As the area around Fabriano was papal territory there was no authority, ecclesiastical or secular, to hinder the two men from using their powers to the utmost. Capestrano was in a state of high excitement. On 8 November he wrote from Massaccio to the pope’s brother, who was the apostolic legate in Bologna, urging him to fresh zeal against the heretics. The defence of the faith, he insisted, must take precedence over all other work; as for his own activity, something extraordinary was about to happen: within the next three days more would be accomplished than in the last six years. And his campaign against the Fraticelli did in fact prove immensely successful. The villages of Massaccio, Poggio and Meroli were purged; and so was Maiolati, which was to figure again in the trial of 1466. Many Fraticelli recanted; those who stood firm were burned — Fabriano itself witnessed the burning of a Fraticelli “pope” together with some of his faithful flock.(44)
The lives of Capestrano in the great hagiographical collection, the Acta Sanctorum, contain further details, which are plausible in themselves and which probably likewise apply to this episode in his career.(45) They tell how the Fraticelli repeatedly tried to assassinate him; how he had thirty-six of their settlements burned to the ground; and how the remnants of the Fraticelli fled to Greece. At the trial of 1466 the “priest” Bernard was to describe how in Greece new centres were founded and new clergy trained, to be sent back to Italy as missionaries.(46) But this was only a last faint flicker of life: the persecutions of 1449 had effectively broken the Fraticelli movement.
Now there exists an account, written within three or four years of these events, which shows that all the infamies with which the Fraticelli were to be charged in 1466, in Rome, were already attributed to them in 1449, at Fabriano. The well-known humanist Flavio Biondo was apostolic secretary at that time. In his book describing the various provinces of Italy, called Italia Illustrata, he mentions the sojourn of Pope Nicholas at Fabriano, and then goes on to give an account of the Fraticelli.(47) All the familiar features are there: the promiscuous orgies, the killing of a child by throwing it from hand to hand, the incineration of the corpse, the mixing of ashes in wine which is then used to initiate new members. The term barilotto turns up, in its Latin form, and is explained just as St Bernardin explained it: the whole performance is named after the little barrel of wine-with-ashes.
But the most instructive part of Biondo’s tale is the piece of personal reminiscence at the end:
John of Capestrano, a most religious and indubitably holy man, related to us how, when he was in charge of persecuting this sect of people, a most wicked woman voluntarily confessed to him, as follows. When, as a result of this diabolic copulation, she had given birth to a child, she carried it to the cave, in a casket lightly decorated for the purpose. Her state of mind was joyful; she brought a most precious gift. And she stayed to watch her son, who was screaming most piteously, being roasted. She did this not only dry-eyed, but with a happy mind. When, therefore, some twelve members of that most cruel sect came to Fabriano, where the court was, they were very thoroughly investigated; and as they obstinately refused to come to their senses, were burned, as they deserved.(48)
Biondo wrote under the very eyes of the pope, indeed in Italia Illustrata he often addresses him directly: “tu, Pater Sancte...”.(49) So what he says of the pope’s friend and emissary can be relied on: Capestrano must indeed have told these tales about the Fraticelli. And this is confirmed by an unpublished sermon of Capestrano’s. In 1451 the fiery preacher was sent to Germany; and the following year at Nuremberg he included, in his preaching, a story about certain cruel heretics who held incestuous orgies in caves.(50) But Capestrano’s responsibility does not end there. The Fraticelli fiad been persecuted for a century before the episode at Fabriano, yet no such charges had ever been brought against them. Bernardin of Siena, who was familiar with such stories, never connected them with the Fraticelli. Everything suggests that Capestrano was the first to ascribe the barilotto to the Fraticelli: and that he did so in the heat of the persecution at Fabriano.
Once voiced, the accusations had to be answered by confessions, which legitimated renewed accusations, which produced further confessions. It is clear from Biondo’s account that at least some of the dozen Fraticelli who were burned at Fabriano had been forced to confess to practising the barilotto. Nearly twenty years later, in the interrogations of Francis of Maiolati in the Castel Sant’ Angelo, the phrases “interrogated concerning the matter of the barilotto”, “interrogated concerning the powders”, appear without previous explanations. Clearly, the interrogators were following an established pattern; and sure enough, the “bishop” Nicholas of Massaro hastened to confirm their preconceptions.(51) It seems, too, that by that time the slanders had penetrated to the common people. Prisoners described how peasant youths around Maiolati would mock the Fraticelli “de opinione” by calling them “fratri de barilotto”, and how boys would shower one another with insults such as, “You were born from the barilotto” And that, at least, sounds convincing.
The trial of 1466 was the end of the Fraticelli as an organized sect; but the defamation continued and increased, until it distorted the whole history of the movement. In the following century a Spanish scholar, Juan Ginez de Sepúlveda, wrote a biography in which he had occasion to mention the activities and fate of some quite different Fraticelli — people who had lived neither near Fabriano nor near Rome, and in the mid-fourteenth century instead of the mid-fifteenth. And he, too, tells blithely how these Fraticelli indulged in nocturnal orgies, killed and incinerated babies, mixed the ashes in their communion wine — all things of which no contemporary had ever accused them.(52) The evil repute of the Fraticelli has lingered on, down to the present day.
In the above account that evil repute has at last been traced to its true source. This was found to lie not in anything the Fraticelli really did, nor even in popular rumour, but in a literary tradition which was known only to educated men.*** Tales told long before, about quite different sects, and recorded in Latin writings, were applied by St John of Capestrano to the Fraticelli. And just as, in earlier centuries, Pope Gregory IX and Pope John XXII had been led, by Conrad of Marburg and Henry of Schönberg, to accept the most monstrous fantasies concerning the Waldensians, so Pope Nicholas V and Pope Paul II were led by Capestrano and his successors to accept these accusations against the Fraticelli. Both these fifteenth-century popes were cultured men — Nicholas indeed was one of the most learned scholars of his day.
The defamation of the Fraticelli, then, was the work of intellectuals in positions of authority. Also, it was carried out at a time when the Fraticelli no longer had any appreciable influence or importance. We have met this pattern before, and we shall be meeting it again.
***
This literary tradition must have had even greater continuity than appears from the above account. The story as told by Biondo in the fifteenth century, and as repeated by Sepúlveda in the sixteenth, contains the following curious detaiclass="underline" “Me in whose hands the baby expires, is held to be appointed supreme pontitf by the divine spirit.” This detail does not appear in the earlier western sources known to us, such as Bemardin of Siena and Guibert de Nogent. On the other hand, it was known in Armenia seven centuries earlier. John of Ojun’s treatise against the Paulicians says: “They venerate him in whose hands the child expires, and promote him head of the sect.” So far as is known, John of Ojun’s treatise first became accessible in the West when an Armenian manuscript, buried in a monastery in Venice, was translated into Latin in 1834. Yet the resemblance is surely too close, and too bizarre, to be explicable by coincidence. There must have been more links in this literary tradition than are now discernible.