Trying to conceal the crimes committed would be of no avail, because if anything further were to happen, the papal envoys would suspect a plot against them. And so there were only two solutions. Either William discovered the murderer before the arrival of the legation (and here the abbot stared hard at him as if silently reproaching him for not having resolved the matter yet) or else the Pope’s envoy had to be informed frankly and his collaboration sought, to place the abbey under close surveillance during the course of the discussions. The abbot did not like this second solution, because it meant renouncing: part of his sovereignty and submitting his own monks to French control. But he could run no risks. William and the abbot were both vexed by the turn things were taking; however, they had few choices. They proposed, therefore, to come to a final decision during the next day. Meanwhile, they could only entrust themselves to divine mercy and to William’s sagacity.
“I will do everything possible, Your Sublimity,” William said. “But, on the other hand, I fail to see how the matter can really compromise the meeting. Even the papal envoy will understand that there is a difference between the act of a madman or a sanguinary, or perhaps only of a lost soul, and the grave proems that upright men will meet to discuss.”
“You think so?” the abbot asked, looking hard at William. “Remember: the Avignonese know they are to meet Minorites, and therefore very dangerous persons, close to the Fraticelli and others even more demented than the Fraticelli, dangerous heretics who are stained with crimes” — here the abbot lowered his voice — “compared with which the events that have taken place here, horrible as they are, pale like mist in the sun.”
“It is not the same thing!” William cried sharply. “You cannot put the Minorites of the Perugia chapter on the same level as some bands of heretics who have misunderstood the message of the Gospel, transforming the struggle against riches into a series of private vendettas or bloodthirsty follies…”
“It is not many years since, not many miles from here, one of those bands, as you call them, put to fire and the sword the estates of the Bishop of Vercelli and the mountains beyond Novara,” the abbot said curtly.
“You speak of Fra Dolcino and the Apostles…”
“The Pseudo Apostles,” the abbot corrected him. And once more I heard Fra Dolcino and the Pseudo Apostles mentioned, and once more in a circumspect tone, with almost a hint of terror.
“The Pseudo Apostles,” William readily agreed. “But they had no connection with the Minorites…”
“… with whom they shared the same professed reverence for Joachim of Calabria,” the abbot persisted, “and you can ask your brother Ubertino.”
“I must point out to Your Sublimity that now he is a brother of your own order,” William said, with a smile and a kind of bow, as if to compliment the abbot on the gain his order had made by receiving a man of such renown.
“I know, I know.” The abbot smiled. “And you know with what fraternal care our order welcomed the Spirituals when they incurred the Pope’s wrath. I am not speaking only of Ubertino, but also of many other, more humble brothers, of whom little is known, and of whom perhaps we should know more. Because it has happened that we accepted fugitives who presented themselves garbed in the habit of the Minorites, and afterward I learned that the various vicissitudes of their life had brought them, for a time, quite close to the Dolcinians…”
“Here, too?” William asked.
“Here, too. I am revealing to you something about which, to tell the truth, I know very little, and in any case not enough to pronounce accusations. But inasmuch as you are investigating the life of this abbey, it is best for you to know these things also. I will tell you, further, that on the basis of things I have heard or surmised, I suspect — mind you, only suspect — that there was a very dark moment to the life of our cellarer, who arrived here, in fact, two years ago, following the exodus of the Minorites.”
“The cellarer? Remigio of Varagine a Dolcinian? He seems to me the mildest of creatures, and, for that matter, the least interested in Sister Poverty that I have ever seen …” William said.
“I can say nothing against him, and I make use of his good services, for which the whole community is also grateful to him. But I mention this to make you understand how easy it is to find connections between a friar of ours and a Fraticello.”
“Once again your magnanimity is misplaced, if I may say so,” William interjected. “We were talking about Dolcinians, not Fraticelli. And much can be said about the Dolcinians without anyone’s really knowing who is being discussed, because there are many kinds. Still, they cannot be called sanguinary. At most they can be reproached for putting into practice without much consideration things that the Spirituals preached with greater temperance, animated by true love of God, and here I agree the borderline between one group and the other is very fine…”
“But the Fraticelli are heretics!” the abbot interrupted sharply. “They do not confine themselves to sustaining the poverty of Christ and the apostles, a doctrine that — though I cannot bring myself to share it — can be usefully opposed to the haughtiness of Avignon. The Fraticelli derive from that doctrine a practical syllogism: they infer a right to revolution, to looting, to the perversion of behavior.”
“But which Fraticelli?”
“All, in general. You know they are stained with unmentionable crimes, they do not recognize matrimony, they deny hell, they commit sodomy, they embrace the Bogomil heresy of the ordo Bulgariae and the ordo Drygonthie…”
“Please,” William said, “do not mix things that are separate! You speak as if the Fraticelli, Patarines, Waldensians, Catharists, and within these the Bogomils of Bulgaria and the heretics of Dragovitsa, were all the same thing!”
“They are,” the abbot said sharply, “they are because they are heretics, and they are because they jeopardize the very order of the civilized world, as well as the order of the empire you seem to me to favor. A hundred or more years ago the followers of Arnold of Brescia set fire to the houses of the nobles and the cardinals, and these were the fruits of the Lombard heresy of the Patarines.”
“Abo,” William said, “you live in the isolation of this splendid and holy abbey, far from the wickedness of the world. Life in the cities is far more complex than you believe, and there are degrees, you know, also in error and in evil. Lot was much less a sinner than his fellow citizens who conceived foul thoughts also about the angels sent by God, and the betrayal of Peter was nothing compared with the betrayal of Judas: one, indeed, was forgiven, the other not. You cannot consider Patarines and Catharists the same thing. The Patarines were a movement to reform behavior within the laws of Holy Mother Church. They wanted always to improve the ecclesiastics’ behavior.”
“Maintaining that the sacraments should not be received from impure priests …”
“And they were mistaken, but it was their only error of doctrine. They never proposed to alter the law of God…”
“But the Patarine preaching of Arnold of Brescia, in Rome, more than two hundred years ago, drove the mob of rustics to burn the houses of the nobles and the cardinals.”