Europe's inner demons полностью

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 And this is confirmed by an unpublished sermon of Capestrano’s. In 1451 the fiery preacher was sent to Germany; and the following year at Nuremberg he included, in his preaching, a story about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.