Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 2.djvu/419

Rh He had a comrade named Bernhard, who fled to Wismar, whither Schöneveld followed him and had him burned in 1403. The same year he seized a priest at Stralsund, who rejected all solicitations to abjure, and was burned as a persistent heretic; and at Rostock he condemned for heresy a woman who drove away with the bit- terest reproaches her son, a Cistercian monk, when he urged her to recant, and who likewise perished in the flames.

About this period heresy appears to have had also to contend with a reaction on the part of the secular authorities. When, in 1400, the Flagellants made a demonstration in the Low Countries, the magistrates of Maestricht expelled them, and when the people took their side the energetic interference of the Bishop of Liège put an end to the insubordination; besides, the Sire de Perweis threw a band of Flagellants into his dungeons and Tongres closed its gates upon them, so that the epidemic was checked. With the year 1400 the comparative peace which the Beguines had enjoyed for some fifteen years came to an end. Their most dreaded enemy was the Dominican, John of Mühlberg, whose purity of life and energy in battling with the moral and spiritual errors of his time won him a wide reputation throughout Germany, so that when he died in exile, driven from Basle by the clergy whom his attacks had embittered, he was long regarded by the people as a saint and a martyr. About 1400 he stirred up in Basle a struggle with the Beguines, which for ten years kept the city in an uproar. Prima- rily an episode in the hostility between the Dominicans and Franciscans, it extended to the clergy and magistrates, and finally to the citizens at large. In 1405 the Beguines were expelled, but the Franciscans obtained from the papacy bulls ordering their restoration, and the retraction of all that had been said against them. At last, in 1411, Bishop Humbert and the town council, excited by a fiery sermon of John Pastoris, abolished the associations, which were forced to abandon their living in common and their vestments, or to leave the place. The city of Berne followed this example, and the magistrates of Strassburg took the same course, when some of the Beguines adopted the former alternative and