Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 3.djvu/658

 642 CONCLUSION. absolution for the vilest of crimes for a few coins. When the only unpardonable offence was persistence in some trifling error of be- lief, such as the poverty of Christ ; when men had before them the example of their spiritual guides as leaders in vice and de- bauchery and contempt of sacred things, all the sanctions of mo- rality were destroyed and the confusion between right and wrong became hopeless. The world has probably never seen a society more vile than that of Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth cen- turies. The brilliant pages of Froissart fascinate us with their pictures of the artificial courtesies of chivalry ; the mystic reveries of Rysbroek and of Tauler show us that spiritual life survived in some rare souls, but the mass of the population was plunged into the depths of sensuality and the most brutal oblivion of the moral Law. For this Alvaro Pelayo tells us that the priesthood were ac- countable, and that, in comparison with them, the laity were holy. What was that state of comparative holiness he proceeds to de- scribe, blushing as he writes, for the benefit of confessors, giving a terrible sketch of the universal immorality which nothing could purify but fire and brimstone from heaven. The chroniclers do not often pause in their narrations to dwell on the moral aspects of the times, but Meyer, in his annals of Flanders, under date of 1379, tells us that it would be impossible to describe the preva- lence everywhere of perjuries, blasphemies, adulteries, hatreds, quar- rels, brawls, murder, rapine, thievery, robbery, gambling, whore- dom, debauchery, avarice, oppression of the poor, rape, drunken- ness, and similar vices, and he illustrates his statement with the fact that in the territory of Ghent, within the space of ten months, there occurred no less than fourteen hundred murders commit- ted in the bagnios, brothels, gambling-houses, taverns, and other similar places. When, in 1396, Jean sans Peur led his crusaders to destruction at Kicopolis, their crimes and cynical debauchery scandalized even the Turks, and led to the stern rebuke of Bajazet himself, who as the monk of Saint-Denis admits, was much better than his Christian foes. The same writer, moralizing over the dis- aster of Agincourt, attributes it to the general corruption of the nation. Sexual relations, he says, were an alternation of disorder- ly lusts and of incest ; commerce was nought but fraud and trick- ery ; avarice withheld from the Church her tithes, and ordinary conversation was a succession of blasphemies. The Church, set