elite, while the native population remained either Catholic or pagan. After his conversion
to Catholicism in the mid-490s, the Frankish king Clovis invoked Arian heresy as a
pretext to invade the Visigothic south. But over the next five centuries, despite occasional
cases of theological dispute (Adoptionism, Predestination), the church was more
concerned with paganism than heresy. The only signs of genuinely Christian dissent
come from popular millenarian or apostolic movements that rejected the ecclesiastical
hierarchy. The leaders of these groups, like the “False Christ” of Bourges or the
prophetess Thiota, arose during periods of need and crisis and used the utopian imagery
of imminent salvation and social revolution to mobilize the most basic of urges for
liberation from current suffering among the peasantry.
Starting in the early 11th century, documents report incidents of “heretical
communities,” which, despite some purely elite (canons of Sainte-Croix at Orléans) or
popular (peasant Leutard of Vertus) instances, most often seem to have united clergy and
laity, aristocrat and commoner alike. The clerics who described these incidents, which
range from Lombardy to Aquitaine to Orléans to Champagne and Arras, express alarm at
a far-flung and deeply threatening movement. The execution of thirteen canons at
Orléans in 1022 by order of King Robert the Pious marks the first time in the Latin
church that someone had been executed specifically as a heretic. Despite the tenor of the
sources, these earliest heresies are difficult to assess: they may be isolated idiosyncratic
instances; they may be part of a larger movement with traveling “leaders.” Their
prosecution may have been limited to the known case of Orléans; or there may have been
widespread, often vigilante, attacks on heretics in which some were killed “merely on
account of their pallor” (i.e., they fasted). They may have been influenced by Bogomil
preachers from the East, thus expressing dualist tendencies. Many seem to be indigenous
movements inspired by some combination of the apostolic life, a rejection of the
ecclesiastical and social structures of the day, and a response to the failure of the Peace
movement and to the passing of the year 1000. In any case, they all seem marked by
strong ascetic tendencies (no meat, sex, or property), iconoclasm (no crucifixes, relic
cults, or elaborate liturgies), and a rejection of the ecclesiastical means of salvation
(baptism, eucharist).
After the mid-11th century, however, popular heresy all but disappeared for the next
half-century. This is explained in part by the appeal of the Gregorian Reform movement
within the church, which mobilized great popular support and inspired many potential
“heretics” to join. Certainly, the case of the radical and violent Patarines in Italy and that
of Ramirhardus, burned as a heretic by the clerics of Cambrai only to be proclaimed a
martyr by Pope Gregory VII, illustrate the way in which behavior that would have been
deemed heresy by early 11th-century clerics was encouraged by a church dangerously
close to Donatism. Perhaps, as well, the more committed “heretical” communities went
underground, or, in the case of the hermits, literally into the woods.
Whatever the case, this hiatus was temporary. Beginning in the early 12th century,
“heresies” reappeared. These new expressions of religious zeal differ from earlier cases
in that they are at once more aggressive and less radical in their rejections of the church.
Inspired by a desire for the apostolic life, charismatic preachers, often “returning”
hermits, invoked the values of the papally led Gregorian Reform movement—purification
of the church and the life of its clergy. But now that the papacy had shifted from its
radical reform program into an ongoing struggle with lay rulers over matters like
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