Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 2.djvu/415

 THE WALDENSES. 399 the Celestinian Order, was appointed papal inquisitor, and early in 1393 he came to Stettin armed with full powers from the Arch- bishop of Prague and the Bishops of Lebus and Camin to represent them. He issued citations, both general ones from the pulpits of the infected region, and special summonses to individuals. This naturally caused great excitement, and some of the suspects fled; in Klein-Wurbiser, indeed, there was a faint demonstration made against the inquisitorial apparitors, but there was no resistance, and the great majority submitted to the inevitable. Friar Peter, as customary, was lenient with those who spontaneously confessed and abjured; all took the oaths, including that of persecuting her- esy and heretics, with only an occasional manifestation of hesitancy. Torture seems to have been unnecessary; there was no exhibition of obstinacy, and no burnings. They were condemned to wear crosses and perform other penance, and when, as was usually the case, their parents had died in the sect, they were required to in- dicate the place of burial, presumably for exhumation. From January, 1393, until February, 1394, Friar Peter was engaged in this work. One of his registers, comprising four hundred and forty-three cases, was in the hands of Flacius Illyricus, fragments of which have recently been discovered and described by Herr Wattenbach.

From Pomerania, Friar Peter hastened to the south, where he found Waldenses as numerous, and less inclined to submission. He has left a brief memorial of his labors, written in 1395, in which he expresses his fears that the heresy would become dominant, as the Waldenses were resorting to force, and were employing arson and homicide to intimidate the orthodox. His only evidence of this, however, is that on September 8, those of Steyer, to punish the parish priest for receiving the inquisitors in his house, burned his barn, and affixed to the town gates, by night, a warning in the shape of a half-burned brand and a bloody knife. This offence was cruelly avenged, for in 1397, at Steyer, more than a hundred Waldenses of either sex were burned. In this relentless persecu- tion the case of a child of ten condemned to wear crosses shows how unsparing were the tribunals, while others in which the cul-