1 - RELATIONS OF TRUST AND DISTRUST
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 December 2009
Summary
Between 1367 and 1393, Franciscan Brother François Borrel, inquisitor of the high Alpine diocese of Embrun in Dauphiné, scourged the Waldensians of his territory. From the Catholic Church's perspective, those primitive Christians qualified as heretics worthy of extermination. After all, they refused to swear oaths, opposed capital punishment, denied the existence of Purgatory, rejected papal authority including the pope's right to canonize saints, and claimed that sacraments administered by sinful priests had no efficacy. In the small, high Dauphinois valley of Vallouise, during three years for which full records exist between 1379 and 1386, the diocese prosecuted at least 300 Waldensians. When church authorities captured the accused heretics, they tried them in ecclesiastical courts, which routinely convicted them.
The church turned condemned heretics over to secular authorities for burning or hanging, then seized their property. The many Waldensians from Vallouise who fled across the border into Piedmont also lost their belongings. During those three years of inquisitorial adventures alone, Vallouise yielded about five thousand florins worth of confiscated property. That amount equaled about 40 percent of the money that the whole of Dauphiné had paid as royal taxes during the prosperous year of 1343 (Paravy 1993: II, 965).
Before the Protestant Reformation, Waldensians never called themselves Waldensians; their enemies used that name. They called themselves variously Brothers, Poor of Christ, or Poor of Lyons (Audisio 1999: 3).
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- Information
- Trust and Rule , pp. 1 - 29Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005