The Protestant Reformation of the Sixteenth century was one of the most important events
in history, splitting Western Europe into two blocks that would fight each other for a century,
causing devastation on a cataclysmic scale, and influencing the worldwide
religious and political landscape in ways we still live with today.
However, Martin Luther wasn’t the first thinker that denounced some of the founding principles
of the Catholic Church, nor was the protestant reformation the first time that the fires of
religious war had engulfed Europe. In this video, we will look at a number of the heretical sects
and breakaway Churches of the middle ages, the impact they had on European history,
and the influence they would have on the early modern Protestant Revolution.
And we’ll also highlight another split that came later - the departure of Christian groups from
Europe to establish colonies in the Americas. This is the beginning of a famous time of killings and
distrust, covered by today’s sponsor MagellanTV in their documentary, Witch Hunt in Salem.
While many have heard of these dark times so close to the beginning of American history,
there is plenty more to be said, and this documentary reveals it all starkly. The
most interesting part is to learn how the strict beliefs of the puritans, the ideology
they fled persecution in Europe to protect, rendered them vulnerable to social breakdown,
being not only very wary of witchcraft, but perhaps also more likely to partake in it.
Within a generation or two, they had turned the religious fervor that drove them to those shores,
to the business of killing their own in the hunt for evil forces,
driven by all manner of misconceptions which this documentary will explain.
Alternatively, another look at the intersection of religious and political conflicts can be seen
in Promises and Betrayals, a documentary that gives a brutally honest report on the role
of the British Empire in stoking the fight between Jews and Arabs in the middle east,
by attempting to manipulate both sides and ultimately failing, revealed through
uncovered government communications. Another great watch on the topic of religious history.
To get started with these documentaries, or anything else from their massive of over three
thousand documentaries, all ad free and with new titles added weekly,
use our link in the description to get a free one month trial of MagellanTV.
Before Martin Luther affixed his ninety-five theses on the doors of the churches of Wittenberg
in 1517, a number of Christian movements that criticized some of the dogmas or elements of
the canonical rules of the Catholic church had appeared in the previous centuries.
Many of these were condemned as heresies by the Popes, bishops, and ecclesiastical
thinkers of their time. The word Heresy comes from the Greek word hairesis , meaning ”choice”,
and it is a belief or opinion that goes against the official doctrine of religion.
Christianity was rocked by challenges to its orthodoxy from its infancy, as questions on
the nature of Christ and the idea of the Trinity sparked discussions, division, and persecutions
among Christians during the times of the Roman Empire. A number of heresies, such as Arianism,
Gnosticism, and Donatism sprawled up in these first centuries of the faith, with some even
becoming the dominant form of Christianity in some areas of Europe and the Middle East.
As such, it quickly became crucial for the heads of the Church to define the doctrines
of the faith to keep its unity. As Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire,
Roman Emperors like Constantine the Great actively engaged in uniforming the faith and condemning
heresies in a number of Church Councils. As a result, schismatic movements challenging
the Christian dogmas became associated with direct challenges to imperial power.
After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, various denominations and heresies of the
Christian faith gradually disappeared in the territory that had been previously Roman, with the
most prominent one, Arianism, dying out in Italy during the seventh century. After this, western
Europe was largely free of religious dissent for approximately three centuries. It was in the tenth
century that political and social events laid the groundwork for the emergence of new movements:
while Europe suffered from external raiders like Vikings and Magyars, and royal authority
in its biggest Kingdoms waned, the prestige of the church suffered greatly, both at the local
level and in Rome. In the eternal city, the local Roman aristocracy used the papacy to obtain power
and influence in the Eternal City with little regard for its spiritual role. Beyond Rome,
the clergy was increasingly employed by kings and emperors to administer their realms as glorified
politicians and landlords, which put into question the religious nature of their position. Moreover,
local strongmen meddled heavily in the affairs of the church and seized its resources, and would
install their favorites in local ecclesiastical positions by buying and selling these offices,
thereby committing a mortal sin known as simony. This political anarchy and meddling laymen even
encroached on the power structure of the most sacred cloisters in Christendom: great monasteries
of Europe. In response to this spiritual degradation, monks and their priors began
reforming themselves and their codes of conduct to return to a more traditional monastic existence,
focused on prayer and helping the poor, rather than the administration of the great riches that
they had accrued in the past centuries through donations. These changes would inspire other
movements with the goal of reforming the church, like the Peace of God campaigns which emerged in
this period, particularly in southern France and Mediterranean cities. These were popular local
manifestations of social and spiritual discontent, protesting against a clergy too influenced by the
local nobility. These campaigns could spring up as grassroots movements as was most likely,
or could be encouraged by the local bishops, who would use them as a tool to assert their authority
over the territory of their dioceses against the lesser nobility and unruly rural churches.
The protest against a clergy too close to the nobility and obsessed with hoarding wealth was
an element often present in most heresies which went against mainstream Catholic teachings.
It was in this atmosphere that the Gregorian reforms took place, which revolutionized the
role of the Papacy in the catholic world, and dominated the relationship between the papacy
and Empire at the turn of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. At the same time,
it was also in this period that the first forms of religious dissent emerged. The first episodes
of heresy we find in the historical sources were sparse and sporadic, located in northern Italy and
France in the first half of the eleventh century. These early heresies seem to have been driven
by a desire to live an extremely ascetic life free of abject poverty, perhaps inspired by the
monastic reforms. Contemporary sources writing about them accused them of being Manicheans,
indicating the possible influences from the Balkan Bogomilism sect which we will explain later.
Another movement that found condemnation among some Christian thinkers was the Patarias,
which emerged in Milan and spread to Lombardy and Florence in the ten-fifties and sixties.
Its goals were to reform the upper clergy of the city to be less ostentatious with their
wealth and live more humbly, combatting simony and marriage in the clergy in the process.
However, there was an element of class struggle in the Pataria, for the movement could also be
seen as a rebellion of smaller landowners against the upper class and the archbishop.
In the twelfth century, a wave of movements to reform the Church emerged in Latin Europe.
The reasons for this are manifold: the experiences of the previous century laid
the groundwork for dissent. Many reforms had been introduced during the Investiture Controversy,
a vicious power struggle between the Pope and Holy Roman Emperors of Central Europe.
These had reinforced the church on the political level, but alienated some believers that wanted
a clergy closer to the original message of Christianity. The crusades had brought western
Europe into contact with the Eastern half of the Church and Islam, and returning pilgrims,
traders and crusaders brought back with them new ideas. The foundation of universities,
the appearance of traveling scholars, and the opening of translation centers where Greek and
Roman philosophers were rediscovered contributed to the discovery and circulation of new ideas.
However, the contribution of scholars should not be overstated, as these were, at their heart,
popular and local movements of social and spiritual discontent. They emerged in the
Mediterranean cities and usually revolved around a preacher who wandered with a small following.
Many of these movements shared the idea that the true Church was characterized by simple rituals
and moral purity, expressed through an apostolic life consisting of minimal clothing, bare feet,
donkeys as means of transportation, taking no money with oneself and living in poverty.
They would often reject the priests that had been educated in the city cathedral,
whose life was too luxurious to be respectable, and many of the Churches more recent reforms,
which were considered superfluous. These wandering preachers were particularly
successful in Southern France, Flanders and Italy . The most influential ones were Peter the Monk in
Le Mans, which combatted prostitution in the city, Peter of Bruys which rejected baptism and mass,
and Valdès of Lyon, the most successful of these, whose movement found its footing in France and
Northern Italy. Valdès’ followers became known as Waldensians, or the Poor of Lyon.
Valdès himself was a wealthy merchant, and began his spiritual journey in 1173 when he gave away
all his possessions to the poor and started to preach a life of poverty, simplicity and of good
deeds. He had the bible translated into French so he himself could read it, and tried to have his
movement recognized by the Pope, but failed. In 1184, he and his followers were declared
heretics. The Waldensians then sought refuge in the Alps where they survive to this day.
The most impactful and dogmatically most peculiar heresy that emerged during that time, however, was
of a completely different vein: the Cathar heresy, from the Greek word Katharoi, meaning pure.
Also known as Albigensian due to the town of Albi in southern France, which was one of its
main strongholds, they were present in the Rhineland as early as the 1140s, though they
might already have been present in Latin Europe for over a century before that. It is very likely
that they were an offshoot of the Bogomil heresy which emerged in the Balkans in the tenth century:
they were both Christian dualists, meaning they believed that there existed two gods,
an evil one which had created the material world where the souls of men had been trapped,
and a good God to which the souls belonged to. They rejected the Old Testament and they did not
see themselves as part of the catholic church, which they saw as corrupt by wealth and pomp,
a deviation from most other sectarian Christian movements, who wanted to reform the Church from
within rather than break from it entirely. The Cathars were well organized into dioceses with
a clear succession rule for their bishops, which made them quite resilient to initial persecution.
To achieve salvation, the Cathars had to live an extremely ascetic life, not eating
animal products, remaining chaste, and otherwise refusing everything material to reach perfection.
This lifestyle was seen as extremely virtuous, and helped with the popularity of Catharism.
The response of the Church was initially quite mild, as it was more preoccupied with its rocky
relationship with the Holy Roman Emperor and was relatively unconcerned with the Cathars.
Catharism was condemned in 1179, but this did not stop it from finding a great number of followers
in Lombardy and southern France, where the central authority of the French King was weaker, making it
extremely difficult to persecute them. In 1209, a crusade was called against the Cathars and those
who supported them, which brought southern France under the direct control of the French kings.
In 1233 the Inquisition was established to track down heretics, and by the middle of the fourteenth
century, Catharism had practically died out in Western Europe. The medieval Inquisition was not,
as might be commonly believed, a religious tribunal that condemned a great number of
heretics to be burned at the stake. Instead, it was a number of regional commissions staffed by
theologians whose goal was to find those guilty of heresy and recant their beliefs.
They could not condemn heretics to death which, because that required the cooperation of the
local secular authority, and although they were allowed to torture those more stubborn it seems
to have been a rare occurrence. The majority of the cases ended with those found guilty repenting
and converting back to the Catholic faith. One of the causes of the Cathars' disappearance
was the establishment of new mendicant orders, in particular St. Francis’ Order of Friar Minor
and St. Dominic’s Order of Friar Preacher. The latter had as their mission to combat heresy by
training preachers to instruct others in Catholic doctrine, while St. Francis Order’s hallmarks were
poverty and simplicity, giving those who aspired for a more ascetic life a group to
join within the framework of the catholic church, instead of going off and making their own sects.
Following the death of Saint Francis in 1226, the order abandoned his ideals of absolute poverty,
which created a rift within the order between those who followed the reformer rules and
those who desired to adhere to their founder’s ideals. This latter group, called Spirituals,
became ever more uncompromising with their position until they were declared heretics
in 1381 and they became known as the Fraticelli heresy. Other movements emerged in the thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries which were inspired by Saint Francis’ message of poverty and simplicity,
like the Joachimites, Apostolic Brethren and the Dulcinians, which were also deemed heretics.
The next dissenting religious movement to shake the Christian world emerged in
the academic halls of Oxford in the second half of the fourteenth century. There, the academic
theologian John Wycliffe managed to inspire a popular movement that took the name Lollardy,
deeply affecting English society, and surviving until the Reformation arrived in England,
where it influenced its development. Wycliffe criticized some abuses of the church like the
holding of multiple religious offices at the same time, and not being present where these offices
had their seat. He also criticized some aspects of Catholicism such as the devotion to saints,
pilgrimage and the authority of the Pope. When some of his followers were expelled from
Oxford in 1382, they started to preach to the population with the use of a vernacular bible,
translated into English. Their movement found initial success in the English political turmoil
that had followed the death of Edward III during the Hundred Years War. However,
in 1401, the English parliament made it mandatory to burn heretics at the stake,
so many recanted their beliefs and Lollardy became clandestine and more extreme in its beliefs,
though occasionally they would revolt against the monarch's authority, such as in 1414.
Not only did Wycliffe’s ideas have deep ramifications in his native England,
its shockwaves also spread across the continent, particularly through the ideas developed by rector
of the University of Prague and Czech preacher: Jan Hus. Hus was a firebrand who agreed with much
of what the English academic wrote, and criticized the abuses and pomp of the church and its priests,
considering their wealth to be a betrayal of the values of the poorer and simpler church during
Christianity’s origin. He criticized the selling of indulgences, where one pays his church to save
one's soul, and the idea that the church could be reformed by a series of councils of cardinals and
theologians. Like many other heretical thinkers, Hus believed it was only what was written in the
Bible that should be considered canonical for the church’s doctrine. He also delivered his sermon
exclusively in Czech, although many Germans had moved to the Bohemian capital, and thus joined
in on the political and ethnic strife that was boiling in the Slav kingdom. His ideas brought
him into conflict with Prague’s episcopate, which managed to get him excommunicated. Hus went to
Constance to appeal this decision at a general council but he was found guilty of being a heretic
and burned at the stake in 1415. Jan Hus’ death enflamed the nobles and population of Bohemia and
Moravia who took his burning as a national affront and began the Hussite wars that lasted until 1434.
Many of the movements presented in our video would have a profound influence on the thinkers
and reformers that began the Protestant Revolution. Ideas such as the translation of
the bible into vernacular languages to allow those not instructed in Latin to read and interpret the
message themselves, the criticism of the selling of indulgences and priesthood, and the rejection
of the authority of the Pope, were all anchors upon which Martin Luther and his peers predicated
their movement upon, and had existed for centuries before their time. We are planning more videos on
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