Papal Politics and Communal Contestation

This chapter explores antipapal views that increased in the wake of popes' decisions to use the charge of heresy to achieve temporal as well as spiritual control over communities in northern and central Italy. This region was the geographic arena for the political struggle that occurred between popes and Holy Roman Emperors, which divided Italian communities into rival factions. It was also the locus of papal efforts to assert religious authority over independent-minded towns that were responding to papal bureaucratization and consolidation of power. Within this context, the accusation of heterodoxy became one means by which the papacy punished those who refused to support papal aims. “Heresy” no longer reflected doctrinal error alone by the late thirteenth century. It had become a characteristic of political orientation, an expression of disaffection with the papacy, and an avowal of regional interests that superseded loyalty to Rome. The chapter then traces the steps that led late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century Italian communities to have political and spiritual antipathy toward the popes and their agents, which became a driving force for these communities to actively contest popes through championing suspect saints, heretical saints, and holy heretics.

Anti-Inquisitorialism to Antimendicantism

This chapter addresses inquisitors and the rise of anti-inquisitorial and antimendicant sentiments. Inquisitors were the ones who had the power to destroy the cult of a regional holy man or woman through an official condemnation of heresy. Since all inquisitors were friars, at times lay observers viewed the mainstream members of the wealthy and powerful mendicant orders as less spiritually worthy than those they prosecuted. Inquisitorial activity in local communities therefore consistently fueled the flames of acrimony. In addition, mendicant inquisitors often clashed with other members of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, in particular the secular clergy and the traditional monastic orders. Some of these other clerics viewed the mendicants as upstarts who interfered with their spiritual authority and received seemingly excessive and unwarranted papal favors. The chapter then details the process by which laypeople's anti-inquisitorial attitudes became antimendicant ones, as well as how other clerics' antimendicant views led them to support anti-inquisitorial actions.