture,” 234. 4 On the heresy of the Free Spirit, see, Robert E. Lerner, The Heresy of the Free Spirit in the Later Middle Ages (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972). 5 “Chronik von 1368–1406 mit Fortsetzung bis 1447,” CsSA, vol. 1, 96; Modestin, Ketzer in der Stadt, 51–53; Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane, “Archiepiscopal Inquisitions in the Middle Rhine: Urban Anticlericalism and Waldensianism in Late FourteenthCentury Mainz,” Catholic Historical Review 92 (July 2006), 211; “Bericht des Inquisitors Petrus,” 250; CDH, 277H. The instances of Waldensians allegedly using violence in self-defence are discussed in greater detail in Chapter 3. 6 Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 22–23; Klaus-Bernward Springer, “Dominican Inquisition in the Archdiocese of Mainz (1348–1520),” in Praedicatores Inquisitores, vol. 1: The Dominicans and the Mediaeval Inquisition: Acts of the 1st International Seminar on the Dominicans and the Inquisition, Rome 23–25 February 2002, ed. Wolfram Hoyer (Rome: Insituto Storico Domenicano, 2004), 312. 7 Modestin, Ketzer in der Stadt; Johannes Müllner, Die Annalen der Reichsstadt Nürnberg von 1623. Vol. 2: Von 1351–1469, ed. Gerhard Hirschmann (Nuremberg: Selbstverlag des Stadtrats, 1984), 175. 8 A notable exception is Heinrich Angermeier’s participation in the trial of Hans Wern, a merchant from Rothenburg ob der Tauber, where he acted without the permission of the bishop of Würzburg, see Schnurrer, “Der Fall Hans Wern,” 31–34; Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 72–73. The inquisition in Rothenburg is the focus of Chapter 4 of this study. 9 Deane, “Archiepiscopal Inquisitions,” 218; Kathrin Utz Tremp, “Der Freiburger Waldenserprozeß von 1399 und seine bernische Vorgeschichte,” Freiburger Geschichtsblatter 68 (1991), 57–85. 10 Chronicon Universale Anonymi Laudunensis. Von 1154 bis zum Schluss (1219), eds. Alexander Cartellieri and Wolf Stechele (Leipzig: Dyk, 1909), 20–22; English translation of the excerpt related to Valdes, see Walter L. Wakefield and Austin P. Evans, trans., Heresies of the High Middle Ages (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 201–02. For a more detailed analysis of Valdes’s conversion and Waldensianism’s origin story, see Cameron, Waldenses, 11–22; Lambert, Medieval Heresy, 70–75; Gabriel Audisio, The Waldensian Dissent: Persecution and Survival, c.1170c.1570, trans. Claire Davison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 7–15; Giovanni Gonnet and Amedeo Molnár, Les vaudois au Moyen Age (Turin: Claudiana, 1974), 75–83; Giovanni Gonnet, “La figure et l’oeuvre de Vaudès dans la tradition historique et selon les dernières recherches,” Cahiers de Fanjeaux 2 (1967), 87–109. Academic histories of Waldensianism point out the lack of evidence about Valdes’ life before his conversion. See, for example, Cameron, Waldenses, 12 n.4. 11 Cameron, Waldenses, 13; Lambert, Medieval Heresy, 71. 12 Cameron, Waldenses, 15. 13 Cameron, Waldenses, 16–17; Lambert, Medieval Heresy, 72–73. 14 Cameron, Waldenses, 17–21; Audisio, The Waldensian Dissent, 14–16. 15 Cameron, Waldenses, 15–16; for a discussion of the sharpened distinction between priesthood and laity after the Gregorian Reform, see Grundmann, Religious Movements, 7–9. 16 Lambert, Medieval Heresy, 72–73; Cameron, Waldenses, 33–34; Audisio, The Waldensian Dissent, 51–55. 17 Lambert, Medieval Heresy, 80–81. 18 Biller, The Waldenses, 126–28; Lutz Kaelber, Schools of Asceticism: Ideology and Organization in Medieval Religious Communities (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), 133–35. Kaelber points out that Waldensians in Austria managed to keep a more egalitarian social structure in their communities c. 1250. For example, there was no distinction between the “ministers” and the “laity,” while

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19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

33 34 35 36

37 38 39 40 41 42

Persecution of German Waldensians, 1390–1404 both men and women could preach and provide religious instruction. They also could lead religious life openly, in a relative absence of persecution. This way of life seems to have changed by the late fourteenth century, when Austrian Waldensians became more similar in beliefs and organization to the German-speaking brethren in the rest of central and eastern Europe. Kaelber, Schools of Asceticism, 161–68. Lambert, Medieval Heresy, 77; Cameron, Waldenses, 97. Kaelber, Schools of Asceticism, 151. Persecutions of the later fourteenth century support this hypothesis: the Waldensians who appear in the inquisitorial records have predominantly Germanic names. Lambert, Medieval Heresy, 168. Biller, The Waldenses, 281; Audisio, The Waldensian Dissent, 105. Biller, The Waldenses, 94–95. Peter Biller, “Heretics and Long Journeys,” in Freedom of Movement in the Middle Ages: Proceedings of the 2003 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. Peregrine Horden (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2007), 99–100. Kurze, Quellen, 200. It is possible that the Waldensian woman, who made this statement under interrogation, tried to minimize her guilt by minimizing her engagement with the heresy. Still, it must have been a believable enough claim to make under oath. Kathrin Utz Tremp, “Multum abhorrerem,” 166; Cameron, Waldenses, 140–41. The Waldensian community in Strasbourg c. 1374 purportedly hired assassins to kill a minister who converted to Catholicism. Modestin, Ketzer in der Stadt, 43–44. Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 57. Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 54–55; James B. Given, Inquisition and Medieval Society: Power, Discipline, and Resistance in Languedoc (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 14–15. Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 14–16; Cameron, Waldenses, 98–99. Lambert, Medieval Heresy, 165–66. Lambert, Medieval Heresy, 168–69; Audisio, The Waldensian Dissent, 40–41; Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 53–54; Werner Maleczek, “Die Ketzerverfolgung im österreichischen Hoch- und Spätmittelalter,” in Wellen der Verfolgung in der österreichischen Geschichte, ed. Erich Zöllner (Vienna: Österreichischer Bundesverlag, 1986), 21–30. Patschovsky, Quellen, 18–22. This is a conservative estimate; the overall number of individuals involved in Gallus’s campaign may have reached 4,400. Lambert, Medieval Heresy, 169–70. Lambert, Medieval Heresy, 168. The longest list of Waldensian “errors” appears in a letter written by Peter Zwicker to the rulers and clergy of Austria (1395). The most accessible edition of the list is in “Bericht des Inquisitors Petrus,” 246–50. Other contemporary lists of “errors” are more concise. Thus, a list from Augsburg (c. 1393), preserved in the chronicle of Hans Mair, counts only sixteen items. Mair, “Nördlingani brevis Historia,” 620. A contemporary list from Bingen (1393) contains only ten Waldensian tenets. Mainz, Stadtbibliothek, Hs. I 151, fol. 205r. Neither of the lists concerns itself with non-theological errors (for example, with statements that emphasize heretical “otherness” in non-religious spheres). ͧ Modestin, Quellen, 169–70: “kein globen hettent an die priesterschaft.” Augsburg: Mair, “Nördlingani brevis Historia,” 620; Strasbourg: Modestin, Quellen, 154–55; “Bericht des Inquisitors Petrus,” 246. Cameron, Waldenses, 135. Kurze, Quellen, 155. Reference in Peter Biller, “Goodbye to Waldensianism?” Past and Present 192 (August 2006), 29. Mair, “Nördlingani brevis Historia,” 620; “Bericht des Inquisitors Petrus,” 249. These and other examples of syncretic beliefs held by Waldensians are discussed in Cameron, Waldenses, 135–37.

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43 Lambert, Medieval Heresy, 175–77; Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 55–57; Modestin, Ketzer in der Stadt, 1–5; Georg Modestin, “The Anti-Waldensian Treatise Cum Dormirent Homines: Historical Context, Polemical Strategy, and Manuscript Tradition,” in Religious Controversy in Europe, 1378–1556: Textual Transmission and Networks of Readership, ed. Michael Van Dussen and Pavel Soukup (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), 221–23; Kurze, “Zur Ketzergeschihte,” 69–71; Cameron, Waldenses, 139–40; Utz Tremp, “Multum abhorrerem,” 166–67; Välimäki, Heresy in Late Medieval Germany, 1–2. 44 Austria: Lambert, Medieval Heresy, 168–69; Cameron, Waldenses, 118–25; Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 53–54; Bohemia: Lambert, Medieval Heresy, 169–70; Pavel Soukup, “Die Waldenser in Böhmen und Mähren im 14. Jahrhundert,” in Friedrich Reiser und die “waldensisch- hussitische Internationale” im 15. Jahrhundert, ed. Albert de Lange und Kathrin Utz Tremp (Heidelberg: Verlag Regionalkultur, 2006), 133–40; Patschovsky, Quellen, 18–22. 45 Välimäki, Heresy in Late Medieval Germany, 31–32. 46 For a general introduction to the beguines and beghards and their persecution, see: Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane, A History of Medieval Heresy and Inquisition (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011), 158–66; Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane, “‘Beguines’ Reconsidered: Historiographical Problems and New Directions,” Monastic Matrix (August 2008), Commentaria 3461; Lambert, Medieval Heresy, 199–207; Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 19–47; Ernest McDonnell, The Beguines and Beghards in Medieval Culture: With Special Emphasis on the Belgian Scene (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1954). 47 Karl Adolf Konstantin von Höfler, ed. Concilia Pragensia, 1353–1413 (Prague: K. Seyfried, 1862), 26–27. 48 Patschovsky, Quellen, 218–22. 49 Kurze, “Zur Ketzergeschichte,” 68–69. 50 Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 54–55. 51 Modestin, Ketzer in der Stadt, 6; Modestin, Quellen, 138; Kieckhefer, Repression, 66–67; Heinrich Finke, “Waldenserprozess in Regensburg, 1395,” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 4 (1890), 345–46. 52 Kieckhefer, Repression, 59–60; Modestin, Ketzer in der Stadt, 74–81. The Waldensians in Strasbourg are discussed in greater detail in Chapter 5. 53 Friedhelm Jürgensmeier, “Konrad von Weinsberg (nach 1324–1396),” BHRR, 412–13. 54 Deane, “Archiepiscopal Inquisitions,” 209–11. 55 Deane, “Archiepiscopal Inquisitions,” 207–09. This article is largely based on Deane’s unpublished doctoral dissertation: Jennifer M. Kolpacoff, “Papal Schism, Archiepiscopal Politics and Waldensian Persecution (1378–1396): The Ecclesio-political Landscape of Late Fourteenth-Century Mainz,” PhD diss. (Northwestern University, 2000). 56 Deane, “Archiepiscopal Inquisitions,” 218–19; Jürgensmeier, “Konrad von Weinsberg,” 413. 57 Mainz, Stadtbibliothek I 151, fol. 198r. See also Deane, “Archiepiscopal Inquisitions,” 200. 58 Kungstein, Chronicon Moguntinum, 63; Deane, “Archiepiscopal Inquisitions,” 212. On the use of penitential crosses, see Given, Inquisition and Medieval Society, 84–85. 59 Deane, “Archiepiscopal Inquisitions,” 214–15; Deane argues that the third member of the inquisitorial triumvirate, Johannes Wasmod, could have been the archbishop’s trusted representative with first-hand knowledge about the religious situation in Mainz itself, which Archbishop Konrad, who resided in Bingen, lacked. See Deane, “Archiepiscopal Inquisitions,” 220–21. 60 Deane, “Archiepiscopal Inquisitions,” 204. An edition of the archiepiscopal commission was published in Valentin Ferdinand von Gudenus, Codex diplomaticus

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61 62 63

64 65 66

67 68 69 70 71

72

73 74 75

76

77 78 79

Persecution of German Waldensians, 1390–1404 anecdotorum res Moguntinas illustrantium (Göttingen, Frankfurt, and Leipzig: U. Weiss, 1751), vol. 3, 598–600. Deane, “Archiepiscopal Inquisitions,” 218–20. Deane, “Archiepiscopal Inquisitions,” 211. Kungstein, Chronicon Moguntinum, 63. Gustav Hammann suggested that the Spiegelberg house may have been connected with the patrician Spiegel family of Mainz. See Gustav Hammann, “Mittelalterliche Waldenser in Hessen. Nachrichten und Spuren,” Jahrbuch der Hessischen Kirchengeschichtlichen Vereinigung 27 (1978), 101. Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 56. Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 57–58; Cameron, Waldenses, 140–41; Biller, The Waldenses, 233–36; Utz Tremp, “Multum abhorrerem,” 166–67; Välimäki, Heresy in Late Medieval Germany, 30–31. Utz Tremp, “Multum abhorrerem,” 166–67; Alexander Patschovsky, “The Literacy of Waldensianism from Valdes to c. 1400,” in Heresy and Literacy, 1100–1530, ed. Peter Biller and Anne Hudson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 134–36. See also, Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 58–59. Audisio, The Waldensian Dissent, 47–48, 93–95; Biller, The Waldenses, 95. For the criticisms of the Waldensian secrecy, see CDH, 280B-81A. Peter Biller, “Heretics and Long Journeys,” 99–100. For mentions of Nikolaus of Solothurn: Modestin, Quellen, 182; Kurze, Quellen, 81, 89; Konrad of Saxony: Modestin, Quellen, 148; Kurze, Quellen, 156, 172. “per mundo gyrante,” CDH, 280D. Biller, Waldenses, 233–36; Välimäki, Heresy in Late Medieval Germany, 116–18. The most accessible editions of the two lists of converted Waldensians, the so-called “short” and “long” lists, are published in Kurze, “Zur Ketzergeschichte,” 94 (short); and Herman Haupt, Der waldensische Ursprung des Codex Teplensis und der vorlutherischen deutschen Bibeldrucke gegen die Angriffe von Dr. Franz Jostes (Würzburg: Stahel, 1886), 35–36 (long). Although the use of repentant heretical preachers was practiced by earlier inquisitors, particularly in Languedoc, these conversions of the heretical elites were sporadic and comparatively rare. Given, Inquisition and Medieval Society, 87–88. Haupt, Codex Teplensis, 35: “Conradus Waythoff . . . interfecti sunt eo quod de secta se averterunt.” Both forms of the minister’s name could derive from his origin from Waidhofen in Lower Austria. See Herman Haupt, Waldenserthum und Inquisition im südöstlichen Deutschland (Freiburg: J. C. B. Mohr, 1890), 85, n.1; Modestin, Quellen, 269–70. The murder of Weidenhofer/Waythoff and other acts of violence attributed to the Waldensians are discussed in Chapter 3. Lerner, The Heresy of the Free Spirit, 101. Haupt, Codex Teplensis, 35. Haupt, Codex Teplensis, 35: “item Conradus de Erfordia qui prius fuit sutor. hic post conversionem suam revenit Erfordiam et coram hereticis eiusdem secte reclamavit errorem suum predicans eis veram Cristi Jesu fidem et nullus voluit converti nisi soror eius que fuit uxor Mathei Witenberg pileatoris . . . item Hans von der Steiermarch filius textoris. hic similiter sicut Conradus predictus reclamavit et revocavit errorem suum coram predictis in Erfordia.” Haupt, Codex Teplensis, 35: “primus Johannes de Wienna, item Claus de Brandeburg, item Fridericus de Hardeck, item Haynricus de Engelstat factus est crucifer. item Petrus de Septem castris Ungarie. isti quinque post conversionem eorum facti sunt sacerdotes ecclesie katholice.” Haupt, Codex Teplensis, 36: “Hanns [sic] de Maguncia prope Renum . . . est factus monachus.” Dietrich Kurze, Quellen, 99, 109. It is possible that another Waldensian minister named Nicholas visited Prague: there were at least several converts with that name. Neumann, České sekty ve století XIV. a XV., 6 (appendix).

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80 Välimäki, Heresy in Late Medieval Germany, 34–35. 81 Malm, “Martin von Amberg,” 612–14. See also, Martin of Amberg, Der Gewissensspiegel, ed. Stanley N. Werbow (Berlin: E. Schmidt Verlag, 1958). A manuscript held at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich contains an edition of a pseudoBonaventure treatise on preaching attributed to “lord Martin of Amberg inquisitor of heretics” (editus a domino Martino inquisitore hereticorum Amberge). BSB, Clm. 3764, fol. 35r; described in Thomas-Marie Charland, Artes Praedicandi: Contribution à l’histoire de la rhétorique au moyen âge (Paris: J. Vrin, 1936), 69. Another document attributes the conversion and punishment of Waldensians in Erfurt in 1391 to Martin of Amberg and his associate, Peter Zwicker. Haupt, Codex Teplensis, 35: “anno domini 1391 per dominum Martinum de Amberg et fratrem Petrum Celestinum omnes in Erfordia sunt convicti et conversi, abjurati et cruce signati.” 82 Martin of Amberg, Der Gewissensspiegel, 8; Stanley N. Werbow, “Martin von Amberg,” in Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters. Verfasserlexikon, ed. Kurt Ruh (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1987), vol. 6, 278; Jan Bistřický, “Johann von Neumarkt (um 1310–1380),” BHRR, 512–13. 83 Välimäki, Heresy in Late Medieval Germany, 195. 84 Döllinger, BZSG, 378: “dominus Martinus Presbyter ex Bohemia”; Lerner, The Heresy of the Free Spirit, 101; Alexander Patschovsky, “Straßburger Beginenverfolgungen im 14. Jahrhundert,” Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters 30 (1974), 89–92. See also, John Van Engen, Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life: The Devotio Moderna and the World of the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 42–43. 85 Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 55 n.11. 86 Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 66–67. 87 For a concise overview of Zwicker’s life, see Biller, The Waldenses, 254–55; Georg Modestin, “Peter Zwicker († nach dem 7. Juni 1404),” Schlesische Lebensbilder 10 (2010), 25–34; Peter Segl, “Zwicker, Peter,” Lexikon des Mittelalters 9 (Munich: LexMA-Verlag, 1998), 732–33; Välimäki, Heresy in Late Medieval Germany, 22–37. 88 Kurze, “Zur Ketzergeschichte,” 71. 89 Most recently, Zwicker’s inquisitorial practice and writings became the subject of Reima Välimäki’s Heresy in Late Medieval Germany. See also, Peter Biller, The Waldenses, 237–91. 90 Biller, The Waldenses, 233–36. 91 J. M. Schneidt, ed., Thesaurus iuris Franconici (Würzburg: Rienner, 1789), 1/17, 3265: “ab aliis haereticis in diuersis mundi Partibus eductus et instructus fuit de illis.” 92 Herman Haupt, Die religiösen Sekten in Franken vor der Reformation (Würzburg: A. Stuber, 1882), 23–24; Herman Haupt, “Zur Geschichte der revolutionären Bewegungen in Würzburg unter Bischof Gerhard von Schwarzburg,” Archiv des Historischen Vereins für Unterfranken und Aschaffenburg 34 (1891), 28; Martin Erbstößer, Sozialreligiöse Strömungen im späten Mittelalter. Geissler, Freigeister und Waldenser im 14. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1970), 124. The bishop’s conflict with the city council of Würzburg is discussed in Chapter 1. 93 Kurze, “Zur Ketzergeschichte,” 72; Kurze, Quellen, 235: “a . . . Pragensi, Lubucensi et Caminensi, archiepiscopo et episcopis, constitutus”; Kurze, Quellen, 253: “eciam inquisitore heretice pravitatis per diocesim Brandenburgensem et adhuc non revocato.” Earlier anti-Waldensians inquisitions in that region were poorly organized and demonstrate a lack of interest on part of the local clergy in pursuing heresy. Kurze, “Zur Ketzergeschichte,” 68–69; Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 54–55. 94 Cameron, Waldenses, 141–42. 95 Zwicker’s explicit use of the interrogation records from Brandenburg in his treatise helped Peter Biller to provide a conclusive identification of Zwicker as the treatise’s author. See Biller, The Waldenses, 258.

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96 Välimäki, Heresy in Late Medieval Germany, 33; Modestin, “The Anti-Waldensian Treatise,” 217–18; Alois Schmid, “Georg von Hohenlohe (um 1350–1423),” BHRR, 560–61. 97 This incident, discussed in detail in Chapter 3, was described by Zwicker in the letter he addressed to the nobility and clergy of Austria, exhorting them to support his inquisition. “Bericht des Inquisitors Petrus,” 250. Although Zwicker never states that he was the victim of this attack, he was probably the only inquisitor in Steyr at the time. Modestin, “The Anti-Waldensian Treatise,” 218. 98 Modestin, “The Anti-Waldensian Treatise,” 212–18. 99 Peter Segl, “Die Waldenser in Österreich um 1400: Lehren, Organizationsform, Verbreitung und Bekämpfung,” in Friedrich Reiser und die “waldensisch-hussitische Internationale” im 15. Jahrhundert, ed. Albert de Lange und Kathrin Utz Tremp (Heidelberg: Verlag Regionalkultur, 2006), 173. 100 Biller, The Waldenses, 237. 101 Modestin, “The Anti-Waldensian Treatise,” 219–22; Biller, The Waldenses, 276–77. 102 Biller, The Waldenses, 253–54. For a list of extant manuscripts of Cum dormirent homines and Processus Petri, see Biller, The Waldenses, 264–69. For the most recent study of Zwicker as an inquisitor and an author, see Välimäki, Heresy in Late Medieval Germany (especially Chapters 2 and 3). 103 Välimäki, Heresy in Late Medieval Germany, 98–103. 104 Malm, “Martin von Amberg,” 612; David C. Mengel, “Emperor Charles IV (1346– 1378) as the Architect of Local Religion in Prague,” Austrian History Yearbook 41 (2010), 22–29; Vilém Herold, “The Spiritual Background of the Czech Reformation: Precursors of Jan Hus,” in A Companion to Jan Hus, ed. František Šmahel and Ota Pavlícek (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 78; Peter Morée, Preaching in Fourteenth-century Bohemia: The Life and Ideas of Milicius de Chremsir (†1374) and His Significance in the Historiography of Bohemia (Heršpice: EMAN, 1999), 48. 105 Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 67. 106 Augustin Alois Neumann, České sekty ve století XIV. a XV. Na základě archivních pramenů podává (Velehrad: Nákl. Cyrilometodějského tiskového spolku, 1920), 6–7 (appendix): “Martinus, altarista in ecclesia beate Marie Virginis ante Letam Curiam . . . inquisitor haereticae pravitatis.” A trial record from Hartberg, Styria (Lower Austria) from 1401—Martin’s last known inquisition—also uses the same title, suggesting that he may have retained his position in Prague, even as he was conducting inquisitions in Austria and the Kingdom of Hungary, and possibly for life. See Haupt, Waldenserthum und Inquisition, 121. 107 Werner Schultheiß, ed., Die Acht-, Verbots- und Fehdebücher Nürnbergs von 1285– 1400 (Nuremberg: Selbstverlag des Stadtrats, 1960), 158–59 (the inquisition is mistakenly recorded for the year 1379, instead of 1399); Haupt, Die religiösen Sekten in Franken, 27–28; “Chronik aus Kaiser Sigmund’s Zeit bis 1434 mit Fortsetzung bis 1441,” in Die Chroniken der fränkischen Städte. Nürnberg, ed. Karl von Hegel (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1862), vol. 1, 362. 108 Helmut Flachenecker and Francis Rapp, “Lamprecht von Brunn (OSB) (um 1320/30– 1399),” BHRR, 52–54; RTA, vol. 3, 88. On political functions performed by official gifts of wine, see Valentin Groebner, Liquid Assets, Dangerous Gifts: Presents and Politics at the End of the Middle Ages, trans. Pamela E. Selwyn (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 23–27. 109 For an overview of the inquisitorial activity of Martin of Amberg and Peter Zwicker in the Kingdom of Hungary, see Gustav Hammann, “Waldenser in Ungarn, Siebenbürgen und der Slowakei,” Zeitschrift für Ostforschung 20 (1971), 428–41. These campaigns still await a detailed study. 110 Hammann, “Waldenser in Ungarn,” 432; Josef Truhlař, “Inquisice Waldenských v Trnavě r. 1400,” Česky časopis historický 9 (1903), 196–97.

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111 Translated in Reima Välimäki, “Imagery of Disease, Poison and Healing in the Late Fourteenth-Century Polemics against Waldensian Heresy,” in Infirmity in Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Social and Cultural Approaches to Health, Weakness and Care, ed. Christian Krötzl, Katariina Mustakallio, and Jenni Kuuliala (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015), 143–44: “ut ibi sit perpetuo receptaculum sordium, ubi prius fuit aliquando latibulum hereticorum.” 112 Haupt, Waldenserthum und Inquisition, 121–24. 113 Malm places Martin’s year of birth around 1340 (although he does not provide any justification for that date), which would make him sixty-one years of age in 1401. Malm, “Martin von Amberg,” 612. It is very possible that Martin was forty or older during his involvement in Strasbourg in 1374 (and at least sixty-seven in 1401). The constitutions of Pope Clement V (1313) prescribed inquisitors of heretical depravity to be at least forty years of age, although this rule was not always followed. For a recent discussion, see Välimäki, Heresy in Late Medieval Germany, 30. 114 Modestin, Ketzer in der Stadt, 6; Neumann, České sekty, 6 (appendix). 115 Haupt, Waldenserthum und Inquisition, 91–92. The trial record was published in Döllinger, BZSG, 343–44. 116 Modestin, Ketzer in der Stadt, 5–6. 117 Neumann, České sekty, 6 (appendix): “abiuravit Elisabeth Sneyder, conversa per dominum Henricum de Olmütz in Broda Ungaricali.” 118 Peter Segl, “Die Waldenser in Österreich um 1400,” 166; Välimäki, Heresy in Late Medieval Germany, 36. 119 Heinrich Angermeier and his career are discussed in detail in Chapters 3 and 4. 120 “Chronik von 1368–1406,” 96: “In dem 1393 jar nach sant Jacobs tag do kom ain pfaff her von Baubenberg.” Flachenecker and Rapp, “Lamprecht von Brunn (OSB) (um 1320/30–1399),” BHRR, 52–54. 121 “Chronik von 1368–1406,” 96–97. The inquisition in Augsburg is discussed in detail Chapter 3. 122 Mair, “Nördlingani brevis Historia,” 620; “Chronik von 1368–1406,” 97. 123 Christian Bürckstümmer, “Waldenser in Dinkelsbühl,” Beiträge zur bayerischen Kirchengeschichte 19 (1913), 274–75. 124 Mair, “Nördlingani brevis Historia,” 620; “Chronik von 1368–1406,” 97. 125 Bürckstümmer, “Waldenser in Dinkelsbühl,” 274: “venerabilem ac circumspectum virum, Dominum et Magistrum henricum, dictum Angermayr, a Reverendo in Christo patre et Domino, Domino Burckhardo dei et apostolicae sedis gratia Augustensis ecclesiae Episcopo Deputatum, propter Sectam Waldensium.” 126 Mair, “Nördlingani brevis Historia,” 620. 127 For Angermeier’s unsuccessful inquisition outside of the Diocese of Augsburg, see Schnurrer, “Der Fall Hans Wern,” 31–34; Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 72–73. See also Chapter 4 of this study. 128 Utz Tremp, “Der Freiburger Waldenserprozeß,” 70 n.41. 129 Modestin, Ketzer in der Stadt, 9–10; Välimäki, Heresy in Late Medieval Germany, 36. 130 Conrad Justinger, Der Berner-Chronik des Conrad Justinger, ed. G. Studer (Bern: Wyss, 1871), 186. For an analysis of the inquisitions in Bern, see Utz Tremp, “Der Freiburger Waldenserprozeß,” 57–64. 131 Utz Tremp, “Der Freiburger Waldenserprozeß,” 64–66. 132 Utz Tremp, “Der Freiburger Waldenserprozeß,” 64–65; Georg Modestin, “Les vaudois de Strasbourg devant leurs juges: une étude comparative; Berne (1399)—Fribourg/ Suisse (1399)—Strasbourg (1400),” Bollettino della Società di Studi Valdesi 125, no. 203 (2008), 12–13. The inquisitions in Bern and Fribourg are discussed in Chapter 6. 133 Utz Tremp, Quellen, 630–34. 134 Utz Tremp, “Der Freiburger Waldenserprozeß,” 79–83; Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 69.

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135 For a detailed study of the inquisition in Strasbourg, see Modestin, Ketzer in der Stadt. 136 Modestin, Quellen, 197–99. Although original letters from and to the Bernese city council did not survive, Georg Modestin discovered a complete draft of the letter to Bern, from which the content of both missing letters can be extrapolated. Notably, Bern, Strasbourg, and other cities in the region were habitually exchanging information pertinent to their security and well-being. For example, in 1348, Bern’s magistrates wrote to Strasbourg, relaying accusations of well poisoning made against the Jews during the plague. John Aberth, From the Brink of the Apocalypse: Confronting Famine, War, Plague and Death in the Later Middle Ages (London: Routledge, 2000), 157–58. 137 Modestin, Quellen, 198. 138 Välimäki, Heresy in Late Medieval Germany, 31–32. 139 Välimäki, Heresy in Late Medieval Germany, 34–35. On Zwicker’s campaign in Brandenburg, see Kurze, “Zur Ketzergeschichte,” 66–91. 140 One of the converted ministers from the lists compiled around 1391 is listed as: “Jacob, who is now in Buda in Hungary” (“Jacobus, qui iam est Bude in Ungaria”). Haupt, Codex Teplensis, 35. Other converted ministers from the Kingdom of Hungary (judging by their names) were: Peter of Siebenbürgen (de Septem castris, Transylvania), Simon of Galicz (Skalitz, modern-day Slovakia) and Gottfried of Hungary. Haupt, Codex Teplensis, 35; Kurze, “Zur Ketzergeschichte,” 94. See also, Gustav Hammann, “Waldenser in Ungarn,” 432–37. 141 Välimäki, Heresy in Late Medieval Germany, 243–45.

3

Inquisition, violence, and urban order in Augsburg1

In late August of 1393, the residents of Augsburg witnessed an eight-day-long spectacle taking place in the heart of their city: each day a solemn procession of men and women walked—two by two, with lit candles in their hands—from the Benedictine abbey of Sts. Ulrich and Afra to the Cathedral of the Virgin Mary. If anyone needed an explanation as to the procession’s reason, yellow cross-shaped badges sewn onto the front and back of their clothing marked the members of the procession as repentant heretics.2 According to the contemporary chronicle accounts, the processions followed a brief inquisitorial trial held at the square in front of the cathedral, where thirty-four individuals abjured their heretical Waldensian beliefs and were condemned to perform penance. In addition to wearing penitential crosses of yellow cloth, the repentant heretics had to walk between the cathedral and the abbey of Sts. Ulrich and Afra, Augsburg’s principle thoroughfare. The route went past the Perlach Tower of the Church of St. Peter, the seat of the city council, and the guild houses of some of Augsburg’s influential guilds.3 In addition to serving as the civic core of the city, the road connecting the cathedral and the Benedictine abbey was also imbued with religious meaning. By parading the route between the two holiest places in the city, the repentant heretics were being integrated back into the fabric of urban existence, while simultaneously providing the onlookers with a cautionary tale. By 1393, urban heresy carried a strong connotation of disobedience—an antithesis of good citizenship— and therefore had to be punished in a visible and public manner.4 The chain of events that resulted in the public spectacle of punishment began with the arrival of an outsider. In late July of 1393, after the feast of St. James (July 25), a traveling preacher visited Augsburg and delivered a fiery sermon against Waldensian heretics living in the city. The sermon, of which little is preserved in the urban chronicles, was successful enough to rouse the city and its bishop, Burkhard of Ellerbach (r. 1373–1404), to act against religious heterodoxy within the city walls. As the summer came to a close, thirty-four men and women were arrested in the ensuing inquisition.5 The trial of Waldensians in Augsburg, which took place during a decade of intensified anti-heretical persecutions throughout the Holy Roman Empire, has received relatively little attention from scholars, until a recent detailed study by Georg Modestin.6 While it is normally included

66 Inquisition, violence, order in Augsburg in discussions of anti-heretical persecutions during the 1390s, most earlier commentators merely noted that the course of the inquisition was influenced by the problematic relationship between the city of Augsburg and its bishop and by the involvement of an itinerant inquisitor, without delving into details.7 The details of the trial, however, are significant precisely because it was a product of historical processes underway in towns during the later fourteenth century. While there have been a number of studies that discuss the interactions between cities and bishops at the close of the fourteenth century, most of these works do not examine anti-heretical inquisitions in this context.8 Conversely, scholars of later medieval heresies rarely examine the political meaning that persecutions of heretics acquired in late medieval towns.9 Throughout the 1390s, records produced as a result of anti-heretical trials in urban communities emphasized the inherently violent and anti-social nature of the religious deviant. In short, heretics made poor citizens. Heresy was thus viewed as incompatible with a growing self-consciousness among the urban elites that stressed strong connections between the political and religious aspects of urban life as German free and imperial cities struggled for greater political autonomy. From this perspective, the trial of Waldensians and its outcome were not merely a result of long-standing struggles between Augsburg and its bishop but a constituent part of these struggles. In addition to being part of a political and religious conflict, the inquisition in Augsburg was a crisis of urban citizenship and a chance for the city council to assert control over its subjects. In Augsburg heresy was instrumentalized in a contest over political authority.

“Ez wer gar vil ketzer”: the inquisition in Augsburg, 1393 In the summer of 1393, one such struggle for authority began with the arrival of a traveling preacher—later identified as Heinrich Angermeier of Stein—who would have been a typical figure in the late medieval religious landscape.10 During the spiritual and ecclesiastical turmoil caused by the Great Schism, and even during earlier decades, wandering charismatic preachers were particularly well received in urban communities where their sermons provided an alternative to the preaching of local secular clergy and the mendicant orders. Wandering preachers often addressed certain religious concerns born out of the commercial pursuits that shaped urban existence (money lending, the accumulation of wealth, and similar concerns).11 Although initially planning on preaching against usury, Angermeier delivered a sermon against heresy and heretics instead. From the pulpit, Angermeier proclaimed that he knew that too many heretics (gar vil ketzer) resided in Augsburg; he offered to help to identify and punish them and even “to shed his blood” for this cause.12 After the sermon, according to the anonymous Chronicle from 1368 to 1406, the preacher appealed to the bishop of Augsburg in order to receive his permission to act against the Waldensian heretics, which Bishop Burkhard of Ellerbach granted.13 Now, armed with the bishop’s authority and—presumably—with the anti-heretical sentiments he was able to stir up with his sermon, Angermeier posed a formidable threat to the heretical community in the city (or to anyone who could be accused of belonging to such a group).

Inquisition, violence, order in Augsburg 67 Angermeier’s sermon must have struck a nerve with his audience. The chronicle reports that shortly after delivering it, the inquisitor was nearly attacked by a knife-wielding man—described in the chronicle as a heretic (ketzer)—in what could have been an attempt to derail an impending inquisition.14 The would-be assassin miscalculated: his attempt to intimidate Heinrich Angermeier only served as a further catalyst for the inquisition. Once Angermeier’s attacker was apprehended, the city gates were locked to allow the capture of thirty-four heretics at the orders of the traveling inquisitor and his local associate, the Dominican friar Peter Engerlin.15 That the arrests took place so swiftly suggests that the episcopal and city officials knew where to look. Inquisitorial procedure in the Middle Ages allowed individuals to be accused on the basis of their bad reputation (mala or publica fama) in absence of a formal denunciator, which was an important exception that allowed for a speedier prosecution.16 The social profile of the Augsburg Waldensians probably also helped to speed up their arrest. The anonymous chronicler reports that most of the accused belonged to the guild of weavers, specializing in making rough woolen cloth (lodweber), with “very few among them from other crafts.”17 This statement can be corroborated, to some extent, by the fact that two out of six Waldensians whose names were preserved in the sources, Fritz (Francz) Struss (Straus) and Konrad Steinlin, were identified as lodweber in municipal sources.18 Steinlin might even have even represented his guild—one of the Lesser Guilds in the city—in two constitutional documents (Zunftbriefe) created during the guild revolt of 1368.19 Close association between Waldensianism and textile-related crafts was not unique to Augsburg. Members of the Waldensian community investigated in 1400 in Strasbourg were also heavily involved in the production and sale of textiles, while at least one weaver was among the Waldensians put on trial in Regensburg in the 1380s.20 Let us pause here and consider the available sources for this narrative of the inquisition. Unlike other anti-Waldensian trials that occurred in the Germanspeaking lands in the 1390s, the inquisition in Augsburg left no trial records or any other inquisitorial documents. What can be learned about the course of the trial comes from in the city chronicles, a particularly rich genre in later medieval Germany. While the absence of procedural sources complicates reconstruction of the events that occurred prior to and during the inquisition, the fact that all chronicles were written by urban rather than clerical elites provides us with a particular, city-centric version of the events and allows us to consider the place heresy occupied in Augsburg’s political landscape.21 The earliest and perhaps the most trustworthy account is preserved in the Chronicle from 1368 to 1406. It appears to have been composed during or soon after the events by an anonymous author who demonstrates a detailed knowledge of the city’s internal affairs. Although the chronicle’s author remains unidentified, it has been suggested that he might have been a member of the city’s ruling elite, possibly even a city council scribe (Stadtschreiber), a position that allowed him to record Augsburg’s history by consulting municipal documents.22 On the other hand, despite providing an otherwise detailed account, the chronicler demonstrates little interest in preserving the names of Augsburg’s Waldensians or of the

68 Inquisition, violence, order in Augsburg preacher responsible for initiating their persecution, whom he describes merely as a “priest from Bamberg” (pfaff von Baubenberg).23 Another important source of information about the events of 1393 is the Chronicle of Hector Mülich, written by a member of the city’s merchant elite, Hector Mülich (c. 1410–1487), a generation after the events. Largely derivative and of questionable reliability, Mülich’s account provides an abbreviated version of the events; but despite some factual errors, it supplies names of the individuals involved in the inquest and other important details, which the earlier chronicle lacks.24 Crucially, the chronicler provides the name of the traveling preacher who initiated the inquisition, calling him “lord Heinrich the inquisitor” (herr Heinrich der ketzermeister), lists some of the heretical beliefs of the accused, and describes their penance.25 As one of his sources, Mülich probably perused an earlier chronicle by Hans Mair, a city councilor from Nördlingen, who preserved a list of the heretical “errors” of the Augsburg Waldensians (a manuscript containing the list was owned by the Mülich family from the early fifteenth century). However, if Mülich did consult Mair’s list, the account of the Waldensian beliefs he chose to give in his own chronicle is fragmentary—centered primarily on the heretical disbelief in purgatory and their condemnation of indulgences, holy water, consecration of church grounds and churches, blessing of palms, and so on—and may be symptomatic of his highly selective presentation of information.26 It is possible that by minimizing heretical beliefs (for example, by omitting any mention of the Waldensian belief in confessing to their lay ministers, which is listed first in Mair), Mülich was trying to mitigate the effect of the heretics’ existence in Augsburg on the city’s reputation.27 Hector Mülich’s concern for Augsburg’s reputation is emblematic of the changes is urban culture taking place during the later Middle Ages. Simultaneously a byproduct of the struggles for political independence and an impetus for them, a new city-centric worldview emphasized the city’s autonomy in matters secular and religious to a point where the two merged into one concept of civic spirituality. From this perspective, communal piety was integral to political and economic well-being of the city, and its pursuit of the common good.28 Since civic ideology fused sociopolitical concerns with religious ones, later medieval towns began to pay more attention to religious deviancy as well as social deviancy, often blurring the boundaries between the two.29 Religiously deviant groups offended belief in the sacred status of the city and simultaneously undermined the image a city sought to project to its neighbors, friends, and foes. In addition to damaging a city’s reputation, religious deviance of its residents—officially within the purview of the Church—opened the city to an intervention by a potentially hostile outsider; in the case of Augsburg, this outsider was its bishop. From this perspective, heretical communities constituted a particular challenge for urban authorities, distinct from other “undesirable” groups in the city, including prostitutes or vagrants, because their members were hard to identify. The clandestine nature of heresy made it appear even more dangerous. Once heresy’s presence in a town was made public, it emerged out of its normal—that is, hidden—place; its presence in the city compromised the community’s spiritual

Inquisition, violence, order in Augsburg 69 integrity and attracted unwanted attention to its leadership. Thus, heresy polluted the city, to use Mary Douglas’s classic definition of pollution as “matter out of place.”30 If cities were spaces of contested authority, heretical communities, because of their charged status, unsurprisingly became entangled and instrumentalized in this contest. Judging by the context and the course of the persecution, it appears that Heinrich Angermeier was targeting the city’s Waldensian community specifically. His decision to do so may have been influenced by events elsewhere in the Holy Roman Empire. The preacher’s visit to Augsburg coincided with the end of a protracted inquisition against Waldensians in Mainz (1391–93)—and Augsburg was part of the Archdiocese of Mainz—which may have made such a target more politically expedient.31 It is also possible that Angermeier found out about the presence of a Waldensian community in the city and decided to grasp the opportunity to preach on this subject. If the inquisitor targeted Waldensians specifically—and no other kinds of heretics are mentioned in the sources—what led both the bishop and the city council to support him? If Waldensianism did not attract much attention from the Church and civil authorities in the decades prior to the 1390s, why was its eradication suddenly on the minds of both the secular and religious lords of the city? As Hector Mülich’s chronicle specifies, Heinrich Angermeier derived his authority from both the city council and the bishop, a sign of an unusual readiness to cooperate among recent political rivals.32 Why were the city and the bishop willing to entrust an investigation of such a delicate affair to a wandering preacher?

Augsburg’s Waldensians between the city and the bishop The city’s behavior can be partially explained by the concept of civic shame. By delivering an anti-heretical sermon and claiming that Augsburg was home to a large heretical community, the future inquisitor essentially made what might have been Augsburg’s hidden religious problem publicly known and shamed his audience into doing something about it. The rhetoric of shame appears time and again in the context of urban heresy investigations. For example, in the spring of 1400, the city council of Strasbourg initiated an inquisition against local Waldensians. As a result, a group of Waldensians was expelled from Strasbourg for bringing “great shame and dishonor” to the city.33 Moreover, Angermeier’s sermon allowed the preacher not only to advertise his services to the urban audience, which may have included representatives of the city government, but also to portray the heretical community in Augsburg as inherently violent and diametrically opposed to the ideal of good citizenship so important to later medieval cities.34 Recourse to the topos of heretical violence can be guessed as a possible context for Angermeier’s promise to “shed his blood” in the process of rooting out heretics; highly-charged imagery must have implied that such a sacrifice would be necessary.35 The presence of a group prone to anti-civic behavior was very inconvenient for Augsburg’s city council at this moment in the city’s history. From the later thirteenth century, political authority over the city had been contested between the city council and the bishop. The bishop of Augsburg, Burkhard of Ellerbach, like

70 Inquisition, violence, order in Augsburg many German bishops in the fourteenth century, did not reside in his own cathedral city; indeed, over a century earlier, in 1276, Augsburg broke free from its former lord and won the right to be governed by an elected city council supported by the German Emperor.36 As a rule, bishops dispossessed of political control over their capitals tended to settle outside it in smaller towns, although they remained in possession of cathedral complexes in their former cities. Cathedrals provided later medieval bishops with a vital link to the site of their power, as they served both as a reason for staging an episcopal entry (Adventus) into the defiant city. Cathedrals were also a principal stage from which to project the signs of episcopal power during a period when the bishops were “losing much of their political, judicial, and economic privilege, they continued to rule through ritual.”37 Normally, bishops visited their former capitals only during religious feasts and on other special occasions. Each episcopal visit involved ritual and pageantry that tied it to its dual historical antecedents: the ritual of imperial entry as a sign of temporal power and, of course, the entry of Christ into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday.38 Episcopal visits served as a symbolic reminder about the city’s prior status; through these encounters, the bishop could remind the city that although he was no longer its lord, he still had the right of entry. Anthropological studies of ritual behavior reveal that the nature of ritual is polysemic, or as historian Geoffrey Koziol describes it, “every ritual action is capable of conveying several possible meanings, many of them contradictory.”39 For its part, through a carefully staged display, the city council cooperated in reenacting the bishop’s version of the past by allowing him within the city walls. However, from the magistrates’ point of view, the ritual entry also restricted the bishop’s movement through the city for the purpose of reminding him that the present-day Augsburg was independent from his political control. As Keith D. Lilley observes in his study of medieval urban culture, “rituals are performed in order to commemorate some past mythical event, imitating in the present that which has gone before.”40 Every time a bishop entered the city, both parties reenacted the events that led to Augsburg’s independence in the later thirteenth century. There are no descriptions of similar visits from the 1390s, but we have detailed records of later episcopal entries into Augsburg from the fifteenth century to help us imagine the way in which Augsburg’s topography was utilized to both welcome the bishop and restrict his movement. These occasions were organized as public spectacles with many stages. First, the bishop was welcomed outside the city walls. He was then accompanied through the gates and guided through the city on his way to the cathedral while citizens barricaded parts of Augsburg to restrict his movement.41 In particular, the bishop and his retinue rode across the city by following the street that linked the abbey of Sts. Ulrich and Afra and the cathedral, traveling past the seat of the city council on their way. If this route was taken during all or most later medieval visits—and a scarcity of detailed descriptions does not allow us to be certain of this—then the only way a bishop could access his cathedral was by observing the embodiment of independent, local political authority. The city maintained this carefully constructed relationship with the bishop through violence as well as ritual. The relationship between the city and its bishop

Inquisition, violence, order in Augsburg 71 was particularly dire in the 1380s, when the two waged an actual war against each other, taking sides in a larger conflict between the Swabian City League and the Society of the Lion (a princely league meant to combat the united cities), which included Bishop Burkhard’s ecclesiastical superior, the archbishop of Mainz. The conflict proved somewhat inconclusive, with Augsburg gaining an upper hand early in the decade, only to be forced into submission by its end.42 After all, despite their constant animosity and intermittent conflicts, the city and its bishop depended upon each other. The bishop could not be bishop without his cathedral, the ultimate source of his authority and its ritual center. The Augsburg Cathedral of the Virgin Mary was the place where bishops were “born”; that is, assumed their position. It was also the final resting place for bishops.43 In this manner, the cathedral connected the bishop to his predecessors. It was the only permanently fixed point in a bishop’s itinerary and timeline. The city, too, depended on its bishop. Despite losing his control over the city government, the bishop still controlled its mint and had the right to levy crucial tolls, affecting Augsburg’s economy. The bishop also had a tremendous political advantage over the city. As the decade of warfare between Bishop Burkhard and the city of Augsburg demonstrated, while the city could be victorious for a while, in the end the bishop and his vast networks of political and ecclesiastical affiliations proved to be a more reliable source of power. The city’s attempt to defend itself by joining the Swabian City League failed to produce a long-lasting political and military counterweight. By the end of the 1380s, the fragile equilibrium of authority had been restored after the city was forced to pay the bishop 7,000 gold pieces in restitution.44 Finally, in 1391 the victorious bishop and the defeated city concluded a treaty, promising to put their disagreement to rest and to conduct their affairs in an amicable manner.45 From the perspective of this recent conflict, the inquisition that took place in 1393 may have provided the bishop with yet another opportunity to undermine the city’s authority by pointing out some of its shameful residents and emphasizing that it was the bishop’s role to guard his flock against heresy. Moreover, when the religious persecution reached its climax, the sermon and the inquisitorial trial took place in the Fronhof, a vast open space adjacent to the cathedral, the locus of the bishop’s power in the city. Bishop Burkhard himself was allowed to observe the trial and no doubt used this occasion to visit the city and to demonstrate the level of power he still possessed over it.46 If Heinrich Angermeier was indeed furthering the political interests of the bishop by initiating the inquisition, then his efforts received an appropriate reward after the trial concluded. Within months of the Augsburg Waldensians receiving their punishment, Heinrich Angermeier appears in the records of smaller antiWaldensian inquisitions in the region to the north of the city. In early November, Angermeier probably oversaw a trial in Wemding that ended with the burning of ten men and women at the stake.47 Almost simultaneously, the inquisitor presided over the trial in Dinkelsbühl, where an unknown number of men and women were accused of following Waldensianism, ten were assigned penance, and two were burned.48 A month later, in Donauwörth, as many as forty Waldensians

72 Inquisition, violence, order in Augsburg were condemned to various punishments (including the execution of as many as twenty-six).49 Unlike in Augsburg, where Angermeier had to cooperate with a local Dominican inquisitor, in later inquisitions he was entrusted with full episcopal authority. The trial records from Dinkelsbühl, for example, call the inquisitor a “venerable and prudent man, lord and master Heinrich, called Angermeier . . . deputy of the bishop of Augsburg in the matter of the Waldensian sect.”50 Having proved his ability to persecute in Augsburg, it seems that Angermeier was given free rein in the surrounding region.51

Heretical violence and urban order In the late summer of 1393, the attempted attack on the inquisitor, which precipitated the inquisition, was no doubt instrumental in gaining the city council’s cooperation. Historical sources for the anti-Waldensian persecutions of the 1390s repeatedly attribute violence to the Waldensians, despite their earlier reputation as pacifists.52 Depictions of the use of violence by the German Waldensians were part of a collection of topoi that emphasized the monstrous nature of the heretics. Although the view of heresy as violent was not new in the 1390s, it became more prominent as some of the older devices used to demonstrate the monstrosity of heterodoxy were failing during the zenith of the Great Schism (1378–1418). In particular, one view that contrasted the universal unity of the true Church with the fragmented and contradictory heretical movements was losing its force while the popes in Avignon and Rome struggled to establish their authority. Anti-heretical texts, like German polemic written before the 1390s, still used the following argument to point out that the Waldensians had no rightful claim to the truth: “they are divided in three parts in their opinions and errors. And therefore they by no means constitute a Church, since the Church is one, just as the faith is one, and not several . . .”53 Now, however, the same argument could be used as a critique of the Schism. Mentions of Waldensian violence appear at least three times in the context of anti-heretical persecutions during the decade. In all cases, violent actions were interpreted as measures taken in response to an impending or an ongoing inquisition. Descriptions of heretical violence served as proof that heretics indeed posed a real threat to society at large. Preserved in the records with a macabre attention to detail, violent acts reminded the audience of the anti-social behaviors that were bound to take place if heresy was left unchecked, including murder, intimidation by a mob, and arson. These instances of violence were particularly effective in demonstrating why heresy was detrimental to public peace—they provided reallife examples that applied theological “errors” to the realm of daily existence. All three cases come from a German urban context but are found in different types of historical records. One was the aforementioned attack on Heinrich Angermeier in Augsburg in the summer of 1393, when the inquisitor was allegedly followed by a knife-wielding man. Another case involved the murder of Hans Weidenhofer, a Waldensian preacher from Strasbourg, who converted back to Catholicism, potentially betraying and endangering the heretical community in that city in 1374. Weidenhofer was murdered by assassins paid by the city’s

Inquisition, violence, order in Augsburg 73 Waldensian community, but the information about the murder was revealed during a later inquisition in Strasbourg (1400) and served as an important justification for expelling Waldensians from the city.54 Yet another case of heretical violence was a presumed attempt on the life of another inquisitor, Peter Zwicker, in Upper Austrian Steyr in 1395.55 The incident involving Zwicker deserves closer attention as it demonstrates contemporary anti-heretical topoi that were probably exploited by Angermeier as well. In his letter written—among other addressees—to the nobility and clergy of Upper Austria, Zwicker lists ninety-two “errors” of the Waldensians, exhorting his audience to take action against the heretical threat in the region. Intriguing in their scope, the “errors” listed convey a sense that Waldensians were the complete opposites of their orthodox neighbors. Not only did they disagree with the most crucial elements of Christianity (the role of the Church in attaining salvation, the Eucharist, purgatory, prayers for the dead, saints, and relics), but they also ridiculed even such minor elements as clerical tonsures.56 Here Zwicker was certainly aiming for general effect rather than for any practical application of his oversized list (unlike other much shorter lists of heretical errors that were used for guiding interrogations during an inquisition).57 Written in 1395, the letter’s principal aim was to assure support for Zwicker’s impending inquisition. The inquisitor’s earlier patron in the region, Duke Albert III of Austria, died that year, leaving his domain in a dynastic struggle. With the death of his patron, Zwicker’s anti-heretical ambitions were left without a political ally and, probably, without financial support.58 According to Zwicker, who clearly sought to shock his audience, the region risked being overwhelmed by heretics if left without inquisitorial attention. To illustrate the danger, Zwicker described acts of arson and “homicidal threats” (terroribus homicidiorum) that happened within days of Duke Albert’s passing, as if to celebrate the occasion.59 By placing Waldensian violence in the context of the duke’s death, Zwicker clearly indicated that Waldensians made poor and disobedient subjects, a notion reinforced by his later statement that the heretics “condemned and disobeyed” secular authorities as well as “imperial laws.”60 As a particularly vivid example of heretical “barbarity,” Zwicker informed his readers that in Steyr, the focus of his inquisitorial attention at this point, the heretics had set fire to a barn of a local priest who had housed the inquisitor and his associates (familia). Not satisfied with arson, the attackers affixed a half-burned brand and a bloodied wooden dagger to the city gates as a warning against future inquests. Both acts of symbolic violence occurred on the eve of the Feast of the Nativity of the Virgin Mary, making the heretics’ act into a violation of sacred time and sacred space (since one can read the burning of a priest’s barn as symbolic violence against his person and, through him, against the body of the Church).61 An explicit exhortation to help in identifying, apprehending, and punishing the heretics followed the description of heretical violence, concluding the letter.62 Although it is hard to measure the direct effect Peter Zwicker’s missive might have had on the Austrian ruling elites, the next duke, Albert IV, did support his inquisition. The formal anti-Waldensian campaign began in late May of 1397 and resulted in, among other punishments, over a hundred death sentences.63

74 Inquisition, violence, order in Augsburg How real were these instances of violence? Considering that violence perpetrated by Waldensians against their persecutors appears with more frequency towards the end of the fourteenth century, scholars of medieval Waldensianism and its persecution tend to assume that these incidents did indeed take place, and that they represented a reaction of the Waldensian communities against the inquisitors, perhaps a desperate attempt at self-defense.64 Moreover, Peter Biller notes that the use of violence for self-preservation was relatively new to the Waldensian movement and possibly meant a departure from earlier doctrines, especially the strict prohibition against violence. Biller even posits the use of force as a possible sign of a crisis of consciousness among the late medieval Waldensians, “a long slow ebbing of the spirit and energy with which the doctrine was taught and implemented.”65 Whatever the truth behind descriptions of Waldensian violence, there was certainly a relative proliferation of sources that portrayed the heretics as violent and anti-social. Waldensian violence was savored by late medieval authors and retold with a surprising attention to detail. Since there were at least three instances of Waldensian violence recorded within the same decade, appearing in different types of sources, it is possible to imagine it as a newly created topos. This topos portrayed Waldensians as violent in an attempt to rekindle the will to prosecute Waldensian communities in the empire and beyond. Moreover, since at least two recorded cases of Waldensian violence appear in the sources connected to the itinerant inquisitors, the topos of violent Waldensianism was probably particularly useful for this group of persecutors. While we cannot always reconstruct how inquisitors like Peter Zwicker and Heinrich Angermeier were able to establish their authority and to obtain powerful patrons, it is possible to trace common instances of the same anti-heretical topoi used by both men. Incidents of Waldensian violence provided the inquisitors with specific examples of heretical abnormality and of their anti-social behavior that deserved punishment. Acts of violence transgressed social norms in a way that endangered the community as a whole by redefining its public spaces as polluted by heretics. By “polluting” public space, the heretics laid claim to it, just as their “errors,” as represented in the anti-heretical literature, attempted to take over the orthodox by polluting or “infecting” them—to use Zwicker’s metaphor.66 These public acts— or, rather, acts that occurred in public spaces, although sometimes carried out in a clandestine manner—were linked to the impious nature of heretics. Carefully explained in the texts, they reminded the readers about the dangers of heresy and exhorted them, either implicitly or explicitly, to react to these acts of urban pollution by supporting an inquisition. Violence transgressed both space—sacred and public—and time, and these multiple transgressions reinforced each other. The example of heretical violence provided in Peter Zwicker’s letter lists these transgressions one by one, encouraging a rising sense of indignation in the mind of the reader. The acts of violence took place during a sacred time, in sacred and public space (i.e., an attack on the representative of the Church and the nailing of a bloodied dagger and a halfburned brand on the city gates as a warning), all because “[the heretics] wanted to defend their heresy this way.”67 By committing their crimes during a major

Inquisition, violence, order in Augsburg 75 feast, the perpetrators offended the Virgin Mary (in whose ability to intercede on behalf of humanity, as Zwicker points out explicitly in the preceding list of “errors,” Waldensians did not believe) and broke away from the religious calendar followed by the rest of Steyr’s population.68 The tendency of social groups to synchronize their temporal perspectives, outlined by sociologists Alfred Schütz and Eviatar Zerubavel, made this slight against the sacred calendar into an act that endangered the fabric of urban coexistence.69 In later contexts, profaning sacred time was used to emphasize religious distinction and potentially led to violent confrontations.70 While the chronological dissonance emphasized Waldensian otherness and incompatibility with the rest of the population, it was matched by a similar emphasis on spatial distinctions between the heretics and the rest of the population. As Zwicker reports, the heretics called themselves chunden or “those in the know” and referred to the orthodox Christians as “strangers” (fremden), thus creating an inverted sense of social space and claiming the norm. In a similar vein, sources unsympathetic to the heretics stressed difference by placing Waldensians in problematic spatial settings. Thus, in the Augsburg chronicle the Waldensians are called “hole-people” (grüblins lüt), while during the same decade, the Waldensians in Strasbourg are referred to exclusively as “corner-people” or “corner-preachers” (winkeler or winkelprediger).71 A similar expression, “corner-lurking” (in angulo latitante), is used by Peter Zwicker to describe heretical preachers in his antiWaldensian treatise from 1395.72 Fears of heretical violence also tarnished the image the city wanted to project beyond its walls. The proliferation of images of late medieval heretics as violent must have had a particularly important meaning in urban centers of the Holy Roman Empire that strove to compete with bishops and archbishops—their former overlords—and to emphasize their political and spiritual independence. Heresy presented the city fathers with an uncomfortable problem that had the potential to endanger the sacred status of their community. This was particularly true if the heretics “revealed” themselves through violent acts that laid claim to the city’s public space. In these cases, toleration of heretical violence presented the whole population as potentially heretical or, at the very least, poorly governed. After all, the blanket accusation that entire cities were full of heretics was the weapon of choice for ecclesiastical writers during the period. For example, during an anticlerical revolt in Mainz in the 1380s, a local ecclesiastical chronicler lamented that the city was deaf to the archbishop’s condemnation of the revolt because it was “wallowing in heresy.”73 Not surprisingly, after the revolt Mainz experienced a prolonged anti-Waldensian inquisition between 1390 and 1393, initiated by its archbishop, Konrad II of Weinsberg, which probably set the tenor of persecution for the duration of the decade.74 The description of the attack on Heinrich Angermeier followed the model that we observe in Zwicker’s letter. The incident happened on the road linking the Benedictine abbey of Sts. Ulrich and Afra to the cathedral, the two poles of Augsburg’s sacred topography. The street between them, a major thoroughfare to this day, was imbued with civic and religious significance.75 Augsburg’s city hall

76 Inquisition, violence, order in Augsburg is also located on this axis, approximately halfway between the abbey and the cathedral. While the cathedral, as has been discussed, was crucial to the bishop’s prestige, the abbey of Sts. Ulrich and Afra, on the other hand, became a locus of urban piety and a popular focus for donations from the urban elites; it acted as a symbolic and religious counterweight to the power of the cathedral. St. Ulrich, once a bishop of Augsburg himself and the protector of the city during the Magyar invasions in the 970s, continued to serve as a convenient symbolic defender of the city against its current bishop throughout the conflicts of the 1380s and the 1390s. Forbidden from joining the cathedral chapter by a decree issued in 1322, Augsburg’s urban elites favored the abbey of Sts. Ulrich and Afra, as well as the lay confraternity of St. Ulrich, which numbered over 5,000 members.76 After the inquisition, those condemned to perform public penance were supposed to walk in processions from the abbey to the cathedral and back, parading the sacred axis of the city, trudging over the spot where Heinrich Angermeier was supposedly attacked by one of their kind, as if trying to erase this memory.77 This form of punishment and its ritual nature deserve an explanation. Standard punishment for a first-time offence of heresy involved the imposition of penitential crosses made out of yellow cloth that an individual wore on his or her clothing, demonstrating their liminal religious status to the world around them. Signifying both difference (and former deviance) and the fact that their bearer was on the path to rejoining the Christian community, the crosses placed the penitent individuals in a problematic social space. Thirteenth-century instructions for the use of penitential crosses reinforce this notion by ordering the penitents to participate in all religious processions while occupying a special place between the clergy and the rest of the lay participants.78 Although it is unclear if this practice was still enforced in the 1390s, there is evidence of at least one penitent being ordered to stand in front of a church portal during Sundays and feast days, presumably to make himself an object of public shame.79 It is notable, however, that those accused of belonging to the Waldensian community remained in the city and were allowed to do so. Increasingly often by the later fourteenth century, urban governments came to view even repentant heretics as potentially dangerous residents and preferred to expel them from their cities. While this practice fulfilled the needs of urban authorities, it contrasted with the desire of the Church to contain heresy and keep individual heretics under control. Still, banishment as a form of punishment for heresy (as well as sorcery) became popular during the second half of the fourteenth century—a development Richard Kieckhefer attributes to the rising role of urban magistrates in anti-heretical persecutions in their cities.80 Augsburg used banishment against the wife of a vagabond preacher named Brother Hans in 1388; the preacher himself and four of his associates were executed. Similarly, after a later inquisition in Strasbourg, twenty-seven individuals were banned from the city.81 Given this propensity for expelling repentant heretics, it is crucial to note that the Waldensians convicted in 1393 were not banned from Augsburg but were to be reintroduced back into their community through ritual behavior. The highly ritualized spectacle of punishment that took place in the heart of the city during late August not only demonstrated the price for embracing heretical

Inquisition, violence, order in Augsburg 77 ideas to all onlookers but also was meant to reassert orthodox behavior. A brief near-contemporary chronicle account by an outsider, Hans Mair of Nördlingen, preserves a detailed description of the penance the forty-six repentant Waldensians underwent in Augsburg. It is possible that Mair, a member of the urban elite in his own town, left an unusually detailed account of the punishments in case heresy was to be found in Nördlingen, located only about fifty miles to the north of Augsburg and within the same diocese.82 According to his account, the former heretics were instructed to perform the following penance: for the sake of correction: first, to wear the small cross on the chest [affixed] to their clothes for the whole year. Also, that they had to walk for eight days from the [abbey of] St. Ulrich until the cathedral of the Virgin Mary, always two by two, and that they had to carry lit candles, and in the Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary they had to say the Hail Mary seven times and a priest was to sprinkle them with holy water. And in the cemetery they had to read the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary for the dead three times.83 Rather than excluding the repentant Waldensians from their community, as the city did with other purported heretics in the 1380s, the magistrates of Augsburg attempted to reintroduce them into the community by placing them into the city’s ritual and symbolic center. Every part of the penance was imbued with religious symbolism. The aforementioned penitential crosses, as well as other forms of penance (e.g. prayers), were more traditional punishments for heresy, well established by the late fourteenth century. Obligatory processions between the abbey of Sts. Ulrich and Afra and the cathedral were imbued with civic importance as well—on their way, the repentant passed the city hall and residences of its patriciate. The ritual behavior performed by the repentant Waldensians was also highly instructive and was clearly designed with an understanding of Waldensian teachings. Each penitential act—processions between churches, the lighting of candles, aspersions with holy water, the Hail Mary prayer, and prayers for the dead in general—represented an element of Catholic religious practice that Waldensian ministers explicitly discouraged in their teachings. By performing these elements repeatedly, the repentant heretics were forced to disobey the teachings of Waldensian ministers and to demonstrate the truthfulness of their earlier abjuration of heresy. Moreover, this form of public penance broadcasted the “correct” forms of religious practice to non-Waldensian residents of Augsburg.84 Late medieval theologians and inquisitors conceived of heretical practice as an opposite of orthodoxy and, as Reima Välimäki observes, used anti-heretical treatises and sermons as venues for religious instruction of the laity.85 In particular, Ulrich of Pottenstein, an Austrian theologian and canon of St. Stephen, incorporated extensive passages from Peter Zwicker’s anti-Waldensian polemic Cum dormirent homines into his vernacular encyclopedic catechism. To Ulrich, Waldensians represented “a negative image of the Christian modus vivendi” that provided the clergy with a negative example to argue against in the process of educating the laity.86 In Augsburg, public penance performed over the course of eight days performed a similar function, as it helped reaffirm correct belief to all who witnessed it.

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The most public part of the penance was only its first and shortest stage. Even after eight days of negating their errant beliefs, the former heretics were supposed to wear cross-shaped badges on their clothing for a year, a reminder of their liminal Christian and civic status.87 From the perspectives of both the Church and urban governments, the crosses demonstrated a symbolic victory: a heretical presence that was once hidden was now laid bare and defeated. For the individuals condemned to wear the crosses, they meant torment and ostracism. It is hard to overestimate the importance of these markers of religious difference, especially in urban environments with a high degree of social interactions. Throughout the history of their use, bearers of the penitential crosses frequently attracted ridicule and abuse, demonstrated by repeated Church decrees meant to prevent such behavior. It is not surprising that some individuals undergoing this form of public penance chose either to remove the crosses or to flee their communities. Some paid for these attempts with their lives, since insubordinate actions were widely perceived as a sign of relapsing into heresy, a crime ultimately punished by death.88 The city council’s decision to reincorporate former heretics back into the community emphasizes the role that civic ideology played in the city’s participation in the externally provoked inquisition. It also explains the final episode in this particular persecution. Later in 1393, the group of Waldensians who had been condemned to wear yellow penitential crosses decided to make their punishment less visible. They approached the bishop and offered him a sum of seventy gold pieces in exchange for a “secret penance”—a permission to remove any visible signs of their former heretical status. The bishop agreed to the deal, but evidently the city council took this agreement amiss. Justice was swift; nine of the fourteen were forced to resume their visible punishments, while the other five men, possibly the leaders, were burned at the stake later that month.89 What was a perfectly regular practice of commuting punishment into a cash payment became grounds for a summary execution of heretics by the city council. From the city council’s point of view, what happened after the inquisition, when a smaller group of Waldensians tried to strike a deal with a bishop, was not an attempt at rehabilitation of the errant, but an institutional overreach. By making a secret deal with the bishop, Augsburg’s citizens broke the urban order. Not only had the heretics brought a bad reputation to the city and threatened its wellbeing by revealing their existence, now they were symbolically breaking the civic hierarchy and breaching the city’s walls by dealing with a dangerous outsider. It is not at all surprising that the names of the five men burned at the stake in the aftermath of the inquisition were recorded by a near contemporary chronicler and later appear in Hector Mülich’s account of the events. The only other name preserved in the account is of the unfortunate Hans Lutz, who was accused of attacking the inquisitor.90 If Lutz unwittingly served as a catalyst for the inquisition, endangering the city’s sacred status, the other five men made the situation even worse by dealing with the bishop behind the city council’s back. By punishing their heretics more harshly than the bishop, the city was making a claim about its ability to dispense justice more effectively than its rival. Heretics, as long as they were repentant, could still be part of the city, re-integrated into

Inquisition, violence, order in Augsburg 79 its fabric by perambulating along the route, which emphasized the city’s claim to being a sacred community, in possession of the hallowed graves of the former bishops and the ceremonial focal point of the current one. From this perspective, the only true outsider, the only true Other, was the bishop himself. Yes, he could commute public penance into a payment for a group of Waldensians, but the city could decide whether to honor or to ignore this bargain. Symbolic inclusion of the repentant Waldensians corresponded to the symbolic exclusion of the bishop. His right to decide cases dealing with heresy was denied within the city walls. *** The inquisition in Augsburg is only one incident in a chain of anti-heretical persecution that took place within the last decade of the fourteenth century. Often initiated by itinerant inquisitors like Heinrich Angermeier or Peter Zwicker, these inquisitions exacerbated the struggles between towns and their rivals, placing heretical communities in the middle of these conflicts. The presence of heretics in a city aggravated a highly ritualized contest over urban space. To use the concepts developed by historian of religion Jonathan Z. Smith, the authority of the bishop of Augsburg was rooted in the “system [of] the sacred based on power,” and derived from the historical significance of his cathedral, the locus of power and glory of this and all previous bishops in the defiant city.91 This system, dependent on the bishop’s access to the Cathedral of the Virgin Mary, “his charismatic center,” tied the exiled bishop to Augsburg.92 The city, on the other hand, was able to base its authority and its new vision of urban spirituality on status; that is, the ability to create and uphold urban order based on inclusion and exclusion, on separating purity from pollution, and on ritualized ways of turning one into the other. Ultimately, sacred urban space in Augsburg provided an alternative to the more traditional structure of Church hierarchy; this allowed the city to imagine itself as a miniature version of Christendom, independent from external religious will, even if the political reality was far from this ideal.93 After all, as Burkard Zink, another chronicler from Augsburg wrote in the fifteenth century, in cities “everyone wants to go to heaven.”94 In 1435, a widow approached the magistrates of Augsburg asking for a letter that stated that her husband was not among the heretics tried in the inquisition forty-two years earlier. Apparently, there were rumors to the contrary and the widow suffered enough abuse from the townspeople to request an official proof of her husband’s innocence.95 Notably, the woman did not ask for such a document from the representative of the bishop but approached the city council instead. Formerly a purview of the Church, now the question of guilt or innocence in the matters of faith was firmly within the authority of the city’s secular government. This also suggests that proving her husband’s innocence was a civic, rather than a religious matter; the widow was mistreated because heretics and their associates made bad citizens. The attempts to associate religious heterodoxy with social deviancy mapped neatly onto the process of blurring the boundaries between the secular and religious in German free and imperial towns. Urban communities and, in particular, urban elites were focused on salvation as a political concept that was indivisible from their independence; this merging

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of civic and religious sensibilities into one ideology of the common good rooted in civic religion left no room for non-participation, especially if it endangered the whole city. The inquisition in Augsburg was a contest of authorities in which the presence of urban heresy was instrumentalized and used in competing claims, included and excluded through signs and rituals. What began as an attempt to find a weakness in the image of a sacred community that Augsburg’s elites wanted to project, ended with the city’s decision to act on its own in punishing the errant, once again denying the bishop control over the city. While the outcome of the inquisition was shaped by the local political agenda, the anti-Waldensian campaign in Augsburg can be understood as part of a larger conflict between urban and ecclesiastical authorities. The following chapter will look at another example of an anti-Waldensian campaign that took place in Rothenburg ob der Tauber a year after the events in Augsburg, albeit with a different outcome. Instrumentalization of heresy was not limited to struggles between urban governments and their external enemies. Fears of heretical presence in cities created an environment in which similar anxieties were used in internal political struggles between members of the urban elite. If heretical beliefs were incompatible with the ideals of good citizenship, anti-heretical rhetoric became a powerful weapon in local power struggles, while involvement of an itinerant inquisitor like Heinrich Angermeier provided a veneer of legitimacy to the accusations of Waldensianism used to defame rivals within the city walls.

Notes 1 An earlier version of this chapter was published as Eugene Smelyansky, “Urban Order and Urban Other: Anti-Waldensian Inquisition in Augsburg, 1393,” German History 34, no. 1 (March 2016), 1–20. 2 “Chronik von 1368–1406 mit Fortsetzung bis 1447,” CsSA, vol. 1, 96: “und man macht iedem ketzer ain gelwez krütz an sin gewand hinden und vorn zů ainem urkünd ires posen glouben, den si gehebt hetten.” 3 Dominique Adrian, Augsbourg à la fin du Moyen Age. La politique et l’espace (Ostfildern: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 2013), 31. 4 Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 75–79. 5 “Chronik von 1368–1406,” 96–97. 6 For the most recent and most detailed overview of the inquisition itself, see Georg Modestin, “Der Augsburger Waldenserprozess und sein Straßburger Nachspiel (1393– 1400),” Zeitschrift des Historischen Vereins für Schwaben 103 (2011), 43–68. 7 See, for example, Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 69–70. 8 As a rule, studies of the relationship between the bishop of Augsburg and the city either omit the inquisition: Tyler, Lord of the Sacred City; or mention it in passing: Rolf Kießling, Bürgerliche Gesellschaft und Kirche in Augsburg im Spätmittelalter: Ein Beitrag zur Strukturanalyse der Oberdeutschen Reichsstadt (Augsburg: Mühlberger, 1971), 317. 9 For a few notable exceptions see Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane, “Archiepiscopal Inquisitions in the Middle Rhine: Urban Anticlericalism and Waldensianism in Late Fourteenth-Century Mainz,” Catholic Historical Review 92 (July 2006), 197–224; as well as: Jennifer M. Kolpacoff, “Papal Schism, Archiepiscopal Politics and Waldensian Persecution (1378–1396): The Ecclesio-Political Landscape of Late FourteenthCentury Mainz,” PhD diss. (Northwestern University, 2000). Richard Kieckhefer

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devotes a chapter to a brief overview of heresy in urban contexts. Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 75–82. Heinrich Angermeier’s involvement in the inquisition can be corroborated by trial records from other towns in the region where he acted as an inquisitor in 1393–94. Modestin, “Der Augsburger Waldenserprozess,” 65–67; Alexander Patschovsky, “Waldenser und Hussiten,” in Handbuch für Bayerische Kirchengeschichte, ed. Walter Brandmüller, vol. 1: Von den Anfängen bis zur Schwelle der Neuzeit (St. Ottilien: EOSVerlag, 1999), 764–65; Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 55. Itinerant preachers during the period proved to be controversial figures, whose power to agitate their audiences was recognized by the secular and ecclesiastical authorities. For example, Johannes Malkaw’s preaching against the Schism in the cities on the middle and upper Rhine made him a target of an inquisitorial manhunt and a trial in 1391 when he was accused of being a heretic but later acquitted. Malkaw’s trial is discussed in more detail in Chapter 5. See also Robert E. Lerner, The Heresy of the Free Spirit in the Later Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Pres, 1972), 101–03. “Chronik von 1368–1406,” 96: “ez wer gar vil ketzer zů Augspurg und die wölt er rügen und furpringen, und wölt darumb sin plůt vergiessen.” “Chronik von 1368–1406,” 96: “und begert an bischoff Burkhart gnaden und gewaltz uber die ketzer, der ward im auch geben und erlaubt.” For a brief overview of bishop’s life, see Manfred Weitlauff, “Burkhard von Ellerbach († 1404),” BHRR, 26–29. “Chronik von 1368–1406,” 96. “Chronik von 1368–1406,” 96: “. . . und man beschloß alliu tor an der stat und fieng ͤ der ketzer 34, man und wip, und die stůnden in půß und sprachen, si wölten pussen und pessern den ungeloben, den si gehebt hetten.” Modestin, “Der Augsburger Waldenserprozess,” 54–56. For an overview of the concept of publica fama, see Henry Ansgar Kelly, “Inquisition, Public Fame and Confession: General Rules and English Practice,” in The Culture of Inquisition in Medieval England, ed. Mary Catherine Flannery and Katie L. Walker (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2013), 9–12. “Chronik von 1368–1406,” 97: “Nota. Die ketzer waren all lodweber, wann gar lützel was lüt under in von andern hantwerken.” Hector Mülich, “Chronik des Hector Mülich 1348–1487,” CsSA, vol. 3, 41; Erhard Wahraus “Chronik des Erhard Wahraus, 1126–1145 mit Nachträge zum Jahre 1462,” CsSA, vol. 1, 249. For Fritz Struss/Francz Straus: Modestin, “Der Augsburger Waldenserprozess,” 59 n.74. Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 70. For the editions of the Zunftbriefe, see Christian Meyer, ed., Urkundenbuch der Stadt Augsburg, Vol. 2: Die Urkunden vom Jahre 1347–1399 (Augsburg: Lampart, 1878), 147, 152. On the political role of the guilds in Augsburg, see Jörg Rogge, Für den Gemeinen Nutzen. Politisches Handeln und Politikverständnis von Rat und Bürgerschaft in Augsburg im Spätmittelalter (Tübingen: De Gruyter, 1996), 12–27. Modestin, Ketzer in der Stadt, 97–106. Modestin, “Der Augsburger Waldenserprozess,” 50–51. A concise overview of the German city chronicles as historical sources and of their authors in English remains F. R. H. Du Boulay, “The German Town Chroniclers,” in The Writing of History in the Middle Ages: Essays Presented to Richard William Southern, ed. R. H. C. Davis and J. M. Wallace-Hadrill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 445–69. For the chronicles from Augsburg, see Jürgen Wolf, “Augsburger Stadtchroniken des 15. Jahrhunderts,” in Die deutsche Literatur des Mittelalters. Verfasserlexikon, ed. Kurt Ruh et al. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2004), vol. 11, cols. 185–88. Modestin, “Der Augsburger Waldenserprozess,” 51; Dieter Weber, Geschichtsschreibung in Augsburg: Hektor Mülich und die reichsstädtische Chronistik des Spätmittelaters (Augsburg: Mühlberger, 1984), 32–33. “Chronik von 1368–1406,” 96.

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24 For example, Mülich lists the names of five individuals executed as a result of the inquisition, but mistakenly claims that they were pardoned. Modestin, “Der Augsburger Waldenserprozess,” 60; Weber, Geschichtsschreibung in Augsburg, 50–55; see also Werner Alberts, “Mülich, Hektor,” in Verfasserlexikon, ed. Kurt Ruh (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1987), vol. 6, cols. 738–42. 25 Mülich, “Chronik,” 40–41. 26 Mülich, “Chronik,” 41; Mair, “Nördlingani brevis Historia,” 620. The aforementioned manuscript (Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Cgm. 342) was acquired by Hans Mülich, Hector Mülich’s grandfather. See Karin Schneider, Die Deutschen Handschriften der Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek München: Cgm 201–350 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1970), 365–66. 27 Mair, “Nördlingani brevis Historia,” 620. 28 For a more detailed discussion of the ideology of the common good in late medieval cities, see Chapter 1. See also Eberhard Isenmann, “The Notion of the Common Good, the Concept of Politics, and Practical Policies in Late Medieval and Early Modern German Cities,” in De Bono Communi. The Discourse and Practice of the Common Good in the European City (13th–16th c.): Discours et pratique du Bien Commun dans les villes d’Europe (XIIIe au XVIe siècle), ed. Elodie Lecuppre-Desjardin and Anne-Laure Van Bruaene (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), 107–48. 29 Richard Kieckhefer observes that heresy began to be perceived as a civil disorder, similar to vagrancy, rioting, and sexual deviancy. Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 77–78. A recent study by Laura Stokes also places intensification of urban persecutions of witchcraft from the early fifteenth century on within the context of urban reform. Laura Stokes, Demons of Urban Reform: Early European Witch Trials and Criminal Justice, 1430–1530 (New York: Palgrave, 2011), 129–53. 30 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (New York: Routledge, 2000), 36. 31 Deane, “Archiepiscopal Inquisitions,” 197–99. 32 In what could have been a later interpretation of the events, Mülich reports that the inquisitor’s authority came from both the bishop and the city: “dem ward erlaupt von der stat und dem bischof, ime die zů straffen.” Mülich, “Chronik,” 40. However, the earlier anonymous chronicle only mentions Angermeier asking for the bishop’s permission: “und begert an bischof Burkhart gnaden und gewaltz uber die ketzer, der ward im auch geben und erlaubt.” “Chronik von 1368–1406,” 96. Nevertheless, it appears unlikely that the inquisitor could have acted against the heretics in the city without the city council’s support or at least its tacit approval; it is possible that the city council decided to support the inquest later (e.g., after the attempt on Angermeier’s life). 33 Modestin, Quellen, 194: “große smehe und unere.” 34 The inquisition in Strasbourg was also prompted by a sermon by an itinerant preacher, in this case a Dominican. See Modestin, Ketzer in der Stadt, 13. 35 “Chronik von 1368–1406,” 96: “und die wölt er rügen und furpringen, und wölt darumb sin plůt vergiessen.” 36 Tyler, Lord of the Sacred City, 86. For a recent study of Augsburg’s politics and society in the later medieval period, see Adrian, Augsbourg à la fin du Moyen Age. 37 Tyler, Lord of the Sacred City, 103–04. 38 Tyler, Lord of the Sacred City, 112. 39 Geoffrey Koziol, Begging Pardon and Favor: Ritual and Political Order in Early Medieval France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 308. On the polysemy of a ritual, see also Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), 50. Thomas A. Brady makes a case for the use of anthropological theory in analyzing ritual entries of bishops and kings in later medieval and early modern Strasbourg. Thomas A. Brady, Jr. “Rites of Autonomy, Rites of Dependence: South German Civic Culture in the Age of Renaissance and Reformation,” in

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40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

51 52 53 54 55 56 57

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Religion and Culture in the Renaissance and Reformation, ed. Steven Ozment (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth-Century Journal Publishers, 1989), 20–23. Keith D. Lilley, City and Cosmos: The Medieval World in Urban Form (London: Reaktion Books, 2009), 159. Tyler, Lord of the Sacred City, 144–45, 147–48. Maximilian Gloor, Politisches Handeln im spätmittelalterlichen Augsburg, Basel und Straßburg (Heidelberg: Winter, 2010), 339–40. Tyler, Lord of the Sacred City, 146. Tyler, Lord of the Sacred City, 92–93; Karl Schnith, “Die Reichsstadt Augsburg im Spätmittelalter (1368–1493),” in Geschichte der Stadt Augsburg: Von der Römerzeit bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Günther Gottlieb (Stuttgart: K. Theiss, 1984), 158–59. Meyer, Urkundenbuch der Stadt Augsburg, vol. 2, 244–48; Schnith, “Die Reichsstadt Augsburg,” 158. “Chronik von 1368–1406,” 96: “. . . und man tett ain predig uff dem fronhoff mit aller pfaffhait, und der pischoff was selb engagen.” On the symbolism of the Fronhof, see Adrian, Augsbourg à la fin du Moyen Age, 346–47. Mair, “Nördlingani brevis Historia,” 620; “Chronik von 1368–1406,” 97. Christian Bürckstümmer, “Waldenser in Dinkelsbühl,” Beiträge zur bayerischen Kirchengeschichte 19 (1913), 274–75; Mair, “Nördlingani brevis Historia,” 620. Mair, “Nördlingani brevis Historia,” 620; “Chronik von 1368–1406,” 97. Bürckstümmer, “Waldenser in Dinkelsbühl,” 274: “venerabilem ac circumspectum virum, Dominum et Magistrum henricum, dictum Angermayr, a Reverendo in Christo patre et Domino, Domino Burckhardo dei et apostolicae sedis gratia Augustensis ecclesiae Episcopo Deputatum, propter Sectam Waldensium.” The following year, Heinrich Angermeier participated in an inquisitorial trial in Rothenburg ob der Tauber, discussed in Chapter 3. Biller, The Waldenses, 81. “Attendite a falsis prophetis,” quoted in Biller, “Goodbye to Waldensianism?” Past & Present 192, no. 1 (2006), 31. Biller dates the manuscript to c. 1370. Biller, The Waldenses, 121, n.61. Modestin, Ketzer in der Stadt, 51–53. “Bericht des Inquisitors Petrus,” 246–50. Zwicker also encountered some resistance during his earlier inquisition against the rural Waldensians in Brandenburg and Pomerania (1392–94). Kurze, Quellen, 233–34. “Bericht des Inquisitors Petrus,” 246–47, 249. For example, a more modest list of errors of the Waldensians in Augsburg, preserved in the chronicle of Hans Mair, counts only sixteen items. Mair, “Nördlingani brevis Historia,” 620. A contemporary list from Bingen (1393) contains only ten Waldensian tenets. Mainz, Stadtbibliothek I 151, fol. 205r. Neither of the lists concerns itself with nontheological errors, i.e., statements that emphasize heretical otherness in non-religious spheres. Georg Modestin, “The Anti-Waldensian Treatise Cum Dormirent Homines: Historical Context, Polemical Strategy, and Manuscript Tradition,” in Religious Controversy in Europe, 1378–1556: Textual Transmission and Networks of Readership, ed. Michael Van Dussen and Pavel Soukup (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), 217–18; Peter Segl, “Die Waldenser in Österreich um 1400: Lehren, Organizationsform, Verbreitung und Bekämpfung,” in Friedrich Reiser und die “waldensisch-hussitische Internationale” im 15. Jahrhundert, ed. Albert Lange and Kathrin Utz Tremp (Heidelberg: Verlag Regionalkultur, 2006), 163–64. “Bericht des Inquisitors Petrus,” 246: “violencijs incendiorum et terroribus homicidiorum.” Modestin notes that the act of heretical violence occurred on September 7, nine days after the death of Albert III. Modestin, “The Anti-Waldensian Treatise,” 218. “Bericht des Inquisitors Petrus,” 249: “Item [dampnant et reprobant] leges imperiales.”

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61 “Bericht des Inquisitors Petrus,” 250. It has been suggested that Zwicker himself might have been the guest of the parish priest and, if the incident took place, might have witnessed the violence firsthand. Biller, The Waldenses, 271; Peter Segl, “Die Waldenser in Österreich um 1400,” 184. 62 “Bericht des Inquisitors Petrus,” 250. 63 Modestin, “The Anti-Waldensian Treatise,” 217–18; Peter Segl, “Die Waldenser in Österreich um 1400,” 165–69. 64 Modestin interprets all three cases as self-defense. Modestin, “Der Augsburger Waldenserprozess,” 52–53. See also, Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 57–58. There is disagreement among scholars about the actual perpetrators of violence within Waldensian communities. Susanna K. Treesh argues that violent actions were undertaken by Waldensian followers trying to protect themselves from persecution. Susanna K. Treesh, “The Waldensian Recourse to Violence,” Church History 55, no. 3 (1986), 295–96. Martin Schneider, on the contrary, sees the Waldensian violence as a notion advocated by the religious leaders within Waldensian communities. Martin Schneider, Europäisches Waldensertum in 13. und 14. Jahrhundert (New York: De Gruyter, 1981), 82–83. Violent responses to persecution occurred earlier in the century as well. Gallus of Neuhaus was threatened repeatedly and eventually attacked (and possibly murdered) during his anti-Waldensian inquisitions in Bohemia (c. 1335–55), while Johann von Schwenkenfeld was assassinated in Prague in 1341 (although in this case, his assassination may have been prompted by a conflict between the bishop and the city of Breslau, in which Schwenkenfeld sided with the bishop). Patschovsky, Quellen, 54; Alexander Patschovsky, Die Anfänge einer ständigen Inquisition in Böhmen. Ein Prager Inquisitoren-Handbuch aus der ersten Hälfte des 14. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1975), 61–65; Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 46. 65 Biller, The Waldenses, 95. 66 Douglas, Purity and Danger, 36–37; “Bericht des Inquisitors Petrus,” 246. 67 “Bericht des Inquisitors Petrus,” 250: “Nam nuper in nocte vigiliarum natalis beate virginis genitricis dei Marie combusserunt horreum domini plebani in Styra eo quod in domo sua colligit fovet et nutrit inquisitores pravitatis heretice cum sua familia, et ad portas civitatis vel oppidi Styre affixerunt lignum adustum vel rhedam cum cultello ligneo cruentato, volentes taliter suam heresim defensare.” 68 “Bericht des Inquisitors Petrus,” 246. 69 Alfred Schütz, “Making Music Together: A Study in Social Relationship,” Social Research 18, no. 1 (1951), 96–97; Eviatar Zerubavel, Hidden Rhythms: Schedules and Calendars in Social Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 105–10. As an example of sacred time, Zerubavel analyzes a plethora of meanings given to Sabbath in Judaism and observes its importance for the creation of a distinct Jewish identity. 70 For example, Natalie Zemon Davis discusses Protestant women in sixteenth-century Lyon, who openly spun on Catholic feast days in order to demonstrate their religious difference. Natalie Zemon Davis, “Rites of Violence: Religious Riot in SixteenthCentury France,” Past & Present 59 (1973), 73. 71 “Bericht des Inquisitors Petrus,” 249; Augsburg: Wahraus “Chronik des Erhard Wahraus,” CsSA, vol. 1, 228; Strasbourg: Modestin, Quellen, 19–24. The term Grüblinsmann also appears in Augsburg’s criminal records regarding a confidence man or a gambler, banished from the city in 1364. Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 79. A list of errors of the Waldensians from Augsburg also mentions the distinction between members of the community (“notos,” i.e., those ‘in the know’) and the outsiders (ignotos & alienos). Mair, “Nördlingani brevis Historia,” 620. A similar dichotomy existed among the English Lollards. See Modestin, “The Anti-Waldensian Treatise,” 214. 72 Biller, The Waldenses, 278; CDH, 280D. 73 Kungstein, Chronicon Moguntinum, 54: “quod cives minime curabant, ymmo deridebant, quia pullulabant in heresi.”

Inquisition, violence, order in Augsburg 85 74 Deane, “The Archiepiscopal Inquisitions,” 197–99. The inquisition in Mainz is discussed in Chapter 2. 75 Hoher Weg, Karolinenstraße, and Maximilianstraße in present-day Augsburg. 76 Tyler, Lord of the Sacred City, 101. Increased lay membership in all ecclesiastical institutions except for the cathedral has been noted in Rolf Kießling, “Bürgertum und Kirche im Spätmittelalter,” in Geschichte der Stadt Augsburg: Von der Römerzeit bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Günther Gottlieb (Stuttgart: K. Theiss, 1984), 211–12. See also Eberhard Isenmann, Die deutsche Stadt im Mittelalter, 1150–1550: Stadtgestalt, Recht, Verfassung, Stadtregiment, Kirche, Gessellschaft, Wirtschaft (Weimar: Böhlau, 2012), 657. 77 Mair, “Nördlingani brevis Historia,” 620. 78 On the use of penitential crosses as a form of punishment for heresy, see James B. Given, Inquisition and Medieval Society: Power, Discipline, and Resistance in Languedoc (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 69, 74–75. Participation of penitents in processions is prescribed in Processus Inquisitionis, a manual for inquisitors compiled by Bernard of Caux and Jean of Saint-Pierre in 1248–49. See Walter L. Wakefield, ed., Heresy, Crusade, and Inquisition in Southern France, 1100–1250 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 255. 79 Deane, “Archiepiscopal Inquisitions,” 216–17. 80 Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 75–76. On banishment as punishment for magic, see Stokes, Demons of Urban Reform, 38–39. 81 Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 77–78; Modestin, Quellen, 192–96. The inquisition in Strasbourg is the focus of Chapter 5. 82 Modestin, “Der Augsburger Waldenserprozess,” 62. For a brief overview of Hans Mair’s biography, see Hans-Josef Dreckmann and Hans Mair, Das “Buch von Troja” von Hans Mair: Kritische Textausgabe und Untersuchung (Munich: Fink, 1970), 229–31. 83 Mair, “Nördlingani brevis Historia,” 620: “datum est eis pro emenda, primo quod crucem in vestimentis parvam portare deberent per annum integrum in plateis: item quod debent ire pro octo dies, de S. Udalrico usque ad Sanctam Mariam, semper duo & duo, et quod debent portare candelam ardentem, & in Ecclesia Beatae Mariae Virginis debent orare septem Ave Maria, & Presbyter debet ipsis dare aspersionem, & in cimiterio debent orare tria Pater noster & Ave Maria pro defunctis.” It is unclear how many times a day the penitents performed this procession. 84 Modestin, “Der Augsburger Waldenserprozess,” 62–63. 85 Välimäki, Heresy in Late Medieval Germany, 200–03. 86 Välimäki, Heresy in Late Medieval Germany, 200. 87 Mair, “Nördlingani brevis Historia,” 620. 88 Given, Inquisition and Medieval Society, 85–86. 89 “Chronik von 1368–1406,” 97: “Darnach umb sant Gallentag ware 14 ketzer, die komen mit dem pischoff uberain und gaben im 70 guldin, daz si die krütz solten ablegen, und legten si auch hin. Des wurden die purger innan und der raut und fiengen derselben ketzer fünf der pesten under in, und die wurden auch darumb verprant, die andern wurden begnadet und legten die krütz wider an sich und tragen si als vor.” 90 Modestin, “Der Augsburger Waldenserprozess,” 58–61. Hector Mülich mistakenly lists the names of the five men among the pardoned. Mülich, “Chronik,” 41. 91 Christine M. Thomas, “Place and Memory: Response to Jonathan Z. Smith on to Take Place, on the Occasion of Its Twentieth Anniversary,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 76, no. 3 (2008), 774. 92 Tyler, Lord of the Sacred City, 122. 93 Bernd Moeller, Imperial Cities and the Reformation: Three Essays, trans. H. C. E. Midelfort and M. U. Edwards, Jr. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1972), 49. 94 Burkard Zink, “Chronik des Burkard Zink. 1368–1468,” CsSA (Leipzig, 1866), vol. 2, 45: “. . . dann iederman wolt gen himl.” 95 Augsburg, Stadtarchiv, Missivbücher, 3, fol. 359r. The incident is described in Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 68.

4

Elite identity, urban competition, and inquisition in Rothenburg ob der Tauber

If historians could hear the proverbial “voices of the past,” in Rothenburg ob der Tauber, an imperial city in Middle Franconia, during the late fall of 1394 and winter of 1395, these voices would be arguing about whether Hans Wern was a heretic or not. Debates about Wern’s religious status probably continued for the rest of the decade, but those arguments began in November of 1394, when Hans Wern, a prominent and wealthy citizen of Rothenburg, was accused of being a heresiarch or a heretical Waldensian minister by an outsider, an itinerant inquisitor named Heinrich Angermeier. Such weighty accusations sent ripples through the very fabric of urban society.1 Was Wern to be the first of many accused of harboring heresy in the city? Many in the town heard of persecutions of Waldensians in Swabia during the previous year; Rothenburg was a busy imperial city with constant trade and rumors flowing through. Echoes of trials and even executions in Augsburg, Wemding, Dinkelsbühl, and Donauwörth probably made some residents ponder if Rothenburg was to be next on that list.2 But Rothenburg was spared from a large inquisition and even Wern, its sole “heretic,” was soon acquitted by a representative of the bishop of Würzburg.3 Such a surprising resolution to an anti-heretical trial stands out during the decade of intensified persecutions of the German Waldensians. How did Hans Wern find himself accused in the first place? Taking place over a year after the inquisition in Augsburg (1393), the trial in Rothenburg ob der Tauber adds an additional layer of complexity to our analysis of the persecution of heresy in late medieval Germany. There are important differences between the two persecutions, some of them shaped by the local ecclesiastical and political contexts. If the trial in Augsburg was both chronologically the first anti-Waldensian inquisition of the decade in southern Germany and the first known trial that involved Heinrich Angermeier, the inquisition in Rothenburg—as far as we know—concluded his campaign of persecutions in Swabia and Franconia. If in Augsburg the trial involved a group of men and women, in Rothenburg only one man, Hans Wern (d. 1406), was ever accused of being a Waldensian. This is highly unusual since the German Waldensians were usually persecuted in groups as whole communities became uncovered by the inquisitors.4 Moreover, if the inquest in Augsburg ended with a spectacle of public abjuration and penance, the inquisition in Rothenburg saw a complete acquittal of its sole target.

Identity, urban competition, inquisition 87 And yet, despite these and other differences between the inquisitions in the two cities, there are important similarities. Like Augsburg, Rothenburg ob der Tauber was an imperial city and, for most of its recent history, had a strained relationship with the bishop of Würzburg, the region’s most powerful ecclesiastical figure.5 The trials in both Augsburg and Rothenburg reflected these conflicts of episcopal and lay authorities, who contested the degree of political influence upon each other. Waldensianism and heretical presence—real or imagined—inside a city were instrumentalized by the competing sides in these contests. Heinrich Angermeier’s role, as an outsider, freelance heresy-hunter, was pivotal in both cases, even if his involvement produced drastically different results. Finally, while the narrative of the Augsburg inquisition is informed primarily by the local chronicle accounts, a surviving cache of inquisitorial and municipal documents from the trial of Hans Wern allow us to examine this persecution from the perspective of urban politics. Through these sources, the trial of Hans Wern demonstrates the way a threat of heretical presence in an imperial city could be harnessed by the urban elites and used in internal political struggles. In communities where religious orthodoxy was equated with honor, even the suspicion of heresy became the antithesis of loyalty and good citizenship. The opening salvo of the inquisition occurred when Heinrich Angermeier arrived in Rothenburg ob der Tauber in early November of 1394 and accused Hans Wern of being “a leader and founder of all heretics.”6 From that point onward, the trial unfolded in an unpredictable manner. Hans Wern, whose social and political standing within the city brought him into close contact with many of its religious institutions, was able to relay the news of the accusation against him to the bishop of Würzburg, Gerhard of Schwarzburg (r. 1372–1400).7 The bishop did not take the incident lightly and sent his vicar-general (vicarius in spiritualibus), Walter Schubel, to Rothenburg to take over the trial. This decision reduced Heinrich Angermeier’s involvement to the role of a denunciator, thus placing the burden of proving Hans Wern’s guilt on him. It is unlikely that Angermeier expected episcopal involvement and hoped to assume the role of a judge instead, as he had during his anti-Waldensian trials in Swabia during the previous year. This may explain why, throughout the course of the trial, Angermeier—described in the trial records with an almost perceptible air of derision as “a self-styled inquisitor of heretical depravity, heresy and specifically heretical errors of the Waldensian sect”—was unable to produce sufficient evidence of Wern’s guilt.8 Without any specific evidence against the accused, Schubel questioned Wern about his religious beliefs, including his knowledge of the sacraments and whether he believed that “a good layman can hear confessions and absolve sins” (the most telltale Waldensian tenet).9 Satisfied with Wern’s answers, the episcopal judge nevertheless ordered him to produce five to seven character witnesses to swear on behalf of his good reputation. This procedure was known as compurgation and meant to establish if the very reputation of the accused could serve as evidence of his innocence.10 In this case, compurgation became a public spectacle aimed at restoring urban honor. In a conscious attempt to demonstrate how unfounded the charges against him were, Wern found a remarkable number of witnesses: an abbot, ten regular and

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secular clerics, and over fifty laymen.11 All swore to his good character and the heresy trial concluded with Wern’s full acquittal on November 16, 1394. Despite the acquittal, Hans Wern’s legal troubles were far from over.

Historiography of the Wern affair Considering the enigmatic and unusual nature of the Wern affair, it has barely received attention from scholars of heresy or its persecution until recently, particularly in conjunction with the other anti-heretical campaigns that happened in the same region during the 1390s. At least partially, the lack of scholarly attention to Rothenburg’s history, in general, comes from the city’s relative isolation and decline in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Situated in Bavaria’s northwestern corner, Rothenburg was left disconnected from major railroad routes until the late nineteenth century.12 As the city lacked any institutions of higher learning, its history and rich archives were left predominantly to local historians. In 1917, Helmut Weigel published the trial record from Hans Wern’s trial, in the original Latin, with a brief preface outlining the narrative of the trial (most details were gathered by Weigel from the document itself).13 Presumably because Weigel was the first to bring this document to scholarly attention—and because Wern’s trial was not recorded in the contemporary chronicles—the inquisition in Rothenburg escaped mention in either Herman Haupt’s foundational work Waldensianism and Inquisition in Southeastern Germany or Henry Charles Lea’s A History of the Inquisition in the Middle Ages, both of which were published earlier.14 Thereafter, the Rothenburg inquisition remained virtually unknown to later scholars of religious persecution until the late 1970s. In 1979, Richard Kieckhefer briefly mentioned the Rothenburg case in Repression of Heresy in Medieval Germany and thus introduced Weigel’s original publication to a wider audience.15 Kieckhefer’s retelling of the Wern affair, however, follows the somewhat misleading narrative contained in the trial proceedings that provides virtually no context for the trial itself. Kieckhefer concludes that the grounds for the eventual acquittal of Wern were “clearly substantive rather than political.” In his opinion, it was not Heinrich Angermeier’s actions (the fact that he conducted an inquisition without the bishop’s permission) that antagonized the judge, but rather the nature— that is the absence—of evidence against Wern.16 Moreover, just like Weigel in 1917, Kieckhefer’s account of the inquisition does not include a discussion of local social and political context or, indeed, of the events that followed the trial. Among German scholars, too, the inquisition in Rothenburg remained relatively obscure until the twenty-first century. In 2001, Ludwig Schnurrer, a local historian of medieval and early modern Rothenburg, who has also edited a two-volume collection of documents from Rothenburg’s city archive, published a detailed article reconstructing the Wern affair. In it, Schnurrer conclusively interprets the trial of Hans Wern as part of a conflict between the members of the city’s sociopolitical elites, namely between Wern and Rothenburg’s burgomaster, Heinrich Toppler.17 Schnurrer’s analysis reveals a surprising richness of surviving sources; in addition to the aforementioned trial proceedings, there are letters exchanged

Identity, urban competition, inquisition 89 between burgomaster Toppler, itinerant inquisitor Heinrich Angermeier, and the bishop of Würzburg, a list of expenses incurred by Angermeier during his stay in Rothenburg and paid from the city’s treasury, as well other documents.18 However, despite his painstaking attention to recreating both the narrative and the context of the inquisition, Schnurrer shows little interest in the persona of the itinerant inquisitor or in the inquisition itself. To him, the inquisition was merely a prelude to a more serious—and more effective—embezzlement trial against Wern that succeeded in chasing the accused out of the town and stripping him of the citizenship status.19 However, just like in the case of the inquisition in Augsburg discussed in the previous chapter, the trial of Hans Wern provides a unique glimpse into the processes that instrumentalized Waldensianism and its persecution in urban conflicts.

Trouble in “Jerusalem”: heresy and urban conflict Rothenburg ob der Tauber, today a quiet provincial town thronged by tourists attracted to its late medieval architecture—an important stop on the German “Romantic Road” (Romantische Straße)—was once not quiet at all.20 One of many imperial cities in southern Germany, Rothenburg shared their political and economic ambitions. In the fourteenth century, its growth and expansion brought the city’s influence from within its walls to the lands around them. Nowhere as powerful as Nuremberg, Augsburg, or Ulm, Rothenburg and its merchant patrician government nevertheless were important players in the regional politics. In a region dominated during the fourteenth century by the prince-bishops of Würzburg and Bamberg, and by the burgraves of Nuremberg, Rothenburg was able to hold its own for a time by masterfully engaging in diplomacy with other cities and by pitting the bishops and the burgraves against each other. It was also a religious center, an “exemplary late medieval pilgrimage city.”21 Just as modern tourists swarm the city streets today, medieval pilgrims frequented Rothenburg, attracted by its hospital and the church of St. James (St. Jakobskirche, still under construction in the second half of the fourteenth century). Rothenburg’s location on the pilgrimage routes leading from central Europe to the shrine of St. James of Compostela and to Rome ensured the flow of religiously inspired visitors. Moreover, Rothenburg’s topography was even described by some as resembling that of Jerusalem, adding to the city’s fame as an important destination for pilgrims.22 The religious significance of a city fed into the political authority it was trying to project in the region. Ambitious construction of the church of St. James—the largest structure inside the city walls—in the heart of the city during most of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries coincided with the peak of Rothenburg’s prosperity and political power. This heady mix of faith and political self-reliance—as I have discussed in previous chapters—led Rothenburg’s city council to think of its city as a sacred community, whose religious status needed protection with as much zeal as its political independence. The city’s desire to present itself as a German replica of Jerusalem (or at the very least as an important religious center) gave a sense of particular urgency to Heinrich Angermeier’s

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claim that Rothenburg’s leading citizen was not merely a Waldensian, but “a founder and leader of all heretics.”23 If Hans Wern was a heretical leader, where were his followers? Considering that Wern was the only individual accused of being a heretic in Rothenburg, how believable were the accusations leveled against him? Waldensianism was not mentioned in Rothenburg’s records before 1394, although earlier anti-Waldensian persecutions did take place in the nearby Dinkelsbühl (1393), Nuremberg (1978), Würzburg (1391), as well as further south in Swabia, including the inquisition in Augsburg (1393).24 Without a doubt, by the fall of 1394, the residents of Rothenburg would have heard about a chain of anti-heretical trials happening in cities and towns nearby, some of which were Rothenburg’s allies and trading partners. In those communities, however, the Waldensians were found and punished in groups and usually came from a social strata of urban craftsmen, especially those—as in Augsburg—in the textile crafts.25 On the other hand, the existence of a Waldensian merchant, one who combined heretical ministry and long-distance trade, is present in contemporary sources from other inquisitions. Perhaps the fact that Hans Wern was accused of being a heresiarch—or a Waldensian minister—placed him into this category. Expected to travel throughout the German-speaking lands and minister to the dispersed communities of urban and rural Waldensians from Pomerania to the Rhine, the ministers had to have a reliable source of income to support themselves. We know of ministers like Hans of Plauen, an affluent merchant who came to reside in Nuremberg in 1407, or his student, Friedrich Reiser (1401–1458), son of a Waldensian merchant from Donauwörth and a notorious Waldensian preacher in his own right.26 It is possible that the Waldensian ministers, who served as leaders in their communities and possibly even supported them financially, could use their elite merchant status as a crucial asset that could possibly lend a certain degree of protection. Merchants with ties to the local governments could use their political clout to protect themselves even if their communities perished.27 If we take these facts into consideration, it is possible, then, that in the eyes of his accusers, burgomaster Heinrich Toppler and inquisitor Heinrich Angermeier, Hans Wern could have been plausibly presented as a suspect in an anti-Waldensian inquisition. Moreover, by accusing Wern of being a heretic, burgomaster Toppler was able to destroy the reputation of his potential competitor and the second richest man in the city. A letter from inquisitor Angermeier to the burgomaster preserved in Rothenburg’s archive supports the hypothesis; in it, the inquisitor responds to Toppler’s earlier invitation to visit the city in order to investigate an unspecified matter.28 The letter, albeit vague and secretive, suggests that the inquisitor was invited to Rothenburg by burgomaster Toppler to conduct an inquisition and therefore targeted Hans Wern from the beginning.

“The honorable man Heinrich Toppler”: urban conflict and elite identity Heinrich Angermeier’s target was a representative of Rothenburg’s new wealth, although in a dynamic economic environment of late medieval cities, the

Identity, urban competition, inquisition 91 difference between the “old” wealth and the new often came down to one or two generations.29 But so much sharper were the conflicts between the members of these economic groups, who spent their lives ambitiously climbing the social ladder and political hierarchy. The earliest record of the name “Wern” appears in the records from 1324 and 1329, belonging to one “Wern pistor.”30 Despite the suggestive surname “baker” (pistor), which this individual probably inherited, this probable ancestor of Hans Wern was involved in wool and wine trades, just like Wern himself. The records skip about a generation between 1329 and 1360; the first reliable evidence of Hans Wern’s familial ties exists only for himself, Leutpolt Wern (Hans’s brother), and Sifrid (either a brother or a cousin), who appear in the tax records for the year 1360.31 Despite their relatively new status in the city, the Werns proved to be financially successful: all three men appear in the records for 1377 as taxpayers and property owners. Even in the 1370s, however, Hans Wern was a clear financial heavyweight. Leutpolt’s and Sifrid’s contributions for 1377 (7 ½ and 14 ¾ pounds respectively) are dwarfed by Hans’s impressive eighty pounds paid in taxes, which made him the eleventh richest man in the city that year (with Heinrich Toppler behind him as the twelfth).32 Hans Wern’s rise to the top of Rothenburg’s society coincided with the growth of the city’s economy and, not surprisingly, with the conflict between the city’s established patriciate and the new elites during the 1360s and 1370s.33 A representative of the latter, Wern was an owner of property within the city, including his house on the Obere Schmiedgasse—a major thoroughfare in the vicinity of the seat of Rothenburg’s city council—which also featured the residence of Heinrich Toppler.34 Wern was also involved in significant merchant enterprises, including the wine trade. Rothenburg, along with most of Franconia, was renowned for its wine, and Wern’s involvement in the wine trade made him the principal supplier of wine in the city; this lucrative trade became an additional mark of prestige. For example, when Emperor Charles IV (r. 1346–78) and his heir, King Wenceslas (r. 1378–1400), were welcomed into the city in 1377 with a gift of wine “worth 50 pounds”—a common practice for honoring important dignitaries—it came from Hans Wern’s cellars.35 Politically, he had served as the burgomaster only for one term in 1379/80 but continued his public career by managing Rothenburg’s treasury. Wern also took part in a number of delegations that represented Rothenburg ob der Tauber beyond its walls in dealings with the neighboring cities.36 Although a representative of the new wealth in Rothenburg, by 1394, he was a key figure in the town’s political, social, and economic milieu. His rival, burgomaster Heinrich Toppler, also a representative of the city’s new elite, started his political career in the early 1370s at the same time as Hans Wern. Unlike Wern’s, Toppler’s family fortune can be traced back to a previous generation. Heinrich’s father, Konrad Toppler, was the first in the family to serve on the city council, having reached prosperity by trading livestock.37 Heinrich Toppler followed his father’s path into urban politics. Age thirty at the time, he was first elected to the city council and became a burgomaster in 1373; he would remain part of the city’s government until his demise and death in 1408. Between 1384 and 1403, he ruled continuously as Rothenburg’s burgomaster, successfully winning

92 Identity, urban competition, inquisition every election. After a brief interruption, he held that position again from 1406 to 1408.38 Toppler’s political career weathered the disruptive decade of warfare between the Swabian City League (of which Rothenburg was a member from 1382 to its dissolution in 1389) and the unified opposition of the regional nobility and clergy. Even after the League’s defeat, Toppler remained in power, guiding the relatively small imperial city in its interactions with the powerful bishop of Würzburg and the burgrave of Nuremberg. By early 1392, he concluded a peace treaty with the bishop of Würzburg ending over a decade of conflicts.39 Yet, like the peace treaty concluded between the bishop of Augsburg and that city in 1391, the peace between the bishop of Würzburg and Rothenburg did not eliminate the contestation of political authority between the two but merely made it less apparent. Toppler’s reign as Rothenburg’s burgomaster also coincided with the city’s ambitious territorial expansion into the surrounding countryside. Over the span of roughly two decades (c. 1380–1400), the town acquired a territory of about 173 square miles (450 km2), making it the fourth largest city-state after Nuremberg, Ulm, and Erfurt. Rothenburg’s surprising success in buying the surrounding lands from the local lords and the bishop of Würzburg came at a price—the blending of the boundaries between personal and public property of its burgomaster. When Rothenburg’s council attempted to buy the nearby estate of Nordenberg in the 1380s but could not afford the asking price of 7,000 guldens, Toppler volunteered to cover one-fifth of the sum from his personal funds. In return, he arranged to receive the landlordship over the estate; the same scheme was repeated throughout his time in office. By the end of the burgomaster’s career and life in 1408, his estates surrounded Rothenburg in a circle with a twelve-mile radius and brought him a significant personal income.40 In other words, Rothenburg’s expansion was simultaneously Toppler’s; the burgomaster was simultaneously an urban merchant and a rural overlord. Perhaps the most peculiar remnant of Heinrich Toppler’s regime in Rothenburg— and an insight into his identity and worldview—can be found just beyond the city walls, by the riverside. The river that gave Rothenburg ob der Tauber its name, the Tauber, does not actually enter the walled city. Most of Rothenburg is built on a steep hill rising from the riverbank, while the river, a placid tributary of the Main, flows northward nearby. Standing by the water, one can only see the city walls atop the vineyards on the hillside, away from the modern-day tourist crowds visiting the crown jewel of the German Romantic Road. The tourists are a modern phenomenon, but Rothenburg in the late fourteenth century, at its economic peak, was probably just as busy and filled with activity. Away from the hum, din, and smoke of medieval urban life, Toppler built a structure that summarized his character and ambition in perfect clarity. Called “Toppler’s Little Castle” (Topplerschlösschen) in modern guidebooks, the building is a two-story-high tower, crowned with a whitewashed half-timber house typical of German urban architecture.41 The only entrance, opening to a small stone bridge, suggests that waters from the nearby river could be directed to flood the depressed area around the base of the tower to create an improvised moat. Toppler built his “castle,” or rather his fortified house, in 1388, after over a decade as Rothenburg’s burgomaster. Rothenburg’s role in the Swabian

Identity, urban competition, inquisition 93

Figure 4.1 Topplerschlösschen, 2013 Source: Photograph courtesy of Xylome

City League left Toppler anxious about the outcome of the war between the League and the princely alliance of the bishops and the regional nobility, and about his future security. As he proclaimed on a plaque affixed to the structure’s fortified wall, “this house was built by the honorable man Heinrich Toppler, at the time

94 Identity, urban competition, inquisition burgomaster of Rothenburg, with his own funds and labor.”42 Notably, he began the construction before the Peace of Eger of 1389 and its disastrous outcome for all members of the League including Rothenburg. Judging by the text of the plaque, Toppler was keen to present his suburban “castle” as a direct result of the worsening hostilities and as a safe house built by a person of local importance to weather the crisis. According to the inscription, the house was built “in the year of the arduous war between princes and all the nobility on one side, and all the cities, which were bound together [by a treaty] on the other side, in the German lands.”43 Such dramatic and inflated description of the conflict—a war of all the nobles against all the cities—in turn, elevated Toppler’s own role in the conflict. He was a hero of the war for Rothenburg’s very existence, resolute in his stand along with other cities; an honorable leader seeing the community in his charge through the crisis. The castle and the plaque were Toppler’s way to ensure he was remembered this way. And yet the building neatly summarizes Toppler’s ambition and social aspirations. On one hand, the fortified house with a makeshift moat located outside the city walls was a symbol of knightly self-reliance. Its walls, featuring decorative crenellations and narrow arrow slits, have more in common with the castles of the very nobles Rothenburg and its allies struggled against in the 1380s. The upper part of the “castle,” however, resembles the house of an urban merchant: half-timbered, with wider crown glass windows and a tall gable on the roof. Simultaneously a castle tower and an urban residence, its conflicting halves make the structure seem strangely unstable and out-of-place in both the city and the countryside. The building’s location, moreover, within the view of city walls, but separated from them by a river, makes it occupy a liminal position and makes one question its actual purpose. How effective could such a “castle” have been given the conflict that ravaged Upper Germany and pitted its most powerful cities against the equally ambitious bishops and princes? The building’s height—especially of its “castle” half— probably made it indefensible against anyone armed with a ladder, hardly a wartime stronghold. If Toppler wanted to be protected against the enemies of his city, Rothenburg’s impressive system of city walls and the men defending them would have proved to be a better defense. It is equally improbable that the “castle’s” fortifications would have been effective against Rothenburg’s citizens themselves, had they decided to confront Toppler and force him to flee the city. Not an investment in personal security, Toppler’s castle was rather a statement of his political and social aspirations. Indefensible and isolated, Toppler’s “castle,” like the coat of arms he received from the Duke of Bavaria some years earlier in 1382, stands in stark opposition to his role as a burgomaster of an imperial city.44 Both attributes defy the communal ethos of its merchant elites and suggest that the “castle” was built to deliver a powerful message about its owner’s social standing. Unlike the prevalent city-centric mentality that viewed the city walls as both a practical and symbolic boundary that separated urban order from rural disorder and danger, Toppler consciously built his “castle” as a statement that combined the two.45 Engaged in expanding

Identity, urban competition, inquisition 95 his city’s territory and its regional influence, Toppler saw himself as a master of his own city—both a merchant and a lord—and a man, who could afford to build a suburban dwelling that portrayed him as such. And yet, his “castle” remained an awkward combination of an urban dwelling and a rural keep, built on the border between city and countryside, foreign in both environments. Not surprisingly, when Toppler’s political fortune ran out in the early fifteenth century, his “castle” could not defend him against the enraged burghers of Rothenburg.46 Can the suburban “castle” suggest an explanation for the burgomaster’s prolonged conflict with Hans Wern that began with the inquisition of 1394? On a more pragmatic level, Toppler’s “castle,” his suburban estates, and even his coat of arms demonstrate the burgomaster’s ever-growing political and social ambitions. Toppler’s coat of arms, featuring a pair of dice, black and white—a play on the Middle High German word for “dice,” Toppeln—was clearly a point of pride for its owner, a clever pun on his name.47 Toppler’s rival, Hans Wern, had a coat of arms as well; by contrast, Wern’s design was much more utilitarian, a capital letter “W” on a shield, hardly a product of much thought. Toppler’s, on the other hand, fits with his carefully cultivated self-image.48 His financial power had also been on the rise since 1374, when he was listed in the tax records as the seventeenth richest person in Rothenburg; by 1377 Toppler rose to the twelfth place (lagging behind Wern both times). By the time of his death in 1408, the burgomaster’s wealth was without a rival and he paid 310 guldens in taxes.49 In other words, Toppler was a man on the rise, with plenty of political ambition both within and outside Rothenburg and in the process of assuring and expanding his power in the city. These aspects of Toppler’s character provide us with a background for his conflict with Hans Wern, another leading member of Rothenburg’s merchant elites, although he did not demonstrate as much political ambition as Toppler. The question of Wern’s actual ability or desire to compete with Toppler can be safely set aside. As David Shaw observes in his study of late medieval English urban elites, legal conflicts were used by the burgesses to construct and perform their social selves. Litigiousness asserted aggressive masculinity and demonstrated an individual’s sense of property and honor, even when there was little reason for it.50 For Toppler, counted among the “late medieval tyrants in German cities” by historian Hartmut Boockmann, this sense of entitlement extended beyond his own property and included Rothenburg itself; a competitor, even if not a direct one, was not to be tolerated.51 As Shaw points out, for the urban elites, honor was “was not merely a yes or no question for themselves, it was necessarily converted socially through [the] value of hierarchy into a current league table ranking . . . There was no class division, so nothing was settled and certain.”52 In a sense, Toppler’s political life in Rothenburg depended on his unrelenting climb to the top of the city’s social ladder. But then so did Wern’s, and the removal of a potential rival from the city’s hierarchical “league table” was an understandable concern on Toppler’s part. The inquisition in Rothenburg is an example of a less direct form of urban competition. Toppler’s decision to invite an itinerant inquisitor from outside the city and the diocese demonstrates his determination to accuse Hans Wern of

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being a heretic without involving clergy members from his own city. It is possible that the rumors of Heinrich Angermeier holding anti-Waldensian trials in Wemding, Donauwörth, and Dinkelsbühl in the fall of 1393 prompted Toppler to invite the inquisitor to Rothenburg to investigate heresy there. Rumors of the anti-Waldensian inquisitions that took place in the region a year earlier probably exacerbated fears of heresy in Rothenburg itself and would have made Toppler’s accusations against Wern seem more plausible. The burgomaster’s decision to involve an inquisitor and to entrust him with the delicate task of eliminating his political opponent may have come to him through an extensive network of familial affiliations Toppler built in Swabia and Central Franconia during the 1380s and early 1390s. A shrewd urban politician as well as merchant, Toppler excelled in establishing ties that benefited him both financially and politically. The social trajectory of Toppler’s marriages supports this interpretation. His first two marriages allied him with powerful families in Rothenburg; this allowed Toppler to join the city’s leading financial circles and acquire crucial supporters on the city council.53 After the death of his second wife around 1390, Toppler’s political ambitions led him to look for a spouse outside the city; after all, by then his social status has outstripped any other family in Rothenburg itself. The choice of a bride from an influential family from another imperial city, on the other hand, promised a chance of extending Toppler’s political and economic influence in the region. In 1392 Toppler made a marriage alliance with a patrician family from Nördlingen, an imperial city about forty miles to the south. Compared to his previous marriage, his union with Margaretha Mayler of Nördlingen was not financially profitable in the short term, as it brought him “only” 900 guldens in dowry. Nevertheless, the marriage provided Toppler with a diplomatic foothold in the neighboring town. One of the leading cities in the Swabian City League, Nördlingen and its ruling patrician families were crucial allies in the region.54 Thus, Toppler’s diplomatic and familial ties to Swabia kept him informed about the anti-Waldensian inquisitions taking place there. Finally, by using the same notorious inquisitor as the earlier trials, the burgomaster also made his own attack on Hans Wern seem part of the same antiheretical campaign, despite a year-long gap. It is unclear whether Toppler realized that by inviting an itinerant inquisitor, he antagonized the bishop on whose direct prerogative he was encroaching. After all, as Richard Kieckhefer observes, canon law reserved to the Church the right “of determining whether an alleged heretic actually subscribed to heterodox doctrine.”55 And yet, even after the bishop responded to the inquest against Hans Wern and even sent his vicar-general to preside over the trial, Heinrich Angermeier continued to search for the elusive proof of Wern’s guilt, no doubt prompted by his ambitious patron.

“Venerable and prudent man”: Heinrich Angermeier between Augsburg and Rothenburg By the fall of 1394, Heinrich Angermeier, whose peak of activity took place in Swabia and southern Franconia a year earlier, had undoubtedly attained some

Identity, urban competition, inquisition 97 degree of regional notoriety. Having earned his metaphorical spurs in July and August of 1393 in Augsburg, Angermeier continued his activities in the diocese. It is possible that at least in part his involvement in a series of smaller persecutions was directed by the desire to apprehend those heretics who, as the chronicler reports, had fled Augsburg to avoid prosecution.56 This may also explain the somewhat harsher punishment assigned to the Waldensians found in Wemding, Dinkelsbühl, and Donauwörth. Unfortunately, these smaller campaigns have left only fragmentary evidence; they are, however, mentioned briefly in the chronicles from Augsburg and Nördlingen, indicating that even smaller persecutions were deemed important enough to record. Moreover, all contemporary chronicle accounts mention the inquisitions in these cities as part of the same group and, presumably, sharing the same persecutor. On November 12 (St. Nicholas’s Day), the inquisitor presided over the trial in Dinkelsbühl, a city only twenty-two miles south of Rothenburg.57 In Dinkelsbühl, where Angermeier conducted a trial similar to the one that took place in Augsburg, we can observe in a surviving trial record an itinerant inquisitor acting as a judge. If, as far as the chronicle sources allow us to surmise, the trial in Augsburg involved predominantly the city’s residents, the one in Dinkelsbühl was by definition a product of long-distance contacts, an environment where the itinerant inquisitors were best-suited to perform their duties. Out of the eleven convicted women and men listed in the records, at least half are indicated as originating from outside Dinkelsbühl; some of the accused came from places as distant as Bayreuth (Diocese of Bamberg), Weissenburg (Diocese of Eichstätt), and even Austria. The origin of the accused is important since it demonstrates the complicated demographics of the German Waldensians in the later fourteenth century. It is, moreover, possible that the very reason why Angermeier, described as “a priest from Bamberg,” began his inquisitorial activity in and around Augsburg was to pursue the heretics from his own diocese—like Elizabeth of Bayreuth, one of the women on trial in Dinkelsbühl—who may have found refuge in Swabia.58 A surprising range of geographic origins among the accused is matched by an equally intriguing list of clergy present at the trial. While it seems ordinary that representatives from various religious institutions in Dinkelsbühl were in attendance, as well as a representative of the bishop of Augsburg, some of the guests at the trial seem unexpected. Besides the inquisitor himself, there were in attendance: men of God, Heinrich Weringer, canon of the Augsburg Cathedral, Brother Konrad, prior of the Carmelite order [in Dinkelsbühl], lord Gerung, deacon and rector of the same [church] in Dinkelsbühl, Heinrich Trub of Weissenburg, Seyfrid, a cursor from Speckbach, Tyermann, rector of the parish church in Hausen, lord Johan Crochler and lord Georg de Gyengen, priests from dioceses of Eichstätt, Worms, and Augsburg.59 The list of ecclesiastical attendees at the trial was rounded off by representatives of the city council, Dinkelsbühl’s patrician elites.60

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Presiding over the trial witnessed by so many important guests was inquisitor Angermeier himself, styled in the record as a “venerable and prudent man, lord and master Heinrich, called Angermayr, representative of lord Burkhard . . . Bishop of Augsburg, concerning the Waldensian sect.”61 The record leaves no doubt that by November of 1393, Angermeier was acting as the fully authorized episcopal inquisitor. Notably, his “specialization” in pursuing Waldensians was the direct consequence of his involvement in the Augsburg inquisition only a few months earlier. Fully deputized by the bishop, Angermeier condemned ten Waldensians to wear penitential crosses and possibly even condemned two of them to death at the stake. Although the trial record itself does not mention the executions, chronicle reports confirm that “two [of the accused] were burned” (combusti sunt duo).62 It is possible that the two executed Waldensians were among the initial ten but relapsed and were burned at the stake later. The brief and fragmentary nature of the surviving evidence for the inquisitions in Dinkelsbühl and a trial that occurred a month later in Donauwörth (December 6, 1393) does not allow us to analyze the social status of Angermeier’s victims.63 Nevertheless, there are indications that the targets of his inquisitorial activity in late 1393 were of higher economic standing, perhaps even comparable to that of Hans Wern in Rothenburg. At least one of the men on trial in Dinkelsbühl, Cuntz Wolffaher (Konrad Wolfnaher), was a man of property, which his heirs later renounced.64 Likewise, in Donauwörth, a house owned by one of the individuals on trial (and possibly confiscated and resold) was sizable enough to be donated by its later owners to the city’s hospital.65 These indications of wealth of at least some of Waldensians persecuted by Angermeier in the fall of 1393 suggest an additional motive for pursuing heresy in Swabia—the property belonging to the executed was confiscated by the bishop of Augsburg.66 Even if this was not the main reason for unleashing Heinrich Angermeier on the towns in his diocese, financial penalties and confiscations provided an additional impetus to conducting a systematic persecution of heretics in the region. An unusually diverse audience at Angermeier’s inquisitorial trial in Dinkelsbühl suggests an additional function of public inquisitorial trials. In addition to contributing to social discipline by demonstrating the reality of punishment and publicly shaming those who were associated with heretical communities, these spectacles of punishment also helped to further an itinerant inquisitor’s fame by demonstrating the end result of his ability to identify and apprehend heretics.67 At the trial, as one can see from the Dinkelsbühl protocol, the inquisitor emerged as a figure of crucial importance. An unnamed “priest” (pfaff) from the Augsburg chronicle became a highly-specialized representative of the bishop, in charge of eradicating the Waldensians.68 Whether the guests attending the trial—both lay and clerical—were invited for a specific purpose or simply happened to be in Dinkelsbühl on the day, their presence not only lent authority to the proceedings but also helped to spread Heinrich Angermeier’s fame throughout the region. During the fall and early winter of 1393, Angermeier persecuted heretics within the diocese of Augsburg, having received permission to do so from the bishop, but he was possibly preparing to expand his operations further. Dinkelsbühl is located

Identity, urban competition, inquisition 99 in the very north of the diocese of Augsburg, on the border with the dioceses of Würzburg to the north and Eichstätt to the east. It was, therefore, a perfect location to hold a public trial in order to introduce the inquisitors’ name to clerical dignitaries from other provinces (even, presumably, from the diocese of Worms on the distant Rhine). Thus, it was probably the inquisition in Dinkelsbühl that brought Heinrich Angermeier’s career to the attention of Heinrich Toppler. Although it appears from the sources that the first meeting between the two men took place in or shortly before September of 1394—almost a year after the trial at Dinkelsbühl—the cities are only twenty-two miles apart and rumors about the trial must have certainly reached Rothenburg before that.69 Aside from his connections to Nördlingen through his third wife, Toppler was in the process of arranging the marriage of his oldest daughter, Barbara, to an heir of the wealthy Wernitzer family from Dinkelsbühl.70 Another possible reason for Toppler’s interest in Angermeier’s antiheretical activity could have been expressed in a bitter remark by the chronicler from Nördlingen, which accused the inquisitor and his patrons of having venal motives behind sending people to the stake. The chronicler, Hans Mair, a city councilor of Nördlingen (d. 1407), notes and then repeats his accusation that the “lords of those who were burned [have] received their goods and released the poor. I believe that the principal cause [of that practice] was evil [that is, financial gain].”71 Not only was Heinrich Angermeier operating in the area that Toppler knew well (and probably visited often), but the inquisitor was also known for persecuting the wealthy. In other words, inquisitor Angermeier was a unique fit for Toppler’s purposes.

Inquisition, heresy, and urban honor By employing an inquisitor from outside of Rothenburg and even the diocese, burgomaster Toppler bypassed the hierarchy that might have been less sympathetic to his use of an inquisitorial trial for political gain. It also created a number of difficulties. An outsider in Rothenburg, Heinrich Angermeier’s investigation would have been impossible without access to various resources. Even if we assume that Angermeier himself might have been motivated by the desire to rid the city of a dangerous heretic, he was in dire need of local patronage especially in absence of an authorization to proceed from the bishop of Würzburg. While the trial record studied by Weigel and Kieckhefer does not provide any indication to the identity of Angermeier’s patron, a cache of documents discovered in the city archives by Ludwig Schnurrer makes it abundantly clear that burgomaster Toppler not only invited the inquisitor to Rothenburg, but fully funded him from the municipal treasury as well. Moreover, among these documents, there even exists a list of expenses for which the inquisitor was—presumably—reimbursed despite his failure to prove that Wern was a Waldensian. Despite its cryptic content, the list of expenses demonstrates that Angermeier acted with the full support of the city council, a proof of the inquisitor’s ability to associate himself with powerful patrons regardless of their origins.72

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What kinds of expenses does the list include? A unique piece of evidence, it contains information about a series of voyages undertaken by Heinrich Angermeier outside of Rothenburg—presumably in order to find further proof of Hans Wern’s Waldensian beliefs. According to the document, Angermeier’s employment was quite lucrative and allowed him to travel in relative comfort. Among the expenses were purchases of mules and provisions for an escort consisting of two armed guards. While the document does not provide any details about the exact reasons for Angermeier’s investigative expeditions, a wide range of destinations visited by the inquisitor—including Ulm, Nördlingen, Augsburg, and Würzburg—suggest that he and his patron did not spare any expenses while searching for the elusive proof of Hans Wern’s guilt. Twenty-seven guldens alone were spent on food for the inquisitor and his entourage, while payments for Angermeier’s visits to various locations across the region are interspersed with sums paid to him for unspecified expenses. Overall, the expense account totaled at 53 guldens 259 pounds and 4 silver shillings heller, an impressive sum that suggests that Toppler was ready to apply the city’s financial resources to the task of getting rid of his economic and political competitor.73 Given the narrow focus of the inquisition, and the fact that Angermeier acted without episcopal permission and was essentially retained by Rothenburg’s city council, it may be surprising that Bishop Gerhard of Würzburg did not simply dismiss Angermeier’s accusations without proceeding any further. The bishop’s reaction, however, demonstrates that even if he did not believe the accusations against Wern (as his support of Wern both before and after the trial demonstrates), he decided to conduct a formal inquest in order to reaffirm his authority to conduct such proceedings on his own terms. This may explain why he appointed his vicar-general, Walter Schubel, as an episcopal judge presiding over the trial, instead of relying on local clergy from Rothenburg or any number of more juniorranking clerics at his disposal. The bishop’s motivation in Hans Wern’s trial was similar to the motivation of the bishop of Augsburg when Heinrich Angermeier discovered Waldensians in that city. An inquisition was a bishop’s way of reaffirming his authority at the time when such reaffirmation was necessary in order to keep the defiant city in line. Crucially, Gerhard of Schwarzburg (r. 1372–1400), bishop of Würzburg, did not oppose delegating the task of pursuing heresy to an itinerant inquisitor per se. Just a few years earlier, in 1391, he had entrusted another itinerant inquisitor, Martin of Amberg, with the investigation of Waldensians in Würzburg itself, in response to the city’s attempt to gain more political independence.74 In the case of Rothenburg, however, the bishop had to react to a presence of an unauthorized “heresy-hunter” preparing an inquisitorial trial in one of his diocese’s most prosperous cities. While he did not take usurpation of his authority lightly, the bishop, who had concluded his conflict with Rothenburg only two years earlier, had to operate in an environment that precluded any direct action against Angermeier and Toppler or risk the reopening of the conflict.75 From his perspective, he had the power of due process on his side. If the inquisition in Rothenburg was spurred by Heinrich Toppler’s desire to get rid of a possible political opponent, then a properly conducted trial ending in an acquittal constituted the best possible

Identity, urban competition, inquisition 101 outcome for the bishop: restoration of Hans Wern’s reputation and public humiliation for the unwelcome itinerant inquisitor. Indeed, the very involvement of Walter Schubel, his vicar-general, was meant to produce an acquittal and to remind Rothenburg’s city council and its burgomaster that they were encroaching on the bishop’s jurisdiction. Schubel became the vicar-general for the Würzburg diocese only a few months before the trial, having previously occupied positions as a cathedral canon there, as well as in Bamberg, Augsburg, and Eichstätt.76 Moreover, he had been involved in an earlier inquisitorial trial at Eichstätt in 1381, if only as a witness, and therefore was familiar with the process.77 The trial, which ended on November 16, 1394, accomplished both of the bishop’s goals. After Wern brought to court more than sixty-one individuals, who all swore to his good character and orthodoxy, Walter Schubel proclaimed Wern a good Catholic and ended the trial.78 The proverbial ball was in Toppler’s court. After the inquisitorial trial was formally over and Hans Wern was acquitted of all charges, Toppler and the inquisitor in his employ continued to look for incriminating evidence against him. However extensive were Heinrich Angermeier’s expeditions in search of new evidence of Hans Wern’s heretical beliefs, he was not able to uncover anything new. Setting aside the notion that Angermeier’s travels were nothing more than an elaborate show to justify his (and Toppler’s) continued harassment of Hans Wern, we can only speculate about the kind of evidence Heinrich Angermeier was trying to find on these voyages. It stands to reasons that his visits to Würzburg and possibly Augsburg were meant for investigating any vestiges of the Waldensian communities there; it is also possible that Angermeier attempted to acquire the support for his inquest from the bishop of Würzburg himself. Other destinations are harder to explain. The inquisitor visited Nördlingen, Oettingen (twice), and Weissenburg, possibly looking for evidence of Waldensian activity and its links to Wern there. All three towns were located south of Rothenburg and in the region where Angermeier conducted his earlier inquisitions in the fall of 1393. Finally, the inquisitor visited Ulm (about seventy miles from Rothenburg), an important commercial center in the region, albeit without any known Waldensian activity. And yet, Angermeier traveled to Ulm twice, accompanied by an armed escort, which suggests that these voyages were clearly important to him (and presumably his patron). Expeditions to Ulm alone account for almost half of Angermeier’s expenses (twenty guldens and twelve pounds total!) and appear among the first on the list.79 Angermeier’s frantic search for evidence brought no results. But on another level, this constant search for nonexistent proof of Hans Wern’s guilt succeeded in putting the merchant and his civic reputation under constant scrutiny and suspicion. Given Rothenburg’s self-produced image as a pilgrim hub and a German “Jerusalem,” even unproven accusations could leave a real stain on one’s reputation. Once repeated enough in public, even the most unfounded claims crossed over into the realm of rumors, doubt, and infamy. Walter Schubel’s acquittal of Hans Wern put a procedural end to Angermeier’s accusations, but it did not destroy all suspicions and fully restore Wern’s reputation. Even after Wern’s acquittal, the inquisitor continued to look for more evidence, prompting

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the bishop to write to Toppler on Wern’s behalf inquiring about the continued harassment of Wern.80 Unwilling to wait until Toppler complied with the court’s decision, Wern left the city in early December of 1394 and temporarily moved to Würzburg to stay there under the bishop’s protection. This desperate, if somewhat naïve move probably worsened Wern’s situation, however, since the bishop was still remembered as Rothenburg’s principal rival; Wern’s attempt to seek justice at the bishop’s side was no doubt raising questions about his loyalty to the city. Moreover, perhaps in hope of gaining additional legal protection, Wern acquired citizen rights from Würzburg in February 1395, in a clear contradiction to his citizen’s oath to Rothenburg.81 The inquisition in Rothenburg presents an interesting aberration from, or even a reversal of, a more usual narrative of an inquisition initiated by the Church. Instead, in Rothenburg, the secular authorities in the city accused a citizen of their city of being a heretic, while the bishop of Würzburg brought the authority of the Church to the defense of the accused. Although on the surface the acquittal of Hans Wern may appear as a victory of the bishop’s authority over Rothenburg’s, in reality the inquisition was a prelude to a more sinister second act of the campaign against the merchant. By February of 1395, Wern was on trial again, this time for crimes thoroughly within the competence of Rothenburg’s city council: embezzlement from the city’s treasury and its hospital and misuse of power while serving on the city council. The crime of embezzlement, not an unsurprising charge considering Wern’s involvement with Rothenburg’s treasury and tax collection, left him completely at the mercy of the Toppler-controlled city council.82 Even more importantly, Wern’s position in the city and his urban honor derived from high economic status were severely undermined—if not erased altogether— by the earlier inquisitorial campaign. Accusations of Waldensianism, while dismissed by the Church officials, left a stain of “indelible suspicion” on Hans Wern’s reputation.83 Indeed, the very involvement of the bishop of Würzburg, the city’s recent enemy, in the trial and Wern’s later sojourn under the bishop’s protection in Würzburg was perceived as an act of betrayal. While the bishop could protect Wern from the accusations of Heinrich Angermeier, he also opened him to the suspicions of civic disloyalty. Viewed from this perspective, the inquisition against Hans Wern was not a failure on the part of burgomaster Toppler, but rather the first act of an urban drama meant to weaken its victim in time for the subsequent trial. While the bishop’s involvement was tolerated in the matters of heresy, any further involvement on behalf of Hans Wern was perceived as a hostile overreach. In October of 1395, when the bishop attempted to influence the course of the second municipal trial—using Walter Schubel once again as his representative—the city council probably reminded him that he was not to meddle in Rothenburg’s internal affairs. The bishop restricted his involvement to asking for Wern—“an old and sick man” by then—not to be kept imprisoned in the harsh conditions of the city’s jail.84 Having been convicted, Wern was finally let out of jail in midMarch of 1396; in exchange for his freedom, he was forced to pay a staggering fine of 2,000 guldens and to renew his citizen oath of loyalty to Rothenburg.85 Toppler was finally able to rid himself of a potential competitor. Although, given

Identity, urban competition, inquisition 103 the state of evidence, it is impossible to say whether there was any truth to Toppler’s allegations about Wern’s malfeasance, the inquisitorial trial that opened the conflict between the two richest men in Rothenburg might have acted as a kind of character assassination, forced Wern to flee the city, and allowed Toppler to prepare the embezzlement case against him. Despite Angermeier’s ultimate failure to prove Hans Wern’s heretical beliefs, the trial affected Wern’s fama; the mere act of escaping harassment from the inquisitor became perceived as a flight from justice and the abandonment of his citizen’s oath, providing yet another reason for the persecution.86 By accusing Wern of being a heretic and putting him on trial, Toppler tugged at the very fabric of urban society and identity. Like the bishop and the city of Augsburg in the previous chapter, Toppler instrumentalized fear and threat of heresy, but unlike them, he used it to destroy one’s personal, not communal, identity. As David Shaw demonstrates, “fidelity, honor, and hierarchy [were] at the center of urban life.”87 These notions were the interpretive framework of medieval cities; even unconsciously, they provided meaning to every public action undertaken by medieval city-dwellers. Heresy cut across all three. It undermined the fidelity to one’s community, the Church, and to God himself. It stained honor, visibly breaking taboos and polluting not only the individual but everyone who came in contact with her or him. If honor, to quote Georg Simmel, allowed a group to preserve “its unified character and its distinctness from the other groups within the same inclusive association,” even as a suspect, Wern undermined civic unity and was bound to be excluded.88 Finally, suspicions of heresy upended the hierarchy, opening the community as a whole to outside threats. Wern’s attempt to defend himself by involving the bishop was perhaps the rational choice of action, but it saw him going beyond his community and inviting a dangerous outsider. Wern’s decision to flee the city after the trial broke the sacred vow of his citizen oath during the period when such oaths were becoming centerpieces of the city-centric worldview that linked the city of God and the city of man.89 Wern was acquitted, of course. Was this enough to erase the stain on his reputation? Not to all. First, Wern was acquitted by an outsider, by a representative of the city’s sworn enemy. Second, no judicial decision could extinguish the rumors or restore reputation. Just as with the widow from Augsburg, harassed decades later because her husband was rumored to have been among the heretics burned in 1393, even after his acquittal, Wern remained in a weakened position socially.90 His reputation could never recover fully and, in turn, could be used to accuse him of financial dishonesty. Even eight years later, suspicions of him being a heretic found their way into the record of the whole affair.91 Even if Toppler was fully aware that Heinrich Angermeier’s accusations against Wern were doomed, his success lay in being able to destroy Wern’s reputation beyond recovery. Much like a mutilated face—a sign of dishonor in late medieval cities—that could never heal without a mark, so the stain of suspicion in cases dealing with heresy was indelible.92 Even after paying the exorbitant fine of 2,000 guldens in exchange for his freedom and a renewed Rothenburg citizenship, Wern continued to be a threat to

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Toppler’s economic and political dominance in the city. Unwilling to remain in the city that turned so hostile to him, Wern engineered his second departure from Rothenburg, this time a permanent one. In the first days of 1400, Wern fled first to Nuremberg and then, in a move that was clearly meant as a final insult to Toppler and the city council, to Ansbach, a town mere eighteen miles away from Rothenburg. Despite its proximity, Ansbach was the seat of the Hohenzollern burgraves of Nuremberg, the regional overlords, and traditional enemies of Rothenburg. If Wern’s decision to seek help from the bishop of Würzburg in 1394 was probably spontaneous, his selection of Burgrave Friedrich VI (r. 1398–1427) as his new patron was a shrewd geopolitical move that not only provided Wern with a stable and secure residence, but no doubt antagonized Toppler. There, in Ansbach, Wern died in the summer of 1406.93 Somewhat ironically, if Wern’s flight from Rothenburg in 1400 signified Toppler’s ultimate victory in a feud between them, his triumph did not last long. 1400 was a year of crucial changes throughout the Holy Roman Empire, and Toppler’s ambitious foreign policy could not keep up with the changing political tides. The summer of 1400 saw Wenceslas, King of the Romans and de facto Holy Roman Emperor dethroned by the German electors; Count Palatine Rupert of Wintelsbach was chosen to replace him. Within a few years, the situation closer to Rothenburg was also changing. The new bishop of Würzburg, Johann I of Egloffstein (r. 1400–1411) and—a few years prior—a new burgrave of Nuremberg, Friedrich VI (r. 1398–1440) presented new challenges for the aging Toppler. In 1405, faced with the growing pressure from the burgrave, the burgomaster reached out to the recently deposed King Wenceslas for help; the news of this treasonous behavior pitted Toppler (and Rothenburg) against the formidable coalition of the regional nobility, the bishop, and the princes of the empire.94 In the end, after a brief war, the city council of Rothenburg—without Toppler—negotiated a peace settlement that allowed the city to come out virtually unscathed. The price for such leniency was its burgomaster. In early April of 1408, Toppler was arrested during the city council meeting, charged with various abuses of power, and thrown into the dungeon. A few months later, he died there before the councilors who toppled him could decide his fate.95 *** The inquisition in Rothenburg challenges and adds to our understanding of the anti-Waldensian persecutions of the 1390s. At first glance, the inquisition in Rothenburg consisted of the same elements as the trial in Augsburg, albeit with a different outcome: an itinerant inquisitor, threat of heretical presence, and the city council and powerful regional bishop engaged in a political tug-of-war. Although the persecution of heresy was most evidently instrumentalized by the burgomaster, the bishop’s response demonstrates a similar attempt to use a political trial for extending his authority over the imperial city. If in Augsburg the bishop did so by persecuting heresy, in Rothenburg, the bishop used the trial that ended in an acquittal (uncommon during this period) as a demonstration of his competence and control in the matters of religion. By insisting on remaining in control of

Identity, urban competition, inquisition 105 the inquisition in Rothenburg, the bishop reminded its citizens of his pastoral duties and even wrestled his right to judge heresy away from the overly ambitious burgomaster. Taken in context, however, the trial of Hans Wern acquired additional meaning. Unlike in Augsburg, where both the trial itself and the punishment became points of contestation between the city council and the bishop, in Rothenburg the accusations of heresy were an important prelude to an internal conflict among the urban elites, with the bishop of Würzburg playing an important, but not a central, part. While both sides exploited the political potential of the inquisitorial trial, Toppler was able to use even the unsuccessful inquisition as a tool against his political opponent. His access to an itinerant inquisitor allowed the burgomaster to circumvent established ecclesiastical hierarchy and to control the affair without being directly implicated in it. By approaching inquisitor Angermeier and inviting him to Rothenburg, by keeping him on the city’s payroll, and by putting Hans Wern on trial, Toppler followed his ambitious plan for removing a possible political opponent from the city. Even after the suspect was acquitted by an episcopal judge, Toppler’s access to the inquisitor allowed the burgomaster to continue harassing Wern. Eventually, Angermeier’s continuous accusations forced Wern to leave the city, allowing Toppler to exploit the city-centric worldview of late medieval cities, steeped in “fidelity, honor, and hierarchy” that saw the very act of leaving the confines of a town as a transgression that endangered the individual’s moral status.96 Wern’s decision to seek protection at the bishop’s side was interpreted as an act of treason—after all, Bishop Gerhard and Rothenburg had only recently been fighting each other during the 1380s—and made the task of accusing Wern of embezzlement easier, with his affected fama as proof of his guilt. Even if Toppler’s attempt to get rid of a potential rival by accusing him of being a heretic failed, his eventual success in eliminating Hans Wern from Rothenburg’s political stage demonstrates the corrosive effect of accusations of heresy on civic reputation and their political potential from the late medieval urban perspective. The case studies of Augsburg and Rothenburg ob der Tauber demonstrate the instrumentalization of heresy in ecclesiastical, political, and social conflicts between the cities and within their walls. Even mere rumors of heretics living in a city affected its reputation and undermined its image of a self-contained sacred commune, a miniature Christendom (corpus christianum).97 While such rumors— if not addressed—could make urban governments appear unable to deal with the heretical threat, and therefore undermine their political authority, they could also strain relationships between cities. Both allies and competitors, late medieval cities and their governments understood heresy as not only dangerous to the spiritual well-being of individual communities but also as contagious; fleeing persecution, heretics could easily find support in a different town, “infecting” it with their presence. As a result, once they were engaged in an anti-heretical campaign in their own city, some urban governments used their diplomatic ties and regional influence to induce neighboring cities to follow suit. The next two chapters will examine three anti-Waldensian inquisitions in Strasbourg (1400), Bern (1399–1400), and Fribourg (1399), with particular attention to

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the place of heresy in late medieval political competition and cooperation between urban governments, other cities, and ecclesiastical elites. All three campaigns occurred roughly simultaneously, prompted by the diplomatic efforts of Bern’s city council. However, each persecution produced a different outcome, contingent upon the actions of each city’s ruling elites. By examining the relationship between heresy and honor, this chapter will discuss the role of anti-heretical inquisitions in maintaining urban reputation, the common good, and the ideal of good citizenship. By the late 1390s, the presence of a heretical community in a city became a shameful fact that could tarnish the image that a city projected beyond its walls to its rivals and allies alike. As a result, cities had to react either by eradicating the shameful heretical community or by hiding or obscuring its existence.

Notes 1 For a narrative overview of the inquisition, see Schnurrer, “Der Fall Hans Wern,” 31–35; Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 72–73. 2 Alexander Patschovsky, “Waldenser und Hussiten,” in Handbuch für Bayerische Kirchengeschichte, ed. Walter Brandmüller, vol. 1: Von den Anfängen bis zur Schwelle der Neuzeit (St. Ottilien: EOS-Verlag, 1999), 764–65; Christian Bürckstümmer, ed. “Waldenser in Dinkelsbühl,” Beiträge zur bayerischen Kirchengeschichte 19 (1913), 272–75; “Chronik von 1368–1406 mit Fortsetzung bis 1447,” CsSA, vol. 1, 97; Mair, “Nördlingani brevis Historia,” 620. 3 For the proceedings of the trial in which Hans Wern was acquitted, see Helmut Weigel, “Ein Waldenserverhör in Rothenburg im Jahre 1394,” Beiträge zur bayerischen Kirchengeschichte 23 (1917), 83–86. 4 Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 61–62. German Waldensians lived in tightly knit communities and were usually prosecuted in groups as well. 5 Ludwig Schnurrer, “Rothenburg und das Hochstift Würzburg im Mittelalter,” in Rothenburg im Mittelalter. Studien zur Geschichte einer fränkischen Reichsstadt, ed. Ludwig Schnurrer (Rothenburg ob der Tauber: Verlag des Vereins Alt-Rothenburg, 1997), 247–53. 6 Schnurrer, “Der Fall Hans Wern,” 49: “do gab er dem rate zu erkennen, der were aller ketzer hauptman und vorgener, und nennet Hansen Weren.” 7 On Wern’s involvement with and support of various religious institutions in Rothenburg ob der Tauber, see Schnurrer, “Der Fall Hans Wern,” 27–29. See also, Gerlinde Schlenker and Helmut Flachenecker, “Gerhard von Schwarzburg (1313–1400),” in BHRR, 900–02. 8 Weigel, “Waldenserverhör in Rothenburg,” 83: “magistiri Heinrici Angermair, se nominantis inquisitore heretice pravitatis de heresi et specialiater de erroribus hereticorum de secta Waldensium,” (my emphasis). 9 Weigel, “Waldenserverhör in Rothenburg,” 85: “quod bonus laicus habeat potestatem audiendi confessiones et a peccatis absolvendi.” 10 Henry Ansgar Kelly, “Inquisition, Public Fame and Confession: General Rules and English Practice,” in The Culture of Inquisition in Medieval England, ed. Mary Catherine Flannery and Katie L. Walker (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2013), 10–11. 11 Weigel, “Waldenserverhör in Rothenburg,” 86. 12 Joshua Hagen, Preservation, Tourism and Nationalism: The Jewel of German Past (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 57–58. 13 Weigel, “Waldenserverhör in Rothenburg,” 81–86. 14 Herman Haupt, Waldenserthum und Inquisition im südöstlichen Deutschland (Freiburg: J. C. B. Mohr, 1890); Henry Charles Lea, A History of the Inquisition in the Middle Ages, 3 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1887–88).

Identity, urban competition, inquisition 107 15 Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 72–73. 16 Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 73. 17 Ludwig Schnurrer, ed. Die Urkunden der Reichsstadt Rothenburg o.d.T. 1182–1400, 2 vols. (Neustadt: Degener & Co, 1999); Schnurrer, “Der Fall Hans Wern,” 9–53. 18 The documents related to the Wern affair are held at the municipal archive (Stadtarchiv) of Rothenburg ob der Tauber: Rothenburg StA, A 778a/II, with select documents published as appendices in Schnurrer, “Der Fall Hans Wern,” 44–53. The current study uses editions in Schnurrer, “Der Fall Hans Wern” (cited by their article page numbers) and the original documents consulted at Rothenburg’s municipal archive (cited by their archival location). Where possible, citations for the documents in modern German translation from URR are provided for readers’ reference. 19 Schnurrer, “Der Fall Hans Wern,” 35–39. 20 On Rothenburg’s popularity with tourists and its cultural and political significance as a “jewel” of medieval German architecture in the late nineteenth and the twentieth century, see Hagen, Preservation, Tourism and Nationalism. 21 Ludwig Schnurrer, “Rothenburg als Wallfahrtsstadt des Spätmittelalters,” in Die oberdeutschen Reichsstädte und ihre Heiligenkulte: Traditionen und Ausprägungen zwischen Stadt, Ritterorden und Reich, ed. Klaus Herbers (Tübingen: Narr, 2005), 69. 22 The earliest written accounts comparing Rothenburg to Jerusalem survive from the sixteenth century. Hagen, Preservation, Tourism and Nationalism, 35–36. On Rothenburg’s role as a pilgrimage center, see Schnurrer, “Rothenburg als Wallfahrtsstadt des Spätmittelalters,” 69–99. 23 Schnurrer, “Der Fall Hans Wern,” 49: “aller ketzer hauptman und vorgener,”. The precise wording of the accusation survived only from a later summary of the charges brought by Angermeier against Wern, written in 1402. 24 Cameron, Waldenses, 139; Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 61–62; Herman Haupt, Die religiösen Sekten in Franken vor der Reformation (Würzburg: A. Stuber, 1882), 23–24; Martin Erbstößer, Sozialreligiöse Strömungen im späten Mittelalter. Geissler, Freigeister und Waldenser im 14. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1970), 124. 25 “Chronik von 1368–1406,” 97. A number of Waldensians investigated in Strasbourg (1400) and Fribourg (1399) were also involved in the manufacturing or sale of textiles. See Biller, The Waldenses, 113–19; Modestin, Ketzer in der Stadt, 97–106. 26 Die Nürnberger Bürgerbücher 1. Die Pergamentenen Neubürgerlisten 1302–1448. Mit einer Einführung in die mittelalterlichen Quellen zur Bevölkerungs- und Sozialgeschichte Nürnbergs, ed. Stadtarchiv Nürnberg (Nuremberg: Selbstverlag des Stadtrats, 1974), 86; Martin Schneider, “Friedrich Reiser—Herkunft, Bewegung und Weg,” in Friedrich Reiser und die “waldensisch-hussitische Internationale” im 15. Jahrhundert, ed. Albert de Lange und Kathrin Utz Tremp (Heidelberg: Verlag Regionalkultur, 2006), 77–82. 27 Biller, The Waldenses, 113–16; Modestin, Ketzer in der Stadt, 74. 28 Rothenburg StA, A 778 a/II fol. 34v; URR, 2: 972. 29 Heinrich Toppler, Wern’s rival and Rothenburg’s burgomaster, himself was only a second-generation burgher and merchant, whose grandfather came from the peasantry of rural Franconia to the south of the city. Ludwig Schnurrer, “Heinrich Toppler,” in Rothenburg im Mittelalter. Studien zur Geschichte einer fränkischen Reichsstadt, ed. Ludwig Schnurrer (Rothenburg ob der Tauber: Verein Alt-Rothenburg, 1997), 26. 30 Schnurrer, “Der Fall Hans Wern,” 11. 31 Schnurrer, “Der Fall Hans Wern,” 11–12. 32 Schnurrer, “Der Fall Hans Wern,” 18; Schnurrer, “Heinrich Toppler,” 28. 33 Schnurrer, “Der Fall Hans Wern,” 9–10. 34 Schnurrer, “Der Fall Hans Wern,” 18. Toppler’s residence, known at the time as “The Golden Griffin” (Zum goldenen Greifen), is still extant and today functions as a hotel. 35 Deutsche Reichstagsakten unter König Wenzel, ed. Julius Weizsäcker (Munich: Oldenͤ bourg, 1867), vol. 1, 202: “Man schankt dem keiser und dem kunige win, der kost 50 lb. gen Hansen Weren”; Schnurrer, “Der Fall Hans Wern,” 20. For a recent historiographical

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46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59

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overview of the German medieval winemaking and trade, see Tom Scott, “Medieval Viticulture in the German-Speaking Lands,” German History 20, no. 1 (2002), 95–115. On winemaking in Franconia: Winfried Schenk, “Viticulture in Franconia along the River Main—Human and Natural Influences since 700 AD,” Journal of Wine Research 3, no. 3 (1992), 185–203. On the practice of giving gifts of wine, see Valentin Groebner, Liquid Assets, Dangerous Gifts: Presents and Politics at the End of the Middle Ages, trans. Pamela Selwyn (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 22–27. Schnurrer, “Der Fall Hans Wern,” 24–27. Schnurrer, “Heinrich Toppler,” 26. Schnurrer, “Heinrich Toppler,” 33–34. Schnurrer, “Heinrich Toppler,” 34–35; Schnurrer, “Der Fall Hans Wern,” 32–33. Tom Scott, The City-State in Europe, 1000–1600: Hinterland, Territory, Region (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 151–54. Schnurrer, “Heinrich Toppler,” 31; Hartmut Boockmann, Die Stadt im späten Mittelalter (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1986), 11. Schnurrer, “Heinrich Toppler,” 31: “Diz haus mit dem graben hot der erber man Heinrich Toppler burgermeister zu der zeit zu Rotenburg mit sin selbes kost und erbeit gebawet.” Schnurrer, “Heinrich Toppler,” 31: “in dem jor, do der beswerlich krieg [was] zwischen fursten und allen edeln uff einer seit und auch allen stetten, die zusamen verbunden woren, uff der ander seit in teutschen landen.” Schnurrer, “Heinrich Toppler,” 31. On the symbolic meaning of city walls, see Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (New York: Harcourt, 1961), 304–05; Keith D. Lilley, “Mapping Cosmopolis: Moral Topographies of the Medieval City,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 22, no. 5 (2004), 686–94. Schnurrer, “Heinrich Toppler,” 44–45. Toppler’s downfall is discussed at the end of this chapter. Schnurrer, “Heinrich Toppler,” 31. Schnurrer, “Der Fall Hans Wern,” 30–31. Schnurrer, “Heinrich Toppler,” 28. David Gary Shaw, “Social Selves in Later Medieval England: The Worshipful Ferrour and Kempe,” in Writing Medieval History, ed. Nancy F. Partner (London: Bloomsbury, 2005), 12–14. Hartmut Boockmann, “Spätmittelalterliche deutsche Stadt-Tyrannen,” Blätter für deutsche Landesgeschichte 119 (1983), 73–74. Shaw, “Worshipful Ferrour and Kempe,” 9. Schnurrer, “Heinrich Toppler,” 27. Schnurrer, “Heinrich Toppler,” 27–28. Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 78. “Chronik von 1368–1406,” 97: “Man sol wissen, daz vil ketzer von der stat fluchen.” Bürckstümmer, “Waldenser in Dinkelsbühl,” 272–75. Bürckstümmer, “Waldenser in Dinkelsbühl,” 274: “Elizabeth de peyrrawt.” For Angermeier’s alleged origin in Bamberg, see “Chronik von 1368–1406,” 96. Bürckstümmer, “Waldenser in Dinkelsbühl,” 274–75: “viris dominis Heinrico weringer canonico ecclesiae Augustensis, fratre Conrado priore ordinis fratrum Carmelitarum, domino Gerungo Decano et plebano ibidem in Dinckelspuhel, Henrico Trub in weissenburg, Seyfrido Cursore in Speckbach, Tyermanno in hawsen parochialium ecclesiarum rectoribus, domino Johanne Chochler et domino Georgio de Gyengen presbyteribus Eystetensis, Burmacensis et Augustensis dyocesum.” Bürckstümmer, “Waldenser in Dinkelsbühl,” 275. Bürckstümmer, “Waldenser in Dinkelsbühl,” 274: “venerabilem ac circumspectum virum, Dominum et Magistrum henricum, dictum Angermayr, a Reverendo in Christo patre et Domino, Domino Burckhardo dei et apostolicae sedis gratia Augustensis ecclesiae Episcopo Deputatum, propter Sectam Waldensium.”

Identity, urban competition, inquisition 109 62 Hans Mair of Nördlingen is unclear on the number of the accused but states that two were executed. Mair, “Nordlingani brevis Historia,” 620. For the list of the ten women and men punished by wearing the penitential crosses, see Bürckstümmer, “Waldenser in Dinkelsbühl,” 274. 63 The only information about the trial in Donauwörth is related by brief chronicle accounts, which disagree on the number of the Waldensians punished there. The anonymous chronicler from Augsburg states only that five men and eleven women were burned at the stake. “Chronik von 1368–1406,” 97. Hans Mair of Nördlingen provides the most detailed account: forty heretics were put on trial initially, and out of them ten men and sixteen women were accused of relapsing and burned. Mair notes that despite being executed as relapsed heretics, these men and women “invoked the Blessed Virgin and all the saints, and were buried in the cemetery” (invocaverunt beatam Virginem & omnes Santos, & sepulti sunt in cemeterio). This suggests that the executed demonstrated enough orthodox belief during their execution to merit burial on the consecrated ground. Mair, “Nordlingani brevis Historia,” 620. 64 Ludwig Schnurrer, ed., Die Urkunden der Stadt Dinkelsbühl, 1282–1450 (Munich: K. Zink, 1960), 84. 65 Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 71. 66 Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 71; Alexander Patschovsky, “Waldenser und Hussiten,” 764–65. 67 On public spectacles of punishment as a form of anti-heretical propaganda, see James B. Given, Inquisition and Medieval Society: Power, Discipline, and Resistance in Languedoc (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 71–76. 68 “Chronik von 1368–1406,” 96. 69 Schnurrer, “Der Fall Hans Wern,” 31. On September 11, 1394, Angermeier wrote to Toppler, making a reference to their previous meeting. Rothenburg StA, A 778 a/II fol. 34v; URR, 2: 972. 70 The marriage itself took place a year after the Rothenburg inquisition, in 1395. See Schnurrer, “Heinrich Toppler,” 28. 71 “Tandem finaliter inventum est, quod Domini illorum, qui combusti fuerunt, receperunt bona ipsorum, et pauperes dimiserunt. Credo, quod causa principalis fuerit mala.” A few lines earlier, chronicler Hans Mair explicitly states that the bishop of Augsburg received the confiscated property: “Episcopus recepit bona eorum, male sibi pauperes fuerunt dimissi, divites combusti.” Mair, “Nördlingani brevis Historia,” 620. 72 Schnurrer, “Der Fall Hans Wern,” 45. 73 Schnurrer, “Der Fall Hans Wern,” 45. 74 Haupt, Die religiösen Sekten in Franken, 23–24; Herman Haupt, “Zur Geschichte der revolutionären Bewegungen in Würzburg unter Bischof Gerhard von Schwarzburg,” Archiv des Historischen Vereins für Unterfranken und Aschaffenburg 34 (1891), 28; Erbstößer, Sozialreligiöse Strömungen im späten Mittelalter, 124; Schlenker and Flachenecker, “Gerhard von Schwarzburg,” 900–02. 75 Schnurrer, “Der Fall Hans Wern,” 32–33. 76 Schnurrer, “Der Fall Hans Wern,” 33, n.229. 77 Herbert Grundmann, “Ketzerverhöre des Spätmittelalters als quellenkritisches Problem,” Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters 21 (1965), 564–66. Schubel was one of the witnesses in a trial of one Konrad Kannler, a man accused of believing in the Heresy of the Free Spirit in Eichstätt in 1381. Grundmann demonstrates that Kannler was in fact a victim of suggestive questioning and possibly his own delusions of self-grandeur. Later he withdrew his earlier statements and was absolved and assigned an unspecified penance. See Grundmann, “Ketzerverhöre des Spätmittelalters,” 535–50. See also, Robert E. Lerner, The Heresy of the Free Spirit in the Later Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 142–45. 78 Weigel, “Waldenserverhör in Rothenburg,” 86.

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79 Schnurrer, “Der Fall Hans Wern,” 45. Angermeier claimed ten guldens the first time and ten guldens and twelve pounds for the second voyage. 80 Rothenburg StA, A 778a/II, fol. 27v; URR, 2: 980. 81 Rothenburg StA, A 778a/II, fol. 19v; URR, 2: 984. 82 Schnurrer, “Der Fall Hans Wern,” 35–37. 83 Laurence Buchholzer, “Une affaire municipale à Rothenbourg/Tauber (1396–1404),” in Religion et société urbaine au Moyen Âge, études offertes à Jean-Louis Biget par ses anciens élèves, ed. Patrick Boucheron and Jacques Chiffoleau (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2000), 211. 84 Rothenburg StA, A 778a/II, fol. 29v: “daz er ein alter kranker man ist”; URR 2: 1002. 85 Schnurrer, “Der Fall Hans Wern,” 37. 86 Schnurrer, “Der Fall Hans Wern,” 46. 87 David Gary Shaw, Necessary Conjunctions: The Social Self in Medieval England (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005), 23. 88 Georg Simmel, “The Persistence of Social Groups,” American Journal of Sociology 3 (1897), 680–81. 89 Isenmann, Deutsche Stadt, 213. For a general overview of the practice of administering citizen oaths (Bürgereid), see Wilhelm Ebel, Der Bürgereid als Geltungsgrund und Gestaltungsprinzip des deutschen mittelalterlichen Stadtrechts (Weimar: Böhlau, 1958). 90 The example of the widow from Augsburg is discussed in detail in the previous chapter. Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 68. 91 Schnurrer, “Der Fall Hans Wern,” 49. 92 Valentin Groebner, “Losing Face, Saving Face: Noses and Honour in the Late Medieval Town,” History Workshop Journal 40 (1995), 6–11. 93 Schnurrer, “Der Fall Hans Wern,” 42–43. 94 Schnurrer, “Heinrich Toppler,” 41–44. 95 An exact date of Heinrich Toppler’s death is unknown. His epitaph in the church of St. James, claims that he died on June 13, 1408. Schnurrer, “Heinrich Toppler,” 44–45. 96 Shaw, Necessary Conjunctions, 23. 97 Bernd Moeller, Imperial Cities and the Reformation: Three Essays, trans. H. C. E. Midelfort and M. U. Edwards, Jr. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1972), 49.

5

“Shame and dishonor” Municipal authority and persecution of heresy

The weeks of late March and early April of 1400 were a remarkable period for the city of Strasbourg. Over the course of just a few weeks, Strasbourg’s city council embarked on an unprecedented anti-heretical campaign in the city aimed at the long-standing and well-integrated Waldensian community that counted over thirty members—many from the ranks of wealthy merchants and artisans. This community had existed in the city since at least the 1370s and succeeded in warding off potential investigations until the spring of 1400. That spring, however, the ruling council was determined to purge the city of a group that, according to the verdict announced at the end of the trial, brought Strasbourg “great shame and dishonor” by their very existence within its walls.1 Surprisingly, the council acted against heresy on its own, with virtually no involvement from the Church. On April 1 and 3, twenty-seven men and women were banned from the city: some for a term of five years, but the majority for life.2 Just a few days later, another, harsher persecution took place in the city. This time, it involved only one person, a bath keeper named Johannes Rorer accused of “committing heresy” (in this case, the phrase refers to illicit sexual acts) with another man.3 Rorer was burned at the stake on April 8, bringing the unusually intensified period of persecution to a close. The two persecutions provide a closer look at the roles heresy, as well as social and moral discipline, played in late medieval Strasbourg. However, the anti-Waldensian inquisition in particular illustrates the pressures late medieval cities like Strasbourg faced; these pressures, ranging from political conflicts with the local bishop to the diplomatic relationships between Strasbourg and its neighbors, provided a catalyst for an anti-heretical campaign. The resulting trial was a contest over the definition of good citizenship. It demonstrated the urban understanding of heresy as a stain on the city’s honor that undermined its reputation in the eyes of friends and rivals alike. The origins, course, and outcomes of the inquisition in Strasbourg also reveal the process of gradual encroachments of civic governments upon the power and privileges of the bishop within the city walls. As boundaries between secular and religious matters became more permeable, the city council began expanding its control over the full spectrum of spiritual and moral well-being of Strasbourg’s residents. The anti-Waldensian trial that took place in the spring of 1400 in Strasbourg demonstrates both a culmination of the anti-heretical tendencies of the period and

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a remarkable departure from them.4 On the one hand, the intensification of antiWaldensian persecution throughout German-speaking central Europe prompted the discovery and persecution of a previously unharmed Waldensian community in the city. There were pressures exerted by outside forces—from another urban government with influence in the region and from a visiting anti-heretical preacher—and the widespread understanding of heretical presence in a city constituting a stain on its reputation; both forced the city council to act.5 On the other hand, the reaction of the council itself differs from the existing models for persecutions. First, the resulting inquisition remained in the hands of the city’s government; neither the bishop of Strasbourg nor the mendicant inquisitors were involved in the trial. This choice is remarkable considering that contemporary inquisitions of Waldensians in Bern (1399–1400) and Fribourg (1399) both involved Franciscan and Dominican friars in the roles of inquisitors, while other inquisitions during the decade employed at least some members of clergy for this task.6 Second, the punishments meted out to Strasbourg’s Waldensians—either five-year or lifetime bans from the city and, in some cases, from the diocese—were highly unusual.7 Moreover, as Richard Kieckhefer points out, the expulsion of heretics did not achieve the goals of the Church when dealing with heresy, that is to say, reform and reincorporation of the penitent heretics into the fold. On the contrary, expulsion merely made heresy someone else’s problem or even facilitated the spread of heretical ideas.8 Finally, the inquisition of 1400 and its results were heavily misrepresented and underplayed by the city council in its communications and even in the city chronicle. This suggests the council’s attempts to minimize the significance of the trial and expulsion of heretics, some of whom belonged to prominent merchant families and even served as members of the city’s government. The involvement of Strasbourg’s city council in the trial, its outcome, and the attempts to manage the information available about the anti-Waldensian inquisition, demonstrates the role the persecutions of heretics—as well as other “shameful” groups within urban societies—played in city governments’ attempts to control the definition of urban citizenship. The expulsion of heretics at the end of the inquisition in Strasbourg reveals the means used by late medieval cities for maintaining their self-produced reputation as pious and moral communes.

A city council inquisition The events of the inquisition that took place in late March and early April of 1400 can be reconstructed from a rich cache of documents—in particular, the testimonies of key witnesses and of the accused—that survived in Strasbourg’s archives. Some of the documents related to the inquest received the attention of nineteenth-century scholars and were published; others remained undiscovered until the twenty-first century.9 Detailed inquisitorial sources produced by the city council tribunal remain unmatched in the level of detail they provide about the Waldensian community of merchants and craftsmen living in one of the larger

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cities of the Holy Roman Empire. These records, moreover, are in a local German dialect spoken by both the persecutors and the persecuted. One of the usual problems in working with inquisitorial sources, in which the “voices” of the interrogated heretics can become lost to the translation of the vernacular testimonies into Latin, therefore, is absent in the documents from Strasbourg. These records still exhibit a formulaic style, but it is probable that a municipal tribunal was less interested in imposing certain theological ideas about heresy. This was a common practice among clerical inquisitors, whose interest was less in representing individual heretical belief accurately, but rather in categorizing “errors” in accordance with preexisting definitions of various heretical movements.10 In general, the judges of the Strasbourg inquisition did not concern themselves with specific beliefs but criminalized behavior instead: acts of providing food and shelter to the Waldensian ministers or listening to their sermons, the use of violence or threats of violence for their community’s protection, and so on. Even the term used to describe Waldensian heretics, winkeler, does not refer to any particular heretical movement but rather to a generalized “heresy.”11 Lack of nuanced understanding of Waldensianism did not stop the city council of Strasbourg during the spring of 1400. The urban authorities, prompted to act against heresy by external agents, were reacting to the heretical presence in Strasbourg in order to protect the city’s reputation. The earliest known event that precipitated the inquisition occurred a few months earlier during Advent of 1399, when a Dominican preacher arrived in the city and delivered a sermon against heresy. The preacher, identified by Georg Modestin as Peter Mangold, a cursor from the Dominican convent in Basel, arrived with an explicit understanding that heretics were indeed present in Strasbourg. This fact alone was detrimental to Strasbourg’s reputation, especially when announced openly by an outsider from the pulpit during the sacred time of year.12 The tactic of initiating an inquisition of a local heretical community by delivering a sermon against it is not unique to Strasbourg. Preaching performed an important communicative function and was frequently used in inquisitorial practice. The opening sermon announced an inquisitor’s arrival and promised leniency to those willing to confess; the closing sermo generalis informed the audience of the punishments meted out to those convicted and concluded an investigation.13 As Chapter 3 demonstrated, in the summer of 1393, itinerant inquisitor Heinrich Angermeier catalyzed the inquisition in Augsburg by delivering an unexpected sermon against heresy. Peter Zwicker used a similar approach in his contemporary inquisitorial practice; in 1401 he and Martin of Amberg delivered a sermon against the Waldensian heresy in Hartberg, Austria, before beginning an inquisition there.14 Mangold’s sermon resonated with the Waldensian community, which until then remained untouched by the series of persecutions of Waldensians across Germanspeaking central Europe, including the ongoing inquisitions in nearby Bern (1399– 1400) and Fribourg (1399).15 The sermon was equally impactful for the upper echelons of the city’s government. Heretical presence in the city, especially so widely announced, demanded their reaction. The sense of urgency was reinforced by another external catalyst—a letter from the city council of Bern addressed to

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their colleagues in Strasbourg—claiming that there were many heretics in the city. The original letter is lost and only the response penned by the Strasbourg’s council on April 13, 1400, survives; it is also unknown when the initial letter from Bern was received.16 It is possible that Bern’s council informed Strasbourg about heretical presence in the city around the same time as they met with the council members of nearby Fribourg (November 28, 1399), where they provoked an inquisition as well. That would put the date of the letter around late November or December of 1399, close to the time the Dominican preacher from Basel arrived in Strasbourg with his incendiary anti-heretical sermon.17 Even if the letter was written in the early months of 1400, repeated claims that Strasbourg was home to many heretics appeared close enough in time to rouse the city council to action. The council moved swiftly in an attempt to minimize the damage to the city’s reputation. Detailed trial records allow us to re-create a narrative of the inquisitorial process in Strasbourg, even if it is not completely clear when the persecution itself began. A key piece in the investigation of the Waldensian community was a joint denunciation made by five women—Waldensians themselves—probably in an attempt to avoid being swept up in a persecution alongside their community.18 One of the women, Kunigund Strussin the Elder of Nördlingen, a widow from Augsburg, was a survivor and a refugee of the Augsburg inquisition of 1393. Her husband, Francz (Fritz) Strus was not as lucky; he and four other Waldensian men were burned at the stake by the city council of Augsburg after they unsuccessfully attempted to petition the bishop of Augsburg for a reduction of their penance.19 It is very possible that Kunigund, like her husband, was among at least thirty-four men and women apprehended in August 1393 and forced to perform penance. As an abjured heretic, Kunigund certainly had a good reason to cooperate with the city council: if found associating with Waldensians, she risked being sent to the stake as a repeat offender. Caught between betraying the Waldensians of her new hometown and possible execution, Kunigund and her daughters, Kunigund the Younger and Metze, chose to cooperate. It is not clear why the other two female witnesses—mother and daughter, Metze and Else Berolfin—joined the Strussins in becoming the most important witnesses for the inquisition, but they might have had similar motivations.20 The denunciations by five Waldensian women were supported by two additional documents. The first was a written statement from the former parish priest of the Old St. Peter’s Church, who drafted a list of Waldensians among his former parishioners.21 Early in the inquisitorial process, the city council asked the priests from Strasbourg’s parishes to provide information about any parishioners they knew or suspected to be heretics. Operating with minimal clerical involvement, the city council sought the parish clergy as a source of information about the city’s population; regular confessions required at least once a year from all Christians since the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) made the parish priests into unique experts in the spiritual state of their parishes.22 However, the current priest of St. Peter’s, as well as his colleagues from every other parish church in Strasbourg, denied the presence of heretics among their parishioners; a testament to the Waldensian community’s ability to avoid attracting attention to itself.23 The other

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source of information about the Waldensian community was a letter penned by an anonymous informant that corroborated the statements from the five women and the parish priest.24 Beyond revealing many details about the Waldensian community in the city, including the names of its members, the city council required a list of principal heretical beliefs of the community they planned to investigate; this information was also provided by the Waldensian witnesses.25 The need for a clear summary of Waldensian beliefs is understandable. The judges from the city council lacked any theological understanding of heresy and needed a clear list of “errors” they could use to guide their interrogations of other members of the community.26 This list allowed the city council to interrogate the Strasbourg Waldensians, one by one, without having to involve the bishop or invite a mendicant inquisitor into the city.27 As a result, the city council was able to investigate the Waldensian community very quickly, before any further outside involvement could take place. Georg Modestin suggests March 13, 1400, as a possible date for the beginning of the inquisitorial proceedings. By April 1, six men and women were expelled from the city for five years, followed two days later by twenty-one individuals banned from the city for life. On April 13, exactly one month after the possible beginning of the inquest, the burgomaster and the city council of Strasbourg sent their response back to the city council of Bern. As far as the council was concerned, the heretical presence that brought “shame and dishonor” to their city had been eradicated by expulsion.28 Although the expulsion of identified Waldensians was meant to “cleanse” the city and its government from any suspicion, there was nevertheless a degree of secrecy involved in preserving the memory of the event. Any information about the inquisition beyond the minimal account related in the letter to Bern’s city council was probably suppressed. In their letter to the city council of Bern penned just ten days after the perpetual expulsion of Waldensians from the city, the burgomaster and the city council engaged in creative reinterpretation of the recent inquisition, meant to present themselves and Strasbourg in the best possible light. First, the letter firmly denied that heresy was ever as widespread in the city as the outsiders claimed: Dear friends, we have heard that it is said by you that important people in our city are ensnared by aberrant Christian beliefs and that we should have imprisoned many of them. Your Wisdoms should know that it is not so.29 It is true, the letter explains, that there were indeed some heretics in the city, who erred in “such items and points, which are too long to be written [here].”30 Thus, no detailed description of the heresy is given in the letter, helping the magistrates to distort the truth about the Waldensians in their city. Indeed, the overall tone of the letter demonstrates a desire to present the heresy found in the city as trivial. These individuals, moreover, were “insignificant people and of foreign birth, not from our city.”31 People of low social standing and of foreign origin constituted a social group the city could easily disavow in order to save its overall reputation from “shame and dishonor” (smehe und unere).32 Emphasis on the low social

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status of the accused heretics was crucial since Bern’s magistrates believed that prominent townsmen in Strasbourg had been involved with heresy, as was the case in Bern itself.33 Overall, the letter represents the city council’s strategy of admitting only to the most general narrative about the inquisition; all other details were either minimized, omitted, or misrepresented. The desire to minimize the presence of heresy can also be seen in Strasbourg’s Latin and vernacular chronicles. The earlier inquisitions in Mainz and Augsburg were exceptionally well covered by contemporary or near contemporary chroniclers, both foreign and local. These accounts are rich with specific details about the persecutions, the names of the participants, and even descriptions of the heretical beliefs of the accused.34 The local chronicle from Strasbourg, however, is virtually silent about the anti-heretical trial. The contemporary chronicler, Jakob Twinger of Königshofen (1346–1420)—normally in the habit of providing detailed accounts of the events taking place in Strasbourg—states laconically: “Twenty heretics in [their] beliefs were expelled from Strasbourg in 1400.”35 This brief statement is echoed in the Latin version of Twinger’s chronicle: “Twentytwo [sic] heretics were banned from the city, some perpetually, some for a time, in the year 1400.”36 Neither an elaboration of their “heretical beliefs” nor any details about the trial are provided. This seems especially surprising since during the trial Twinger was a canon of the church of St. Thomas in Strasbourg and, as a cleric, must have been at least somewhat interested in heretical teachings of the Strasbourg Waldensians or in the fact that a number of prominent citizens and residents of his town turned out to be heretics.37 Brief notes about the inquisition in both versions of the chronicle (and lowered number of the expelled Waldensians) indicate that Twinger was clearly unwilling to divulge too much information about the heresy and inquisition in Strasbourg. After all, the chronicle was a work that touted the glorious history and proud image of the city; heresy did not fit this vision of Strasbourg.38 Nevertheless, in his brief mention of the Strasbourg inquisition, Twinger supplies just enough information to present his city in the best possible light; his brevity streamlines the process and demonstrates that the city’s reaction was swift: once heresy was discovered, it was immediately expelled from the city. At the dawn of the fifteenth century, German cities were far from arguing with the Church’s definition of heterodoxy. By internalizing an outside category—and accepting the fact that the Waldensian community was indeed dangerous for the city as a whole—the city councilors of Strasbourg pursued a pragmatic goal of purging the city of a problematic element within its walls.

“Insignificant people”: Strasbourg Waldensians before the inquisition of 1400 Given that Strasbourg had such a robust and well-established heretical community, it is understandable that its city council decided to present the Waldensians—at least to the world beyond its walls—as insignificant newcomers, whose “erroneous Christian beliefs” did not originate from Strasbourg itself.39 This assertion

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was only partially true; many of the leading Waldensians did arrive into the city from elsewhere, some in the decade before the inquisition, many much earlier. In the second half of the fourteenth century, Strasbourg’s thriving economy and its lucrative trade in cloth and wine drew many from the surrounding region.40 Periodic outbreaks of the plague also created a demographic vacuum and promoted immigration into the city. Georg Modestin points out that out of thirty-two interrogated individuals, seventeen were immigrants, although many had resided in Strasbourg for decades. Based on their known places of origin, immigrant Waldensians came to Strasbourg from towns and villages in Alsace, Speyer, Solothurn, as well as from towns further afield in Swabia.41 This information by itself, however, does not relate the degree to which even those Waldensians who were born outside of Strasbourg were able to assimilate and establish themselves as successful members of its society as merchants and artisans. While we do not know the motives that led Waldensians to settle in Strasbourg, most of them engaged in successful business enterprises and some even reached prominence as members of the city council.42 The majority of Waldensian households were engaged in the sale or manufacturing of cloth and adjacent trades (weavers, cloth cutters and merchants, woolworkers, and tailors)—Strasbourg’s primary source of income—as well as in the highly lucrative trade in Alsatian wine. A sure sign of economic and social integration, economic success of the immigrant generation sometimes translated into even higher status for their children. The zur Birken family demonstrates a particularly spectacular socio-economic trajectory. Its patriarch, tailor Hermann zur Birken, came to Strasbourg from Friedberg, a small town to the north of Frankfurt (or, possibly, from another small town of the same name near Augsburg). In 1379, Hermann became a master in the tailor’s guild and in 1390 served as a representative of his guild on Strasbourg’s city council for a one-year term. In 1391, the same council seat went to Hermann’s son, Lawelin zur Birken, also a tailor. However, Hermann’s political career was not over; a few years later, in 1395, we find him as one of the three officials in charge of overseeing the city’s treasury, including municipal debts and taxes, the so called “Three Men of the Pfenningturm.”43 In the same year as his father entered the city council on behalf of his guild, another of Hermann’s sons, Claus zur Birken became a member of the city council representing the citizens of the city; he would occupy this position two more times, in 1396 and 1398 (the last time merely two years before the inquisition of 1400!). In 1395, Claus served as a judge on the city’s court and the following year (1396) also became the member of the city’s treasury committee previously occupied by his father. Perhaps in recognition of his civic service, Claus received the rights to a coat of arms, an attribute that clearly marks position among the urban elites.44 Overall, the fact that two generations of men from the zur Birken family held on to important positions in Strasbourg’s government suggest their degree of integration and social mobility, which was available to at least some of the Waldensians who were born outside of the city. There were other, less well-documented examples, too. In 1393, Waldensian weaver Kunze Erlebach also served a term in the city council on behalf of his guild, while other, nonimmigrant Waldensians, like the zum Hirtze family, acquired considerable wealth

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as wine merchants and innkeepers.45 However, neither Claus zur Birken’s nor his father’s wealth or history of municipal involvement spared them from the expulsion that befell the Waldensian community of Strasbourg in early April of 1400; Hermann received a lifetime ban, while his son (perhaps in recognition of his burgher status) was exiled for five years.46 Another prominent member of the Waldensian community whose mother was born outside of Strasbourg, in Speyer, was Johannes Blumstein, a patrician with considerable clout and influence both within the Waldensian community and within the city government as well. Described as a “key figure in Strasbourg’s Waldensian circles” by Georg Modestin, Blumstein was involved in all aspects of his community’s existence in the city.47 His patrician status in the city was matched by the role of de facto leader of Strasbourg’s Waldensians. A man of means and of action, Blumstein—as one of the Waldensian witnesses described him—has been “well-informed about everything [related to] this [Waldensian] life and . . . [involved in] everything” related to the community.48 His involvement was particularly notable at times of crisis, when Blumstein’s actions contributed to the survival of fellow Waldensians; in these situations he also acted as an “enforcer” of the heretical community, ready to mete out threats of violence. In the late 1380s, Blumstein was instrumental in threatening Dominican inquisitor Johannes Arnoldi, who had attempted to investigate the Waldensian community in Strasbourg. According to a later testimony from a group of Waldensian women, Blumstein asked Arnoldi for a private confession and then threatened him with murder if he was not to cease his investigations of the Waldensian community.49 How credible were these threats? According to a testimony from 1400, the Waldensian community of Strasbourg had already used violence to protect itself; in either 1372 or 1374, a Waldensian minister, Hans Weidenhofer, converted to Catholicism. To prevent the new convert from betraying his followers to the Church, Weidenhofer was murdered shortly after his conversion. His killers—Waldensians Hans Mülich of Mainz, an unnamed man from Bamberg, and an out-of-town brother of another important member of the Waldensian community, Brigida zum Hirtze— were perhaps intentionally summoned from outside of Strasbourg (and from different communities) to prevent anyone from recognizing or apprehending them.50 It is unclear whether Johannes Arnoldi, who was appointed inquisitor only in 1382, knew about Weidenhofer’s murder, which happened almost a decade earlier. His reaction, however, suggests that the inquisitor saw Blumstein’s threat as credible enough to resign “of his own will” shortly after.51 Arnoldi’s successor, Dominican friar Nikolaus Böckeler, was perhaps more determined to investigate heresy in the city. Böckeler spent some of his earlier years at the Dominican General Chapter in Carcassonne in Languedoc and, one might speculate, was familiar with the history of his order in persecuting Cathars and Waldensians in southern France.52 However, when the new inquisitor arrived in Strasbourg during the early 1390s, Blumstein brokered a deal with him in order to prevent his community from being prosecuted publicly: the Waldensians abjured their beliefs to Böckeler in a private ceremony and were assigned equally secret penance.53 Blumstein’s decision to subject the Waldensian community to a

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secret abjuration was a well-considered move; it served as a temporary solution meant to prevent an impending inquisition, but it also came at a price. Once heresy was abjured and penance assigned, anyone implicated in continuing to hold heretical beliefs could be executed as a repeat offender.54 Böckeler’s use of this tactic, moreover, may have been inspired by the early years of his career at the Dominican Convent in Carcassonne. Not only was Carcassonne at the heart of the region associated with two great medieval heresies, but the Dominican might have known about the tactic used by a fellow inquisitor nearly a century earlier. In 1299, the inquisitors and the burgesses of Carcassonne reached an agreement that allegedly convicted all residents of Carcassonne of being heretical sympathizers and absolved them. In the hands of the inquisitors, this wholesale admission of guilt became a powerful instrument of social control; any future perceived misbehavior could be interpreted as a relapse and punished by death.55 Whether Böckeler’s decision was a product of sinister manipulation or an act of sympathy to the Waldensian community consisting of prominent citizens of Strasbourg, as a short-term result, the abjuration left the Waldensians undisturbed for the remainder of that decade. Blumstein’s role in dealing with Böckeler demonstrates his position as the community’s de facto leader; his status as a prominent member of the city elite certainly made him a valuable asset to the Waldensian community as a whole. Blumstein’s status shaped the outcome of the inquisition of 1400 for him personally. Despite repeated mentions of Blumstein’s name in the interrogation records, he escaped persecution, even as his mother was banned for life from the city. Blumstein’s career remained unscathed as well and he continued to serve his city. Already in 1401, Blumstein acted as an administrator (vogt) of the small lordship of Lichtenau under Strasbourg’s control. Ironically, considering his Waldensian beliefs, years later Blumstein even took part in Strasbourg’s delegation to the Council of Constance (1416–17) and represented his city at the papal court of Martin V (r. 1417–31) in Mantua the following year.56

The city and its bishop During the Advent of 1399, the arrival of a Dominican preacher ready to call out the heretical presence in Strasbourg was untimely and inconvenient for the city council. Although delivered within the city itself, the Dominican’s message could have been intended for the ears of its rival, the bishop of Strasbourg, Wilhelm of Diest (r. 1394–1439) and possibly meant to remind the bishop of his pastoral duties (which included persecution of heresy). The bishop, however, was the traditional rival of the city and its government; this potential call for episcopal intervention must have been interpreted as a serious threat to the city’s independence. Over the course of more than a century, since the charter of civic freedoms given to the city by Bishop Heinrich of Geroldseck (r. 1263–1273) in 1263, Strasbourg and its government continued to erode the episcopal power within the city walls. The very wording of the charter of 1263 containing the list of twelve rights granted to the city—all related to its ability to govern itself—allowed for this process. The document ends with an intentionally vague phrase: “other customary rights that

120 “Shame and dishonor” the city enjoyed, which are not written here, shall also be allowed”; this clause provided the city with an opportunity to continue expanding its freedoms at the bishop’s expense.57 The slow and painstaking process of civic encroachment is best summarized by René-Pierre Levresse, a historian of Strasbourg’s relationship with its bishop, who notes that “the city always followed the same objective: to increase its autonomy, becoming solely responsible for all matters concerning the inhabitants.”58 This ambitious goal can be seen, in part, in a long process of wrestling the Cathedral Foundation (fabrica) from the control of the bishop and the cathedral chapter and its patronage by the urban elites. As Chapter 3 has demonstrated using Augsburg as an example, in late medieval cathedral cities, the cathedral continued to represent the bishop, even as bishops themselves were gradually pushed out of the cities they once owned. The cathedral provided the “exiled” bishop a chance to continue his symbolic presence in the city and even to enter the city on occasion.59 In Strasbourg, however, after the charter of 1263, the Cathedral Foundation increasingly fell under civic control, while the cathedral itself—a permanent construction project typical of late medieval Gothic cathedrals—grew and transformed symbolically from the seat of the bishop to the centerpiece of civic identity and pageantry.60 In 1334, the west façade of the cathedral became the backdrop of the annual Schwortag, a civic ritual held in January of every year, in which newly elected officials swore an oath of loyalty to the city. The swearing-in ceremony was attended by all citizens of the city, and the inclusion of the cathedral in it reinforced its role as a symbol of urban unity.61 Two decades later, the cathedral became a starting point of the civic procession on St. Luke’s Day (October 18), which was meant to pray for the protection of Strasbourg against the destructive earthquake that took place earlier that year; the procession then became a yearly event demonstrating once again the symbolic role of the cathedral as the center of urban piety.62 The power struggle between the city and the bishop lasted into the 1380s and 1390s, becoming particularly bitter during the reign of Bishop Friedrich of Blankenheim (r. 1375–1393).63 Bishop Friedrich spent most of his reign trying to reassert his influence over the city, including the Cathedral Foundation. The papal Schism provided additional fuel for this conflict. Between 1378 and 1384, the bishop of Strasbourg, like his superior, the archbishop of Mainz, Adolf of Nassau (r. 1379–1390), sided with the Avignon papacy; this shrewd political move can be easily explained by the diocese’s proximity to the kingdom of France.64 Friedrich’s decision contrasted with the city’s own obedience to Rome. Moreover, in the 1380s, Bishop Friedrich joined forces with the archbishop of Mainz, the bishops of Augsburg and Würzburg, and members of the territorial nobility in an attempt to curtail urban liberties. The resulting conflict between cities and their opponents pulled Strasbourg’s council—who entered an alliance with other cities from the Middle and Upper Rhine and Swabia in 1381—into a prolonged and costly war.65 Although initially successful in protecting their interests against the bishops and the nobility, the urban leagues were eventually defeated on the battlefield in 1388, forced to sue for peace at Eger in 1389, and paid steep reparations.66 Allied with other cities during the war, the leagues’ members pursued their

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own interests in defeat. Forced to pay reparations, the city council of Strasbourg attempted to reduce its liability for participating in the “Town War” by claiming that it took part in the hostilities only because it was bound to do so by the League’s obligations.67 In spite of the decade marked by intermittent warfare between urban leagues and their rivals, Strasbourg’s economy and influence continued to grow throughout the late 1380s and the 1390s. In 1388, the city embarked on an ambitious project by constructing a bridge across the Rhine. As a result, it gained a significant source of income by collecting tolls and re-routed the flow of goods in its favor. The bridge, begun without imperial permission, was ratified only five years later; this once again suggests the Strasbourg’s government’s tendency to act first and ask for permission later.68 In the 1390s, as Strasbourg’s economic situation was improving, so was the city’s perception of itself. In the mid-1390s, the city council became patrons to a talented chronicler, Jacob Twinger of Königshofen (1346–1420). Author of the encyclopedic vernacular chronicle that praised (and largely invented) Strasbourg’s history, Twinger quite literally put Strasbourg on the historical map, proclaiming the city’s ancient origins and its connections to Rome and even Troy.69 He produced a work that combined features of a universal chronicle and a local one, while emphasizing Strasbourg’s historical and regional importance. Even more importantly, the author wrote his chronicle not in Latin, but in Alsatian, the local dialect of German, for, as he laments in the foreword to his magnum opus, “very few books of this kind are written in German, even though intelligent laymen read such things as willingly as learned clerics.”70 Thus, by commissioning a chronicle that placed the city within the greater narrative of universal history, while constantly emphasizing its own proud past, the city council of Strasbourg was stressing its city’s independence, steeped in communal sacredness and self-sufficiency. For Strasbourg, expansion of political and economic independence meant the continuation of the conflict between the city and its bishop into the early 1390s, when the city found itself pitted against the alliance that included the bishop, the margrave of Baden, the duke of Württemberg, and the regional nobility. The war, once again inconclusive and costly for both sides, ended in early 1393 although the cessation of military activity did not improve the relationships between the two.71 In 1393, Bishop Friedrich launched an investigation of the Cathedral Foundation, using rumors about the corruption of the cathedral’s master builder as pretext. Badly in debt after over a decade of conflicts with Strasbourg, the bishop used this opportunity to wrestle the control over the city’s cathedral and its fabrica, along with its endowments, from the council and to humiliate the city.72 Bishop Friedrich’s plan is highly reminiscent of the actions of the archbishop of Mainz or the bishop of Augsburg, who had launched inquisitions into heresy in their towns during the same time period. Both the bishop’s investigation of alleged corruption in the Cathedral Foundation and the persecutions of Waldensians in Mainz and Augsburg provided the ecclesiastical overlords of these towns with a chance to undermine urban reputation and to reassert authority over their rebellious city councils.73 In the case of Strasbourg, however, Friedrich’s plan was

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never fully realized since he became the bishop of Utrecht that year and left the region by the summer of 1393.74 With its principal opponent gone, Strasbourg succeeded in reaffirming its grip on the Cathedral Foundation in a process that lasted for most of that decade. In the following year, the city council launched its own investigation of the Foundation’s corruption and, in 1399, dismissed the Foundation’s head (custos fabricae), the two procurators, and the prebendary priest.75 Even the cathedral’s master builder was replaced; the city hired a new, more famous (and perhaps more able) master builder, Ulrich of Ensingen, who had previously overseen the construction of the grand minster in Ulm.76 The investigation, which succeeded in removing an important threat to the city’s civic independence by purging the ranks of the Cathedral Foundation, reveals important parallels to the anti-Waldensian inquisition that took place only a year later. In both cases, the city council investigated a source of potential disruption within the city in order to restore its reputation and to demonstrate its ability to govern in all aspects of urban life. In both cases, the investigations relied exclusively on the city council’s own resources and leadership, underscoring that the city was capable of keeping itself free of corruption— whether financial or spiritual—without any external help. The investigation of the cathedral fabrica also suggests one of the possible reasons for the overall atmosphere of silence surrounding the inquisition of 1400. As Charlotte A. Stanford, an expert on the Cathedral Foundation, observes, the corruption scandal drastically diminished the donations to the fabrica, despite the council’s decisive actions against corruption; some blemishes on the city’s reputation could not be erased even after appropriate action was taken.77 On the other hand, by minimizing the extent of the heretical presence in the city, the urban government attempted to keep it from permanently damaging Strasbourg’s reputation in the eyes of its partners and rivals alike. Another example of Strasbourg’s civic government encroaching upon the episcopal purview comes from earlier in the decade, during the period of intermittent feuds between Bishop Friedrich and the city. Trying to limit the bishop’s influence within its walls, Strasbourg’s council was not afraid to practice overreach even in cases that lay clearly outside of its jurisdiction. In addition to the aforementioned tug-of-war over the Cathedral Foundation, in the early 1390s, the city attempted to insert itself into the inquisitorial process against Johannes Malkaw, a popular preacher accused of being a heretic.78 The preaching career of Johannes Malkaw and his trial represent the power a charismatic and skillful preacher could wield against the ecclesiastical institutions already rattled by the Schism. No stranger to confrontation, Malkaw engaged in a preaching tour, delivering sermons against the Schism and in defense of Roman obedience in the archdioceses of Cologne, Trier, and eventually, Mainz. Chased out from one province after another for his fiery sermons delivered without any regard for the complicated situation in the Schism-riven ecclesiopolitical landscape on the Rhine, Malkaw stayed on the move. Eventually, he arrived in Strasbourg, where he continued to antagonize both the secular clergy—some of whom, like Bishop Friedrich, used to favor the Avignon papacy less than a decade

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earlier—and the mendicant orders. Malkaw’s conflict with the bishop, however, had apparently won him some friends in the city itself, who kept him safe for some time. Despite their protection, in late 1390, Malkaw was arrested by inquisitor Nikolaus Böckeler, and kept in Strasbourg’s municipal jail.79 In an attempt to get rid of a problematic and popular preacher, Böckeler prepared a long list of charges against Malkaw.80 Among them were claims about his adherence to the heretical ideas of Waldensians, Spiritual Franciscans, and the heresy of the Free Spirit, with accusations of blasphemy and debauchery thrown in as well. All of these were completely trumped-up, with individual “errors” from various heresies assembled piecemeal to make the accusations appear more impressive; thus, Malkaw was accused of adhering to Waldensian teachings only because he allegedly preached without a license. While Malkaw was an independent-minded preacher popular with the crowds and with a penchant for getting on the wrong side of his powerful superiors (as his record of making enemies of the archbishops of Trier and Cologne demonstrates), the ideas contained in his sermons were provocative and, strictly speaking, contrary to the canon law but not heretical.81 In fact, it was his strident obedience to Rome that got him in trouble with the bishop of Strasbourg, who feared that a pro-Roman preacher may upset his own pro-Avignon allies.82 That an individual charged with heresy and apprehended by an archiepiscopal inquisitor was to be kept in a city jail was unusual enough. Even more striking was the role members of the city council played in the trial itself, despite the clearly religious nature of Malkaw’s purported crimes. During the initial hearings before a joint committee that included the city’s mendicants, representatives of the bishop, and members of the city council, Böckeler was unable to persuade the committee that Malkaw was a heretic and an unlicensed preacher. Indeed, the committee only reached an agreement that Malkaw was “vehemently suspected” (vehementer suspectus) of heresy and decided to expel him from the diocese.83 Given that the bishop and the mendicants were behind Malkaw’s arrest in the first place, it is clear that the city council’s delegates provided the dissenting voice in Malkaw’s defense. The decision to expel him—one opposed by the bishop who probably wanted to find a more permanent solution to the Malkaw problem—was a compromise. The city’s ability to remain involved in the trial ended soon after. Shortly after the committee decided to expel Malkaw, the bishop wrote to the city council of Strasbourg sternly insisting (despite the diplomatic tone of the letter) that Malkaw should be transferred to the episcopal prison, since the matters of faith were in the bishop’s area of expertise and jurisdiction.84 The city council obliged, although the fact that the bishop had to write a lengthy letter explaining his request and providing guarantees that no one would harm Malkaw in the episcopal prison proves that even in a case that clearly fell under episcopal jurisdiction, the city council had its say.85 Moreover, here again we can see banishment used as the punishment of choice for religious crimes, despite the established Church practice. Gaps in the evidence preclude any knowledge of how Malkaw’s case was resolved. He may have been transferred back to Strasbourg from the episcopal

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prison at Benfeld and released by his allies in the city or expelled from the diocese in accordance with an earlier sentence. In 1394, Malkaw was finally cleared of all charges by a faculty panel at the University of Heidelberg and even studied at the University of Cologne.86 His case, however, demonstrates that by the late fourteenth century, Strasbourg’s city council attempted to be an active participant in all matters even tangentially related to the city, even those that clearly fell within the bishop’s jurisdiction. By the end of the decade, the readiness to encroach upon the episcopal duties of pursuing heresy in the diocese had led the city council to exclude the bishop completely from its quick but impactful anti-Waldensian inquisition during late March of 1400. By the second half of the 1390s, Strasbourg normalized its relationship with the new bishop, Wilhelm of Diest (r. 1393–1439). Despite this normalization, the city council chose to conduct an inquisition internally, without the bishop’s involvement. As Georg Modestin points out, a period of relative quiet in the relationship between the bishop and the city council gave Strasbourg’s magistrates an opportunity to launch an inquisition against the Waldensians in the city without fearing that the bishop might exploit the existence of heresy as a chance to intervene.87 After all, inquisitions of heresy were still within the bishop’s jurisdiction, despite Strasbourg’s increasing autonomy. Conversely, earlier in the decade, when the majority of the Waldensians in the city had confessed and abjured their heresy in a secret meeting with the Dominican inquisitor, Nikolaus Böckeler, Strasbourg was in the middle of a conflict that would have made a public inquisition impossible from the city’s point of view.88 However, a period of peace between the city and the bishop in 1400 also gave urgency to the inquisition. Just like the corruption in the Cathedral Foundation, the heretical community within the city opened Strasbourg to an ecclesiastical attack.89 Public disclosure of this fact by an itinerant Dominican preacher from Basel during Advent of 1399, as well as the letter from Bern, demanded the city’s preemptive action. Unwilling to wait until the news about the existence of heretics among the city’s prominent citizens spread, the city council acted as fast as it could, taking about three weeks from the presumed beginning of the inquest until its end. Even the punishment chosen by the magistrates suggests the need to deal with this crisis of urban citizenship quickly; expulsion, a non-traditional punishment for heresy, purged Strasbourg of bad citizens whose mere existence endangered the city.

Banishment as punishment The expulsion of twenty-seven Waldensian women and men from Strasbourg— twenty-one of them perpetually and six for a term of five years—demonstrates a remarkable departure from the punishments traditionally associated with persecutions of heresy. Preexisting punishments for heresy, which included forms of public and private penance, imprisonment and, in particularly severe cases, execution by burning, aimed either to reincorporate a repentant heretic back into the community or to use violent public punishments as a deterrent. Either intention presumed that heretics and their supporters needed to be punished in

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a public manner, turning the punishment into a spectacle aimed at social control and propaganda.90 By the late Middle Ages, this approach to punishment became standard and was used in all other anti-Waldensian inquisitions that took place between 1390 and 1404. In some cases, forms of penance assigned were intended to mirror the Waldensian “errors” as a way of reinforcing “correct” religious practice. For example, in Augsburg, the Waldensian men and women were forced to participate in a solemn procession, lit candle in hand, between the city’s cathedral and the abbey of Sts. Ulrich and Afra. Contravening Waldensian disbelief in these rituals, the penitents were instructed to pray for the dead and receive aspersions from a priest.91 The expulsion of Waldensians from Strasbourg, on the other hand, did not achieve the same goals of moral reeducation or social control. As Richard Kieckhefer points out, the use of non-traditional forms of punishment for heresy—banishment, in particular—demonstrates that by the late Middle Ages, “municipal courts were beginning . . . to assume competence over religious and semireligious offences of other kinds, such as blasphemy and sorcery.”92 In an urban context, heresy was deemed dangerous because it undermined civic religion and damaged the city’s reputation; the precise theological nature of a particular type of heresy or its tenets were less important.93 In other words, urban governments had internalized the definitions of heresy used by the Church and wanted to purify their communities of anyone that fell into that category. As a result, a city council involved in the persecution of heresy on its own was less prone to distinguish between various heretical movements or to attempt reincorporating the errant into the community. Instead, loosely defined “heretics” faced expulsion, the easiest method—as far as the urban governments were concerned—for removing unwanted elements from a community. Strasbourg’s expulsion was not completely unprecedented. In Nuremberg and Augsburg between 1352 and 1381, men and women were banished as punishment for their perceived heresy. Although in many cases the records are vague about specific beliefs of the expelled, they suggest the conflation of heresy with other forms of antisocial behavior. In 1353, two men were expelled from Augsburg because “they were seen to be heretics” (my emphasis); similarly, in 1381, two men were banished from the city: one for lecherous behavior and behaving like a beghard, while another, a layman, for engaging in unauthorized preaching.94 Even more surprisingly, in 1354 and 1362, and later in 1399, heretics were repeatedly expelled from Nuremberg. Some, like a certain Konrad Schram of Prague, were expelled multiple times: Schram was first banned for a term of five years in 1354 and then expelled perpetually in 1362. Notably, Schram’s status as a repeat offender did not lead to a heavier punishment—for example, an execution—but only to a more extreme form of expulsion.95 While we should not assume that all persecutions of heretics demonstrated such relative lenience to the offenders, evidence from Augsburg and Nuremberg—as well from Strasbourg itself—suggest that the inquisitions ran by urban governments were more willing to break with ecclesiastical traditions and instructions for pursuing heretics if the situation required it.96 Not surprisingly, banishments and expulsions of those accused of being heretics completely contradicted the ecclesiastical practice. As Kieckhefer argues,

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“exile and banishment did not further the ends that the Church desired: cleansing of Christendom as a whole from corrupting influence, and conversion of persons who had fallen from the faith.”97 City governments, however, were not interested in cleansing all of Christendom, but rather in defending the city’s honor at all cost. The forms of penance aimed at gradual reincorporation of the repentant heretics back into the community—penitential crosses or processions—took time; expulsion was immediate. As such, it was a convenient measure for ridding the community of the offending elements—heretics, in this case—although similar punishments awaited petty criminals, prostitutes, vagabonds, and other “undesirable” individuals. Purging of the city from deviants and marginalized groups reinforced the boundaries of the city, a community imagined as an opposition between its members and non-members, between those allowed to stay and those to be excluded. On a deeper level, expulsions were ritual acts that reinforced the communal unity and social order by separating the pure from the polluted. By being able to enforce this separation, urban governments asserted their authority and the distinctions between the two groups. Such creation and enforcement of spatial separation helped to define the lawful residents from the outsiders, who always posed a potential threat to the city, be they criminals, heretics, regional nobility, or even a local bishop, since many larger late medieval cities expelled their bishops during their struggles for independence.98 It was the simplest and most accessible form of social regulation and remained in use by the city governments in Germany well into the Reformation and post-Reformation period. For example, as Jason P. Coy argues in his study of sixteenth-century Ulm, “the town council [there] used banishment in an attempt to expel and exclude aliens and deviants from the urban community, using purgation to define and defend the social and spatial boundaries of their domain.”99 Indeed, although most of the studies of banishment and expulsion in a German context focus on the period from the late fifteenth century on, when urban government became even more involved in policing their communities, it is safe to say that the origins of banishment as an instrument of social control in cities can be located in the late Middle Ages.100 Banishment also performed more pragmatic purposes; late medieval magistrates, like their early modern heirs, lacked a permanent law enforcement force. Exclusion beyond the boundaries of the city coupled with a threat of heavier punishment—sometimes by death—for those daring to return was meant as a solution to urban crime. The punishment for heresy chosen by the city council of Strasbourg demonstrates these concerns in action. Faced with external pressure to investigate heresy in the city, the city council treated heresy as a civic crime that violated the ideal of good citizenship and threatened the common good. It is not surprising that during the same period this type of punishment was widely used by the city council for other crimes that endangered the social order as a whole. Thus, temporary expulsions for terms of various lengths were used as a punishment for rioting, for leveling false accusations, for robbing one’s master, and finally, for beating one’s guest. All of these crimes either directly endangered the social order (rioting or robbery) or violated social and moral norms of the city (slander or guest-beating).

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In all of the above, a perpetrator was banished from the city for a term of either five or ten years, depending on the severity of the offense.101 Interestingly, an epilogue to the anti-Waldensian inquisition of 1400 demonstrates the use of banishment for such antisocial behaviors. On September 6, 1401, Hermann zur Birken the Younger, son of the expelled Waldensian merchant Hermann zur Birken, was banned from the city for a term of five years for slandering a fur merchant and accusing him of theft. Hermann, who was spared during the inquisition and allowed to remain in the city for being too young to share his parent’s heretical beliefs, was nevertheless judged to be old enough to be expelled for slander a year later. The verdict prescribed an additional five-year ban at the discretion of the victim (presumably in order to force Hermann to make amends); in 1403, the young man was banned for the second term.102 His case demonstrates the degree to which Strasbourg’s city council engaged in policing behavior of the residents, even as far as controlling their speech. The simple act of trying the heretics without any clerical involvement signified yet another victory for a city that had a long history of struggle for the full control of its affairs. The inquisition as a whole demonstrated to the bishop that Strasbourg was, to use Bernd Moeller’s phrase, “a sacred society” where “the borders between the secular and spiritual areas of life disappeared.”103 Hence, the city council claimed the right to judge not only secular but religious matters as well. Even questions that were undoubtedly within the jurisdiction of the Church were open to interference from the city council. The peculiar case of the municipal court presiding over the matters of religion forced the city council to improvise. This can be seen in the wording of the verdicts handed down by the city council to the twenty-seven men and women in April of 1400. First, most of the accused were banned for life not from the city itself but from the diocese, which implies the religious rather than secular nature of their crimes.104 Similar punishment is prescribed in the verdict for six Waldensians banned for the term of five years.105 Notably, the city council of Strasbourg had no judicial power outside the city, and therefore the municipal court had no authority to ban anyone from the diocese. It would have been equally problematic to enforce this ban. Instead, as Georg Modestin notes, the choice to ban the Waldensians from the diocese instead of the city illustrates the city council’s encroachment upon the bishop’s authority in Strasbourg and even beyond its walls.106 Even if unenforceable, the ban from the diocese symbolized Strasbourg’s claim to the control not only over the city itself but also over its hinterland. It is also possible that the city council was keen to banish the heretics as far from Strasbourg as possible in order to preserve its reputation from any damaging associations with heresy. Moreover, the sentences state clearly that if any heretic was to return to the city or the diocese, they risked being burned at the stake if caught, a punishment the Church reserved for unrepentant or relapsed heretics.107 This peculiar blend of traditional punishments for antisocial crimes (banishment) with the method of execution traditionally associated with ecclesiastical persecutions of heresy (burning at the stake) demonstrates the novelty of the city council inquisition in Strasbourg and its improvised nature. The forms of punishment used support the hypothesis that from the city council’s point of view, heresy was a crime with

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strong antisocial implications. Instead of seeing heretics as individuals who commit crimes against the Church—and by extension, against God—the council saw the Waldensians guilty of a crime against their community, and therefore deserving to be excluded. On the other hand, those deemed innocent or of good repute by the city council were allowed to remain in the city. Two women from Waldensian families, Else zur Birken and Katherine Erlebach, were married to non-Waldensian husbands, and therefore were spared from expulsion (unlike their parents).108 Another woman, Dilin Erlebach, was excused from the inquisitorial proceeding on account of being pregnant. Three other individuals were spared because they were deemed too young—or, in one case, “not too smart” (nit gar wise) to adhere to heretical views.109 Finally, Johannes Blumstein—despite his conspicuous role as a leader of the Waldensian community—was allowed to remain probably because his expulsion went completely against the city council’s official description of the inquisition as a trial of primarily foreigners. On the other hand, Blumstein’s mother—born in Speyer—was expelled for life.110 It might be tempting to view the expulsion of Waldensians itself as a less violent form of punishment. The expulsion spared the lives of the twenty-seven men and women but at what cost? The lives of the banished heretics are nearly impossible to trace, although it appears that even those who were allowed to return to Strasbourg five years later did not achieve the same prominence as before. For Claus zur Birken, who had served three terms on the city council during the 1390s, the temporary expulsion undoubtedly marked the end to his political career; for others it destroyed their livelihoods—either as artisans or as merchants—or broke up families. Even Johannes Blumstein, the patrician leader of the Strasbourg Waldensians who had remained seemingly unscathed by the inquisition in terms of his political and diplomatic career, had to be separated from his elderly mother. It is equally unclear what happened to the property of the banished Waldensians. It is very possible that it was confiscated by the city council as part of their expulsion, but the extremely fragmentary nature of the city’s financial records from the period can only leave us guessing.111

A different kind of ketzerei On April 8, 1400, only five days after the conclusion of the bloodless anti-Waldensian inquisition, a man was burned at the stake in Strasbourg. The man, a bath keeper named Johannes Rorer, was condemned to die for his alleged affair with another man, Heinzmann Hiltebrant. The two, as the document describing their relationship specifies, “have hereticated each other” (einander geketzert), that is, engaged in sexual activity.112 Once their relationship was discovered, Rorer was apprehended and subsequently executed; his partner fled the city. Although in this case the “heresy” in question refers to sodomy, a contemporary catch-all term for deviant sexual activity (including same-sex acts, as well as bestiality), the persecutions of two kinds of “heresy” shared common elements. Both were persecuted near contemporaneously by the city council, albeit with radically different outcomes. At the end of both trials, Strasbourg’s council communicated its actions

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to the city councils of other cities. Finally, persecutions of religious and sexual deviance demonstrate the extent of the urban government’s attempt to purge their communities of any individuals who undermined Strasbourg’s reputation and endangered its common good. Echoing Michel Foucalt’s oft-quoted description of sodomy as an “utterly confused category,” Jonathan Goldberg writes that sodomy “remains incapable of exact definition.”113 The lack of a clear or fixed definition for sodomy made it a uniquely malleable crime, with a tendency to overlap with other deviant behaviors. Historically, since at least the Byzantine Emperor Justinian’s laws, which repeatedly prohibited sexual acts between men, sodomy was firmly coupled with blasphemy. From that point of view, both offended God and endangered the larger community by leaving it open to divine wrath. Sexual encounters between members of the same sex, moreover, became associated with heresy by way of an elaborate clerical tradition of describing imaginary clandestine heretical rites that included indiscriminate orgiastic couplings between members of heretical sects and, in some cases, also featured infanticide.114 All of these alleged acts were described in detail and reinforced the connection between erroneous belief and illicit sexuality. Indeed, the German word ketzerei, which came to denote both heresy and sodomy, is etymologically linked to the word “Cathar,” one of the principal heretical movements of the High Middle Ages. In addition to blurring the lines between belief and sexual acts, as Helmut Puff points out, sodomy in the medieval and Renaissance imagination was frequently linked to other transgressions that endangered the community, such as “usury, treason, lèse-majesté,” and many others.115 Hence, by acting against sodomy and by persecuting individuals associated with it, late medieval cities enforced a form of moral discipline meant—just like sumptuary laws or prohibitions on gambling, excessive drinking, and illicit prostitution—to purify the community by controlling deviant behavior and eliminating anyone who did not comply. In the somewhat later context of pre-Reformation and Reformation German and Swiss cities, persecutions of sodomy and witchcraft were found to be correlated; both “crimes” were targeted and demonized as a result of the reforming zeal of the city officials armed with torture and the death penalty.116 In Strasbourg, the death penalty for Johannes Rorer stands in surprising opposition to the fates of the twenty-seven banished Waldensians. If both sodomy and heresy were conceptually close to each other, why did both persecutions have such drastically different outcomes? At first glance, Rorer’s social status may seem to be the defining factor. While most of the expelled Waldensians were successful merchants and craftsmen, some with a history of serving on the city council, was Johannes Rorer, a bath keeper, insignificant enough to execute? This hypothesis is not supported by evidence; in fact, Rorer was probably as successful as the zur Birken or zum Hirze clans of the Waldensian community. In addition to owning a bathhouse in the city, Rorer represented his guild of bath keepers and barbers on the city council for two terms in 1391–92 and 1393–94 (that is, in 1391–92 he sat on the same city council as Lawelin zur Birken).117 The bath keeper’s guild was formed by members of the two professions who performed many common functions and services. By the early modern period, although probably

130 “Shame and dishonor” in the late fourteenth-century as well, both trades were practically indistinguishable. In addition to providing bathing services to their patrons, the bath keepers, just like barbers, provided shaves and haircuts, “did surgery, let blood, set broken bones, and amputated limbs.”118 In mid-sixteenth century Augsburg, bath keepers and barbers were required to finish a two-year apprenticeship before serving as journeymen for five years, and only then be able to stand for a master’s examination.119 In short, Johannes Rorer was a highly skilled member of his guild with a history of political involvement. It is possible, despite the fact that Rorer’s guild was allowed a seat on the city council, that bath keepers and barbers were viewed as members of a somewhat dishonorable trade; such was the case in some late medieval German cities. For example, in Cologne, the birth record of a journeyman goldsmith in 1391 specified that he was “not the child of a barber, a minstrel, or a vagrant, but . . . of an honorable and pious man.”120 Questionable respectability may have influenced the verdict of the city council that condemned Rorer to death at the stake. If his trade was already of suspect reputation, then perhaps it was easier to believe that its former representative at the council practiced the “heresy” of sodomy. Persecutions of sodomy, as with heresy, blasphemy, and similar transgressions, often hinged on an individual’s reputation (fama), which, in turn, allowed the ecclesiastical or secular authorities to act against them.121 As the surviving account of Rorer’s arrest penned by the city council for its colleagues in Lucerne states—with a frustrating degree of ambiguity—Rorer was questioned in a manner consistent with the way a man of his reputation should be questioned.122 This statement both suggests that Rorer’s reputation played a key role in his trial and that his interrogation was possibly accompanied by judicial torture, which was frequently relied on for producing confession in cases related to “hidden” crimes, such as sodomy. It was under torture—if it was used—that Rorer admitted to having engaged in mutual masturbation with Heinzmann Hiltebrant, a carpenter. By the time the city council judges received this confession, Hiltebrant had already fled Strasbourg; the letter to the city council of Lucerne was part of the attempt to apprehend him. Unlike the letter sent by the city council to Bern, providing a somewhat misleading account of the anti-Waldensian inquisition in Strasbourg, the letter written to Lucerne regarding Rorer and his escaped partner is significantly more revealing and informative. Given the chronological proximity of both trials, it is indeed possible that both were carried by the same city council courier, Heinzmann Sweblin (the letter to Lucerne was delivered on April 20—a week after the letter to Bern was written).123 While both letters inform their recipients of Strasbourg’s persecutions of “dishonorable” crimes, the letter to Lucerne—in its second, confidential part aimed for the eyes of the city’s councilmembers only—does not shy away from revealing explicit details. From it, we learn that Rorer and Hiltebrant have masturbated each other in an outhouse by the city wall, as well as in other locations, until both produced semen.124 Rich in detail, the letter does not, however, specify what the city council of Lucerne was expected to do in case they apprehended Hiltebrant. Moreover, there is no indication in the letter why it was sent to Lucerne and not elsewhere; no similar letters have been found in other

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city archives in the region.125 Instead, the letter can be read as a veiled attempt at informing Strasbourg’s neighbors and regional partners about the trial and execution of Rorer. First, they wanted to clear any possible rumors which could have spread about the persecution of sodomy and to separate his trial from the larger trial of Waldensian heretics that took place only days earlier. Second, the magistrates wanted to demonstrate that Strasbourg was indeed committed to upholding morality and piety standards for its residents. Civic attention to persecution of sodomy and control of sexual deviance in general were part and parcel of late medieval governance and social control. If the presence of actual heretics—specified in Jakob Twinger of Königshofen’s chronicle as “heretics in [their] beliefs” (ketzer am glouben), perhaps to avoid unfortunate confusion between Waldensianism and sodomy—was dangerous to the city’s reputation and opened it to a potential intervention by a hostile bishop, sodomy was viewed as an even more dangerous crime.126 Sodomy polluted the city and opened it to divine wrath by its very existence; it undermined not only the urban honor but also the community’s relationship with God. Not surprisingly, Jakob Twinger does not mention Rorer’s execution in his chronicle, although it features a brief reference to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah as punishment for “heresy.”127 Within the context of urban independence and civic religion, sodomy was perceived as particularly damaging—after all, Sodom and Gomorrah were cities, too. Drawing on Justinian’s laws, Austrian cleric Ulrich of Pottenstein reminded the readers of his early fifteenth-century catechism that the shameful sin of sodomy was thought to cause earthquakes and plagues; both disasters repeatedly struck Strasbourg in the fourteenth century and probably made the anxiety about sodomy even more pronounced in the city.128 Even the details contained in the confidential part of the letter to Lucerne betray a sense of indignation caused by Rorer’s and Hiltebrant’s actions. The letter specifies that the two men engaged in sexual activity near “our city walls,” symbolically polluting the very structure meant to keep Strasbourg protected.129 In addition to their defensive function, perimeter walls played a symbolic role in medieval cities. Descendants of the Roman pomerium, city walls were a border between the city and the hinterland, perhaps even a boundary between licit and illicit, order and disorder. In the late Middle Ages, civic and religious processions meant to protect the city were often taken on a route around the city walls, tracing the outline of the walls as if to reaffirm the spatial hierarchy between urban space and the hinterland established by them.130 The sex act between Rorer and Hiltebrant, a symbolic breach of the city’s boundaries violated their integrity and thus undermined the very notion of urban independence. It also symbolized a departure from divine law, which the city council was expected to uphold.131 In short, it demanded the sternest of punishments. The public execution of Rorer served an additional, public purpose. As Helmut Puff observes: In order to be effective, albeit to a limited degree, urban control of sexual behavior had to be regularly rehearsed. The council’s willingness to bring the

132 “Shame and dishonor” community in line with divine mandates demanded that such a standard be communicated to the urban populace. From time to time, an example would have to be set. Well-publicized, scandalous incidents were particularly effective in this regard.132 Rorer’s execution reminded the city’s inhabitants of their obligations to uphold moral behavior for the benefit of the whole community. Both persecutions—of Rorer and his partner and of the Waldensian community—demonstrated the city council’s attempts to instill and maintain social discipline. Sodomy, however, elicited a more violent response because, unlike heresy, it was perceived as an existential threat to the city. Conversely, heresy brought the city “shame and dishonor” and could be dealt with in a less drastic manner, by expulsion.133 That heresy was a serious but less dangerous crime from the perspective of the city council is clear from the fact that even after the inquisition, the leader of the Waldensian community, Johannes Blumstein, was allowed to remain in the city and even became its envoy at the Council of Constance!134 Similarly, the five women who served as key witnesses in the inquisition were also able to remain in the city, despite their obvious connections to Waldensianism. Unlike sodomy, which elicited divine wrath, heresy presented a severe but more manageable crisis. The city council’s attempts at setting the example by punishing those who transgressed urban moral and spiritual discipline also had an external audience. The letter to Lucerne, much like the public execution of Johannes Rorer in the city itself, was meant to reaffirm Strasbourg’s status as a pious and honorable community living in accordance with divine law. On the other hand, the expulsion of the heretical community, which existed in Strasbourg for a long time and whose existence was pointed out to the city council from outside the city, pursued the opposite result—to avoid public admission of any shame associated with the presence of Waldensians in the city. In both cases, communication between Strasbourg’s city council and their peers in Bern and Lucerne allowed the magistrates to control the information being released in order to present the city and its community in the best possible light even at a time of crisis. The persecution of Waldensians in Strasbourg, alongside the earlier trials in Augsburg and Rothenburg ob der Tauber, provides examples of the role heretical presence came to play in late medieval cities. In comparison to the earlier persecutions, the city council of Strasbourg decided to exclude any possibility of external interference in the inquisition by conducting the trial on its own, without episcopal involvement. In essence, heresy was dealt with as a secular crime, although within the city-centric worldview of late medieval German cities, secular and religious crimes were two largely overlapping categories of behavior incompatible with the ideal of good citizenship. While all three trials represented a civic crisis and a contestation over the definition of urban citizenship, the outcome of the inquisition in Strasbourg demonstrated the most straightforward solution to this crisis: expulsion of the group found to be undermining the spiritual well-being of the community as a whole. The following chapter will examine the contemporary anti-Waldensian campaigns in the Swiss cities of Bern (1399–1400) and Fribourg (1399). Aware of the

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political meaning heresy acquired by the end of the fourteenth century, municipal governments of these cities took measures to control their course and outcomes. While in Strasbourg, the city council assumed full control of the inquisition, in Bern and Fribourg, the ruling elites had to work together with more traditional Dominican inquisitors, while simultaneously trying to minimize the damage these Waldensian communities could pose to their cities’ honor and reputation.

Notes 1 Modestin, Quellen, 194: “sú unser stette und dem lande große smehe und unere ͤ zůgefuget hant.” 2 For the most recent and most detailed study of the inquisition in Strasbourg, see Modestin, Ketzer in der Stadt; as well as the accompanying collection of sources for this inquisition in: Modestin, Quellen. 3 Johannes Fritz, ed. Urkundenbuch der Stadt Straßburg. Band 6: Politische Urkunden von 1381–1400 (Strasbourg: Karl J. Trübner, 1899), 786–87; Helmut Puff, Sodomy in Reformation Germany and Switzerland, 1400–1600 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 23–24. 4 To my knowledge, the only study in English that discusses the Waldensians in Strasbourg in some detail (although published before Modestin’s and covering only some of the city’s Waldensians) is Biller, The Waldenses, 113–15, 146–52. 5 Modestin, Ketzer in der Stadt, 11–12. 6 Kathrin Utz Tremp, “Der Freiburger Waldenserprozeß von 1399 und seine bernische Vorgeschichte,” Freiburger Geschichtsblätter 68 (1991), 57–85. 7 Modestin, Ketzer in der Stadt, 71–74; Modestin, Quellen, 192–96. 8 Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 76. 9 Timotheus Wilhelm Rohrich, Mitteilungen aus der Geschichte der evangelischen Kirche des Elsasses, 3 vols. (Strasbourg: Treuttel und Würtz, 1855); Modestin, Quellen. 10 For a discussion of the process by which testimonies in the vernacular underwent translation into Latin and subsequent rewriting and of changing approaches to interpreting inquisitorial sources, see John H. Arnold, Inquisition and Power: Catharism and the Confessing Subject in Medieval Languedoc (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 4–7. Municipal judges in Strasbourg were less prone to be influenced by clerical ideas about heresy and did not always follow a set list of questions. See Biller, The Waldenses, 153. 11 Modestin, Quellen, 19–21. This misnomer has led several earlier scholars to assume that the heresy in Strasbourg was not Waldensian at all. See Henry Charles Lea, A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages (New York: Macmillan, 1887–88), vol. 2, 400: “in Strassburg, there was active persecution against a sect known as Winkelers. . . . Although, strictly speaking, not Waldenses, they had so many traits in common that the distinction is rather one of organization than of faith.” However, a list of heretical beliefs derived from the interrogations during the Strasbourg inquisition clearly indicates that these heretics were indeed Waldensians. See Modestin, Ketzer in der Stadt, 126–27. The term winkeler (“corner people”), nevertheless, emphasizes the contemporary understanding of the marginal nature of heresy, similar to the term “hole-people” (grüblins lüt) used in Augsburg to refer to Waldensians. Erhard Wahraus “Chronik des Erhard Wahraus, 1126–1445 mit Nachträge zum Jahre 1462,” CsSA, vol. 1, 228. 12 Modestin, Quellen, 58–63; Modestin, Ketzer in der Stadt, 12–14. 13 Christine Caldwell Ames, Righteous Persecution: Inquisition, Dominicans, and Christianity in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,

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20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29 30 31 32 33 34

35 36 37 38

“Shame and dishonor” 2009), 40–46; James B. Given, Inquisition and Medieval Society: Power, Discipline, and Resistance in Languedoc (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 71–76; Välimäki, Heresy in Late Medieval Germany, 172–75. For a more detailed discussion of preaching in this context, see Chapter 6. Välimäki, Heresy in Late Medieval Germany, 172–73. Modestin, Ketzer in der Stadt, 11–12; Utz Tremp, “Der Freiburger Waldenserprozeß,” 57–73. Modestin, Ketzer in der Stadt, 21. For an edition of the letter from Strasbourg’s city council to Bern’s, see Modestin, Quellen, 197–99. Utz Tremp, “Der Freiburger Waldenserprozeß,” 66–67. Modestin, Ketzer in der Stadt, 32–33. Georg Modestin, “Der Augsburger Waldenserprozess und sein Straßburger Nachspiel (1393–1400),” Zeitschrift des Historischen Vereins für Schwaben 103 (2011), 58–59; Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 69–70. The trial in Augsburg is discussed in detail in Chapter 3. Modestin, Quellen, 208–09 (the Berolfins), 210–12 (the Strussins). Modestin, Quellen, 163–67. On the role of parish priests in the persecution of heresy in southern France, see Given, Inquisition and Medieval Society, 198–205. Modestin, Quellen, 184–88. Modestin, Quellen, 160; Modestin, Ketzer in der Stadt, 35. Modestin, Ketzer in der Stadt, 126–27; Modestin, Quellen, 154–56, 167–76. Modestin, Quellen, 88–104. A sixteenth-century description of the trial by Daniel Specklin (1536–1589) mentions that clerical involvement in the inquisition was limited to Johannes of Reichstett, a canon of St. Thomas and representative of the bishop. Except for Reichstett’s presence, the trial was conducted in front of the city council and burgomaster (stettmeister), Johannes of Kageneck the Elder. Modestin, Ketzer in der Stadt, 22–23. Modestin, Ketzer in der Stadt, 29, 71–72; Modestin, Quellen, 194. Modestin, Quellen, 197: “Lieben frúnde, wir haben vernommen, das by úch erschollen sie, das ein michel volk in unser stat beheftet sient mit irrunge cristens glouben und daz ͤ wir der gar vil sollent haben gefangen. Sol uwer wißheit wissen, das daz nit enists.” Modestin, Quellen, 198: “solichen stúcken und puncten, die zů lang werent zů schribende.” Modestin, Quellen, 198: “und sint dieselben unahtber lúte und von frumden gegenen geboren, nit von unser stat—ußgenommen zwo personen oder drie.” Modestin, Quellen, 198. Utz Tremp, “Der Freiburger Waldenserprozeß,” 60–61. At the end of the inquisition in Bern, in early October of 1400, over 130 convicted Waldensians were forced to pay over 3,000 guldens as part of their penance. For an overview of the chronicle accounts of the inquisition in Mainz, see Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane, “Archiepiscopal Inquisitions in the Middle Rhine: Urban Anticlericalism and Waldensianism in Late Fourteenth-Century Mainz,” Catholic Historical Review 92 (July 2006), 201–03. For chronicle accounts of the inquisition in Augsburg, see Chapter 3. Jacob Twinger of Königshofen, “Chronik des Jacob Twinger von Königshofen,” in Die Chroniken der Oberrheinischen Städte, ed. Karl von Hegel (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1870), vol. 2, 891: “Ketzer am glouben wurdent 20 zů Strosburg vertriben 1400.” Modestin, Quellen, 203: “Heretici numero XXII a civitate proscribuntur, quidam perpetue, quidam ad tempus, anno MCCCC.” Olivier Richard, “Histoire de Strasbourg, histoire pour Strasbourg. Sur la chronique allemande de Jakob Twinger von Königshofen,” Revue d’Alsace 127 (2001), 220. Richard, “Histoire de Strasbourg,” 224–26.

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39 Modestin, Quellen, 197: “irrunge cristens glouben.” 40 Phillippe Dollinger, “La Ville Libre à la Fin du Moyen Age (1350–1482),” in Histoire de Strasbourg des origines à nos jours, ed. Georges Livet and Francis Rapp (Strasbourg: Editions des dernières nouvelles de Strasbourg, 1980–82), vol. 2, 155–59. 41 Modestin, Ketzer in der Stadt, 82–84. 42 For a list of the Strasbourg Waldensians serving on the city council, see Modestin, Ketzer in der Stadt, 108–09. See also, Biller, The Waldenses, 113–15; Georg Modestin, “‘Dass sie unserer Stadt und diesem Land grosse Schmach und Unehre zugefügt haben’: Der Strassburger Waldenserprozess von 1400 und seine Vorgeschichte,” in Friedrich Reiser und die “waldensisch-hussitische Internationale” im 15. Jahrhundert, ed. Albert Lange and Kathrin Utz Tremp (Heidelberg: Verlag Regionalkultur, 2006), 192–94. 43 Modestin, Ketzer in der Stadt, 101–06, 108; Modestin, “Der Strassburger Waldenserprozess von 1400,” 192–93. 44 Modestin, Quellen, 224–25. 45 Modestin, Ketzer in der Stadt, 95–97, 108. 46 Modestin, “Der Strassburger Waldenserprozess von 1400,” 194. 47 Modestin, Quellen, 230. 48 Modestin, Quellen, 176: “umbe dis leben alles wol wuste und . . . by allen dingen gewesen ist.” 49 Modestin, Quellen, 177; Modestin, “Der Strassburger Waldenserprozess von 1400,” 194–95. 50 Modestin, Ketzer in der Stadt, 51–53. 51 Modestin, Quellen, 97. For Arnoldi’s resignation, see: Thomas Kaeppeli, ed., Registrum litterarum Fr. Raymundi de Vineis Capuani (Rome: Instituto Storico Domenicano, 1937), 131, no. 68: “Item die 4 aprilis absolvit fratrem Johannem Arnoldi ab officio inquisitoris Maguntinensis ad instantiam sui,” (my emphasis). 52 Georg Modestin, “Ein Mainzer Inquisitor in Strassburg: Ketzerverfolgung und Ordensreform auf dem Lebensweg von Nikolas Böckeler, 1378–1400,” Mainzer Zeitschrift 102 (2007), 167. 53 Modestin, Ketzer in der Stadt, 74–81; Modestin, “Der Strassburger Waldenserprozess von 1400,” 199. 54 Given, Inquisition and Medieval Society, 74–75. 55 Once the supposed meaning of the agreement became known to the residents of Carcassonne, they began a revolt incited by a Franciscan friar, Bernard Délicieux, and stormed the inquisitorial prison in the city. Alan Friedlander, The Hammer of the Inquisitors: Brother Bernard Délicieux and the Struggle Against the Inquisition in Fourteenth-century France (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 124–32; Given, Inquisition and Medieval Society, 188. 56 Modestin, Quellen, 233–35. 57 Wilhelm Wiegand, ed., Urkundenbuch der Stadt Straßburg. Band 1: Urkunden und Stadtrechte bis zum Jahre 1266 (Strasbourg: Karl J. Trübner, 1879), 395: “Ander reht unde gewohnheit, die sie unde ire vordern unz her hant braht, die hie nút geschrieben stant, die sol men in öch luzen”; Charlotte A. Stanford, Commemorating the Dead in Late Medieval Strasbourg: The Cathedral’s Book of Donors and Its Use (1320–1521) (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), 123–24. 58 René-Pierre Levresse, L’officialité épiscopale de Strasbourg de ses origins à son transfert à Molsheim (1248–1597) (Strasbourg: Université des Sciences Humaines, 1973), 105: “La ville poursuit toujours le même objectif: augmenter son autonomie, en devenant seule compétente pour toutes les affaires concernant tous les habitants de Strasbourg.” 59 Tyler, Lord of the Sacred City, 122–23. 60 Stanford, Commemorating the Dead, 125. 61 Stanford, Commemorating the Dead, 137. 62 Stanford, Commemorating the Dead, 138.

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63 Dollinger, “La Ville Libre,” 160. See also, Francis Rapp, Jan van Herwaarden, and Markus Ries, “Friedrich von Blankenheim (1356–1423),” BHRR, 832–33. 64 Rapp, Van Herwaarden, Ries, “Friedrich von Blankenheim,” 832. 65 Jennifer M. Kolpacoff, “Papal Schism, Archiepiscopal Politics and Waldensian Persecution (1378–1396): The Ecclesio-Political Landscape of Late Fourteenth-Century Mainz,” PhD diss. (Northwestern University, 2000), 90; Georg Modestin, “Les vaudois de Strasbourg devant leurs juges. Une étude comparative. Berne (1399)— Fribourg/Suisse (1399)—Strasbourg (1400),” Bollettino della Società di Studi Valdesi 125, no. 203 (2008), 8. For an overview of recent research on the “Town War” (Städtekrieg), see Duncan Hardy, Associative Political Culture in the Holy Roman Empire: Upper Germany, 1346–1521 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 179–97. 66 Hardy, Associative Political Culture, 195. 67 RTA, 2: 92n.1. 68 Dollinger, “La Ville Libre,” 149–50. 69 Jacob Twinger of Königshofen was appointed canon of the church of St. Thomas, a prestigious position for a person of humble origins that put him in charge of the church’s library and archives. It is most probable that his vernacular chronicle was commissioned directly by the city council, which secured his prestigious appointment. See Olivier Richard, “Histoire de Strasbourg, Histoire pour Strasbourg,” 220, 224. 70 Twinger of Königshofen, “Chronik,” 1:230: “Aber zů dütsche ist lützel sollicher ͤ bucher geschriben, wie doch das die klůgen legen also gerne lesent von semelichen dingen also gelerte pfaffen.” 71 Modestin, “Der Strassburger Waldenserprozess von 1400,” 196–97. 72 Stanford, Commemorating the Dead, 142–43. 73 Deane, “Archiepiscopal Inquisitions,” 211–12, 218–19; Reima Välimäki, “Bishops and the Inquisition of Heresy in Late Medieval Germany,” in Dominus Episcopus: Medieval Bishops between Diocese and Court, eds. Elena Balzamo and Anthony John Lappin (Stockholm: Kungl. Vitterhetsakademien, 2018), 194–95. The inquisition in Augsburg is discussed in Chapter 3. 74 Modestin, “Der Strassburger Waldenserprozess von 1400,” 197; Rapp, Van Herwaarden, Ries, “Friedrich von Blankenheim,” 833. 75 Stanford, Commemorating the Dead, 143. 76 Hans Reinhardt, La Cathedrale de Strasbourg (Paris: Arthaud, 1972), 23–24; Stanford, Commemorating the Dead, 95–96. 77 Stanford, Commemorating the Dead, 143. 78 Robert E. Lerner, The Heresy of the Free Spirit in the Later Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 101–03. 79 Modestin, “Ein Mainzer Inquisitor in Strassburg,” 170. 80 Michael Tönsing, Johannes Malkaw aus Preussen (ca. 1360–1416): Ein Kleriker im Spannungsfeld von Kanzel, Ketzerprozess und Kirchenspaltung (Warendorf: Fahlbusch, 2004), 225–27. 81 Välimäki, Heresy in Late Medieval Germany, 136–37. 82 Lerner, Heresy of the Free Spirit, 101–02; Modestin, “Ein Mainzer Inquisitor,” 170; Deane, “Papal Schism,” 142–47. For a detailed study of the Malkaw affair, see: Tönsing, Johannes Malkaw aus Preussen. 83 Tönsing, Johannes Malkaw aus Preussen, 49–50; Deane, “Papal Schism,” 146–48. 84 Tönsing, Johannes Malkaw, 51. 85 For an edition of the letter, see Tönsing, Johannes Malkaw, 227–28. 86 Lerner, Heresy of the Free Spirit, 103; Modestin, “Ein Mainzer Inquisitor,” 170. 87 Modestin, Ketzer in der Stadt, 16. 88 Modestin, “Der Strassburger Waldenserprozess von 1400,” 199. 89 Modestin, “Le vaudois de Strasbourg,” 8; Modestin, Ketzer in der Stadt, 14. 90 For a discussion of types of punishment available to an inquisitor and their use, see Given, Inquisition and Medieval Society, 71–90.

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91 Mair, “Nördlingani brevis Historia,” 620; Modestin, “Der Augsburger Waldenserprozess,” 63. For a detailed discussion of the inquisition in Augsburg, see Chapter 3. 92 Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 75. 93 Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 78. 94 Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 76–78. 95 Werner Schultheiß, Die Acht-, Verbots-, und Fehdebücher Nürnbergs von 1285–1400 (Nuremberg: Selbstverlag des Stadtrats, 1960), 150–51. See also Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 77. 96 Notably, in 1399, another inquisition in Nuremberg resulted in seven men and women burned at the stake, eleven subjected to wearing penitential crosses, and several individuals expelled from the city; nineteen more, who fled the persecution, were banned from Nuremberg as well. This campaign, however, involved inquisitor Martin of Amberg acting on behalf of the bishop of Bamberg. Martin’s involvement suggests the use of more traditional forms of punishment: burning and penitential crosses. Schultheiß, Die Acht-, Verbots-, und Fehdebücher, 158–59 (the inquisition is mistakenly recorded for the year 1379, instead of 1399); “Chronik aus Kaiser Sigmund’s Zeit bis 1434 mit Fortsetzung bis 1441,” in Die Chroniken der fränkischen Städte. Nürnberg, ed. Karl von Hegel (Leipzig, 1862), vol. 1, 362; Deutsche Reichstagsakten unter König Wenzel, ed. Julius Weizsäcker (Munich, 1877), vol. 1, 88; Herman Haupt, Die religiöse Sekten in Franken vor der Reformation (Würzburg, 1882), 27–28. 97 Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 76. Laura Stokes notes that starting in the early fifteenth century, city councils in Upper Germany and Switzerland began to try crimes of religion like diabolism and witchcraft in municipal courts, without involving the ecclesiastical authorities. See Laura Stokes, Demons of Urban Reform: Early European Witch Trials and Criminal Justice, 1430–1530 (New York: Palgrave, 2011), in particular, chapters 7 and 8. 98 Tyler, Lord of the Sacred City, 17–18. 99 Jason P. Coy, Strangers and Misfits: Banishment, Social Control, and Authority in Early Modern Germany (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 8–9. 100 Coy, Strangers and Misfits, 3; For an overview of late medieval expulsion, see Isenmann, Deutsche Stadt, 514–15; Trevor Dean, Crime in Medieval Europe, 1200–1550 (New York: Routledge, 2001), 129–30; Helmut Maurer, “Erzwungene Ferne: Zur raumlichen Dimension der Stadtverweisung im Spatmittelalter,” in Grenzen und Raumvorstellungen (11.–20. Jahrhundert). Frontières et Conception de l’espace (XIe–XXe siècle), ed. Guy Paul Marchal (Zürich: Chronos, 1996), 199–224. 101 Modestin, Ketzer in der Stadt, 19. Modestin looks at the court cases from the period between September 20, 1399 and June 15, 1400, that is, around the time of the inquisition. 102 Modestin, Quellen, 223–24; Modestin, Ketzer in der Stadt, 150. 103 Bernd Moeller, Imperial Cities and the Reformation: Three Essays, trans. H. C. E. Midelfort and M. U. Edwards, Jr. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1972), 46. 104 Modestin, Quellen, 196: “die hant alle ewiclichen uß dem Bystum gesworen.” 105 Modestin, Quellen, 192. 106 Modestin, Quellen, 192 n.5. See also, Modestin, Ketzer in der Stadt, 23–27. 107 Modestin, Quellen, 196: “und wo man Ir jemer deheins im dem Bystum ergrifet, do es uns in unser Gerihte gevolgen mag, das sol man verbúrnen.” On burning as punishment for unrepentant or relapsed heretics, see Given, Inquisition, 75. 108 Modestin, Ketzer in der Stadt, 150. 109 Modestin, Quellen, 144–46. 110 Modestin, Quellen, 195–96; Modestin, Ketzer in der Stadt, 74. 111 Modestin, Ketzer in der Stadt, 74. 112 Staatsarchiv Luzern RP I. fol. 177v; edited and published in Helmut Puff and Wolfram Schneider-Lastin, “Quellen zur Homosexualität im Mittelalter: Ein Basler Projekt,” Forum Homosexualität und Literatur 13 (1991), 122. I use the published version of the document. See also Modestin, Ketzer in der Stadt, 23–24; Helmut Puff, Sodomy, 23–24.

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113 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality (New York: Vintage, 1980), vol. 1, 101; Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 18. 114 Puff, Sodomy, 18. Secret rites involving indiscriminate sexuality, including incest and infanticide, can be traced to the accusations made by Ancient Roman authors against Early Christian communities and to the responses to them by the Christian apologists. In the eleventh century, Guibert of Nogent described heretics practicing similar secret rites in Soissons. Guibert of Nogent, A Monk’s Confession: The Memoirs of Guibert of Nogent, trans. Paul J. Archambault (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 196–97. These accusations are echoed in the John of Winterthur’s fourteenth-century description of heresy: Johannis Vitoduranus, Chronica, ed. F. Baethgen (Berlin: Weidmann, 1924), 144–45. See also, Lerner, Heresy of the Free Spirit, 25–26. 115 Puff, Sodomy, 7. 116 Stokes, Demons of Urban Reform, 155–57. 117 Hans Witte, ed., Urkundenbuch der Stadt Straßburg. Band 7: Privatrechtliche Urkunden aus Rathslisten von 1332 und 1400 (Strasbourg: Karl J. Trübner, 1900), 945, 947. 118 Kathy Stuart, Defiled Trades and Social Outcasts: Honor and Ritual Pollution in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 106. 119 Stuart, Defiled Trades, 106. 120 Quoted in Stuart, Defiled Trades, 105. 121 On the role of fama in persecutions of sodomy, see Puff, Sodomy, 112–19. For a description of the role of “reputation” (fama) played in inquisitorial process, see Henry Ansgar Kelly, “The Fourth Lateran Ordo of Inquisition Adapted to the Persecution of Heresy,” in A Companion to Heresy Inquisitions, ed. Donald Prudlo (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 76–78. 122 Puff and Schneider-Lastin, “Quellen zur Homosexualität im Mittelalter,” 121–22: “vnd habent den noch sinen geschichten tůn frogen in der mosse, als man soliche belúmdete lúte billich froget.” 123 Puff and Schneider-Lastin, “Quellen zur Homosexualität im Mittelalter,” 122–23. 124 Puff and Schneider-Lastin, “Quellen zur Homosexualität im Mittelalter,” 122. 125 Puff and Schneider-Lastin, “Quellen zur Homosexualität im Mittelalter,” 123–24. 126 Jacob Twinger of Königshofen, “Chronik,” 2:891. Notably, this clarification is absent in Twinger’s Latin chronicle, where Waldensians are described simply as “heretici.” Modestin, Quellen, 203. 127 Twinger of Königshofen, “Chronik,” 2:904: “Sodoma, Gomorra, Adoma, Sebays und Bala die fünf stette gingent under von ketzerige wegen vor gotz gebürte 1900 jor.” 128 Puff, Sodomy, 27. Strasbourg experienced four severe earthquakes in 1356, 1357, 1362, and 1363, as well as waves of plague in 1349, 1358, and 1381. See, Stanford, Commemorating the Dead, 138. 129 Puff and Schneider-Lastin, “Quellen zur Homosexualität,” 122: “an vnser ringmuren” (my emphasis). 130 Keith D. Lilley, City and Cosmos: The Medieval World in Urban Form (London: Reaktion Books, 2009), 169; Keith D. Lilley, “Mapping Cosmopolis: Moral Topographies of the Medieval City,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 22, no. 5 (2004), 686–94. 131 Puff, Sodomy, 27. 132 Puff, Sodomy, 42–43. 133 Modestin, Quellen, 198. 134 Modestin, Quellen, 233–34.

6

Communication, resistance, and recovery

On a chilly day in late November 1399, just days before the beginning of Advent, two groups descended upon Wünnewil, a small Swiss village. The groups converged from opposite directions and their entrance into Wünnewil probably betrayed the official nature of this occasion; the men in the two delegations meeting at the village looked and acted as if they were accustomed to political power. Wünnewil, despite its size, was an ideal meeting spot—roughly halfway between Fribourg and Bern, on the border between the territories controlled by the two cities.1 In addition to its location, the village provided a convenient place for a discreet diplomatic exchange; the men in both delegations, after all, had a delicate matter to discuss. Arriving from the northeast were the representatives of the city council of Bern, who had summoned their colleagues, councilors from Fribourg, to this meeting. The conversation between these men and the documents exchanging hands between them were as important as they were unpleasant.2 Important because the meeting concerned Fribourg’s honor and reputation; unpleasant because the meeting was organized by Bern’s city council to inform their counterparts and neighbors that Fribourg was home to a sizable Waldensian community. This assertion—no doubt scandalous—was accompanied by a list of names of those who were “either known to many in Bern to be heretics or were accused of heresy by a converted [heretical] preacher.”3 In the late fall of 1399, Bern was in the middle of an anti-Waldensian inquisition, a drawn out investigation that would last until the fall of 1400. Soon after the ominous meeting at Wünnewil, Fribourg’s Waldensians also became targets of an inquisition. However, unlike the prolonged inquisition in Bern, the anti-Waldensian trial in Fribourg took a radically different, unprecedented course: the brief inquest ended in a full acquittal of all suspects. The meeting at Wünnewil and the anti-Waldensian inquisition in Fribourg that followed illustrate the complex roles Waldensianism and its repression played in urban settings during this period. By the end of the decade of intensified antiWaldensian persecutions across German-speaking central Europe, urban governments were increasingly aware of the political meaning of heresy and the danger an inquisition posed to urban order. Instrumentalized in external conflicts between cities and their competitors throughout the 1390s, accusations of heresy

140 Communication, resistance, and recovery became more ubiquitous but did not lose their potential to hurt reputations, communal or personal. As heresy began to attract more attention, urban Waldensian communities—usually sizable, well integrated, and with members from the ranks of urban economic and political elites—became particularly problematic targets for persecution. Once discovered, Waldensian communities constituted a religious and political crisis as they challenged the definition of good citizenship and ecclesiastical and political hierarchies. Late medieval persecution of urban Waldensians coincided with the growing intensification of social discipline in cities; in order to protect themselves, municipal governments became more engaged in policing religious matters, including heresy. Using the inquisitions in Bern (1399–1400) and Fribourg (1399) as examples, this chapter will argue that even the anti-Waldensian inquisitions which involved more traditional mendicant inquisitors demonstrated greater participation from city councils in controlling the outcome and legacy of each trial.

Inconvenient heretics: urban Waldensians and social control As the presence of heretical communities, and specifically of Waldensians, came to be exploited by the cities’ external competitors, urban governments began to be increasingly concerned about religious heterodoxy within their walls. As Chapter 1 has demonstrated, the later fourteenth century marks the beginning of a long shift toward increasingly paternalistic sets of policies promulgated by urban governments in free and imperial German cities. If the later thirteenth century and most of the fourteenth were spent on carving out and defending the municipal right to self-governance, the last decades of the fourteenth century saw a move towards “new moralism” (neue Sittlichkeit), to use the phrase coined by Beate Schuster.4 If the cities were to be fully in charge of their citizens and residents, they had a responsibility to promote the common good and root out immoral, sinful, un-Christian practices that could open the whole community to divine wrath or endanger its honor and reputation. The policies aimed at establishing the new urban moral order dealt with all aspects of urban life; heresy became invariably targeted as a threat to this order and to the community’s well-being in general. Historians of late medieval and early modern Europe have been interested in the process of social disciplining and its origins in urban communities since the 1960s. This concept was first introduced by Gerhard Oesterreich as shorthand for social, political, and legal transformation that promoted obedience, piety, and religious conformity over the centuries following the Reformation, culminating in the rise of absolutism during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.5 Subsequent studies have firmly associated social disciplining with Reformation-era confessionalization and the state-sponsored emphasis on piety and moral behavior in Lutheran, Calvinist, and Catholic states. As a result, early modern governments became more intrusive and involved in the daily lives of their subjects; in turn, the subjects were expected to internalize new moral and religious norms or suffer increasingly harsh punishments. While the rise of social disciplining at the level of states is an early modern phenomenon, the origins of these processes at

Communication, resistance, and recovery 141 a more local level, especially in cities, can be safely located in pre-Reformation Europe of the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.6 Social regulation and control, as a system of push and pull, action and reaction, took time to develop and to be perfected; late medieval cities became its first testing grounds. As Bettina Günther argues in her study of social regulations in Frankfurt and Nuremberg, municipal governments in late medieval imperial cities were able to develop and enforce morality regulations earlier than larger territorial states.7 Although expanding vigorously in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, imperial cities were still compact enough to sustain the regulating efforts of relatively small governments with limited administrative potential. Consequently, it is in the cities that we see the gradual elaboration of regulations aimed at curtailing gambling, blasphemy, and excessive drinking, as well as the promulgation of sumptuary laws. In the fifteenth century, the religious dimension of social control became spelled out more clearly: a sumptuary ordinance from Nuremberg proclaims that excessively expensive clothing was a sign of pride, a sin particularly hated by God.8 However, even in the fourteenth century this sentiment and the regulations it inspired would have been familiar to the members of a city council. For example, in Nuremberg the magistrates issued wedding ordinances—restricting the allowed number of guests, the value of gifts, and the amounts of food and drink, among other stipulations—four times during the fourteenth century alone (1310, 1320, 1350, 1388).9 The same governments attempted to regulate prostitution and sanitation, upholding the symbolic and literal purity of the communities in their charge.10 In this context of increasing social control, heresy was recognized for its potential to stain a city’s reputation, to cast doubts upon its ruling elites, and to leave the city open to an episcopal intrusion. The penchant for social control in late fourteenth-century Nuremberg is visible from the city’s multiple persecutions of heresy (Waldensianism, in most cases) and the choice of punishments used. In 1354, the city council convicted and banished eighteen men and five women from Nuremberg for a term of five years, on pain of being hanged if they returned. As Richard Kieckhefer points out in his brief discussion of heresy being treated as a civil disorder by municipal governments, the use of banishment and the threat of hanging (instead of burning, which was traditional for recalcitrant heretics) indicated that the city council was involved in this trial, possibly initiated it, and used punishments more typical of anti-social crimes, rather than heresy.11 A few years later, in 1362, eight men and seven women were once again banished from the city, this time for life. A few of those were repeat offenders, previously banished in 1354; however, the fact that they were only expelled and not punished more severely once again demonstrated a glaring breach of traditional inquisitorial practice.12 The irregular nature of punishment in these two trials contrasts with yet another inquisition from 1378, when twenty-four women and fifteen men were convicted of being heretics and forced to wear penitential crosses. The city’s financial records reveal that this trial included a visit from the bishop of Bamberg, Lambert of Brunn (Nuremberg’s ecclesiastical lord); the bishop’s presence at the trial explains the use of more traditional forms of punishment of heresy instead of banishment.13 The three

142 Communication, resistance, and recovery trials and their outcomes demonstrate a clear difference in how the city’s officials and the bishop saw heresy and its repression. For the former, heretics were an unwanted group of individuals whose mere presence was scandalous; the best course of action was to expel them. For the bishop, and the Church in general, the penitential crosses ensured that the heretics, once made visible, could demonstrate their former error and repentance to the rest of the community.14 Did the city council’s involvement in the persecution of heresy signify an ongoing conflict between the municipal and ecclesiastical authorities? Richard Kieckhefer argues that even if Nuremberg’s council claimed concurrent jurisdiction in the matters related to the persecution of heresy, there is no evidence that it claimed exclusive jurisdiction.15 While this is a valid point, the types of punishments used—and the fact that they contradicted established ecclesiastical methods of punishing heretics—suggest that the city council did, in fact, have significant control over the course of the trials of 1354 and 1362. The city council’s desire to exert control even in ecclesiastical matters was not limited to heresy. In 1388, Nuremberg’s council required priests of the city’s parish churches of St. Sebald and St. Lawrence to reside in Nuremberg itself, closer to their parishioners. The priests traditionally resided in Bamberg and were habitually absent from Nuremberg, acting through their vicars instead.16 The residence requirement once again demonstrates the regulatory fervor of the city’s ruling elite and its promotion of the civic religion and communal piety. It also demonstrates an attempt on the part of the city council to weaken the influence of the bishop of Bamberg in the city. For an imperial city like Nuremberg, which did not have a cathedral and therefore lacked that symbolic reminder of episcopal influence over the municipal affairs—unlike Augsburg, Strasbourg, or Mainz—it was perhaps easier to claim a greater degree of autonomy from its bishop even in matters of religion. In the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century, the city continued its practice of gradual encroachment on ecclesiastical privileges within its walls; a similar tactic characterized its approach to dealing with heresy. At the end of the fourteenth century, when yet another inquisition took place in Nuremberg, the city once again demonstrated its desire to interfere in ecclesiastical matters. In late April of 1399, Martin of Amberg, an itinerant inquisitor whose activity in the 1390s and the early years of the fifteenth century was primarily focused on pursuing German Waldensian communities, arrived in Nuremberg. Acting with the permission of the bishop of Bamberg, inquisitor Martin presided over a prosecution of heretics in the city. As result of the trial, seven individuals (six of them women) were burned at the stake. In addition to these seven, out of the unknown total number of men and women put on trial, eleven were condemned to wear penitential crosses while a few more were banished from the city. Nineteen others took matters into their own hands, fled the city before the trial, and were also banished.17 The full spectrum of inquisitorial punishments employed during this trial demonstrates the involvement of both the episcopal inquisitor and the city council in the trial and cooperation between the two. The cooperation was temporary, however. Already the following year, according to the seventeenth-century chronicle Annals of Nuremberg, the city council appointed

Communication, resistance, and recovery 143 one of Nuremberg’s own citizens to investigate heresy within its walls in an attempt to assume full control of the persecution of religious deviance typical of late medieval cities.18 With heretical presence in cities becoming increasingly exploited by their political competitors, urban governments became more cognizant of the need to control anti-heretical inquisitions. Unlike other types of antisocial (from the council’s point of view) behavior—gambling, prostitution, or blasphemy—heresy was harder to police preemptively. It is hard to know the extent to which religious heterodoxy (for example, Waldensianism) itself concerned the city councils in free and imperial cities. The existence of well-established heretical communities in Augsburg, Strasbourg, Fribourg, Bern, and other cities suggests that urban communities and their ruling elites had very limited capabilities for surveillance and control when it came to religious beliefs and practice. Once heretical presence was discovered, however, it posed danger to the whole community, its reputation, and even its political independence. If any heretical presence in a city had the potential to hurt its reputation or open it to a hostile intervention, the nature of Waldensian communities in late medieval German cities made this particular heresy even more dangerous. The communal nature of the Waldensians meant that they were found in groups, often counting over twenty members and reaching over a hundred in rare cases.19 These communities could be found in nearly every large city in Upper Germany, in addition to both rural and urban communities that existed in the Mark of Brandenburg, Austria, and Hungary.20 It is hard to underestimate the effect of such numbers of heretics, most of whom remained undisturbed until the 1390s, being put on trial within the span of little more than a decade. While local chroniclers rarely mention the inquisition taking place elsewhere, it is easy to imagine that the news of inquisitions, trials, and executions traveled quickly along the busy trade routes that connected free and imperial cities. A notable exception can be found in a chronicle of Hans Mair of Nördlingen, where the discussion of four inquisitorial trials in Augsburg, Donauwörth, Dinkelsbühl, and Wemding in the late summer and fall of 1393 can easily create an impression of an overwhelming campaign against heresy sweeping the land.21 It is possible to interpret Mair’s keen attention to the details of anti-Waldensian trials as a sign of the anxiety he felt, as a member of Nördlingen’s ruling elite, as these inquisitions were taking place dangerously close to his hometown.22 The closest of the inquisitorial trials during the fall of 1393 took place in Wemding, mere eleven miles away. Although there are no records of a Waldensian community ever being found in Nördlingen, that does not necessarily prove that none existed. One of the five women who cooperated with Strasbourg city council during its inquisition of 1400, Kunigund Strussin, was born in Nördlingen and later married a Waldensian man in Augsburg. No evidence survived about Kunigund’s religious beliefs before her marriage. The fact that she married a Waldensian man may suggest that she came from a Waldensian family, but in other Waldensian communities in the German-speaking lands and beyond, Waldensians and Catholics did intermarry, even when endogamy was promoted.23 If Kunigund was, indeed,

144 Communication, resistance, and recovery a Waldensian before her wedding, then there might have been a community of her coreligionists in Nördlingen, making it vulnerable to a potential inquest. After all, not all Waldensian communities in the region were uprooted at the hands of inquisitor Heinrich Angermeier and his patron, the bishop of Augsburg. While the heretical community in Donauwörth was probably destroyed (or, at least, severely diminished) when forty Waldensians were put on trial and as many as twenty-six of them executed, at least some Waldensians survived in nearby Daiting, only a few miles to the northeast.24 Thus, Hans Mair’s account and his abovementioned skepticism about the motives for this campaign of persecution can be a sign of a councilmember observing the tide of violence nearing his city. In addition to their numbers, some members of urban Waldensian communities had a remarkably high social and economic status, making them an inconvenient target for persecution. As I have discussed in Chapter 1, in late medieval cities wealth, social influence, and political power overlapped; civic spirituality additionally imbued the wealthy with religious significance as sworn members of the ruling elite. These men were entrusted with the community’s well-being, symbolically at least, as the guarantors and dispensers of the common good. If finding a heretical community within a city already constituted a crisis, finding heretics among the members of the city council dealt a blow to the very foundation of medieval city-centric ideology. However, in most urban anti-Waldensian inquisitions that took place at the end of the fourteenth century, at least some of the accused participated (in various ways) in their cities’ political institutions. Perhaps the clearest example of multiple members of Waldensian communities having a seat on the city council was uncovered by Georg Modestin in his study of the city council inquisition in Strasbourg. In that city, over the course of the 1390s, six Waldensian men represented their guilds or, in the case of councilmember Claus zur Birken, the patrician class, on the council.25 Not surprisingly, in the aftermath of the inquisition and expulsion of Waldensians from Strasbourg, the city council took pains to present the eradicated heretical community as consisting of foreigners and “insignificant people.”26 In a similar move, the council of Bern passed an ordinance shortly after the trial of at least 130 Waldensians in 1400, which banned any former heretics from ever participating in the municipal government; it stands to reason that such categorical prohibition was caused by the known political engagement of at least some of the accused.27 In other cities, anti-Waldensian inquisitions reveal similarly well-integrated and thriving communities. Waldensians in Mainz were said to have owned a house dedicated to their communal meetings—possibly for their interaction with visiting ministers—the so-called “domus Spiegelberg.”28 In Donauwörth and Dinkelsbühl, some of the Waldensians on trial were also men of property, which may have been confiscated by the bishop of Augsburg.29 A Waldensian minister and merchant, Hans of Plauen, moved to Nuremberg in the early fifteenth century and was economically successful enough to acquire citizenship rights in 1407.30 The Waldensian community in Fribourg also included prominent merchants trading in hides and cloth with Strasbourg (including members of the Waldensian community there) and beyond; many members of that heretical community were

Communication, resistance, and recovery 145 citizens and participated in local government in various roles.31 Finally, one out of six Waldensians whose names survived in the chronicle account of the inquisition in Augsburg, Konrad Steinlin, had represented his guild of wool weavers (lodweber) in its interactions with the city council during a bloodless uprising that led to the inclusion of the guilds in the city’s government.32 Well-established, wealthy, and in some cases politically active German urban Waldensians were inconvenient targets for persecution: religious minorities with outsized roles in their larger communities. It is not surprising that urban governments were concerned about heretical presence inside the cities and tried to downplay the social and economic status of its members, take control of the persecution of heresy in their towns, or avoid it altogether. However, unlike other groups whose existence in a city was directly related to the enforcement of social discipline—such as prostitutes or vagrants—heretics were harder to identify by efforts of the municipal authorities alone. Instead, heretical presence needed to be revealed or communicated to the city council by various means—catalysts of the inquisition to come.

Communicating the inquisition Unable to detect or recognize heresy without sufficient theological training, urban governments were left at the mercy of other agents of persecution. This was an unfortunate situation since it left the city open to revelations about its citizens and their religious status at any time. Moreover, in many cases, heretical presence inside a city was communicated in a public venue, which made this highly sensitive information widely known. In a sense, public proclamation that a city harbored a heretical community within its walls was tantamount to an attack on its honor; it urged the authorities to act and to act swiftly, before news of a thriving Waldensian community could be used to inflict more damage upon the city’s reputation and autonomy. If heretical presence constituted a crisis of citizenship, what options did a municipal government have available to it? The remainder of this chapter will discuss three interrelated topics: the use of communication to catalyze an inquisition, the ability of urban elites to respond by communicating their version of the events in an attempt to heal a community after a persecution, and the means of resisting an inquisition altogether. In his recent study of inquisitor Peter Zwicker, Reima Välimäki points out the importance of communication and, in particular, preaching to an inquisitor.33 Preaching was not only a way of educating the lay audience about the dangers of heresy but also a persuasive performance meant to stir up anti-heretical sentiment. Indeed, the preaching and persecution of heresy were interrelated tasks originating from inquisitorial methods and the creation of the Dominican Order of Preachers in the early thirteenth century. Through sermons as well as public reading out of sentences at the close of an inquisition, inquisitors presided over “a performance in which the church’s official version of correct spiritual order was acted out in a grandiose and impressive public fashion.”34 By the late Middle Ages, skillful preaching was so integral to the ability of an inquisitor to perform his duties that

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in 1401 the Dominican General Chapter ordered those inquisitors who were inadequate preachers to be dismissed.35 Although not a Dominican himself, Zwicker certainly fit the preacher-inquisitor mold. Perhaps due to his earlier career as a schoolteacher, Zwicker had a particular gift for educating the laity. Although no texts of the sermons delivered by Zwicker survive, his anti-Waldensian polemic Cum dormirent homines, composed in 1395, contains parts written in accessible terms and with common-sense examples one could expect to find in a sermon.36 Zwicker’s ability to persuade from the pulpit even reportedly caused a Waldensian woman in Hartberg, Lower Austria, to proclaim that the inquisitor’s sermon converted her away from heresy.37 Sermons, especially those delivered in urban settings, had another purpose. In addition to trying to convert any potential heretics in the audience or to dissuade the laity from supporting them, public sermons against heresy undoubtedly served as a message to the ruling elites. A sermon against heresy was, at its core, an acknowledgement that heresy was lurking nearby and needed to be verbally repelled by the preacher. Such a strong statement, even if it was not aimed directly at the city’s rulers, was still a slight against urban honor and against the local government. After all, if enough heretics existed in a city to merit a sermon—often from a visiting preacher—why were they tolerated by the city until then? In other words, anti-heretical sermons had the potential to catalyze a persecution.38 We see this scenario in action in Strasbourg, when a visiting Dominican friar, Peter Mangold, delivered an unplanned sermon against Waldensian heretics in the city during Advent of 1399. The preacher’s exact motivations and the content of his sermon are unknown, but his words had an undeniable effect on the city council, prompting it to begin an investigation of the Waldensians in Strasbourg and culminating in a municipal trial in late March–early April of the following year.39 Although Strasbourg’s council acted quickly to launch a preemptive investigation without any Dominican involvement, was this the preacher’s original intention? As the Dominican stated when he was questioned by the council, he delivered the impromptu sermon to inspire his audience to convert voluntarily.40 Was it possible that the friar expected to incite a persecution, probably with the support of the bishop of Strasbourg, and thus was providing his audience with a brief “grace period”? Such practice was not unheard of and even described in the near-contemporary Directorium inquisitorum by an Aragonese inquisitor Nicholas Eymerich, written around 1376. Eymerich advised that an inquisitor should provide such opportunity to confess and convert voluntarily in exchange for a lighter penance upon his arrival to a place about to be investigated. In fact, Eymerich was so certain that a promise of a “grace period” would elicit a wave of conversions and denunciations that he suggested an inquisitor should prepare to jot down the large amounts of information revealed to him in shorthand.41 Moreover, Peter Mangold’s origin at the Dominican convent in Basel may have inspired him to launch an inquisition in Strasbourg. After all, he was probably aware that by Advent of 1399, both Bern and Fribourg—to the south of Basel—had ongoing anti-Waldensian trials and the inquisitor investigating the Waldensians in Bern was from the same Basel convent as Mangold.42

Communication, resistance, and recovery 147 Public preaching as a catalyst for an inquisition was used in Augsburg only a few years prior to Mangold’s arrival in Strasbourg. Although the anti-Waldensian campaign in Augsburg is discussed in detail in Chapter 3, it is worth pointing out the similarities between the inquisition in Augsburg and Strasbourg. Both began with a sermon from a visiting preacher. In late July of 1393, a preacher from Bamberg, later identified as Heinrich Angermeier, arrived in Augsburg with an intention to deliver a sermon. Just like in Strasbourg, Angermeier’s decision to preach about heresy was unexpected; the preacher initially planned to speak about usury, an appropriate topic for a late medieval city. Shortly after the sermon, the preacher sought the bishop’s permission to pursue heretics in Augsburg and, later, was allegedly nearly attacked by a knife-wielding man. Despite being described in the chronicle account as a “heretic” it is unclear if Hans Lutz, the attacker, was in fact a Waldensian. The incident forced the city council’s hand, however, prompting arrests and the subsequent trial of thirty-four women and men.43 The role of preaching and preachers in catalyzing the inquisitorial campaigns in both cities is remarkably similar. In both cases, preachers were outsiders, preached against heresy unexpectedly, and with their sermon, put enough pressure on the municipal government to engage in a persecution of heresy. It is impossible to know if the city council of Strasbourg was aware of the events that unfolded in Augsburg six years earlier. Still, their swift reaction against the Waldensian community in the city suggests that by 1399, city governments knew better than to leave public revelations about heretical presence in their cities unaddressed. In addition to anti-heretical sermons, city councils had to contend with pressure put on them by other cities, their diplomatic and trade partners in the region. In these cases, communication between cities took a more secretive form as letters between councils or even as meetings between city council delegations. Unlike the sermons that revealed heretical presence to the public, making the presence of heresy harder to deny for the ruling elite, the “peer pressure” exerted by one city’s government upon another was more private but nevertheless effective. Both private and public pressure appealed to a city’s sense of urban honor and forced its government to protect itself from accusations of harboring heterodoxy within the city walls. While Peter Mangold’s sermon against the Waldensians in Strasbourg undoubtedly stirred the city council, the letter from their “excellent friends” and colleagues from Bern provided an additional impetus for the inquisition.44 As far as the timeline of the events prior to the inquisition can be established, there was a considerable delay between the Advent sermon and the beginning of the trial in the second half of March 1400. It is highly probable that the city council—although displeased with the public revelation about the existence of a heretical community in the city—took some time to consider if acting against the well-established Waldensians with a history of participation in municipal governance could be avoided altogether. Eventually, unable to forestall the beginning of the inquisition any longer, the city council relented and began the preliminary investigation seeking information about any potential heretics from the priests of Strasbourg’s parish churches.45 Communication between city governments at a time of crisis was not unprecedented. Decades earlier, during the plague pandemic, cities in the same region

148 Communication, resistance, and recovery (including Bern and Strasbourg) shared information as accusations spread about the alleged poisoning of wells by local Jewish communities. The imaginary conspiracy—borne out of centuries of anti-Judaism, indiscriminate use of torture, and fears stoked by the epidemic—spread through letters and interrogation reports.46 While earlier scholarship has maintained that the plague-era pogroms were largely the result of mob violence from below, more recent studies have re-evaluated these claims pointing out that the exchange of information as well as the acts of violence against the Jews were organized by municipal councils. Armed with information supplied by their neighbors, urban governments unleashed a wave of large-scale pogroms that swept central Europe in 1348–49. Strasbourg’s city council in particular inquired about the well-poisoning accusations from its neighbors up and down the Rhine; eventually, Strasbourg’s Jewish community was massacred on February 14, 1349.47 At the end of the fourteenth century, a similar albeit more limited sharing of information helped to incite anti-Waldensian inquisitions, with Strasbourg’s council once again on the receiving end of this information (although, in this case, unsolicited).

Bern: persecution and recovery Taking place a few months apart, the inquisitions in Fribourg and Strasbourg were both prompted, at least in part, by Bern’s city council and linked to its own persecution of Waldensians. Lasting from the summer of 1399 to the fall of 1400, the inquisition in Bern was most certainly an embarrassment for its ruling elites. First, the Waldensian community found in Bern was surprisingly large, with members from all walks of society. According to the chronicle account by Konrad Justinger, among the apprehended were individuals “from Bern and the hinterland, women and men, [from among] the powerful, the rich and the poor.”48 At over 130 men and women, the heretical community in Bern was among the largest of the ones that came under attack in the late fourteenth century, certainly the largest uncovered in a single city. Just the length of the inquisitorial process alone underscores the logistics involved in prosecuting a community of this size. Justinger’s report that the Waldensians found in Bern came from different economic strata helps to explain why at least some of the individuals on trial had to pay a heavy fine as part of their penance. According to the chronicle account, the fines, levied from the accused in accordance with their wealth, added up to a staggering total of 3,000 guldens. The chronicle is silent about the recipients of these funds, although it is reasonable to believe that a considerable part of it found its way into the city’s treasury. Finally, punished by having to wear customary penitential crosses—just as their brethren in Augsburg were—and fined, the repentant Waldensians were allowed to remain in the city. As this was their first offence, the chronicler reports, none were executed.49 The case of Bern (and other cities that became sites of anti-Waldensian inquisitions), demonstrates the damaging effect an urban inquisition could have on a community. Even when an anti-heretical trial concluded, its influence was far from over. Besides the number of its citizens—some of them prominent and wealthy—forced to wear a visible sign of their repentance in public, the aftermath of the inquisition

Communication, resistance, and recovery 149 scarred the cityscape. At least one house was destroyed because it was related in some way to the Waldensian community—possibly as a heretical “school,” a meeting place where members of the community gathered and interacted with visiting itinerant ministers.50 This practice was not unique to Bern. In 1401, at the end of the inquisition in Ödenburg (present-day Sopron, Hungary), inquisitor Peter Zwicker ordered the houses that served as meeting places for the local Waldensians destroyed and the plots of land where they once stood to be converted into communal dumps for urban waste, “so that there would forever be a waste-heap, where once before was a hiding-place of heretics.”51 Similar punishments were used by earlier inquisitors in Languedoc and northern Italy.52 Even though the razed heretical property was eventually allowed to be rebuilt, the memory of this punishment remained. The aftermath of the inquisition in Bern illustrates another concern on the mind of the city’s councilors: how to restore the city’s reputation and pacify the feuds, which erupted as a result of the large-scale persecution. Considering that some of the Waldensians found in the city belonged to the ranks of the urban elite, the task of “purging” the city government from any members associated with heresy became more urgent as the investigation drew to a close. On October 4, 1400, the ruling city council and the assembly of the “Two Hundred” (Bern’s Greater Council) issued a decree, which proclaimed—among other provisions—that no one punished as a heretic shall ever be allowed to serve on either of the councils or hold any other office in the city. This decision, codified as an ordinance in its final form in early December of 1400 demonstrates a real concern about the collective reputation of the councils and perhaps even their legitimacy in the aftermath of the inquisition.53 Although Justinger’s chronicle does not name any of the heretics found in the city, it is possible that some of the rich among the 130 Bernese Waldensians had connections to either of the city’s councils. The contemporary examples of Strasbourg, where some members of the Waldensian community were also found to be involved in municipal governance, suggests that wealthy Waldensians in Bern might have been equally politically active.54 The ordinance, as the only surviving official account of the inquisition, reinforced the council’s role in defending orthodoxy in the city by excluding anyone tainted by an association with heresy. This document, moreover, served the council’s political aims by broadcasting its own version of the events that transpired during the inquisition. In addition to banning any former heretics from municipal government, the document obscures the extent of the Waldensian community in the city. Instead of any specific number, the document speaks vaguely of “a few people” (etzlich personnen) punished for their heretical beliefs.55 Moreover, the official narrative of the inquisition lacks any mention of the Dominican inquisitor, Nikolaus of Landau, or of any role played by the Church in investigating heresy. Instead, according to the decree, the council punished heretics seemingly on its own.56 This, of course, was not entirely incorrect: the municipal authorities took a crucial part in the inquisition and even attempted to initiate anti-heretical persecutions in other cities. Nevertheless, this interpretation of the inquisition presented the city council in the best possible light as the sole party involved in purifying the city from “the heresy of the Waldensian sect.”57

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Part of the communal healing process that followed the trauma of the inquisition involved the introduction of new rituals meant to celebrate the restoration of correct belief. Already in 1392, the archbishop of Mainz, Konrad II of Weinsberg, followed his anti-Waldensian inquisition in Mainz with an establishment of the city’s first Corpus Christi procession. Corpus Christi processions have been interpreted as celebrations of urban unity (and of the unity between the city and the Church), which provided a neat and orderly representation of urban hierarchy and represented the re-ordering of the symbolic “body of Christ,” the urban community.58 In Bern, the city council took similar measures to reassert its authority, if in a less dramatic fashion. The aforementioned ordinance included an explicit instruction for it to be read out publicly every year, on Easter Monday, in order to prevent its provisions from being forgotten by the city’s residents.59 Yearly commemoration, however, had very little to do with the population of Bern forgetting about the recent inquisition. Instead, through yearly public reading of the ordinance, the council attempted to establish a narrative of the events that portrayed the municipal government not as a body possibly “polluted” by heresy, but as one instrumental in the victory over heresy in the city. Finally, the task of restoring the peace after an anti-heretical trial required putting a stop to the legal mechanisms that enabled the inquisitorial process. The aforementioned ordinance fulfilled that purpose as well. An additional clause, inserted into its final version, made the repentant Waldensians unable to serve as witnesses in court.60 This restriction—another reminder that the repentant heretics remained in a marginalized position even after their abjuration—is reminiscent of the third canon of the Fourth Lateran Council, which proclaimed unrepentant and excommunicated followers of heretical teaching intestable and unable to act as witnesses.61 In Bern, however, the prohibition against former heretics serving as witnesses pursued a pragmatic goal. As Kathrin Utz Tremp argues, this provision meant to prevent any potential feuds or denunciations against any new heretical suspects in the city.62 After over a year of inquisitorial activity, the city council sought peace and tried to avoid any further damage to the urban social fabric. The protective measures undertaken by Bern’s city council in the aftermath of the inquisition underscores the importance of thinking about the effects of antiheretical trials beyond their official end. Even when the procedural phase was over and the punishments meted out, a trial of heretics continued to send ripples across close-knit urban societies, stressing and fracturing communal bonds. This “dark” phase of communal healing usually remains undocumented and cannot be studied systematically, with only rare glimpses at the events that occurred as the communities grappled with conflicts that in some cases took months or even years to dissipate. These tensions or perhaps a sense that the inquisitorial trial did not right all of the perceived wrongs in some cases led to harassment or even violence against anyone rumored to have been involved with heresy in the past. In perhaps an extreme example, a widow from Augsburg petitioned the city council in 1435 to provide her with an official letter stating that her late husband was not among the Waldensians persecuted forty-two years earlier, in 1393. Apparently, someone in town spread rumors to the contrary and the widow suffered abuse as a result.

Communication, resistance, and recovery 151 As Richard Kieckhefer notes, public reaction to the accusation must have been serious enough for the widow to demand the city council’s assistance.63 It is not surprising that some individuals chose to leave their previous residence after a trial: Kunigund Strussin and her two daughters left Augsburg in the years after the inquisition and found themselves in Strasbourg by the end of the decade.64 Another member of the Strasbourg Waldensian community, weaver Heinrich Borschön, left Regensburg after abjuring heresy in that city in the 1380s.65 Even those who had abjured heresy years prior were never truly free of suspicion. In 1395, Konrad Huter of Regensburg and his wife Elizabeth were arrested by the episcopal inquisitor Friedrich Süssner and suspected of relapsing into Waldensianism, which they both had abjured during the previous decade. The couple was betrayed by another Waldensian, a refugee from the inquisition in Donauwörth, Johannes Oertel. On the run, Oertel visited the Huters in Regensburg, but the couple refused to help him; once apprehended, Oertel claimed—either out of spite or to help his case by cooperating—that the Huters had continued to practice Waldensianism even after their earlier abjuration.66 This was a serious accusation, and the Huters risked execution for their alleged relapse. Eventually, the couple was saved by an unexpected intervention from inquisitor Martin of Amberg who received the couple’s earlier abjuration in the 1380s. Consulted on the matter, Martin found “nothing at all punishable” in the Huters’ interrogation records. Upon receiving Martin’s expert assessment, the bishop’s vicar in spiritualibus acquitted the Huters and released them from custody.67 The seemingly happy ending at the end of the months-long investigation during which the Huters were incarcerated in the municipal jail was marred by the events that took place half a year later, in the fall of 1396. A certain Friedrich Goldner reported to the inquisitor that he overheard Konrad blaspheming.68 Even after the acquittal, a former heretic had to watch his every word to avoid being reported for a perceived unorthodox behavior.69 Fortunately for Huter, the inquisitor did not act on Goldner’s accusations. However, the fact that the statements by Goldner and two other witnesses of Huter’s alleged blaspheming were carefully recorded and appended to other documents related to him demonstrates that the inquisitor took this information seriously enough to keep a permanent record of it. Moreover, this incident demonstrates that some residents of late medieval cities felt strongly about preserving orthodoxy in their communities and were not hesitant to act if they suspected the presence of heresy. Considering the disruptive nature of the persecutions of heresy, it is not surprising that some urban governments attempted to influence or even sabotage their course. Urban governments used different tactics in dealing with heretical communities in their cities. As Chapter 5 demonstrated, Strasbourg’s council undertook an inquisition without any significant clerical involvement and misrepresented its Waldensians as insignificant newcomers. Bern’s municipal government used the aftermath of the inquisition to promulgate a particular narrative of the persecution that was favorable to the city’s leadership. Moreover, in addition to providing an additional catalyst for the inquisition in Strasbourg, the city council of Bern used its influence in the region to pressure its more direct neighbor,

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Fribourg, to investigate its alleged Waldensian community. Instead of a letter, a city council delegation from Bern met their colleagues from Fribourg at Wünnewil, a village about midway between the two cities. Pressured into action by its more powerful neighbor, Fribourg’s city council complied and reached out to the bishop of Lausanne with a request to investigate heresy in the city. Remarkably, the inquisition in Fribourg did not become just another anti-heretical campaign of the period. Instead, the brief inquisition that began during Advent of 1399 stalled and ended with a complete acquittal of all suspects.70

Fribourg: inquisition and resistance The inquisition in Fribourg has attracted the attention of scholars for its surprising outcome: an acquittal of all suspects. The “unsuccessful” result of the inquisition—unprecedented for the period—is particularly notable considering that Fribourg’s robust Waldensian community was investigated again in 1430. That later inquisitorial trial, which included some individuals who were previously acquitted in 1399, uncovered the full extent of the Waldensian community in the city.71 How did the Fribourg Waldensians manage to remain undetected until 1430? The mass acquittal has inspired multiple interpretations of the events taking place during Advent of 1399. Writing in 1943, Gertrude Barnes Fiertz, author of the earliest study of this trial in English, was the first to suggest that the inquisition was prompted by a political conflict between two factions among the city’s merchant and landowning elites. The “new” faction sought a political union with Bern, Fribourg’s powerful neighbor, which the landowning “old” elites opposed. To defeat their opponents, Fribourg’s “old” elites initiated an inquisition against them. Ultimately, this conflict failed to achieve its goal, as the economic and political clout of the accused helped to derail the inquisition.72 Although more recent studies have rejected Fiertz’s interpretation of the trial, she was the first to propose analyzing the anti-Waldensian inquisition as a political affair and not merely as a persecution of unorthodox belief.73 Although the urban elites of late medieval Fribourg were not so neatly divided into “new” and “old” camps, Fiertz was correct in observing that the individuals put on trial controlled considerable wealth, and therefore had political influence.74 Taking into consideration the aforementioned wealthy Waldensian communities in Strasbourg and Bern (as well as possibly those in Mainz, Donauwörth, and Dinkelsbühl), the economic success of the Waldensians in Fribourg is not surprising. Just like their brethren in Strasbourg, the Waldensian community in Fribourg included merchants in cloth and hides—principal goods traded in the region. Three Waldensian families loom particularly large in the city’s economic landscape: the Studers, the Praroman-Bonvisins, and the Mossus. All three were engaged in trading cloth, with multiple members of the Studer family described in the records as “cloth-cutters” (Tuchscherer).75 Three decades after being accused of heresy in December 1399, a member of the Studer family, Hanso Studer, was found guilty during the inquisition of 1430, abjured heresy, and paid 2,500 florins in fines.76 Both the Praroman-Bonvisin clan and the Mossu family not only traded

Communication, resistance, and recovery 153 in similar goods as the Studers but also had multi-generational business ties to the members of the Waldensian community in Strasbourg.77 Finally, all three families included members involved in various roles in the city government between the late fourteenth century and the middle of the fifteenth, serving as members of the city council and municipal officials.78 The high social, economic, and political status of these and other Waldensian families made them into a liability for the city; any persecution risked revealing the number of heretics residing in Fribourg and just how influential they were. The brief inquisition in December 1399 threatened both the Waldensian community and the city as a whole for the first time. As Kathrin Utz Tremp demonstrates in her studies of this persecution, the anti-Waldensian trial in Fribourg was catalyzed by the city’s relationship with its powerful neighbor, Bern. As in most cases involving the anti-Waldensian inquisitions of the 1390s, the roots of the competition between the two cities grew out of the tumultuous 1380s. During the war between the Swiss Confederacy (which included Bern) with the Duke of Austria (1386–1388), Bern and Fribourg fought on opposing sides. The animosity between the two cities lasted into the early years of the fifteenth century.79 Why, then, did the representatives of the city council of Bern travel to Wünnewil to meet with their counterparts from Fribourg? Given the long-standing conflict between the two cities, it is unlikely that Bern’s magistrates viewed this meeting as a neighborly favor. Instead, Utz Tremp suggests that the lists of alleged Waldensians in Fribourg served as a weapon, an attack against the city’s reputation and honor.80 It is also possible that in addition to staining Fribourg’s reputation by initiating an inquisition there, the city council of Bern pursued a more pragmatic goal of removing a robust Waldensian community in the nearby city. While the Bernese city council’s exact motivations remain unknown, Fribourg’s reaction to the late November meeting in Wünnewil reveals an array of methods available to an urban government willing to take control or even derail an anti-heretical inquisition. Shortly after receiving the lists of Fribourg’s citizens denounced during the inquisition in Bern, the city council reached out to the bishop of Lausanne, Guillaume of Menthonay (r. 1394–1406). Although some of the bishops during this period can be characterized as political opponents of the cities, a bishop could also serve as an important ally. In Fribourg’s case, the bishop of Lausanne alone had the ultimate authority to investigate heresy in the city and to protect it from the dangerous attacks on its reputation coming from Bern. Some of the language used in the city’s initial petition to the bishop demonstrates that the city council was adamant to refute any rumors of there being a heretical community in Fribourg. After informing the bishop of the scandalous accusations made against some of its citizens, the city council firmly denied them. On the contrary, asserted the petition, Fribourg’s citizens “are and have always been good Catholics, obedient to the mandates of the Church.”81 On November 28, the bishop responded to the city’s petition by issuing the inquisitorial commission to Humbert Franconis, the Dominican inquisitor for the diocese of Lausanne, as well as to Wilhelm of Vufflens, guardian of the Franciscan convent in Lausanne, and the bishop’s own appointee, licentiate Aymo of Taninges.82

154 Communication, resistance, and recovery While the city council’s decision to reach out to the bishop of Lausanne— Fribourg’s ecclesiastical lord—may not appear surprising, it deserves an explanation. While both Bern and Fribourg were part of the diocese of Lausanne, when it came to the investigation of heresy, the two cities found inquisitors from opposing sides of the Schism. Unlike its neighbors to the west, Bern remained obedient to the Roman pope, Boniface IX (r. 1389–1404).83 As a result, the inquisitor active in Bern, friar Nikolaus of Landau came from the Dominican convent in Basel, appointed by the pro-Roman bishop of Lausanne, Johannes Münch of Landskron. Despite the title, Münch was never able to actually rule his diocese, and lived in exile at the court of his brother Konrad Münch of Landskron, the bishop of Basel. On the other hand, the magistrates of nearby Fribourg petitioned Bishop Guillaume of Menthonay, and therefore remained on the “pro-Avignon” side. It is hard to say if this was a conscious choice on the part of Fribourg’s city council; however, they were probably aware that the inquisitors from the opposing sides in the Schism were unlikely to cooperate.84 Ecclesiopolitics played a surprising role in this case: what could have been a conscious attempt to sabotage an unwanted investigation proved to be successful. In addition to the lack of cooperation between the inquisitions in Bern and Fribourg—two concurrent anti-heretical campaigns about seventeen miles apart— the inquisitors in Fribourg also sorely lacked any incriminating information about the alleged Waldensians in the city. It is highly probable that the records handed over at the Wünnewil meeting—a list of Fribourg’s residents implicated in Bern’s inquisition and a list of Waldensian heretical “errors”—were carefully edited to avoid revealing the names of any Waldensian suspects in Bern itself. Aware of the heresy’s potential to mar a city’s reputation, Bern’s city council proved to be extremely careful with its inquisitorial records. Indeed, when the inquisitor active in Fribourg sent a letter to Bern asking for a copy of the interrogation records, the city council responded with a firm refusal. Paradoxically, what began as an inquisition prompted by a transfer of information about the Waldensian community in Fribourg, ended less than a month later because of a lack of any specific evidence against the accused. By Christmas of 1399, the inquisitors found no firm evidence of the Waldensian community in Fribourg and allowed the accused to expurgate themselves.85 It might be tempting to describe the short-lived inquisitorial campaign in Fribourg as “unsuccessful.” However, unsuccessful for whom? If one considers the instrumentalization of heretical presence in a conflict between cities, then Fribourg’s ability to gain a full acquittal for its citizens (especially considering that the men and women on trial were, in fact, Waldensians) is a stunning success for its city council. The document produced at the end of the inquisition on December 23, 1399 not only absolved the women and men on trial but also marked the end of the anti-Waldensian inquisition. In effect, by absolving the accused, the inquisitor also “absolved” the city as a whole. Not surprisingly, in addition to preserving the text of the absolution, the surviving municipal records of the inquisition contain a meticulous description of this document. Reflecting its importance for the city, the absolution’s description even lists incipits and explicits for some of the lines

Communication, resistance, and recovery 155 as an additional feature for securing the original document’s integrity if its authenticity was ever to be questioned.86 Fribourg’s tactic of securing an official document proclaiming the city free of heresy found use in another Swiss city only a few years later. In 1403, a brief inquisition took place in Lucerne. The only surviving evidence of it is a letter written by the itinerant inquisitor Heinrich Angermeier to Lucerne’s city council. The letter reports that the inquisitor arrived in Lucerne with the intention of finding heretics but could not identify any. This brief document—another example of an “unsuccessful” inquisition—specifies that Heinrich Angermeier was known as an expert in the matters of heresy (ketzermeister). He was, therefore, qualified to pronounce the city free of any heretical presence.87 While Angermeier’s inability to find heresy in Lucerne may appear as a failure on the inquisitor’s part, the letter stating that Lucerne was heresy-free should be understood as the city council’s attempt to preserve Lucerne from any future inquisitorial attention. There is no evidence that there ever was a Waldensian community in Lucerne, although its proximity to Bern may suggest that the city was part of the heretical network spanning Upper Germany and the Swiss Lands.88 However, by the early years of the fifteenth century, accusations of heresy in urban settings were used loosely enough for any urban government to be wary of them. It is equally notable that Lucerne’s council decided to employ an independent, itinerant inquisitor, instead of petitioning the bishop of Constance for assistance as was the case in Bern and Fribourg. Taking place only a few years after the anti-Waldensian inquisitions in Bern and Fribourg, Angermeier’s “unsuccessful” inquest was meant to preserve Lucerne from any disruptive inquiries from the city’s opponents. At the end of over a decade of widespread anti-Waldensian persecutions across the German-speaking central Europe, such a certificate of orthodoxy was crucial for securing the city’s reputation. After all, from a city council perspective, the best inquisition was the one that could be avoided.

Notes 1 Utz Tremp, Quellen, 594n.16. 2 Utz Tremp, Quellen, 594–96; Utz Tremp, “Multum abhorrerem,” 173. 3 Utz Tremp, Quellen, 596: “erant tam per nonnullos in Berno hereticos repertos quam per dictum predicantem conversum de heresi accusate.” The inquisitions in Bern and Fribourg, and the connection between them, are discussed in Kathrin Utz Tremp, “Der Freiburger Waldenserprozeß von 1399 und seine bernische Vorgeschichte,” Freiburger Geschichtsblatter 68 (1991), 57–64. 4 Beate Schuster, Die freien Frauen: Dirnen und Frauenhäuser im 15. und 16. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1995), 316. 5 Winfried Schulze, “Gerhard Oesterreichs Begriff ‘Sozialdisziplinierung’ der frühen Neuzeit,” Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung 14 (1987), 265–302; R. Po-chia Hsia, Social Discipline in the Reformation: Central Europe 1550–1750 (London: Routledge, 1992). On social discipline in late medieval cities, see Laura Stokes, Demons of Urban Reform: Early European Witch Trials and Criminal Justice, 1430–1530 (New York: Palgrave, 2011), 132–35. 6 Werner Buchholz, “Anfänge der Sozialdisziplinierung im Mittelalter: Die Reichsstadt Nürnberg als Beispiel,” Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung 18, no. 2 (1991), 129–47; Stokes, Demons of Urban Reform, 132–33.

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7 Bettina Günther, “Sittlichkeitsdelikte in den Policeyordnungen der Reichsstädte Frankfurt am Main und Nürnberg (15.–17. Jahrhundert),” in Policey und frühneuzeitliche Gesellschaft, ed. Karl Härter (Frankfurt: V. Klostermann, 2000), 121–48. 8 Josef Baader, ed., Nürnberger Polizeiordnungen aus dem XIII. bis XV. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Literarischer Verein, 1861), 65–66. 9 Joel F. Harrington, Reordering Marriage and Society in Reformation Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 123–24. 10 Buchholz, “Anfänge der Sozialdisziplinierung im Mittelalter,”141–42; Jamie Page, “Masculinity and Prostitution in Late Medieval German Literature,” Speculum 94, no. 3 (July 2019), 744–45. 11 Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 76. 12 Werner Schultheiß, ed., Die Acht-, Verbots- und Fehdebücher Nürnbergs von 1285– 1400 (Nuremberg: Selbstverlag des Stadtrats, 1960), 84, 150. 13 Schultheiß, ed., Die Acht-, Verbots- und Fehdebücher Nürnbergs, 157n36. 14 Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 76. On inquisitorial punishments as a form of social control on part of the Church, see James B. Given, Inquisition and Medieval Society: Power, Discipline, and Resistance in Languedoc (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 84–86. 15 Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 78–79. 16 Frances Courtney Kneupper, The Empire at the End of Time: Identity and Reform in Late Medieval German Prophecy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 82. 17 Schultheiß, ed., Die Acht-, Verbots- und Fehdebücher Nürnbergs, 158–59 (the inquisition is mistakenly recorded for the year 1379, instead of 1399); Herman Haupt, Die religiösen Sekten in Franken vor der Reformation (Würzburg: A. Stuber, 1882), 27–28; “Chronik aus Kaiser Sigmund’s Zeit bis 1434 mit Fortsetzung bis 1441,” in Die Chroniken der fränkischen Städte. Nürnberg, ed. Karl von Hegel (Leipzig, 1862), vol. 1, 362. 18 Johannes Müllner, Die Annalen der Reichsstadt Nürnberg von 1623. Vol. 2: Von 1351– 1469, ed. Gerhard Hirschmann (Nuremberg: Selbstverlag des Stadtrats, 1984), 175. Unfortunately, Müllner does not elaborate on the details of this appointment. 19 For example, at least thirty-four Waldensians were found in Augsburg (1393), forty in Donauwörth (1393), 130 individuals were on trial in Bern (1399), and thirty-two were summoned before the municipal tribunal in Strasbourg (1400). See: “Chronik von 1368– 1406 mit Fortsetzung bis 1447,” CsSA, vol. 1, 96; Mair, “Nordlingani brevis Historia,” 620; Conrad Justinger, Die Berner-Chronik des Conrad Justinger: Nebst Vier Beilagen, ed. Gottlieb Studer (Bern: Wyss, 1871), 186; Modestin, Ketzer in der Stadt, 56–63. 20 Extensive spread of Waldensian communities in German-speaking central Europe was emphasized by both contemporary observers (such as inquisitor Peter Zwicker) and modern scholars: CDH, 281D-E; Cameron, Waldenses, 125–27; Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 61–62; Lambert, Medieval Heresy, 170–71. 21 Mair, “Nordlingani brevis Historia,” 620; these inquisitorial trials were also briefly noted in a contemporary chronicle from Augsburg. However, the anonymous chronicler only lists the trials in Wemding and Donauwörth briefly and in passing. See “Chronik von 1368–1406,” 97. Another chronicler, writing in Limburg, included a brief account of the archiepiscopal inquisition taking place in Mainz in 1390. See Arthur Wyß, ed., Die Limburger Chronik des Tilemann Elhen von Wolfhagen (Munich: Weidmann, 1980), 81; Deane, “Archiepiscopal Inquisitions,” 202–03. 22 Hans Mair, Das “Buch von Troja” von Hans Mair: Kritische Textausgabe und Untersuchung, ed. Hans-Josef Dreckmann (Munich: Fink, 1970), 229–30. 23 Modestin, Quellen, 210–11. The practice of religious endogamy in Waldensian communities differed based on their location. Gabriel Audisio demonstrates that endogamy was particularly favored by Provencal Waldensians, with at least 89% of marriage contracts drawn within the heretical community. Gabriel Audisio, The Waldensian Dissent: Persecution and Survival, C.1170-c.1570 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 108. On the other hand, German Waldensians interrogated by Peter Zwicker

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24 25 26 27 28 29 30

31

32

33 34

35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

43 44 45

in the Mark of Brandenburg did marry outside of the community; however, more frequently such marriages were conducted between a Waldensian woman and a Catholic man. Cameron, Waldenses, 131. Martin Schneider, “Friedrich Reiser—Herkunft, Bewegung und Weg,” in Friedrich Reiser und die “waldensisch-hussitische Internationale” im 15. Jahrhundert, ed. Albert de Lange und Kathrin Utz Tremp (Heidelberg: Verlag Regionalkultur, 2006), 77–78. Modestin, Ketzer in der Stadt, 107–10. Modestin, Quellen, 198: “und sint dieselben unahtber lúte und von frumden gegenen geboren, nit von unser stat—ußgenommen zwo personen oder drie.” Utz Tremp, “Der Freiburger Waldenserprozeß von 1399,” 61–62. Kungstein Chronicon Moguntinum, 63: “Habuerunt in Maguncia propriam domum dictam Spiegelberg, in qua habebant conventicula sua.” Ludwig Schnurrer, ed., Die Urkunden der Stadt Dinkelsbühl, 1282–1450 (Munich: K. Zink, 1960), 84; Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 71. Die Nürnberger Bürgerbücher 1. Die Pergamentenen Neubürgerlisten 1302–1448. Mit einer Einführung in die mittelalterlichen Quellen zur Bevölkerungs- und Sozialgeschichte Nürnbergs, ed. Stadtarchiv Nürnberg (Nuremberg: Selbstverlag des Stadtrats, 1974), vol. 1, 86. Biller, The Waldenses, 115–16; Kathrin Utz Tremp, “Kaufleute und Häretiker,” in Fribourg sur les Chemins de l’Europe: Freiburg auf den Wegen Europas, ed. Claudio Fedrigo, Carmen Buchiller, and Hubert Förster (Fribourg: Staatsarchiv Freiburg, 2000), 49–57. See also, Kathrin Utz Tremp, Waldenser, Wiedergänger, Hexen und Rebellen (Fribourg: Universitätsverlag Freiburg Schweiz, 1999). Hector Mülich, “Chronik des Hector Mülich 1348–1487,” CsSA, vol. 3, 41; Erhard Wahraus, “Chronik des Erhard Wahraus, 1126–1145 mit Nachträge zum Jahre 1462,” CsSA, vol. 1, 249. Konrad Steinlin’s name is mentioned in the constitutional documents created during the guild revolt (Zunftbriefe). Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 70. For the editions of the Zunftbriefe, see Christian Meyer, ed., Urkundenbuch der Stadt Augsburg, Vol. 2: Die Urkunden vom Jahre 1347–1399 (Augsburg: Lampart, 1878), 147, 152. Välimäki, Heresy in Late Medieval Germany, 172–83. Given, Inquisition and Medieval Society, 73. On preaching and inquisitorial duties expected of the Dominican friars, see Christine Caldwell Ames, Righteous Persecution: Inquisition, Dominicans, and Christianity in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: Penn Press, 2013), 35–38. M. M. Tavuzzi, Renaissance Inquisitors: Dominican Inquisitors and Inquisitorial Districts in Northern Italy, 1474–1527 (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 8. Cited in Välimäki, Heresy in Late Medieval Germany, 175. Cameron, Waldenses, 143–44; Välimäki, Heresy in Late Medieval Germany, 176–77. Biller describes Zwicker’s language as a sign of “more of a practical than academic cast of mind.” Biller, The Waldenses, 273. Välimäki, Heresy in Late Medieval Germany, 172. Välimäki makes a similar point, see Välimäki, Heresy in Late Medieval Germany, 174. For a discussion of the trial of Waldensians in Strasbourg see Chapter 5. Modestin, Quellen, 153. The anonymous “cursor from Basel” is identified as Dominican friar Peter Mangold by Georg Modestin. See Modestin, Quellen, 58–63. Given, Inquisition and Medieval Society, 42. Utz Tremp, “Der Freiburger Waldenserprozeß von 1399,” 57–79; Georg Modestin, “Les Vaudois de Strasbourg devant leurs juges. Une étude comparative. Berne (1399)— Fribourg/Suisse (1399)—Strasbourg (1400),” Bollettino della Società di Studi Valdesi 125, no. 203 (2008), 12. “Chronik von 1368–1406,” 96: “nota der ketzer hieß Hans Lutz, der ward auch darumb gefangen und man beschloß alliu tor an der stat und fieng der ketzer 34, man und wip.” Modestin, Quellen, 197. Modestin, Ketzer in der Stadt, 29–32; Modestin, Quellen, 184–88.

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46 For an overview of the plague-era violence against Jews, see Samuel K. Cohn, Jr, “The Black Death and the Burning of Jews,” Past & Present 196, no. 1 (August 2007), 3–36. 47 John Aberth, From the Brink of the Apocalypse: Confronting Famine, War, Plague and Death in the Later Middle Ages (New York: Routledge, 2010), 157–58; Cohn, “The Black Death and the Burning of Jews,” 18–20. Editions of the surviving letters have been published in Hans Witte, ed., Urkundenbuch der Stadt Straßburg (Strasbourg: Karl J. Trübner, 1879–1900), vol. 5, nos. 173, 175, 178–89, 190, 196, 208, 209, 212. Only Cologne’s city council (no. 190 above) expressed doubts about the veracity of the well-poisoning rumors and forbade the harassment of Jews. 48 Justinger, Die Berner-Chronik, 186: “etwe lüten zu Bern und uf dem lande, frouwen und man, gewaltig, rich und arm, me denne CXXX personen, wurden funden in unglouben.” 49 Utz Tremp, “Der Freiburger Waldenserprozeß von 1399,” 58. 50 Utz Tremp, “Der Freiburger Waldenserprozeß von 1399,” 63–64. 51 Translated in Reima Välimäki, “Imagery of Disease, Poison and Healing in the Late Fourteenth-Century Polemics against Waldensian Heresy,” in Infirmity in Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Social and Cultural Approaches to Health, Weakness and Care, ed. Christian Krötzl, Katariina Mustakallio, and Jenni Kuuliala (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015), 143–44: “ut ibi sit perpetuo receptaculum sordium, ubi prius fuit aliquando latibulum hereticorum.” The document is published in full in Haupt, Waldenserthum und Inquisition, 114–16. Välimäki notes that this phrase was borrowed by Zwicker virtually verbatim from a thirteenth-century inquisitorial formulary from Orvieto, included in the collected volume of inquisitorial materials in Zwicker’s possession (now Linz, Oberösterreichische Landesbibliothek, Cod. 177). See L. J. Sackville, Heresy and Heretics in the Thirteenth Century: The Textual Representations (York: York Medieval Press, 2011), 126; Patschovsky, Quellen, 93–94. 52 Given, Inquisition and Medieval Society, 75; Sascha Ragg, Ketzer und Recht: Die weltliche Ketzergesetzgebung des Hochmittelalters unter dem Einfluß des römischen und kanonischen Rechts (Hannover: Hahn, 2006), 108, 145, 150. 53 Utz Tremp, “Der Freiburger Waldenserprozeß von 1399,” 61–62. 54 Modestin, Ketzer in der Stadt, 107–10. 55 Hermann Rennefahrt, ed., Die Rechtsquellen des Kantons Bern, Vol. 1: Das Stadtrecht von Bern I und II: Handfeste, Satzungsbücher, Stadtbuch, Stadtsatzung 1539 (Aarau: Saurländer, 1971), 173. 56 Utz Tremp, “Der Freiburger Waldenserprozeß von 1399,” 61. ͧ 57 Utz Tremp, “Der Freiburger Waldenserprozeß von 1399,” 61n14: “unglobens wegen der secte Waldensiner.” 58 Deane, “Archiepiscopal Inquisitions,” 219. On the Corpus Christi processions, see Charles Zika, “Hosts, Processions and Pilgrimages: Controlling the Sacred in FifteenthCentury Germany,” Past & Present 118, no. 1 (February 1988), 39; Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 260–65; Keith D. Lilley, City and Cosmos: The Medieval World in Urban Form (London: Reaktion Books, 2009), 169. 59 Utz Tremp, “Der Freiburger Waldenserprozeß von 1399,” 62. 60 Rennefahrt, ed., Das Stadtrecht von Bern I und II, 173–74. 61 H. J. Schroeder, trans. Disciplinary Decrees of the General Councils: Text, Translation and Commentary (St. Louis: B. Herder, 1937), 243. 62 Utz Tremp, “Der Freiburger Waldenserprozeß von 1399,” 62–63. 63 Stadtarchiv Augsburg, Missivbücher, 3, fol. 359r. The incident is described in Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 68. 64 Modestin, Quellen, 210–11. 65 Modestin, Quellen, 243–44. 66 ÖNB, Cod. 3748, fols. 145r-155v. The manuscript source for the Oertel-Huter affair contains depositions by Johannes Oertel, Konrad Huter, his wife, Elizabeth, and his

Communication, resistance, and recovery 159

67 68 69

70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88

niece, Margaret. For a brief overview of the Regensburg trial, see Heinrich Finke, “Waldenserprozess in Regensburg, 1395,” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 4 (1890), 345–46; Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 66–67. ÖNB, Cod. 3748, fols. 149v-50r: “omnino nihil invenio punabile.” ÖNB, Cod. 3748, fols. 151v-152r. See also, Finke, “Waldenserprozess in Regensburg, 1395,” 346; Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 67. In general, mistrust of the recently abjured heretics can be compared to some of the attitudes towards, for instance, medieval converts from Judaism to Christianity. For an overview of the latter, see Jonathan M. Elukin, “From Jew to Christian? Conversion and Immutability in Medieval Europe,” in Varieties of Religious Conversion in the Middle Ages, ed. James Muldoon (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997), 171–89; Paola Tartakoff, Between Christian and Jew: Conversion and Inquisition in the Crown of Aragon, 1250–1391 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 68–69. Utz Tremp, “Der Freiburger Waldenserprozeß von 1399,” 66–68. For the editions of the lists of the denounced heretics and the heretical beliefs, see Utz Tremp, Quellen, 588–92. For an overview of the 1430 inquisition in Fribourg, see Utz Tremp, Quellen, 23-54; Lambert, Medieval Heresy, 179; Cameron, Waldenses, 147–48. Gertrude Barnes Fiertz, “An Unusual Trial under the Inquisition in Fribourg, Switzerland, in 1399,” Speculum 18, no. 3 (July 1943), 356–57. Utz Tremp, Quellen, 243. Fiertz, “An Unusual Trial,” 350–53. For the complete prosopographical study of the Waldensians in Fribourg, see Kathrin Utz Tremp, Waldenser, Wiedergänger, Hexen und Rebellen. Biller, The Waldenses, 115. For an overview of Hanso Studer’s biography, see Utz Tremp, Waldenser, 443–61. On trade relationships between the Waldensians of Fribourg and Strasbourg, see Georg Modestin, “Weiträumige Kontakte. Strassburger Waldenser in freiburgischen Quellen (bis 1400),” Freiburger Geschichtsblätter 82 (2005), 19–37. Biller, The Waldenses, 115–16. Utz Tremp, “Der Freiburger Waldenserprozeß von 1399,” 74–75. Utz Tremp, “Der Freiburger Waldenserprozeß von 1399,” 75–76. Utz Tremp, Quellen, 586–87. Utz Tremp, Quellen, 586; Utz Tremp, “Der Freiburger Waldenserprozeß von 1399,” 64–45. For an overview of Bern’s obedience during the Schism, see Karl Schönenberger, “Die Städte Bern und Solothurn während des grossen Schismas,” Zeitschrift für schweizerische Kirchengeschichte 21 (1927), 54–69. Georg Modestin, “Les Vaudois de Strasbourg devant leurs juges. Une étude comparative. Berne (1399)—Fribourg/Suisse (1399)—Strasbourg (1400),” Bollettino della Società di Studi Valdesi 125, no. 203 (2008), 12–13. Utz Tremp, Quellen, 628–30; Utz Tremp, “Der Freiburger Waldenserprozeß von 1399,” 70–71. Utz Tremp, Quellen, 630–31. Utz Tremp, “Der Freiburger Waldenserprozeß von 1399,” 70 n.41: “Ich Heinrich Angermayr vom Stein, den man da nempt den ketzermeister.” Another city in the region, Solothurn, possibly had a Waldensian community as well. Among the Waldensian ministers converted ca. 1391 was Nikolaus of Solothurn, “from the region around Bern in the Swiss [Lands]” (“Item Nicolaus de Solotern de spacie circa Veronam in Svicz”). Kurze, “Zur Ketzergeschichte,” 90. It is possible that Nikolaus of Solothurn was responsible for revealing the name of Waldensians in Bern to the inquisitors. See Utz Tremp, “Multum abhorrerem,” 173.

Epilogue

By the early years of the fifteenth century, anti-Waldensian inquisitions in German-speaking central Europe grew less frequent. One after another, the two mass persecutors of Waldensians, Martin of Amberg and Peter Zwicker, retired. Zwicker’s last trial took place on the eastern edge of the German-speaking lands, in Buda in 1404. Afterwards, he returned to the Benedictine monastery at Garsten near Steyr, Upper Austria (his earlier “headquarters”) and, according to the local tradition, died there.1 Some trials of Waldensians in areas visited by Zwicker during the 1390s—the Mark of Brandenburg and Upper Austria—did occur; in Austria, Zwicker’s former notary Stephan Lamp continued inquisitorial activity in his stead at least until 1419.2 Overall, however, both rural Waldensians and their urban brethren began to attract less attention after the early 1400s. It is worth asking if there were still Waldensian communities left to persecute in central Europe? Ironically, in absence of widespread inquisitorial activity (and the sources it produced), it is hard to say. At least some Waldensians survived in areas hit by repression during the 1390s, including Swabia. In 1402, as Zwicker neared the end of his career and Heinrich Angermeier was about to investigate the Waldensian presence in Lucerne, Friedrich Reiser was born in the village of Daiting, in the vicinity of Donauwörth. Born to Waldensian parents, over two decades later, Reiser became a Waldensian minister who attempted (or so it has been argued) to unite the fifteenth-century German Waldensians with the remnants of the Bohemian Hussite movement. Eventually he was caught in Strasbourg and burned at the stake in 1458.3 Reiser’s tragic fate and his ambitious mission to find powerful allies for his Waldensian followers lie beyond the chronological boundaries of this study. However, Reiser’s biography, reconstructed from his lengthy testimony before the inquisitors in Strasbourg, provides us with a glimpse of Waldensian life after the decade of persecutions that severely disrupted Waldensian networks in central and eastern Europe. Reiser’s year and place of birth suggest that even in areas where the anti-Waldensian persecutions hit the hardest—at least sixteen Waldensian men and women (or as many as twenty-six, according to some accounts) were burned in Donauwörth in 1393—some remnants of their communities managed to survive the violence.4 Still reeling from the mass conversions of Waldensian ministers around 1391 and the ensuing persecutions, German Waldensians were in need of ministers

Epilogue 161 able to address their spiritual needs. At sixteen, Reiser came to Nuremberg to be trained as a minister by Hans of Plauen. Hans was a longstanding minister himself, mentioned in the inquisitorial records from Brandenburg; evidently, he not only survived the 1390s but also maintained an active ministry into the early fifteenth century. In addition to his religious activity, Hans of Plauen was a successful enough merchant to earn citizenship rights from Nuremberg in 1407.5 As a merchant dealing in cloth and spices, Hans of Plauen had a perfect cover for his itinerant preaching to the remnants of German Waldensian communities. As Dietrich Kurze points out, Hans’s urban residence became a logistical and communication center of German Waldensianism at the time. The merchant maintained communication with the Waldensian community in Fribourg—one of the few that survived the 1390s intact—and even hosted Peter Payne, a Lollard scholar and theologian, when the latter stopped in Nuremberg on his way to Hussite Prague. Moreover, to ordain Friedrich Reiser, Hans of Plauen invited Mermet Hugo from distant Fribourg—a surprising example of renewed mobility of heretical ministers in the German-speaking lands.6 Evidently, as persecution became more sporadic in the fifteenth century, those Waldensian communities and ministers that managed to survive enjoyed a relative respite. Using this opportunity, urban Waldensians, such as Reiser, Hugo, and Hans of Plauen, were instrumental in the attempts to revive the Waldensian networks which existed before the 1390s. Why did the anti-Waldensian persecutions become less frequent? German Waldensians of the early fifteenth century benefited from the shift of inquisitorial attention from them to the “usual suspects” consisting of the beghards and beguines, prompted by yet another change of papal attitude towards these groups. Already in 1395, under influence from the Dominican order, Pope Boniface IX (r. 1389–1404) issued decrees which revoked any earlier protections granted to the beguine communities in northern Europe and installed five permanent Dominican inquisitors in the German-speaking lands.7 These evidently took some time to get established, as Boniface had to issue a similar decree in 1400 instructing the Dominican provincial of Saxony to appoint inquisitors for the archdioceses of Mainz, Cologne, Magdeburg, Bremen, Riga, and the diocese of Cammin.8 The timing here was crucial; if the earlier persecutions of Waldensians took place in relative absence of papal attention towards heresy, Boniface’s decrees opened a new chapter in anti-heretical activity in Germany. Renewed persecution of non-Waldensian heretics involved some of the same agents as the inquisitions of the 1390s. Already in 1398, aware of the changing papal attitudes towards heretics, Johannes Wasmod of Homburg, an altar chaplain of the Mainz Cathedral and one of three clerics commissioned by Archbishop Konrad II to investigate the Waldensians in Mainz in 1392, wrote a polemic aimed at the “new” targets of persecution. Even the polemic’s title, “A Treatise against the Beghard, Lollard and Beguine Heretics” (Tractatus contra hereticos Beckhardos, Lulhardos et Swesteriones), uses the names of heretical groups listed in papal legislation of Boniface IX.9 Early in his treatise, Wasmod mentions the errors of the Waldensians put on trial with his involvement, “condemned and given over to the secular authorities” in 1392.10 Having thus established his authority as an

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expert on heresy, Wasmod launches into a condemnation of the errors of the three heresies in the title.11 Eight years later, in 1406, another prominent persecutor of Waldensians, Heinrich Angermeier, continued his inquisitorial activity in Mainz, having adjusted to the renewed inquisitorial attention to the persecution of beguines and beghards. A contemporary chronicler from Mainz reports that a certain “honorable lord and master Henricus de Lapide” (that is, a Latinized version of Heinrich [Angermeier] of Stein) was involved in the inquisition there against “lollards and beguines” (Lollhardorum et Beginarum).12 Always keen to acquire new patrons, Angermeier’s new interest in non-Waldensian heretics matched his opportunistic behavior during the 1390s. The early fifteenth century also introduced new targets for persecution into the central European religious landscape. Within years of the burning of Jan Hus at the Council of Constance (1415), the Bohemian reformers and their numerous supporters emerged as the primary concern of both ecclesiastical and, more importantly, secular authorities.13 The Hussites embodied the kind of nightmarish vision of heresy conjured by the likes of Peter Zwicker in the 1390s: armed, militant heretics, who were not afraid to defend themselves against the rest of the Empire. In response, secular authorities across the German-speaking lands began to question the religious and political allegiance of their own subjects and seek out religiously heterodox communities in their midst. Notably, worries about the spread of heretical radicalism outside of Bohemia briefly resurrected the fears of hidden Waldensian communities, especially in German cities.14 To a minor extent, these fears were justified, since a small number of Waldensian preachers (including the aforementioned Friedrich Reiser) did attempt to bring together German Waldensians and the Hussites, for the most part unsuccessfully.15 In addition to being perceived as potential allies of the Hussites, the Waldensian communities attracted attention as possible diabolical agents. In 1430, friar Ulric de Torrenté conducted a new inquisition in Fribourg. Unlike his predecessors in 1399, the inquisitor found a robust Waldensian community in the city.16 The timing of the inquisition was crucial in ushering in a new target for persecution, the diabolical witch. The inquisitorial records from Fribourg mention accusations of heresy as well as harmful magic (maleficia), while the local francophone term for Waldensians—Vaudois—came to mean both a heretic and a witch to the inquisitors. Fribourg, situated on the linguistic border between the francophone and the German-speaking parts of the Swiss lands, provided testing grounds for the new idea of a diabolical witch for a few years circa the anti-Waldensian inquisition of 1430. Initially confined to a particular regional and religious context—the Waldensians living in the diocese of Lausanne—the concept of diabolical witchcraft was noted by the Dominican author and reformer Johannes Nider. Nider saw the existence of diabolical witches—devoid of the term’s previous association with Waldensianism—as a sign of a deep crisis in Christendom, a notion popularized through the Council of Basel (1431–37).17 At that same council, the Church managed to reach a compromise with a moderate wing of the Hussite movement, effectively putting an end to this threat. Bereft of their political meaning and

Epilogue 163 overshadowed by the new fear of diabolical conspiracies, the German Waldensians were soon forgotten. Nevertheless, in terms of the treatment of potential Hussite agents or witches in cities, the policies adopted by municipal governments bear a strong resemblance to the policies developed in response to the earlier persecution of Waldensians. Faced with the threat of militant heretics and, later, fearing a diabolical intervention, city councils stressed rituals aimed at establishing communal cohesion and intensified social control. During the Hussite Wars, an imperial edict instructed urban governments to institute oaths of loyalty and orthodoxy as a defensive measure against heretical presence in cities; diocesan capitals Bamberg and Regensburg, both relatively close to Bohemia, issued similar decrees as well.18 In addition to forcing urban communities to affirm their religious beliefs under oath, late medieval cities became increasingly concerned with policing their residents. As Laura Stokes argues, persecutions of witchcraft in late medieval and early modern German and Swiss cities coincided with an emphasis on social discipline involving sumptuary laws and harsher penalties for gambling, blasphemy, and sodomy. By placing persecution of witches in the context of urban criminal history, as Stokes does, it is easier to see the similarities between it and other crimes and deviant behaviors late medieval and early modern cities attempted to control and prevent.19 *** The instrumentalization of Waldensianism for a variety of purposes initiated the period of intense anti-heretical persecutions during the 1390s and the early years of the fifteenth century. The anti-heretical trials of that long decade—each rooted in its local political, social, and religious context—were nevertheless part of a larger wave of persecutions that shared mobile agents and victims and sent shockwaves across the network of Waldensian communities in the German-speaking lands. While the very first inquisitorial campaign of the decade in Mainz (1390– 1393) may have been the result of archiepiscopal politics, it reminded both ecclesiastical and secular authorities of the Waldensian women and men living among their subjects. The ensuing inquests ushered in a number of uses for these heretics as they began to face systematic persecution. In the environment of weakened ecclesiastical authority, political disarray, and urban strife of the 1390s, the persecutors found new uses for the German Waldensians. Real or imagined, they were pawns in conflicts between cities and bishops, weapons in elite political powerstruggles, dangerous urban subjects, or sources of embarrassment for a municipal government. These political, social, religious, and cultural perceptions of German Waldensians came together to underpin a period of intense attention to Waldensianism followed by relative disinterest. In his classic study, Repression of Heresy in Medieval Germany, Richard Kieckhefer concludes that a sudden increase of inquisitorial attention towards heresy can be most effectively described by invoking an “ideological—or perhaps ‘socioreligious’—factor,” especially when it comes to analyzing the motivations of the itinerant inquisitors and their lay supporters.20 The current book,

164 Epilogue building on recent studies of the persecutions of German Waldensians, goes further by explaining what this “factor” or, rather, factors were. First, the timing of the intensification of anti-heretical persecution is important. Taking place at the height of the Great Schism, when many observers feared that Western Christendom would remain split forever, the repression of heresy became a “consolation for the clergy” and a venue for mending and reforming the troubled Church.21 Lack of respect for the clergy associated with Waldensianism stood out following a decade of anticlerical revolts and wars between urban leagues and their ecclesiastical and aristocratic opponents. Repressions of German Waldensians were shaped by these events as local manifestations of large-scale crises of political and ecclesiastical authority. Moreover, internal frictions within the Waldensian communities led to a wave of conversions of itinerant ministers, who provided the persecutors with crucial information about the beliefs, structure, and location of German Waldensian communities throughout central Europe. Finally, the relative lack of attention towards Waldensians in the previous decades and decentralization of persecution of heresy opened these heretical communities to persecution by a wide range of agents: opportunistic itinerant preachers and inquisitors, episcopal judges, mendicant friars, and even city councils. All of them engaged in anti-Waldensian campaigns motivated by their own goals. The large-scale intensification of persecution of German Waldensians coincided with the development of a new city-centric ideology, born over the course of struggles for political and economic independence. This ideology saw heresy as detrimental to the civic spirit and incompatible with the vision of cities as sacred communes that fused political and spiritual concerns into a civic religion. As a result, urban governments asserted their political authority by policing symbolic boundaries between their communities and the outside world as they persecuted any groups deemed detrimental to the communal health of their cities. Anti-heretical persecutions allowed city councils to emphasize their adherence to religious orthodoxy at the time when blanket accusations of heresy were used as powerful political weapons leveled against the cities by their external competitors, including local bishops (the cities’ former lords) and other cities in the region. In the process, municipal ruling elites became more proactive in navigating and negotiating the threat of heresy within their walls by integrating repentant heretics into the urban community (Augsburg), excluding them from it (Strasbourg), avoiding a persecution altogether (Fribourg), or remaining in control of its memory (Bern). An important side effect of this perceived incompatibility of religious heterodoxy and urban citizenship created an environment in which mere suspicion of heresy could be used in internal political struggles among the city elites, as happened in Rothenburg ob der Tauber. In the end, some German Waldensian communities—both urban and rural— survived into the fifteenth century and probably beyond. Despite intensified persecutions, the institutional mechanisms charged with repression and social control were still crude enough to let some victims slip between their gears or to be derailed for a time. These mechanisms would undergo consistent improvement over the following centuries. If widespread campaigns against late medieval Waldensians

Epilogue 165 lasted for only little over a decade, the patterns of persecution observed in this study persisted. As targets of repression changed and the notion of citizenship expanded beyond individual cites, the calls for the repression of some in defense of the alleged common good remain recognizable to us many centuries later.

Notes 1 Georg Modestin, “Peter Zwicker († nach dem 7. Juni 1404),” Schlesische Lebensbilder 10 (2010), 33; Välimäki, Heresy in Late Medieval Germany, 36. 2 Välimäki, Heresy in Late Medieval Germany, 36–37. 3 Martin Schneider, “Friedrich Reiser—Herkunft, Bewegung und Weg,” in Friedrich Reiser und die “waldensisch-hussitische Internationale” im 15. Jahrhundert, ed. Albert de Lange und Kathrin Utz Tremp (Heidelberg: Verlag Regionalkultur, 2006), 77–84; Cameron, Waldenses, 147–50; Lambert, Medieval Heresy, 177–78. 4 Mair, “Nördlingani brevis Historia,” 620; “Chronik von 1368–1406 mit Fortsetzung bis 1447,” CsSA, vol. 1, 97; Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 66. 5 Die Nürnberger Bürgerbücher 1. Die Pergamentenen Neubürgerlisten 1302–1448. Mit einer Einführung in die mittelalterlichen Quellen zur Bevölkerungs- und Sozialgeschichte Nürnbergs, ed. Stadtarchiv Nürnberg (Nuremberg: Selbstverlag des Stadtrats, 1974), 86. 6 Dietrich Kurze, “Märkische Waldenser und Böhmische Brüder. Zur brandenburgischen Ketzergeschichte und ihrer Nachwirkung im 15. und 16. Jahrhundert,” in Festschrift für Walter Schlesinger, ed. Helmut Beumann (Cologne: Böhlau, 1974), vol. 2, 468. 7 Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane, A History of Medieval Heresy and Inquisition (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011), 179; Elizabeth Makowski, “A Pernicious Sort of Woman”: Quasi-Religious Women and Canon Lawyers in the Later Middle Ages (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2005), 121; John Van Engen, Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life: The Devotio Moderna and the World of the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 103; KlausBernward Springer, “Dominican Inquisition in the Archdiocese of Mainz (1348–1520),” in Praedicatores Inquisitores, Vol. 1: The Dominicans and the Mediaeval Inquisition: Acts of the 1st International Seminar on the Dominicans and the Inquisition, Rome 23–25 February 2002 (Rome: Insituto Storico Domenicano, 2004), 334–35. 8 Springer, “Dominican Inquisitors,” 335. Both decrees followed similar provisions for permanent Dominican inquisitors in German archbishoprics made by Pope Urban V in 1364 and Pope Gregory XI in 1372. See Springer, “Dominican Inquisitors,” 324, 327. 9 Van Engen, Sisters and Brothers, 103. 10 Aloys Schmidt, ed., “Tractatus contra hereticos beckhardos, Lulhardos et Swestriones des Wasmud von Homburg,” Archiv für mittelrheinische Kirchengeschichte 14 (1962), 346: “aliqui heretici in Pingwia, videlicet anno Domini MoCCCoXCIIo dampnati et iudicio seculari traditi.” 11 Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane, “Archiepiscopal Inquisitions in the Middle Rhine: Urban Anticlericalism and Waldensianism in Late Fourteenth-Century Mainz,” Catholic Historical Review 92 (July 2006), 203. 12 Kungstein, Chronicon Moguntinum, 82: “erat persecutio Lollhardorum et Beginarum in Maguncia per honorabilem dominum et magistrum Henricum de Lapide.” 13 Cameron, Waldenses, 144–46; Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 96–99. 14 Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 88–90. 15 Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 90–93; Schneider, “Friedrich Reiser—Herkunft, Bewegung und Weg,” 82–86. 16 For an overview of the 1430 inquisition in Fribourg, see Utz Tremp, Quellen, 23-54. 17 Kathrin Utz Tremp, “Von der Häresie zur Hexerei: Waldenser- und hexenverfolgungen im heutigen Kanton Freiburg (1399–1442),” Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Geschichte

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52 (2002), 117–18; Kathrin Utz Tremp, “The Heresy of Witchcraft in Western Switzerland and Dauphiné (Fifteenth Century),” Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft 6, no. 1 (Summer 2011), 1–10; Laura Stokes, Demons of Urban Reform: Early European Witch Trials and Criminal Justice, 1430–1530 (New York: Palgrave, 2011), 10–11; Michael D. Bailey, Battling Demons: Witchcraft, Heresy and Reform in the Late Middle Ages (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), 22–28. Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 88. Stokes, Demons of Urban Reform. Kieckhefer, Repression of Heresy, 110. Välimäki, Heresy in Late Medieval Germany, 261.

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Index

Aachen 20, 22 abbey of Sts. Ulrich and Afra 3, 16, 70, 75–6; penitential processions from 65, 77, 125 abjuration 1, 45, 49, 51, 65, 77, 86, 114; persecuted after 150–2; relapsing after 53, 98, 127; in secret 44, 118–19, 124 Ad abolendam 38 Adolf of Nassau (archbishop of Mainz) 22, 44, 120 Alexander III (pope) 38 Alsace 117 Amberg 49 Angermeier, Heinrich 8–9, 37, 48, 96–9, 155, 160, 162; inquisitor in Augsburg 10, 53, 66–7, 69, 71–6, 79, 147; inquisitor in Rothenburg of der Tauber 10, 54, 86–90, 99–103, 105 Annals of Nuremberg 15, 142 Anonymous Chronicle of Laon 1, 37–8 Anonymous of Passau 40 Ansbach 104 anticlericalism 5, 9, 25–6, 36, 44–5, 56, 75, 164 Aragon 146 archbishop of Mainz 6, 17, 22–3, 25, 71, 120–1, 150 Arnoldi, Johannes 44, 118 arson 51, 72–3 Artisan’s Revolt 19–20 assassination 36, 40–1, 47, 67, 72, 74n64, 147 Attendite a falsis prophetis 43 Augsburg 1–3, 20, 23, 36, 41, 89, 125, 130, 143, 145; conflict with the bishop of 6, 16, 26, 69–71; inquisition in 10, 53–4, 65–9, 75–80, 86–7, 90, 97, 103–5, 113–14, 147, 150; struggle for independence 17–20, 25

Augsburg Cathedral 3, 25–6, 65, 70–1, 75–7, 97 Avignon 5, 21–2, 25, 30, 56, 72, 120, 122–3, 154 Aymo of Taninges 153 Bamberg 6, 53, 68, 97, 101, 118, 142, 147, 163; inquisition in 52 banishment: of heretics 10, 38, 55, 76, 112, 115–16, 118, 123–5, 127–8, 132, 141–2; as punishment for other crimes 126–7 Basel 23, 26, 113–14, 124; inquisitor from 54–5, 146, 149, 154 Battle of Sempach 26 beghards 43, 125, 161–2 beguines 43, 47, 49, 161–2 Benedictines 3, 16, 53, 65, 75, 160 Bern: aftermath of the inquisition 144, 149–50; inquisition in 1, 11, 54–5, 105, 112–13, 124, 132, 139–40, 143, 146–8, 164; interaction with Fribourg 139, 152–4; letter to 115–16, 130, 132 Berthold of Regensburg 40 Bible 36, 38, 41, 51 Bingen 45 bishop of Augsburg 17, 66, 79, 92, 114, 121, 144; and persecution of heresy 6, 10, 53–4, 66, 72, 97–8, 100, 114; relationship with the city 69–71, 78; see also Burkhard of Ellerbach bishop of Bamberg 15, 52–3, 141–2 bishop of Passau 51 bishop of Strasbourg 112, 119–23, 146; see also Friedrich of Blankenheim; Wilhelm of Diest bishop of Würzburg 24–5, 50, 86–7, 92, 99–102, 104–5 blasphemy 30, 123, 125, 129–30, 141, 143, 163

182

Index

Blumstein, Johannes 44, 118–19, 128, 132 Böckeler, Nikolaus 44–5, 118–19, 123–4 Bohemia 7–8, 39, 43, 49, 52, 160, 162–3 Boniface IX (pope) 5, 25, 154, 161 Buda 53, 160 Burkhard of Ellerbach (bishop of Augsburg) 26, 65–6, 69, 71 burning, execution 111, 128, 130; during an anti-Jewish massacre 19, 26; expelled under threat of 127; of prisoners of war 26; as punishment for heresy 15, 40, 45, 53–4, 71, 78, 98–9, 114, 141–2, 160, 162

destruction of houses, as punishment 52, 149 Dinkelsbühl 54, 71–2, 86, 90, 96–9, 143–4, 152 Directorium inquisitorum 146 Donauwörth 22; inquisition in 54, 71, 86, 90, 96–8, 143–4, 151–2, 160

Carcassonne 118–19 Cathars 36, 118 Celestines 50 Charles IV (emperor) 5, 19–23, 26, 49, 91 Church of the Virgin Mary before Týn 52 city council: conflicts with bishops 6, 24–6, 50, 69–71, 119–24; inquisition in Bern 54–5, 139, 148–52; inquisition in Fribourg 55, 139, 152–5; inquisition in Strasbourg 111–17, 127–8, 146–8; persecution of sodomy 111, 128–32; political independence 3–4, 16–20, 89; social control and anti-heretical measures 4, 9–10, 15, 37, 48, 52–5, 65–6, 78–9, 111, 126–7, 142–3, 163–4; Waldensian members of 1, 117, 149; see also civic religion; Greater Council; social discipline city walls 2–3, 70, 92, 94, 130–1 civic religion 9, 11, 30, 80, 125, 142, 164; and control of sexuality 131; definition 27 Clement VII (pope) 21, 25 Cologne 28, 130, 161; archdiocese of 122–3, 161 common good 4, 10, 24, 56, 68, 80, 126, 129, 140, 144; religious meaning 26–30 confession 41–2, 87, 113–14, 118, 130, 146 confraternity of St. Ulrich 3 Constofler 18–19 Corpus Christi 150 Council of Basel 162 Council of Constance 119, 132, 162 Count Palatine 24, 26, 44, 104 craftsmen 2, 7, 90, 111–12, 117, 128–9; political participation in cities 18–20 creed 38 Cum dormirent homines 6, 8, 50–1, 77, 146; see also Zwicker, Peter

Fiertz, Gertrude Barnes 152 Flacius Illyricus,Matthias 6 Fourth Lateran Council 114, 150 Franciscans 37, 48, 112, 123, 153 Franconia 23, 37, 48, 52, 86, 91, 96 Franconis, Humbert 153 Frankfurt 22–3, 117, 141, 155 Frederick I (emperor) 17 free cities 17–18; see also Mainz; Speyer; Strasbourg; Worms; Würzburg Free Spirit, heresy 36, 123 Fribourg: inquisition in 11, 54–5, 105, 112–14, 139–40, 152–4, 164; Waldensian community 1, 8–9, 144–5, 152–3; Waldensian minister in 161; witchcraft accusations 162 Friedrich VI (burgrave of Nuremberg) 104 Friedrich of Blankenheim (bishop of Strasbourg) 120–3

earthquake 29, 120, 131 electors 22–3, 26, 104 endogamy 143 Erfurt 5, 8, 46–8, 50, 56, 92 excommunication 150 Eymerich, Nicholas 146

Gallus of Neuhaus 40 gambling 28, 30, 129, 141, 143, 163 Garsten 53, 160 Georg of Hohenlohe (bishop of Passau) 51 Gerhard of Schwarzburg (bishop of Würzburg) 24–5, 50, 87, 100, 105 Golden Bull 22–3, 26 good citizenship 3–4, 9–10, 106, 111; urban heresy as antithesis of 37, 65, 69, 80, 87, 126, 132, 140 Gottschalk, Nikolaus 48, 56 Greater Council 20–1, 149 Great Schism 5, 21–6, 30, 44, 51, 56, 66, 72, 80, 120, 122, 154, 164 Gregory XI (pope) 21 Gretser, Jakob 6 guilds 18–20, 28, 65, 67, 117, 129–30, 144–5 Guillaume of Menthonay (bishop of Lausanne) 153–4

Index Hail Mary, prayer 77 hanging, execution 141 Hans of Plauen 90, 144, 161 Hartberg 52–3, 113, 146 Haupt, Herman 7, 88 Heinrich of Geroldseck (bishop of Strasbourg) 119 Heinrich of Olomouc 43, 53 Hiltebrant, Heinzmann 128, 130–1 Holy Roman Empire 5, 36, 39, 45–6, 65, 69, 75, 104, 113; and the Great Schism 22–3 Hungary 37, 39, 43, 50, 52–3, 56, 143, 149 Hus, Jan 162 Hussites 6, 162 Huter, Elizabeth 151 Huter, Konrad 49, 151 imperial cities 10–11, 45, 56, 66, 89, 141, 143; internal political conflicts in 18–21; struggle for independence 2–4, 16–18, 22–5; see also civic religion; Rhineland City League; Swabian City League imprisonment 43, 47, 102, 115, 123–4, 151 intimidation 44, 51, 74, 118 Jan of Jenštejn (archbishop of Prague) 43–4 Jews 19–20, 26, 40, 148 Johann I of Egloffstein (bishop of Würzburg) 104 Konrad II of Weinsberg (archbishop of Mainz) 44–5, 75, 150, 161 Konrad of Marburg 40 Konrad of Saxony 39, 46 Kungstein, Johannes 26 Lambert of Brunn 49, 52–3, 141 lodweber 67, 145 Lollards 161–2 Lord’s Prayer 39, 77 Lucerne 28, 54, 130–2, 155, 160 Lutz, Hans 78, 147 Lyon 1–2, 5, 37–9, 41 Mainz 1, 3, 17–18, 23, 144; anticlerical revolt in 5, 25–6, 36, 75, 116; inquisition in 6, 44–6, 56, 69, 161–3 Mainz Cathedral 26, 44–5, 161 Mair, Hans 54, 68, 77, 99, 143–4 Malkaw, Johannes 122–4 Mangold, Peter 113, 146–7 Map, Walter 38 Martin of Amberg 5–6, 8–9, 53, 100, 113, 160; inquisitor in Nuremberg 15,

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142; inquisitor in Regensburg 44, 151; inquisitorial career 37, 49–52, 100; ministers converted by 47–8, 56 Matthew of Krakow 43 merchants 6, 10, 16, 18–20, 54, 127–9, 144, 161; conflicts between 89, 90–2, 94–6; members of Waldensian communities 2, 9, 90, 111–12, 117–18, 128–9, 144, 152 Mermet Hugo 161 Milíč of Kroměříž, Jan 52 Mirror of Conscience 49; see also Martin of Amberg Moeller, Bernd 16, 27, 29, 127 Mülich, Hector 68–9, 78 Müllner, Johannes 15 Münch of Landskron, Johannes (bishop of Lausanne) 154 Münch of Landskron, Konrad (bishop of Basel) 154 Nider, Johannes 162 Nikolaus of Landau 54, 154 Nikolaus of Solothurn 39, 46 Nördlingen 54, 68, 77, 96–7, 99–101, 143–4 Nuremberg 17–22, 144, 161; inquisition in 6, 15, 52, 90, 141–3; social discipline in 141–2; use of banishment 125; see also Artisan’s Revolt Nuremberg Chronicle 2 Ödenburg (Sopron) 52–3, 149 Oertel, Johannes 151 Payne, Peter 161 Peace of Eger 24, 94, 120 penitential crosses 15, 45, 52, 65, 76–7, 98, 141–2, 148; refusal to wear 78 pilgrimage 39, 42, 89, 101 plague 21, 30, 117, 131; anti-Jewish violence 19, 26, 147–8 pogrom 19, 26, 148 pollution 69, 74, 79 Prague 43–4, 48–9, 52, 56, 74n64, 161 prayers for the dead 41–2, 73, 77, 125 preaching: lay 2, 5, 38–9, 40; mendicant 112–14, 119, 124, 145–6; see also Malkaw, Johannes; Mangold, Peter; sermon prison see imprisonment processions 131, 150; organized by urban governments 3, 29, 120; as punishment 65, 76–7, 125–6

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Index

Processus Petri 51; see also Zwicker, Peter prostitution 28, 68, 126, 129, 141, 143, 145 public penance 4, 52–3, 65, 76–8 purgatory 39, 41–2, 68, 73 Reformation 3, 6, 16, 27, 36, 126, 129, 140 refugees 11, 114, 151 Regensburg 43–4, 49, 67, 151, 163 Reiser, Friedrich 90, 160–2 religious poverty 5, 38–9 religious reform 37–8, 52, 162 revolt: anticlerical 9, 25, 44–5, 56, 67, 75, 164; led by guilds 3, 18–20, 67 Rhineland City League 24, 26 Rome 5, 21–2, 30, 56, 72, 120–1; pilgrimage to 42, 89; Waldensian visit to 38; see also Great Schism Rorer, Johannes 111, 128–32 Rothenburg ob der Tauber 21, 24, 90–5; inquisition in 6, 10, 54, 80, 86–90, 95–105, 132, 164; see also Toppler, Heinrich; Wern, Hans Rudolf I (emperor) 17 sacraments 5, 39, 41, 87 Schubel, Walter 87, 100–2 Schwortag 16, 20, 28, 120 sermon 37, 40, 43, 71, 77, 122–3; as catalyst for inquisition 53, 65–7, 69, 113–14, 145–7; by heretical preachers 40, 113 Sigfrid III of Eppstein (archbishop of Mainz) 18 social discipline: persecution of heresy as 4, 8, 98, 125–6, 140–1, 145, 163–4; and sexual deviance 131–2 Society of the Lion 23, 25–6, 71 sodomy 30, 128–32, 163 Solothurn 117, 155n88 Speyer 18, 117–18, 128 Spiritual Franciscans 123 St. Alexius 38 St. James of Compostela 89 St. Ulrich 76 Steinlin, Konrad 67, 145 Stettin (Szczecin) 7, 43, 50 Steyr 36, 51, 53, 73, 75, 160 Strasbourg 20, 29, 160; anti-Jewish violence 19, 26, 148; conflict with the bishop of 18, 119–24; heretical community in 39, 41, 46–7, 67, 72–3, 75–6, 116–19, 143–4, 149, 153; inquisition in 8–10, 37, 44, 48–9, 54–5, 69, 111–16, 146–7, 164; persecution of sodomy 128–32; struggle for

independence 2–3, 16, 18, 23–6; use of banishment 125–8 Strasbourg Cathedral 3, 16, 20, 120–2 Strasbourg Cathedral Foundation 3, 16, 120–2, 124 Strussin, Kunigund 114, 143, 151 sumptuary laws 29–30, 129, 141, 163 Süssner, Friedrich 151 Swabia 5, 23, 90, 96–8, 117, 120; inquisitions in 37, 48, 54, 86–7, 90, 96–8, 160 Swabian City League 21, 23–4, 71, 92, 96 Third Lateran Council 38 Toppler, Heinrich 10, 21, 24, 88–96, 99–105 Toppler’s Little Castle 92–5 Torrenté, Ulric de 162 Tractatus contra hereticos Beckhardos, Lulhardos et Swesteriones 161 Transylvania 48 Trier 122–3 Tyrnau (Trnava) 52 Ulm 29, 89, 92, 100–1, 126; minster 122 Ulrich of Pottenstein 77, 131 University of Cologne 124 University of Prague 43 Urban VI (pope) 21 usury 66, 129, 147 Valdes 1–2, 11, 37–9 Vienna 20, 48, 53 Virgin Mary 39, 73, 75 Waldensianism: beliefs 37–42; origins of 37–8; see also Valdes Waldensian ministers 1, 36, 39–42, 51, 68, 77, 113, 144, 149, 160–1, 164; conversion of 5, 8, 43, 46–8, 50, 56; as merchants 90, 160–1 Waldensian “school” (meeting place) 52, 149 Waldhauser, Konrad 52 Wasmod of Homburg, Johannes 45, 161–2 weavers 67, 117, 145, 151 wedding ordinance 141 Weidenhofer, Hans (Konrad Waythoff)  47, 72, 118 well-poisoning accusations 19, 26, 55n136, 148 Wemding 53, 71, 86, 96–7, 143 Wenceslas IV (king) 21, 23, 26 Wern, Hans 10, 86–91, 95–6, 98–105 Wilhelm of Diest (bishop of Strasbourg) 119, 124 Wilhelm of Vufflens 153

Index wine: gifts of 15, 52, 91; trade in 91, 117–18 winkeler 75, 113; see also Strasbourg; Waldensianism witchcraft 129, 155, 162–3 Worms 5, 18, 25, 97, 99 Wünnewil 139, 152–4 Württemberg 23, 121 Würzburg 24–5, 90, 101–2; inquisition in 6, 46, 50, 100

185

Zink, Burkard 79 Zum Hirtze, Brigida 118 Zur Birken, Hermann the Younger 127 Zur Birken family 117–18, 127–9, 144 Zwicker, Peter 6–8, 37, 42, 77, 149, 162; conversion of ministers by 47–8, 56; end of activity 160; and heretical violence 73–5; inquisitorial career 49–53; preaching 113, 145–6