CommunalPiety and theMendicants 435
every other execution the legal experts recommended took place, the rate of
execution was less than one heretic a year in more than thirteen years for
the area of jurisdiction, Lombardy—that is, most of northern Italy. Medieval
inquisitors believed in deterrence as an important aspect of capital punish-
ment, and this rate was high enough for the procedure to seem routine,
while keeping the burnings rare enough to attract attention.^111 The condem-
nation of two heretics at once was unusual, but Fra Guido probably had no
expectation that the death of one of them would trigger an extraordinary
outburst of popular anger against his tribunal and its procedures.
Bompietro di Giovanni was about thirty-eight years old in 1299. Giuliano,
with whom he would be executed, had years earlier been a friend of Bom-
pietro’s father, Giovanni, who had entertained Cathars while Bompietro was
still young and then had received theconsolamentumin Ferrara before his
death. Bompietro’s was a Cathar family, but perhaps not so inveterately
heretical as Giuliano’s, whose father, Salimbene, may be identical to the
Salimbene whose consolation is recorded, like a baptism in the family Bible
but hidden in code, at the end of the manuscript containing the famous
Cathar treatise, theLiber de Duobus Principiis.^112 Bompietro’s mother, Dolce-
bona, had gone to the stake years before, condemned by Fra Guido him-
self.^113 Indeed, Bompietro’s neighborhood, the cappella of San Martin
dell’Aposa and that of San Tomasso del Mercato, seems to have had a num-
ber of heretical families (domus), enough to be called a ‘‘heretical zone.’’ This
area was centered on the Aposa itself, an urban stream that attracted leather-
working establishments.^114
The young Bompietro had been well acquainted with heretics and inquisi-
tors. Bompietro told Fra Guido how, when he was about twelve years old,
his family gave hospitality to the notorious Cathar preacher Pietro of Rimini
and the one-eyedperfectaMaria of Vicenza.^115 Such granting of hospitality
for transient heretics seems pretty much typical of ‘‘unorthodox’’ behavior
of late-thirteenth-century Bologna, which lacked a large resident heretical
the records for 1291 – 97 may not be complete, these numbers represent a low estimate for the whole
twenty years.
111. On such statistics and medieval inquisition generally, see Bernard Hamilton,The Medieval Inquisi-
tion(New York: Holmes & Meier, 1981 ), 56 – 57.
112. Edited by C. Thouzellier asLiber de Duobus Principiis: Livre des deux principes(Paris: Sources Chre ́tien-
nes, 1973 ); Eng. trans. inHeresies of the High Middle Ages,ed. W. Wakefield and A. Evans, Records of
Western Civilization 81 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969 ), 511 – 91.
113. As would appear from the testimony of Giovanna di Bartolomeo, who suggested that Fra Guido
had burned her because she would not give him her daughter,ASOB,no. 349 , 1 : 228.
114. Lorenzo Paolini, ‘‘Domus e zona degli eretici: L’esempio di Bologna nelxiiisecolo,’’Rivista di
storia della chiesa in Italia 35 ( 1981 ): 371 – 87. Dupre ́Theseider, ‘‘Eresia a Bologna,’’ 277 – 81 , reaches similar
conclusions about the trade connections of Bolognese heretics, but his tabulation shows that the heretics
of the Bologna Register are nearly all non-Bolognese.
115. On Bompietro’s experiences at Ferrara, see his first two interrogations by Fra Guido,ASOB,no.
11 – 12 , 1 : 25 – 33.