Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 2.djvu/437

 JOHN OF WESEL. 421 the latitude allowed to free speech that John of Wesel was per- mitted so long without interference, to ripen into a heresiarch and to disseminate from the pulpit and professorial chair these opin- ions, as dangerous as any emitted by Waldenses, Wickliffites or Hussites. In fact, but for the bitter quarrel between the Realists and Normalists, which filled the scholastic world with strife, it enabled to close his days in peace. He was a leader of the Nom- inalists, and the Dominican Thomists of Mainz were resolved to silence him. The Archbishop of Mainz was Diether of Isenburg, it in 1475 on the death of his competitor, Adolph of Nassau ; he did not wish another conflict with Rome, to which he was exposed in consequence of his public denunciations of the papal auctions of the archiepiscopal pallium; he was threatened with this unlss he would surrender John of Wesel as a victim, and he yielded to the pressure in 1479.

In the great province of Mainz there was no inquisitor; trial by the regular episcopal officials would be of uncertain result and as there was a Dominican inquisitor at Cologne in the person of Friar Gerhard von Elten, he was sent for. He came, accom- panied by Friar Jacob Sprenger, not yet an inquisitor, but whom we shall see hereafter in that capacity busy in burning witches. With him came the theologians from the universities of Heidel- berg and Cologne, who were to site as experts and assessors, and so carefully were they selected that one of the Heidelberg doc- tors, to whom we are indebted for an account of the proceedings tells us that among them all there was but one Nominalist. He evidently regards the whole matter as an incident in the scholas - tic strife, and says that the accused would have been acqduitted had he been allowed counsel and had he not been so harshly treated

The proceesdings are a curious travesty of inquisitorial proc- ess, wich show that, however much its forms had been forgot- ten, the principle was rigidly maintained of treating the accused as guilty in advance. There was no secrecy attempted; every- thing was conducted in an assembly consisting of laymen as well as ecclesiastics prominent among whom we recognize the Count of Wertheim, fresh from the plunder of Hans of Niklaushausen.