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Late Medieval Inquisitors and the Framing of Eastern Christianity: Procedures, Consultations and Treatises
Irene Bueno
Introduction
Medieval polemical works and theological treatises are loaded with refutations of those who were deemed to be Eastern schismatics or heretics.1The bibliography on Latin polemical works against the Eastern Christians, especially the Greeks, is vast. See in particular Antoine Dondaine, ‘Contra Graecos. Premiers écrits polémiques des Dominicains d’Orient’, Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum, 21 (1951), 320–446; Claudine Delacroix-Besnier, Les Dominicains et la chrétienté grecque aux XIVe et XVe siècles (Rome, 1997), especially pp. 201–71; Yuri Georgij Avvakumov, Die Entstehung des Unionsgedankens. Die lateinische Theologie des Mittelalters in der Auseinandersetzung mit dem Ritus der Ostkirche (Berlin, 2002), especially pp. 303–71; Martin Hinterberger and Chris Schabel (eds), Greeks, Latins, and Intellectual History, 1204–1500 (Leuven, 2011); Alessandra Bucossi, ‘Contra Latinos et adversus Graecos. An Introduction’, in Alessandra Bucossi and Anna Calia (eds), Contra Latinos et adversus Graecos. The Separation between Rome and Constantinople from the Ninth to the Fifteenth Century (Leuven, 2020), pp. XIII–XVI; Andrea Riedl, Kirchenbild und Kircheneinheit. Der dominikanische ‘Tractatus contra Graecos’ (1252) in seinem theologischen und historischen Kontext (Berlin, 2020). Yet one fails to find systematic evidence of Oriental Christians and Eastern rite converts who were brought before the ecclesiastical tribunals held by Latin bishops, or by inquisitors officially appointed by the pope. The record-keeping practices of the late medieval inquisition affect the landscape of the surviving evidence. The absence of a centralized inquisition in the Middle Ages, and the lack of corresponding inquisitorial archives comparable to the Archives of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, both account for the incomplete nature of the records preserved, thwarting any chance of drawing a comprehensive map of the confessional control exercised by Latin ecclesiastical judges over Eastern Christians from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century.2 On the archival dispersion and loss of books and documentary materials of the medieval inquisitorial office, see Grado Giovanni Merlo, ‘Problemi documentari dell’Inquisizione medievale in Italia’, in I tribunali della fede: continuità e discontinuità dal medioevo all’età moderna. Atti del XLV Convegno di studi sulla Riforma e sui movimenti religiosi in Italia (Torre Pellice, 3–4 settembre 2005), Bollettino della Società di Studi Valdesi, 124:200 (2007), 19–29. See also John H. Arnold, ‘Archivi e serie documentarie: Francia’ and ‘Archivi e serie documentarie: Inghilterra’, in Adriano Prosperi, Vincenzo Lavenia and John Tedeschi (eds), Dizionario storico dell’inquisizione (4 vols, Pisa, 2010), vol. 1, pp. 83–5. The patchiness of surviving evidence aside, one can safely conclude that, overall, the medieval office of inquisition was rarely concerned with Eastern Christians, due to its primary focus on the plethora of heretics and heretical sects that seemed to threaten Latin Christianity.3Recent syntheses on anti-heresy repression by the medieval Church include, among others, Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane, A History of Medieval Heresy and Inquisition (Lanham, MD, 2011); and Donald S. Prudlo (ed.), A Companion to Heresy Inquisitions (Boston, MA, 2019). Whilst Cathars, Waldenses, and other non-conformist groups worried those in charge of the officium, Eastern Christians seem to fall out of the main competences of the Roman Catholic ecclesiastical justice. Indeed, although there was often no clear-cut distinction between heresy and schism in the theological and canonical thought of the Middle Ages, the latter became especially associated with the inner rifts of the Latin Church and the revolt against the Holy See, rather than the separation of the Eastern Churches from Rome.4See especially Yves Marie-Joseph Congar, ‘Schisme’, in Alfred Vacant, Eugène Mangenot and Émile Amann (eds), Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique, vol. 14:1 (Paris, 1939), col. 1286–1312; Risto Saarinen, ‘Scisma’, in Jean-Yves Lacoste (ed.), Dizionario critico di teologia, Italian edition ed. P. Coda (Rome, 2005), p. 1235; Marie-Hélène Blanchet and Frédéric Gabriel, ‘Dynamiques de la communion: la chrétienté entre schisme et unions’, in Marie-Hélène Blanchet and Frédéric Gabriel (eds), Réduire le schisme? Ecclésiologies et politiques de l’Union entre Orient et Occident (XIIIe–XVIIIe siècles) (Paris, 2013), pp. 1–10; Othmar Hageneder, ‘Der Haresiebegriff bei den Juristen des 12. und 13. Jahrhunderts’, in The Concept of Heresy in the Middle Ages (Louvain, 1976), pp. 42–103, at pp. 52–4. See the related discussion, focused on the early modern period, by Vincenzo Lavenia, ‘Quasi haereticus. Lo scisma nella riflessione degli inquisitori dell’età moderna’, Mélanges de l’École française de Rome – Italie et Méditerranée modernes et contemporaines, 126:2 (2014), 307–24. Similarly, on the qualification of the Latins’ schism and heresy by the Greek Church, see Marie-Hélène Blanchet, ‘“Schismatique” et “hérétiques”: les qualifications appliquées aux Latins à Byzance’, Mélanges de l’École française de Rome – Italie et Méditerranée modernes et contemporaines, 126:2 (2014), <https://journals.openedition.org/mefrim/1870>. Nonetheless, scattered evidence sheds some light on individual inquisitors’ action against Eastern Christians, both in the mission lands and in the West. While such cases are rare, inquisitorial attitudes towards Greeks, Armenians, Nestorians, Jacobites or Georgians are more thoroughly documented elsewhere, namely in theological reflections in ad hoc inquiries and anti-heresy treatises. Indeed, theologians or missionaries who had been active as inquisitors occasionally offered their expertise in the evaluation of Eastern Christians’ errors, drafting rebuttals or lists of errors and thereby helping to locate Eastern Christianity within their construction of a universal knowledge of heresy. Both the judicial and theological responses of late medieval inquisitors against Eastern Christians have so far received only cursory attention. On the one hand, scholars of medieval missions have mainly dwelt on the theological contribution of mendicants settled in the East, illuminating how their intellectual work, nurtured by direct contact with the Eastern clergy and Christian communities in the East, was occasionally intertwined with their judicial action too.5 Current knowledge of the theological elaboration of mendicant missionaries in Romania and the Near East relies extensively on the analyses by Raymond-Joseph Loenertz, Antoine Dondaine and Thomas Kaeppeli, whose specific references are provided below. For a comprehensive overview of the medieval mendicant missions among Near Eastern multiconfessional societies, see in particular Jean Richard, La papauté et les missions d’Orient au Moyen Âge (Rome, 1998); Delacroix-Besnier, Les Dominicains, which also surveys the inquisitorial activity of Dominican missionaries in the East; and Thomas Tanase, ‘Jusqu’aux limites du monde’. La papauté et la mission franciscaine de l’Asie de Marco Polo à l’Amérique de Christophe Colomb (Rome, 2013). On the other hand, the papally appointed inquisitors’ principal drive to combat Western heretics has oriented the focus of inquisition studies accordingly.6For an updated discussion of the historiography of medieval heresy inquisition see Irene Bueno, Vincenzo Lavenia and Riccardo Parmeggiani (eds), Current Trends in the Historiography of Inquisitions: Themes and Comparisons (Rome, 2023), part I, pp. 23–198. As a result, the place of Eastern Christianity within the medieval inquisitors’ wider sphere of judicial and theological intervention is still an open field of research. This paper will first consider the scant surviving traces of inquisitorial activity dealing with Eastern Christian contexts from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, shedding light on the main objectives and areas of competence in this undertaking. Next, it will concentrate on the theological accounts that were offered within anti-heresy treatises, considering how they might contribute to the reconstruction of a distinctive inquisitorial attitude towards Eastern Christians in the late medieval period. Without disregarding the degree of interconfessional communication entailed by coexistence among different religious communities, which recent scholarship has increasingly uncovered,7 Works in this vein include Catherine Holmes, ‘“Shared Worlds”: Religious Identities – A Question of Evidence’, in Jonathan Harris, Catherine Holmes, and Eugenia Russell (eds), Byzantines, Latins, and Turks in the Eastern Mediterranean World after 1150 (Oxford, 2012), pp. 30–60; Christopher MacEvitt, The Crusades and the Christian World of the East: Rough Tolerance (Philadelphia, PA, 2008). For a thorough study of the interactions between Catholic and Eastern Christians in Levantine contexts in the early modern period, see in particular Cesare Santus, Trasgressioni necessarie: communicatio in sacris, coesistenza e conflitti tra le comunità cristiane orientali (Levante e Impero ottomano, XVII–XVIII secolo) (Rome, 2019). the documentary output that is considered here will especially shed light on the interpretative schemes that were applied by mendicant inquisitors and other ministers of the Latin Church to frame different Christian traditions. Medieval inquisitors in the lands of mission
Although confessional control of Eastern Christianity was not an ordinary concern of late medieval inquisitors, scattered pieces of evidence attest to their activity in the lands of mission as well as their involvement in cases concerning Eastern Christians in the West. These cases usually include either the attribution by the pope of inquisitorial privileges to bishops or mendicant friars who were based in the overseas territories, or judicial action against Eastern converts in the West. As has been shown by Raymond-Joseph Loenertz, Jean Richard and Claudine Delacroix-Besnier, the activity of inquisitors in the Near Eastern lands was limited, and mainly concerned with Latins, Jewish converts, and converts of Greek rite, rather than with Oriental Christians.8Raymond-Joseph Loenertz, La société des frères péregrinants, vol. 1, Étude sur l’Orient dominicain (Rome, 1937), pp. 74–6; Richard, La papauté et les missions, pp. 131–7; Delacroix-Besnier, Les Dominicains, pp. 135, 448–9. Interesting attestations of the activity of mendicant inquisitors in the East emerge throughout the registers of John XXII (1316–34). In 1318, drawing on Gregory IX’s bull Ille humani generis (a foundational charter of mendicant anti-heresy commitment), this pope instructed the provincial prior of the Dominicans in Greece to appoint inquisitors ‘contra haereticos et diffamatos’. An inquisitorial tribunal was thus established in the province of Greece, probably in Candia, which according to Tăutu ‘undoubtedly considered Eastern schismatics’ as well.9Aloysius L. Tăutu (ed.), Acta Ioannis XXII, 1317–1334 (Vatican City, 1952), no. 18, pp. 30–3; quotation at p. 33: ‘sine dubio etiam schismaticos orientales respiciebat’. On the probable location of the inquisitorial seat in Candia see below, note 26. The activity of Dominican inquisitors in the East underwent institutional reorganization later in the fourteenth century. On 1 April 1381, upon the inquisitor John Gallo’s death, Pope Urban VI charged the master and general vicar of the Dominicans to appoint three new inquisitors, dividing their competences into three main areas: Greece and Tartaria (from Pera to Caffa), Armenia and Georgia (Caucasus), and Ruthenia–Walachia (from the delta of the Danube as far as L’viv).10 Thomas Ripoll (ed.), Bullarium Ordinis FF. Praedicatorum, vol. 2, p. 299; Loenertz, La société, pp. 74–6; idem, ‘Les missions dominicaines en Orient au XIVe siècle et la Société des Frères Pérégrinants pour le Christ’, Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum, 2 (1932), 1–83, especially 28. As to the areas of Greece and Tartaria, we are informed of the Dominican Andrea Armenus’ appointment as inquisitor in 1389, see below, note 15; upon his death, the Dominican Luca de Bozolo of Pera was appointed inquisitor in partibus Tartariae et Graeciae in February 1400, see Aloysius L. Tăutu (ed.), Acta Urbani PP. VI (1378–1389), Bonifacii PP. IX (1389–1404), Innocentii PP. VII (1404–1406) et Gregorii PP. XII (1406–1415) (Rome, 1970), no. 79, pp. 161–2. Friar Leonard of Chios, aged thirty-six, was then appointed by the general master of the Dominicans as inquisitor of the entire territory of the Societas fratrum peregrinantium, the main Dominican missionary congregation active in the Near East, which was established in around 1300. Despite the master’s subsequent decision to revoke all inquisitors in the Societas’ lands, this role was confirmed by pope Eugenius IV in 1431.11Ripoll, Bullarium, vol. 3, pp. 9–10; Loenertz, La société, pp. 67, 76. On the Societas’ history and organization see especially Loenertz, La société; and idem, ‘La Société des Frères Pérégrinants de 1374 à 1475’, Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum, 45 (1975), 107–45. Delacroix-Besnier has traced the names of no more than fifteen Dominican inquisitors who were appointed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries throughout Romania, the principality of Achaia, Crete, and the territories under the Societas, arguing that their scarcity in number corresponds to a ‘mild pontifical policy vis-à-vis the Eastern Christians’.12Delacroix-Besnier, Les Dominicains, p. 135. Mostly of Italian origin, these inquisitors usually held also the title of general vicar of the missionary congregations in the East, which reveals the close interconnection and high reputation of these roles.13Ibid., p. 135; Loenertz, La société, p. 76. The Italian ancestry of these friars and the prominence of their position seem to confirm Jean Richard’s argument that the appointment of mendicant inquisitors in the East represented an effective means for the papacy to exercise control over the missionaries, bypassing the masters of the Order.14Richard, La papauté et les missions, p. 132. Notable exceptions are nonetheless present in the friars’ origins, as in the case of Andreas Armenus, inquisitor of Caffa and vicar of the Societas in Romania, Tartaria, Gazaria, Armenia and Georgia (1390–3), and Theodor Chrysoberges, a devoted unionist, vicar of the Societas (1415–18), and general inquisitor in the region of Athens (1421), who were of Armenian and Greek descent respectively.15 On Andreas Armenus, see Loenertz, La société, p. 75; idem, Étude sur l’Orient, pp. 19, 28; and Delacroix-Besnier, Les Dominicains, p. 431. On Theodor Chrysoberges see Loenertz, ‘La Société des Frères Pérégrinants de 1374 à 1475’, pp. 122–3; and Delacroix-Besnier, Les Dominicains, p. 445. Early testimonies to the appointment of inquisitors in South Eastern Europe – in Greece, Bosnia and Hungary – charged with the control over Christian converts to Judaism and Christianized Jews, date back to 1267.16Aloysius L. Tăutu (ed.), Acta Urbani IV, Clementis IV, Gregorii X: 1261–1276 (Vatican City, 1954), no. 27, p. 73. Subsequent documents issued by Honorius IV and Boniface VIII mention the appointment of an inquisitor in Bosnia against heretics, the institution of the officium inquisitionis against Bogomils and Patarens in Sclavonia, and the activity of inquisitors in Hungary.17Aloysius L. Tăutu (ed.), Acta Romanorum pontificum ab Innocentio V ad Benedictum XI: 1276–1304 (Vatican City, 1954), no. 105, pp. 176–80; no. 123, p. 202–3; no. 126, pp. 208–9. A number of letters issued by John XXII and Benedict XII shed further light on attempts to enhance the repression of schismatici et haeretici in the same regions. To this end, John addressed the archbishop of Esztergom and the king of Hungary, Charles Robert of Anjou, and the Bosnian ban, while Benedict sought to secure the support of the ban and local lords in the fight against heresy.18Acta Ioannis XXII, nos 32–32a, pp. 62–4; no. 78, p. 161; Aloysius L. Tăutu (ed.), Acta Benedicti XII, 1334–1342 (Vatican City, 1958), no. 44, pp. 97–8. However, due to the usually undetermined nature of the heresy involved, one cannot infer with complete confidence that Eastern Christians were actually involved. It is therefore problematic to identify the ‘enemies of the cross from remote regions of Germany and Poland’ and the Transylvanians, Bosnians and Slavs, mentioned by John XXII with regard to the activity of Dominican inquisitors in the kingdom of Hungary.19Acta Ioannis XXII, no. 91, pp. 179–82; see also nos 92–92a, pp. 182–5. The diversity of their religious belonging emerges in various letters issued in 1421, when Pope Martin V appointed the Franciscan vicar Baptist as general inquisitor in Hungary, Germany, Croatia and various other areas to act against ‘infideles Theurci, manichei et schismatici’ who violently persecuted Catholic converts, and referred to the activity of the inquisitor of Hungary, Dalmatia, Sclavonia and Bosnia against ‘schismatics and heretics’.20 Aloysius L. Tăutu (ed.), Acta Martini PP. V: 1417–1431 (Rome, 1980), no. 196c, pp. 496–8. In addition to inquisitors, papal legates and members of the higher clergy in the mission lands were also expected to deal with Eastern Christians in various ways. For example, in 1330 John XXII urged the Latin patriarch of Alexandria, John of Aragon, to proceed against a Catholic who had entertained a relationship with a Greek woman in Romania and was known to have adhered to the Greeks’ customs and rites, thus committing the ‘crime of schism’.21Acta Ioannis XXII, no. 120, p. 226. In 1326, John entrusted the papal legate Benedict de Cumis, a Dominican theologian, with the faculty of absolving those Greek schismatics – lay and clerics of whatever rank – who had returned to unity with the Roman Church, once they had abjured their schism.22Ibid., no. 88a, pp. 175–6. For similar examples, see Aloysius L. Tăutu (ed.), Acta Clementis PP. VI: 1342–1352 (Vatican City, 1960), no. 85; and note 24 below. While this letter proves that a formal abjuration was expected from Eastern converts, it provides no further information as to the procedures involved. Soon afterwards, John XXII provided the Dominican Raymond Beguin, patriarch of Jerusalem, with a more proactive role in the repression of Eastern Christians’ ‘errors and heresies’, commissioning him to undertake the necessary initiatives to extirpate the errors of the Nestorians, Jacobites and Greeks in Cyprus.23Acta Ioannis XXII, no. 89, pp. 176–7. Similarly, due to close cohabitation on this island of ‘diverse nations and sects […] from different parts of the world’, Clement VI granted the Latin archbishop of Nicosia the faculty to reconcile ‘schismatics and heretics’, provided that they abjured.24Acta Clementis PP. VI, nos 45–45a, pp. 74–6. Among the Dominican inquisitors who were active in the East, Andrea Doto and Filippo de Bindo Incontri have attracted attention due to the importance of their anti-Greek theological contribution, but little is known about their judicial careers. Andrea Doto was appointed inquisitor of the province of Greece.25See Jacques Quétif and Jacques Echard, Scriptores Ordinis Praedicatorum, vol. 1 (Paris, 1719), pp. 156–9; Thomas Kaeppeli, Scriptores Ordinis Praedicatorum Medii Aevi, vol. 1 (Rome, 1970–1993), p. 68; Delacroix-Besnier, Les Dominicains, p. 432. See also Alfonso Maierù, ‘Bonaccorso da Bologna’, in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 11, 1969, pp. 460–1; Lexikon des Mittelallters, vol. 2 (Munich-Zurich 1980–1998), p. 398. Riedl, Kirchenbild und Kircheneinheit, pp. 192–200. Evidence of his activity includes the prosecution of the Jews of Candia in 1314. On that occasion, he acted in particular against Sabbetay, a Jew who had been exceptionally appointed as tax collector in Crete, thereby serving in a public office despite ecclesiastical and Venetian legislation to the contrary. As David Jacoby pointed out, Doto’s sentence against Sabbetay was met by firm opposition from the civic authorities of Candia and the doge, who proved to be more concerned with the island’s commercial prerogatives than with the strict application of anti-Jewish legislation, keeping the Jewish officer in his post.26 David Jacoby, ‘Venice, the Inquisition and the Jewish Communities of Crete in the Early 14th Century,’ Studi veneziani, 12 (1970), 127–44, repr. in idem, Recherches sur la Méditerranée orientale du XIIe au XVe siècle. Peuples, sociétés, économies (London, 1979), IX, pp. 127–44. On the Venetian control over inquisitorial activities in the island see also Henry-Charles Lea, A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages (New York, 1888–1890), vol. 1, pp. 249–53 and 273–4. Despite his loss in the case against Sabbetay, Andrea Doto remained active as an inquisitor in the Venetian domains. Most notably, during his stay at the Dominican convent of Negroponte, in around 1326 he discovered a manuscript which contained the anti-Greek polemical treatise of Bonaccursius of Bologna, which had been compiled in 1292 and then quickly forgotten. Doto reworked it thoroughly and submitted the revised text, entitled Thesaurus veritatis fidei, to Pope John XXII. The Thesaurus is a collection of patristic and liturgical materials, in Latin and Greek, arranged by author and topic in order to support Latin views on the principal points of disagreement between Latins and Greeks, such as the Filioque, purgatory, the use of unleavened bread in the eucharist, the primacy and authority of the Roman pontiff, and the legitimacy of second marriages. The collection is preceded by Doto’s dedicatory letter to the pope, a table of contents, and a prologue.27These materials are edited in Quétif-Echard, Scriptores, vol. 1, pp. 156–9; see Friedrich Stegmüller, ‘Bonacursius contra Graecos. Ein Beitrag zur Kontroverstheologie des XIII. Jahrhunderts’ in Vitae et veritati. Festgabe für Karl Adam (Düsseldorf, 1956), pp. 57–82, at pp. 62–4; Dondaine, ‘Contra Graecos’, pp. 406–18; Raymond J. Loenertz ‘Documents pour servir à l’histoire de la province Dominicaine de Grèce’, Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum, 14 (1944), 72–115, at p. 74. Despite Doto’s direct engagement in anti-Greek polemics, no trace has survived of any sort of inquisitio undertaken by him against Greeks or other Eastern Christians. However, further evidence of contemporary inquisitorial activity in partibus Romaniae is contained in Oldradus de Ponte’s collection of consilia. Here this Lombard jurist, trained in Bologna and active in Avignon for many years, considered several concrete cases from the tribunals in the east: all of them dealt with Christianized Jews who had apostatised, or with Christians who had converted to Judaism, thereby confirming that the inquisitorial tribunals in Romania paid most attention to Jewish converts, not to Eastern Christians.28 Rainaldus Corsi (ed.), Oldradus de Ponte, Consilia, (Frankfurt, 1576), no. XXXVI, cols 16va–17ra. Bibliography on Oldradus de Ponte includes Caterina Valsecchi, Oldrado da Ponte e i suoi Consilia. Un’auctoritas del primo Trecento (Milan, 2000); Brendan Mc Manus, ‘The Consilia and Quaestiones of Oldradus de Ponte’, Bulletin of Medieval Canon Law, 23 (1999), 85–113; Norman P. Zacour, Jews and Saracens in the Consilia of Oldradus de Ponte (Toronto, 1990). One case, for example, refers to a Jew, who having purchased a Christian boy and having had him circumcised, then sent him over to Alexandria out of fear of the inquisition, so as to prevent his reconversion. This same Jew also acquired a Christian woman and, following her conversion to Judaism, married her and had two children. Anxiety to avoid Christianization, however, had tragic consequences. The man poisoned his wife, thereby also causing the death of their child who was breastfeeding, with the surviving son sent to Alexandria upon his father’s death.29Oldradus de Ponte, Consilia, no. XXXVI, col. 16va. Further references shed light on an attempt ‘verbis, scriptis et factis’ to liberate a relapsed Jew from inquisitorial prison, involving clerics and laymen, see ibid., cols 16va–b. Another case reported by Oldradus concerns Jewish converts who had come to Crete, where they kept professing Judaism. While the inquisitor was investigating them, ‘some other Jews who knew they were Christians vexed them to the point that they departed’ in order to escape the Inquisition, but they were eventually captured.30Ibid., no. XXXVI, cols 16vb. As suggested by Jacoby, Oldradus was even likely to have received these materials by Andrea Doto himself, who twice visited Avignon while Oldradus was compiling his Consilia at the curia between 1320 and 1327.31Jacoby, ‘Venice, the Inquisition’. Filippo de Bindo Incontri’s biography and work reveal similar patterns.32On Filippo de Bindo Incontri (or de Pera) see Quétif-Echard, Scriptores, vol. 1, pp. 646–7; Kaeppeli, Scriptores, vol. 3, pp. 274–5; idem, ‘Deux nouveaux ouvrages de Philippe Incontri de Péra’, Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum, 23 (1953), 163–83; Raymond J. Loenertz, ‘Fr. Philippe de Bindo Incontri du couvent de Péra, Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum, 18 (1948), 265–80; Delacroix-Besnier, Les Dominicains, pp. 211–37, 443–4; eadem, ‘Les Prêcheurs, du dialogue à la polémique (XIIIe–XIVe siècle)’, in Hinterberger and Schabel (eds), Greeks, Latins, and Intellectual History, pp. 151–67; eadem, ‘Les prêcheurs de Péra et la réduction du schisme (1252–1439)’, in Blanchet and Gabriel (eds), Réduire le schisme?, pp. 56–74. A member of a patrician family from Siena, his entire career was spent at the Dominican convent of the congregation of the fratres peregrinantes of Pera, where he entered as a novice around 1312. He was soon influenced by the prolific work of Simon of Constantinople, a veteran of the anti-Greek controversy, and in turn engaged in polemical disputation with the Greeks. Filippo compiled various theological works during this campaign, which he waged over more than twenty years: the Libellus qualiter Graeci recesserunt ab oboedientia Ecclesiae Romanae (1357), De oboedientia Romanae Ecclesiae debita (1358 or 1359), and De processione Spiritus Sancti (1359). The Libellus provides a historical reconstruction of the Greeks’ separation from the Latin Church, which Filippo closely related to Photius’ schism and his deposition by the Eighth Council of Constantinople. In the process, Filippo recovered the acts of this council after a loss and translated them into Latin as Actus sanctae et universalis octavae synodi. The two other works offer an in-depth theological defence of the Latin views on Roman primacy and the Filioque.33 Kaeppeli, ‘Deux nouveaux ouvrages’. His long-lasting polemical engagement left Filippo sceptical about the possibility of a reconciliation. ‘This division,’ he bitterly remarked, ‘or the cause of division has lasted until now and will last, it seems to me, until the end, since I see that the Greeks are obstinate in this and would receive all heresy before they acknowledge that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Son.’34Ibid., p. 174. Various papal letters issued during the 1350s shed light on Filippo’s contacts with the Avignon curia and his appointment as inquisitor, and moreover prove that this role was contemporary with his theological writings against the Greeks. In 1351, Filippo was appointed as inquisitor of Romania by Clement VI, a title which was confirmed in 1356. Later on, in 1359, Pope Innocent VI further expanded his responsibilities as inquisitor, covering the Empire of the Tartars, Persia and Cumania as well as Romania, in other words all the territories of the Societas fratrum peregrinantium, where, according to the pope, ‘numerous Christian heretics shamefully rose up against the Catholic faith and the Holy Roman Church’.35Aloysius L. Tăutu (ed.), Acta Innocentii PP. VI: 1352–1362 (Rome, 1961), no. 127, pp. 233–5. In order to support his work, Filippo was authorized to take another Dominican friar to the East.36Ibid., no. 127a, pp. 235–6. Filippo’s simultaneous engagement as missionary friar, polemist and inquisitor in the Eastern lands indicates how intermingled these fields of intervention could be. However, explicit evidence of his inquisitorial scrutiny of Eastern Christians has so far proven impossible to find. Indeed, according to Delacroix-Besnier, the papal registers mention only one other Dominican inquisitor who appears to have dealt with Greek Christians in Crete before the Council of Florence. In 1376, Pope Gregory XI required his intervention in favour of the Rampani, a family of Greek Catholics who had been vexed by hostile Greek Orthodox in Crete. In this case, however, local conflicts and violent aggressions, rather than matters of faith, were the reasons for the pope’s appeal to the Cretan inquisitor. Such disorders threatened scandal, which the pope was concerned might damage the possibility of further conversions.37 Delacroix-Besnier, Les Dominicains, pp. 35, 85–6; Aloysius L. Tăutu (ed.), Acta Gregorii PP. XI: 1370–1378 (Rome, 1966), no. 163, pp. 315–7; see also nos 208, 208a, 209, pp. 410–4. Another Dominican inquisitor later appeared as an advocate of union on the island: Simon of Crete. Appointed as inquisitor in Greece by Callixtus III in 1451 and charged with a special mission in 1455–8, Simon contributed to the spread of Catholicism among the Greeks of the island and to the application of the decrees of the Council of Florence.38Raymond-Joseph Loenertz, ‘Fr. Simon de Crète, inquisiteur en Grèce et sa mission en Crète’, Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum, 6 (1936), 372–8. In any case, even if Eastern Christians overall appear to have fallen outside inquisitorial competences, the religious coexistence and inevitable assimilation of Latin and Greek components of the local society in Crete, in addition to the Serenissima’s moderate tolerance of Orthodox clerics in the island, might have further discouraged inquiries against the Greeks.39On Latin–Greek interactions in Venetian Crete, see in particular Sally McKee, Uncommon Dominion: Venetian Crete and the Myth of Ethnic Purity (Philadelphia, PA, 2000). Indeed, even if such general claims can only be made against the loss of most judicial records, mendicant inquisitors in the East appear to have been concerned with Latins, Jewish converts or Judaized Christians who were present in these regions, in particularly the first of these groups. Sparse references suggest that the main targets of the inquisitors’ judicial activity were Latin pilgrims or fugitives. Interventions in this vein surface in papal letters through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In 1375, for example, Gregory XI conferred on the Franciscan provincial minister in the Holy Land the title of inquisitor haereticae pravitatis of the Holy Land, Egypt and Syria, a provision which resulted from the pope’s concern about the propagation of heresy among pilgrims (‘peregrini christiani’).40Acta Gregorii PP. XI, no. 185, p. 363; Girolamo Golubovich, Biblioteca bio-bibliografica della Terra Santa e dell’Oriente francescano (5 vols, Quaracchi, 1906–1927), vol. 5, p. 212. In 1290, Pope Nicolas IV had already required the archbishop of Jerusalem to appoint inquisitors in the Holy Land. Various other cases concern Fraticelli in the East. As recently pointed out by Nickiphoros Tsougarakis, Franciscan dissidents could find in the Latin territories of Greece a haven in which they were relatively safe from inquisitorial persecution, which both helped revive their movement back in the Italian peninsula and ensured their long-lasting presence in Romania.41 Nickiphoros Tsougarakis, ‘Heretical Networks between East and West: The Case of the Fraticelli’, Journal of Medieval History, 44:5 (2018), 529–42. There are multiple examples of inquisitorial action against Fraticelli in the Latin dominions of Greece and in Armenia.42Golubovich, Biblioteca, vol. 3, pp. 436–52; David Burr, The Spiritual Franciscans: From Protest to Persecution in the Century after Saint Francis (University Park, PA, 2001), p. 89. They include a secret investigation conducted by the Dominican bishop of Tabriz, William de Cigiis and then transmitted to the pope, against a group of Fraticelli who were preaching in the city against John XXII and his poverty decrees (1332–4);43Golubovich, Biblioteca, vol. 3, pp. 436–52. Acta Clementis PP. VI, no. 42, pp. 70–2; and ibid., no. 82, p. 92. Clement VI’s provisions to extirpate heresy in Greater and Cilician Armenia, including a 1346 papal legation to Armenia ‘ad errores extirpandos’;44Acta Clementis PP. VI, no. 42, pp. 70–2; ibid., nos 45, 83, 92. Innocent VI’s 1353 conferment upon the Armenian bishop of Caffa, Thaddeus, of inquisitorial privileges to seek out the Franciscan heretics (‘pseudo-fratres seu prophetae’) of Crimea;45Acta Innocentii PP. VI, no. 27, pp. 49–50. and the trial undertaken in 1359 by the papal legate Pierre Thomas (reported later by Philippe de Mézières) against a number of Fraticelli in Crete, which even resulted in the burning of one of the heretics.46Antonio Fabris, ‘Il Legato Pierre Thomas inquisitore a Candia: storia di un rogo (1359–1360)’, Le Venezie Francescane, nuova serie, 6 (1989), 345–63; Tsougarakis, ‘Heretical Networks’, pp. 535–6. Besides the heresy campaigns of inquisitors in the East, papal registers also shed some light on investigations of Eastern converts in the West, which did not however always involve the inquisitorial office. In 1312, for example, Clement V responded to the complaint of an Armenian presbyter, Leonard Samuel, and other Armenian clerics settled in Apulia against the local Dominican inquisitor, Robert of St Valentine. Presuming that they also erred in faith in addition to observing the Armenian rite, the friar had had them captured and confiscated their goods. This prompted the pope to ask the archbishops of Naples and Brindisi whether or not the Armenian clerics were in error, and if not, to grant them protection and act against the inquisitor.47Aloysius L. Tăutu (ed.), Acta Clementis PP. V: 1303–1314 (Vatican City, 1960), no. 69, pp. 102–3. Ten years later, in 1322, John XXII charged the archbishop of Naples with launching an inquisitio against an Armenian convert identified as ‘frater Apostolus’, based in Naples, who claimed to be archbishop of Nicopolis. Although he was neither baptized, nor ordained ‘secundum formam Ecclesiae’, while in Naples Apostolus had ordained Latin priests, consecrated churches and altars of the Latins, conferred the chrism, and kept erroneous beliefs. In this case, the Armenian pseudo-bishop (identified elsewhere as a Basilian monk), was summoned at the papal curia, suggesting the preference for a centralized inquest when members of the higher clergy were concerned.48 Acta Ioannis PP. XXII, no. 57, p. 142. In other cases, the pope opted for local investigations against Greek converts in southern Italy. Urban V charged the archbishop of Otranto with an inquisitio into the errors allegedly contained in various Greek liturgical books, and under Gregory XI, following complaints, the records were transmitted to the archbishop of Naples.49Aloysius L. Tăutu (ed.), Acta Urbani PP. V: 1362–1370 (Rome, 1964), no. 197, p. 331; Acta Gregorii PP. XI, no. 47, pp. 91–3. On the scrutiny into the liturgical books used among Catholic communities of Greek rite, see José Floristán’s essay in this volume. Inquisitors and the theological account of Eastern Christians
As we have seen, cases of inquisitorial inquiries into Christians of the East are overall rare in the Middle Ages. By contrast, theological rather than judicial writings offer much more material for a study of medieval inquisitorial attitudes towards the Eastern Churches. As mentioned above, a real polemical tradition is traceable among Dominican missionaries in the East, who in some cases performed inquisitorial roles too. This literature, which finds its archetype in the anonymous Tractatus contra Graecos (1252), was largely informed by the consultation of a rich corpus of Greek textual references in addition to the authors’ direct observation of and discussion with interlocutors of their time.50Riedl, Kirchenbild und Kircheneinheit; see also Delacroix-Besnier, Les Dominicains; eadem, ‘Les prêcheurs de Péra’; eadem, ‘Les Prêcheurs, du dialogue à la polémique’. Beside these contributions, various mendicant friars and Church ministers, who had been in charge of the repression of heresy in the West, occasionally offered their theological and legal expertise to evaluate Eastern Christian doctrines, liturgies, rites and customs, taking part in specific inquiries and producing anti-heresy treatises and manuals, in which the Oriental Churches were given a place. Most notably, several summae of religious dissent compiled in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries by Benedict of Alignan, Guido Terreni, Alvarus Pelagius, and Nicholas Eymerich engage with Greeks and Armenians, and to a lesser degree with Jacobites, Nestorians and Georgians. Aiming to confront several different heresies – sometimes deliberately in line with the model of Augustine’s De haeresibus – these works contain lengthy discussions of various Eastern Christian traditions, or of the Greeks alone, usually organized into lists of errors, refutations and explanations of the orthodox beliefs.51 Recent works on these anti-heresy treatises include John H. Arnold, ‘Benedict of Alignan’s Tractatus fidei contra diversos errores: A Neglected anti-Heresy Treatise’, Journal of Medieval History, 45:1 (2019), 20–54 (which points out to the Tractatus’ peculiar structure, not conceived as a list of errors); Claudia Heimann, Nicolaus Eymerich (vor 1320–1399). Praedicator veridicus, inquisitor intrepidus, doctor egregius. Leben und Werk eines Inquisitors (Münster, 2001); Derek Hill, Inquisition in the Fourteenth Century. The Manuals of Bernard Gui and Nicholas Eymerich (York, 2019). On the discussion of the Eastern Christians in these treatises see Irene Bueno, ‘Late Medieval Heresiography and the Categorization of Eastern Christianity’, in Peter Biller and Lucy J. Sackville (eds), Inquisition and Knowledge, 1200–1700 (York, 2022), pp. 135–56. This chapter will not focus on Benedict of Alignan, about whom I refer to the bibliography just cited. Such inventories of religious deviance find a parallel in the many enumerations of Latin errors that were drafted in the Byzantine context. As Tia Kolbaba has shown, Byzantine lists of Latin errors – regarding both religious dogma and praxis – became a prolific body of polemical literature throughout the Middle Ages, reaching a peak in the aftermath of the Fourth Crusade. These texts, Kolbaba argues, were not simply the consequence of a deeper hatred of Latins. They rather reflect the crucial importance of the ritual and normative contents of religion as manifestations of wider social and cultural cohesion. Largely concerned with praxis and ritual matters, such lists ‘represent these differences as self-evidently heinous and heretical’.52Tia M. Kolbaba, The Byzantine Lists: Errors of the Latins (Urbana, IL, 2000), quote at p. 3; see also eadem, ‘Byzantine Perceptions of Latin Religious “Errors”: Themes and Changes from 850 to 1350’, in Angeliki E. Laiou (ed.), The Crusades from the Perspective of Byzantium and the Muslim World (Washington, DC, 2001), pp. 117–43; Bucossi and Calia (eds), Contra Latinos et adversus Graecos; and Marie-Hélène Blanchet, ‘Les listes antilatines à Byzance aux XIVe–XVe siècles’, Medioevo greco, 12 (2012), 11–38. As shown by their succinct style, the ambition of these lists is to inventory elements of religious difference, rather than to engage in in-depth theological confrontation. A similar approach is well attested, for example, by a prominent inquest about the Armenians that was held at the Avignon papal court ‘per viam inquisitionis iudicialis et sollemnis’. Despite the formal alignment of the Armenian Church to Rome, pronounced by the Cilician councils of Sis (1307) and Adana (1316), but disregarded by a large part of the Greater Armenian religious, suspicions about the Armenians’ beliefs and religious allegiance increasingly undermined Armeno-Latin relations in the fourteenth century, acting as a lever for wider political and diplomatic tensions. At the turn of the 1340s, pope Benedict XII (renowned for his long-lasting anti-heresy commitment and former inquisitorial campaigns in Languedoc)53 For an overview of Benedict XII’s anti-heresy commitment, see Irene Bueno, Defining Heresy. Inquisition, Theology, and Papal Policy in the Time of Jacques Fournier (Leiden, 2015); on his provisions towards the Armenians see ibid., pp. 312–23. received an accusatory booklet written in Latin, which contained a lengthy list of errors attributed to the Armenians.54The list is edited in Acta Benedicti XII, no. 57, pp. 119–55. It was compiled by Nersēs Palienc‘, an Armenian unionist who had entered into conflict with the Armenian catholicos, and who then sought refuge at the papal court. His aim was thus revenge, alerting the papacy that the Roman alignment of the Armenians, recently pronounced by the Armenian councils of Sis and Adana, was only formal, as their Church was characterized by local traditions that differed greatly from Roman Catholicism in a number of doctrinal, liturgical, ecclesiological and disciplinary matters. As a consequence, the pope started a centralized theological investigation in order to assess the content of the booklet and evaluate the Armenians’ orthodoxy. On this occasion, numerous Armenian and Latin witnesses travelled to Avignon to depose before the Curia, and various Armenian texts were presented and partially translated into Latin. Moreover, the pope appointed an apostolic notary to write down ‘depositions and confessions as they were being given and proven errors as they were being translated or extracted from the said books’.55Ibid., no. 57, pp. 119–20. A true centralized inquisitio was thus in place, the outcome of which was a list of 117 errors of the Armenians, which was to be copied in the papal registers and sent to the Armenian king, the catholicos and the high dignitaries of the Armenian Church. This text addressed a wide range of topics that were perceived to be causing division, such as Christology, the primacy of the pope, the qualification of the Roman Church as catholic and apostolic, the celebration of the Nativity of Christ, the transmission of original sin, the existence of purgatory, salvation and damnation, sacramental theology, fasting customs, the rejection of third and subsequent marriages, and more besides. Most of these matters are repeated in several articles throughout the text, so as to multiply the number of errors and hence to amplify the impression that the Armenians had fallen into deviancy.56See François Tournebize, ‘Les cent dix-sept accusations présentées à Benoît XII contre les Arméniens’, Revue de l’Orient Chrétien, 9 (1906), 163–181, 274–300, 352–70. Latin expertise on the list includes an assessment by Guido Terreni, Carmelite bishop, former inquisitor of Majorca, and prominent theologian at the papal curia. His refutations of the Armenians’ errors became part of the Summa de haeresibus et earum confutationibus, a comprehensive inventory of all heresies, which he compiled in Avignon between 1338 and 1342.57 Guido Terreni, Summa de haeresibus et earum confutationibus (Paris, 1528), pp. 29v–42v. See Irene Bueno, ‘Guido Terreni at Avignon and the “Heresies” of the Armenians’, Medieval Encounters, 21:2–3 (2015), 169–89. The bibliography on Guido Terreni includes Bartomeu Xiberta, Guiu Terrena. Carmelita de Perpinyà (Barcelona, 1932); Alexander Fidora (ed.), Guido Terreni, O. Carm. (†1342) (Barcelona-Madrid, 2015). This is an ambitious treatise which avowedly aimed to complement Augustine’s De haeresibus. It sought to describe in detail all past and present heresies and – unlike Augustine – to provide rebuttals for each error. The resulting text is a comprehensive guide to heterodox religion, which includes Jews, Eastern Christians, ancient and modern sects (i.e. Cathars, Waldensians, Apostles and Beguins) as well as individual heretics. As far as Eastern Christians are concerned, Guido only briefly focuses on the Jacobites and Georgians, but provides lengthy discussions of the Greeks and Armenians. His knowledge of the latter is essentially based on the booklet of Armenian errors discussed above, which he closely follows, even while reorganizing and grouping the relevant materials thematically. As to the Greeks, Guido’s list of errors reveals a remarkable convergence with another fourteenth-century compilation, the Collyrium fidei contra haereses by Alvarus Pelagius, completed after 1344, whose sixth part contains concise descriptions and rebuttals of the Greeks’ errors.58Miguel Pinto de Meneses (ed.), Alvarus Pelagius, Colírio da fé contra as heresias (Lisbon, 1956), vol. 2, pp. 80–189. The two heresiologists clearly influenced each other, with Guido either being dependent on Alvarus, or both of them referring to a common source. Such closeness is not surprising, as Guido and Alvarus were both active at the same time at the papal court in Avignon. Their treatises share a common structure and ambition. Like Guido, Alvarus considers a large number of errors and heresies from late antiquity to his own time, such as errors about papal primacy, Augustine’s sects, the seventeen heresies derived from Gratian, various modern heretics, and forty-one errors of the Greeks. Alvarus discusses all these errors from the perspective of canon law: his aim was to provide a repertoire of juridical arguments against all heresies, composed of legal loci. His concise arguments against the Greeks, therefore, rely on frequent citations from Gratian’s Decretum, the collections of decretals, and the glosses, besides quoting the Scriptures and Church Fathers.59See Irene Bueno, ‘Les erreurs des Orientaux chez Guido Terreni et Alvaro Pelagio’, in Fidora (ed.), Guido Terreni, O. Carm., pp. 241–68. By contrast, Terreni’s ambition was to dismantle heresy based on the Bible alone. Regarding heresies as opinions that plainly contradict the Scriptures, he set out to reject them all by means of the Bible, especially the New Testament, and only to a lesser degree by referring to patristic authors (essentially Augustine). He argued this method would ultimately prove more effective, since heretics scorn the Church Fathers and the ecclesiastical tenets but value the Sacred Scriptures. In this manner he explored the many ways in which the Greeks and Armenians appeared to contradict the Scripture, thereby falling into heresy. To complement this overriding interpretation, their rejection of the determinations of the Holy See also appears as a fundamental sign of unorthodoxy. In his preface to the Summa, Guido indeed defines heresy and heretics: in addition to other elements, he refers to the latter as having being baptized and yet holding ‘false and erroneous opinions against the truth of faith and the determinations of the Church’.60 Guido, Summa, fol. 3rv. Later on, with regard to the Greeks, Guido claimed for example that ‘they are in error against the determination of the Church, and indeed heretics’ because they do not confer chrism and reject the sacrament of confirmation, adding that ‘this error and schism results from the condemnation and disdain of the law of Roman Church, mother and mistress’.61Ibid., fols 24r–25r. In this respect, Guido argued, Eastern Christians were not dissimilar to Cathars, Waldensians and other ancient and modern heretics who not only err against the Bible, but also reject the injunctions of the Roman Church. The presence of various types of dissent within a universal summa thus allowed Guido to compare and refer among all these different groups. The Armenians, therefore, were not only compared to Greeks, but also to Pelagians, Serdonites, Donatists, Cathars, Waldensians, as well as to Joachim of Fiore and Peter John Olivi.62See for example ibid., fols 30rv, 35r; and Bueno, ‘Guido Terreni at Avignon’, pp. 182–3. By contrast, Alvarus Pelagius was more inclined to adopt the term error instead of heresy or heretic with regard to the Greeks. Nonetheless, he too sometimes points out the similarities between the Greeks and various heretical sects. For example, he argued that the Greeks’ rejection of papal primacy and statement that there are multa capita in the Church resembles the Manichean dualistic theology. Likewise, he argues, the Greeks are not dissimilar from the Cathars, and even ‘belong to their sect’, because of their rejection of second and third marriages.63Alvarus Pelagius, Colírio, p. 145. Sometimes, Guido’s refutations of Greeks and Armenians circulated independently from the rest of his treatise. A fifteenth-century miscellany, now preserved in the Vatican Library, binds Guido’s refutations of the Greeks along with other anti-Greek works, such as the treatises contra Graecos by Bonaccursius of Bologna and Thomas Aquinas.64 Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Pal. lat. 679. Such anthologies reveal the interchange of materials and arguments produced by friars who had been active in the East (sometimes acting as inquisitors there too), and inquisitors and heresiologists whose activity was essentially confined to Western provinces but occasionally engaged in the evaluation of Eastern Christianity. Nonetheless, the treatises produced in the mission lands differed substantially from the summae of inquisitors and heresiologists who were based in the West. As in the case of Filippo de Bindo Incontri and Andrea Doto, the works of missionaries rely upon a thorough understanding of Eastern theology, facilitated by personal conversations with the Greeks and by the accessibility of Greek books, as shown in, for example, their extensive mobilization of Greek patristics. By contrast, the Western inquisitors’ summae are informed by the core sources of medieval Latin heresiography. These works usually aimed to construct a universal knowledge of heresy, placing Eastern Christians within wide-ranging inventories of all heresies, eastern and western, past and present. Knowledge of late-antique heresies therefore merged with descriptions of later sects and even contemporary inquiries, such as those promoted at the papal court about the Christians in the East. Rather than offering practical tools for inquisitors, or repertoires of arguments to sustain interdenominational conversations, the production of such manuals was intended to provide the necessary theological and judicial weapons to recognize and dismantle virtually all heretical error.
Despite such profound differences, however, some elements of convergence also exist between these apparently separate traditions. Dominican polemicists in the East and West in fact referred to shared auctoritates, as in their frequent citation of Aquinas’ Contra Graecos. This work was often copied along with the anonymous Tractatus contra Graecos of 1252, which was later reprised by Bonaccursius of Bologna and Andrea Doto and briefly referred to by Filippo de Bindo Incontri.65Dondaine, ‘Contra Graecos’; Riedl, Kirchenbild und Kircheneinheit, p. 195; Delacroix-Besnier, Les Dominicains, pp. 223, 232. In addition to informing various polemical contributions originating in the mission lands, Aquinas’ treatise was also the principal source of the anti-Greek section of one of the most influential medieval inquisitorial texts, the Directorium inquisitorum by the Dominican inquisitor and theologian Nicholas Eymerich (1320–99).66 Francisco Peña (ed.), Nicholas Eymerich, Directorium inquisitorum (Rome, 1587), pp. 303–4. Of Catalan origins, Eymerich entered the Dominican order in Girona in 1320 and was trained in Paris in 1351–2, before serving as inquisitor of the Kingdom of Aragon in 1358–60 and again in c. 1363–75. A stern judge and prolific theologian, particularly concerned with the prosecution of magic and the philosophy of Ramon Llull, Eymerich was repeatedly removed from his inquisitorial role and eventually expelled from Aragon in 1375, having come into conflict with King Peter IV. It was therefore during his exile at the papal court of Avignon that Eymerich completed the Directorium inquisitorum in 1376.67See Jaume de Puig i Oliver, ‘Nicolás Eymerich, un inquisidor discutido’, in Wolfram Hoyer (ed.), Praedicatores, inquisitores, vol 1: The Dominicans and the Mediaeval Inquisition (Rome, 2004), pp. 545–93; Heimann, Nicolaus Eymerich; Hill, Inquisition in the Fourteenth Century. Made famous by more than a dozen printed editions (most of which were edited by Francisco Peña), the Directorium was a comprehensive manual that aimed to guide inquisitors in the field, offering all the necessary theological and canon-legal references, concise descriptions of all historical sects, as well as procedural and practical advice. The third and last part of the Directorium deals with the practice of the inquisitorial office, focusing on procedural matters, collecting formularies, and providing information about numerous individual sects, heresies, heretics and errors. While different sections are devoted to Turks, Saracens and Tartars, the Greeks are the only Eastern Christian community to be considered in the treatise.68On Eymerich’s discussion of the Greeks’ errors, see Bueno, ‘Late medieval heresiography’, pp. 150–5. Within the eighteenth quaestio (De erroribus Graecorum), Eymerich produced a succinct list of thirty-three errors related to doctrine and orthopraxis, without any further commentary or rebuttal. First, he considers the Greeks’ rejection of the Filioque and their use of unleavened Eucharistic bread, arguing that these two articles had not been adopted by various prominent Greek Fathers, but they were nonetheless maintained ‘until today’ (‘usque hodie’). Elsewhere the author relies entirely on Thomas Aquinas’s Contra Graecos, from which he draws a concise list of articles, pointing out that they were instead maintained by several Greek doctors. Therefore, he agrees with Aquinas that because of these doctors’ standing, such errors ‘should not be condemned, but respectfully exposed’.69 ‘Qui articuli licet ut stant, sint falsi, et quamplures erronei; tamen possunt exponi, ut facit sanctus Thomas (…) in libro qui intitulatur Contra errores Graecorum, ubi dicit quod propter dictorum Doctorum dignitatem, non sunt condemnandi, sed reverenter exponendi’, Eymerich, Directorium, p. 303. In the wake of Aquinas – whose works are also extensively mobilized in the Directorium’s first part – the Catalan inquisitor thus proved hesitant to apply the heresy label when referring to different elements from the Eastern Christian tradition, for he too acknowledged the dignity (‘dignitas’) of the Eastern Fathers who gave support to them. Overall, Eymerich’s adherence to Aquinas’s anti-Greek work – a work that was itself largely inspired by the elaborations of Dominican missionaries – further sheds light on the shared intellectual references of anti-Greek Dominican polemicists on the eastern and western shores of the Mediterranean. But even if occasionally informed by the same authorities, mendicant missionaries who held inquisitorial roles in the East and inquisitors in charge of the repression of heresy in the Western provinces dealt with the Eastern Christian ‘errors’ in different ways. Scant surviving evidence suggests that confessional control of Eastern Christians was not within the remit of medieval inquisitorial justice, which mostly dealt with Latins, Jewish converts and Judaized Christians, and only rarely supervised the beliefs of Catholics of Eastern rite in regions under the Roman control. If the medieval ecclesiastical justice was hardly concerned with the surveillance of Eastern Christianity, various mendicant inquisitors engaged in the scrutiny and polemical rebuttal of Eastern doctrine and praxis. On the one hand, day-to-day coexistence and religious interaction enabled the friars in the East to gain a thorough understanding of Eastern theology and ritual, which informed their polemical works. This production included collections of patristic and liturgical materials, careful historical reconstructions of the separation between Latins and Greeks, and theological defences of the Latin views on the principal matters of this conflict, often supported by ad hoc translations. On the other hand, inquisitors in the West were mainly driven by the theoretical ambitions of medieval heresiography, rather than direct acquaintance with Eastern Christianity. Aiming to assemble complete inventories of heresies, heretics, and errors across space and time, their lists emphasize the interconnectedness of ancient sects, modern Western heresies, and Eastern Christian doctrines, liturgies, and customs. Driven by the reasoning of medieval anti-heresy writing and its long tradition dating back to Augustine, their endeavour drew upon Scriptural, patristic and canon-legal references, rather than the original works of Greek theology, resulting in a different categorization of the beliefs attributed to various Eastern Christian traditions, whether as heresies, errors or as articles that were to be explained, rather than condemned.
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