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The Foxes in the Vineyard of the Lord

The First Western Heretics

At the turn of the first millennium, a peasant called Leutard in the village of Vertus, near Châlons-sur-Marne in the north-east of France, had a dream. In it, a swarm of bees attacked his private parts, and then entered his body – presumably through his urethra. The dream, rather than making Leutard wake up half the village with his screaming, inspired him to go into his local church, break the cross above the altar and desecrate an image of Christ. But he didn’t stop there: he sent his wife away and began to preach openly in the village, urging whoever would listen that they should withhold payment of tithes. The bishop of Châlons got wind of the peasant’s activities, but Leutard threw himself down a well before he could be apprehended. Leutard seems to have belonged to a group, although it is not known for sure whether it was Bogomil in origin. (If it was, we can safely assume that the bees were a unique addition to the original Balkan teachings.) Heresy had, despite these somewhat unusual circumstances, arrived in the west.

Heresy was also a phantom presence at the other end of the social and religious spectrum around the time of Leutard’s singular ministry. Gerbert d’Aurillac, the first Frenchman to become pope – he reigned as Sylvester II between 999 and 1003 – made an unusual disposition at Rheims in 991 on the occasion of his consecration as Archbishop. He stated his belief in both the Old and New Testaments, the legitimacy of marriage, eating meat and the existence of an evil spirit that was lesser than God, one that had chosen to be evil. Since the Bogomils, and later the Cathars, rejected all the things that Gerbert was professing faith in, it has been assumed that he was either denouncing a Bogomil sect in the locality, or had himself been suspected of heretical leanings and was making a show of his orthodoxy.30

An obscure French peasant and a pope were not the only forerunners of Catharism. Vilgard, a scholar from Ravenna, saw demons in the shape of Virgil, Horace and Juvenal, ‘who encouraged his excessive pagan studies.’31 Despite his being burnt at the stake, Vilgard’s teachings spread in Italy, and are alleged to have reached Sardinia and Spain, where his followers were supposedly persecuted. In 1018 ‘Manichaeans’, who rejected the cross and baptism, appeared in Aquitaine, and four years later further ‘Manichaeans’ were sighted in Orléans. The Orléans heretics were in fact ten canons of the Church of the Holy Cross, a number of clerics and a handful of nobles, including Queen Constance’s confessor. They were also accused of worshipping the devil in the form of an Ethiopian (Ethiopia being a byword for blackness and, therefore, ultimate evil),32 rejecting the sacraments of the Church, denying that Christ was born of a virgin and denying the reality of the Passion and Resurrection. Furthermore, they were accused of holding nocturnal orgies, carrying out child sacrifice and performing magical flight – all of which would later recur in the Witch Craze of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. But in 1022, witches were a threat as yet unperceived by the Church, and the Orléans group was burnt as heretics.

Burning at the stake had been the punishment for Manichaeans and would become the favoured method for dispatching unrepentant heretics. However, as the Church had had little experience of heresy for centuries, official procedure was non-existent and punishment varied greatly from area to area. A group of heretics discovered at Montforte in north-western Italy in 1025 was burnt, but at Arras-Cambrai a group which was unearthed the same year was merely forced to recant and was then given a copy of their renunciation in the vernacular.

As the eleventh century progressed, there were further outbreaks of heresy: during the 1040s, it flared up again at Châlons-sur-Marne; A