Page:A history of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, volume 3.djvu/89

 THE MARTYRS OF MARSEILLES. 73 most of the culprits were brought to repentance and abjuration. Only four of them had the physical and mental endurance to per- severe to the last — Jean Barrani, Deodat Michel, Guillem Sainton, and Pons Rocha — and these were handed over the same day to the secular authorities of Marseilles and duly burned. A fifth, Ber- nard Aspa, who had said in prison that he repented, but who re- fused to recant and abjure, was mercifully condemned to prison for life, though under all inquisitorial rules he should have shared the fate of his accomplices. The rest were forced to abjure pub- licly and to accept the penances imposed by the inquisitor, with the warning that if they failed to publish their abjuration wher- ever they had preached their errors they would be burned as re- lapsed.* Although in the sentence the heresv of the victims is said to have been drawn from the poisoned doctrine of Olivi, and though the inquisitor issued letters prohibiting any one from possessing or reading his books, there is no allusion to any Joachite error. It was simply a question of disobedience to the bull Quorumdam. They affirmed that this was contrary to the Gospel of Christ, which forbade them to wear garments of other fashion than that which they had adopted, or to lay up stores of corn and wine. To this the pope had no authority to compel them ; the} T would not obey him, and this they declared they would maintain until the Day of Judgment. Frivolous as the questions at issue undoubtedly were, it was on the one hand a case of conscience from which reason had long since been banished by the bitterness of controversy, and on the other the necessity of authority compelling obedience. If private judgment were allowed to set aside the commands of a papal decretal, the moral power of the papacy was gone, and with it all temporal supremacy. Yet, underlying all this was the old Joachitic leaven which taught that the Church of Rome had no spiritual authority, and thus that its decrees were not binding on the elect. When Bernard Delicieux was sent, in 1319, from Avi- gnon to Castelnaudari for trial, on the road he talked freely with his escort and made no secret of his admiration for Joachim, even going so far as to say that he had erased from his copy of the Decretum the Lateran canon condemning Joachim's Trinitarian
 * Baluz. et Mansi II. 248-51.— Hist. Tribulat. (loc. cit, p. 147).