Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 3.djvu/183

 THEIR MISSIONARY ZEAL. 167 earnest spirits among them who were ready to dare as much as the orthodox among the infidels and barbarians. Already, in 1344, Clement VI. found himself obliged go address the archbishops, bish- ops, and all the faithful throughout Armenia, Persia, and the East, warning them against these emissaries of Satan, who were seek- ing to scatter among them the seeds of error and schism. He had no inquisitors to call upon in those regions, but he ordered the prel- ates to inquire after them and to punish them, authorizing them, with a singular lack of perception, to invoke, if necessary, the aid of the secular arm. The Fraticelli made at least one convert of importance, for in 1346 Clement felt himself obliged to cite for appearance within four months no less a personage than the Arch- bishop of Seleucia, who, infected with pseudo-minorite errors, had written in Armenian and was circulating throughout Asia a postil on St. John in which he asserted the forbidden doctrine of the poverty of Christ. In 1354 Innocent VI. heard of Fraticellian missionaries laboring among the Chazars of the Crimea, and he forthwith ordered the Bishop of Caffa to repress them with inquis- itorial methods. In 1375 Gregory XI. learned that they were active in Egypt, Syria, and Asia, and he promptly ordered the Franciscan provincial of those regions to enforce on them the se- verity of the laws. One, named Lorenzo Carbonello, had ventured to Tunis, to infect with his heresy the Christians of that kingdom, whereupon Gregory commanded Giacomo Patani and Guillen de Ripoll, the captains of the Christian troops in the service of the Bey of Tunis, to seize him and send him in chains to the Arch- bishop of Naples or of Pisa. Doubtless, if the command was obeyed, it led the unthinking Moslem to thank Allah that they were not Christians.* In Languedoc and Provence the rigorous severity with which the Spirituals had been exterminated seems to have exercised a wholesome influence in repressing the Fraticelli, but nevertheless a few cases on record shows the existence of the sect. In 1336 we hear of a number confined in the papal dungeons of Avignon — among them a papal chaplain — and that Guillaume Lombard, the judge of ecclesiastical causes, was ordered to exert against them No. 27.
 * Raynald. aim. 1344, No. 8 ; ann. 1346, No. 70 ; ann. 1354, No. 31 ; ann. 1375,