This summary is taken from a book titled The Dawn of a New Era 1250-1435 written by Edward P. Cheney, the first book in the 20-volume historical series The Rise of Modern Europe. The original copyright was in 1936; this particular copy is dated 1971, so the monetary figures in “modern value” are not accurate.
The Decline of the Church: The Weakening of the Papacy
The members of the medieval church were set apart from the rest of the community by ordination and vows and the church was free from secular interference, electing its members to its offices by its own methods. With possibly hundred of thousands of members throughout Europe the church offered diverse offices and duties: bishops, canons, priests and deacons, chaplains, vicars, curates, monks, friars and nuns, notaries and university students. The church devoted most of its attention to maintaining the unity of its organization, preserving its immunities, increasing its power and maintaining the uniformity of its doctrine.
The church also worked diligently in its hunger for income that was used as endowments for its members and to carry out its objectives and the church own considerable amounts of land throughout Europe. Members were given fees, salaries or other payments that were the result of tithes of the parish priest, the feudal dues of the bishops, the rents of the monasteries, and the taxation, annates and judicial fees of the popes, some of which was extorted from unwilling debtors. The collection and expenditure of income was the subject of much criticism both from without and within the church.
In the mid 13th century had dominion over the minds of men, but change was coming over the next 200 years, culminating in the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Church’s Counter-reformation.
The Conflict between Pope Boniface VIII and the Kings of France and England, 1294-1303
The church was highly centralized. All members, including the secular, looked to the pope. He was the bishop of Rome and the [self-proclaimed] successor to Peter and the [self-proclaimed] vicar of Christ on earth.
The loss of power and prestige by the pope and the weakening of church authority of the church were closely connected. The pope’s troubles were first evident. The old struggle for preeminence between emperor and pope was already largely past. Frederick II, the last emperor to enter into a serious contest for supremacy, died in 1250. Successive emperors, Henry VII, Lewis of Bavaria, Charles IV, were still crowned at Rome, mainly to strengthen their power and prestige as German and Italian rulers and not to either acknowledge or defy the popes as European over-lords in either the temporal or spiritual fields.
But in the 13th and 14th centuries a challenge was issued to the pope that was a more serious danger than the antiquated and tenuous claims of the emperor. This was the rising power of the national monarchies that were supported by the newly enfranchised middle classes. The centralized power of the king that was fast destroying the independence of the nobles was also a threat to the church.
Edward I of England and Philip the Fair of France made nearly simultaneous attacks upon the immunities of the church. Prepared to confront the kings were Pope Boniface VIII. Both kings attempted to tax church property, looking for a way to gather more money for war.
In 1296, after the French clergy refused to ante up, the pope issued the bull “clericis laicos”, which declared it unlawful, under pain of excommunication, for lay governments to tax church property and forbade clergymen to pay such impositions without papal consent. England was given the same notice the following year. This did not sit well with the kings. Edward immediately demanded from the clergy a tax of a fifth of the income from their temporal property. When they did not cough up the cash Edward ordered the judges to refuse all protection to clergymen, and instructed the sheriffs to seize and hold church lands. Philip also took action, forbidding the export of money from France, denying the papacy much of its regular revenue.
Bulls were sent from Rome to Philip, The “Ausculta fili” or “Listen, my son,” and the “Super Petri solio” that threatened Philip with excommunication and released his subjects from their allegiance. There were also two other bulls sent.
At the jubilee of 1300 the pope, at Rome before 200,000 pilgrims, reaffirmed his supremacy in Christendom and exalted his demands upon kings. But Edward was still able to get payments from the clergy that were higher that the taxes originally refused and in France the clergy also gave in to demands. Then the church and the kings took turns smearing and accusing each other. And in 1303 the pope sent a final bull to Philip, with threats of excommunication and an interdict upon all France.
Philip countered with a declaration that the pope was elected illegally and asked the general council of the church to elect a new pope. This would depose and humiliate Boniface and invalidate all the bulls.
A lawyer named William of Nogaret was chosen to prosecute the pope. The formal charges included illegitimacy of election, simony, immorality, violence, irreligion and heresy, and obtained authority from that court to seize the pope and bring him before the proposed council.
It was still the year 1303 when the pope was with his cardinals in the little town of Anagni situated on the slopes of the Apennines. On the 7th of September, a day before the interdict on France was to occur, Nogaret appeared at the gates of Anagni with a few hundred soldiers. In a few hours time the cardinals houses were sacked, the papal treasury looted and Boniface was taken prisoner. The populace of Anagni and Rome forced the release of the eighty-six-years old pope, however. He returned to Rome and died on the 11th of October.
The Avignon Residence of the Popes, 1305-1378
Rising financial claims and the opposition to them led the pope to choose Avignon as a place of residence. The “Babylonian captivity,” as churchmen referred to it, lasted from 1305 to 1378. Clement V, who became pope at the beginning of this period, was from Aquitaine, France. He not only did not reside at Rome, but also never set foot there. The absence from Rome for over seventy years was not a deliberate policy. But with the succession of popes being French prelates and the college of cardinals also predominately French the French kings wanted the popes nearby and a papal capital was built at Avignon. It should be noted that in the preceding half century the pope had seldom spent much time in Rome. A great palace was in place for the final four popes of this period and the city of Avignon became a papal possession in 1348. Though the centralized power and the income of the church grew these seventy years the morality of the papacy was at a decline. There was great ceremony, a court of many and extensive financial, judicial and administrative duties.
There were also twenty to thirty cardinals at Avignon, each with a palace/dwelling place of their own. They had their own entourage, and tended to the needs of the church and their own ecclesiastical and personal properties as well.
This was also a period of secular interests and luxurious living, not conductive to piety, spiritual elevation and in many cases falling short of a decent morality. The English Parliament referred to it as “the sinful city of Avignon,” and the poet Petrarch called it Babylon, saying, though possibly with some exaggeration, that there was no piety, no charity, no faith, no reverence, no fear of the Almighty, nothing holy, nothing just and nothing sacred at Avignon. During this time there was an increase in income and a system of papal collectors was established throughout Europe.
The old claim of the papacy to fill vacancies in local churches when the incumbents died at papal court or on their way to and from it was extended to a practice of nominating to all positions where there was anything unusual in the form of appointment or in the relations of the appointee to the pope. This was then taken further by grants of papal “reservations” and “provisions,” or prior rights to election or appointment to certain church positions to become operative immediately after the death of the existing incumbent, potentially in any country and at the expense of any patron or his appointees. Men traveled to see the pope hoping to obtain these “provisions,” at the expense of endowments often in different countries and intended for very different uses.
Anti-Papal Legislation
Local churches opposed the papal encroachments. This has a history back to Paris in 1283, at Wurzburg in 1287, the Spanish cortes of Zamora in 1301 and at the parliament of Carlisle in England in 1307. They all were in opposition to papal grants of provisions, the diversion of monastic funds from their proper uses, the appointment of foreigners to native benefices, the harsh exaction of first fruits, and the newly devised papal levies and the undue extension of ecclesiastical jurisdiction.
But it was not until mid 14th century, when papal intrusion in the field of appointments had gone much farther, when loss of wealth by its transfer abroad had threatened nation treasuries and when the court of Avignon had lost much of the prestige that belonged to Rome that the full force of national opposition showed itself. England was at the vanguard of opposition in 1338, as a result of its war with France. There was a French pope, in a French city, with French cardinals, all presumed to be under the influence of a French king. It was not tolerable for England for such a pope to make appointments in English churches, with part of the income intended for his treasury. After the English victory at Poitiers a distich was circulated: “Now the Pope has become French and Jesus has become English, You have seen which is greater, The Pope or Jesus.”
The process of the provision and the appointment was as follows: a document is sent from the pope to a cleric stating that the pope has reserved to himself the appointment of a successor to the present incumbent of a certain benefice and naming the holder of the provision as that appointee. After the death of the incumbent the appointee replaces him. Provisions were usually for deanships or canonries at a cathedral, sometimes a judicial position, a large parish a bishopric or abbey. This might deprive a lay or ecclesiastical patron of an appointment and infringe upon the cathedral chapter’s right of election. Sometimes the pope allowed a bishop to find a position for the appointee.
The practice of appointments increased with the needs for funds. In the diocese of Salisbury in 1326, the pope had nominated the dean, precentor, treasurer, two archdeacons and twenty-three holders of prebends and there were eight known holders of provisions waiting vacancies.
England’s opposition began in earnest in 1343. In parliament a strong remonstrance was drawn up by the nobles and commoners and given to a judge, Sir John Shoreditch. He took it to Avignon and addressed the pope and the cardinals, telling them that the appointed dean of York was considered “a deadly enemy of our king and his realm.” Shoreditch left the papal city suddenly, apparently in fear of his life.
Other grumbling from later parliaments included: the urging that the benefices of foreigners should be subject to the king and the possessions of foreign priories confiscated; the claim that foreign higher church courts overruled the king’s courts and favored the pope’s appointees; a complaint that the papal collector was living like a prince in London and his army of clerks sending much English money to France and the French cardinals who were England’s enemies; that alien priests, monks and nuns were plundering England of its treasures and betraying secrets to England’s enemies. They also claimed that the pope was seeking to rule over England and its king.
This resulted in the passage of the laws known as the Statutes of Provisors and Praemunire, from 1351 to 1393. The object was to make all papal appointments in England invalid and to limit to its narrowest bounds the exercise of papal jurisdiction and administrative action in England.
Concerning the limits of other papal rights, twice a call for monies from England was denied. In 1365 the pope wanted a certain sum paid in acknowledgement of the feudal dependence of England and Ireland, and in 1374 the pope sought a subsidy for a war with the Florentines. The pope fought back, with threats of excommunication and a few conferences were called in hopes of ending the hostilities. Even though there was resentment against the pope and the church the English kings still relied on the pope for the placing of their own favorites into ecclesiastical office. Other countries also opposed these appointments, Germany, Spain and even France.
The Great Schism, 1378-1415
The popes had finally returned to Rome. There had been opposition in Italy to the pope’s living in France, over eighty cities banding together in 1375 objecting to the pope sending Frenchmen to Italy to administer papal territories and collect revenues. This was put down by the use of 10,000 men from France and a series of excommunications, interdicts and plundering. It was then thought that if the pope returned to Rome opposition would cease and prosperity would replace the poverty and ruin. Lacking the papal court and the concourse of officials, diplomats, visitors and pilgrims, Rome had become a second-rate town. The roofs of many of its churches fallen in and there were sheep pasturing on the grass that grew around the altars of St. Peter and the Lateran. And Avignon was not always safe either. The banditti, the discharged soldiers of the truces of the Hundred Years War, were a threat. These roving bandits had already struck the city in 1361 and 1365.
The first attempt at a return was by Urban V in 1367, against the opposition of French cardinals. With a fleet of sixty Italian vessels as escort he returned to the Vatican. But the difficulties were great there and Urban returned to Avignon in 1370, where he immediately died, this seen as punishment by the Italians.
Gregory XI, of a French family, succeeded Urban and also returned to Rome. This occurred in 1376, again with a great entourage. The following year was a troubled one, however, and Gregory was considering a retreat to France, but died in 1378.
The people demanded an Italian pope and the cardinals chose the Archbishop of Bari, a Neapolitan. He took the name of Urban VI. He soon confronted the cardinals, reproving them for their lifestyles, cut off some of their income and threatened to create a large number of new Italian cardinals. The French cardinals sought to replace him, announcing that his election was void, the result of the pressure put on them by the Roman populace. They called on Urban to resign; he refused and they issued a manifesto declaring the papal throne vacant. They then chose Robert, the cardinal of Geneva, a Frenchman who took the name of Clement VIII. After a short and ineffective campaign for the capture of Rome he returned to Avignon. The king of France was a relative and accepting him as pope were the sovereigns and countries in alliance with France – Aragon, Castile, Navarre, Sardinia, Sicily, Scotland and some parts of Germany – thereby ruling over the greater and richer part of Europe.
In Rome, Urban created twenty-nine new cardinals (mostly Italians) and announced the deposition and excommunication of his rivals. His support came from England, Flanders, the northern kingdoms and most of Germany. This was the Great Schism and it lasted for fifty years, in which it threatened to subordinate the head of the church to his prelates and completed the subjection of the church as a whole to the control of the lay rulers of Europe. Urban died in 1389, replaced by Boniface IX, Innocent VII and Gregory XII. Clement died in 1394 and was succeeded by a Spaniard, Pedro de Lima who became Benedict XIII.
The feuding popes resorted to military force against each other with no effect. Verbose and abusive bulls of deposition and condemnation were exchanged and excommunications were also swapped. Both popes were reliant on temporal rulers for support and since the unity and authority was missing the church was not as respected as before. Making matters worse for Europe, the needs and the abuses of the church were now doubled, making it twice the burden on the people. To raise money for their expeditions against each other both papacies increased taxation and sold indulgences. The schism made it possible for the Lollard “heresy” to take root. Through it all lavish expenditure prevailed, especially at Avignon. Rome was reckless in the issue of indulgences, as one English cleric said “At Rome everything is bought and sold, so that benefices are given not for desert but to the highest bidder; whence every man who had wealth . . . kept his money in the merchant’s bank to further his advancement . . . As therefore under the old dispensation, when the priests were corrupted with venality, miracles ceased, so I fear it will come to pass, under the new dispensation; and methinks the danger standeth daily knocking at the very door of the church.”
The Avignon papacy was also criticized; “The virtues of our ancestors are quite neglected, boundless avarice and blind ambition have invade the heart of churchmen. ‘Freely give for freely ye have received’ in now most vilely perverted. ‘Freely I have not received, nor will I freely give, for I bought my bishophric for a great price and must indemnify myself for my unprofitable outlay.’
Church members were revolted by the spectacle of two feuding popes, the excommunications, the war and political intrigue, the irregular morals and a corrupt self-indulgent court. Another “heretic”, Wyclif, wrote essays in which he denied the divine authority and the practical value for religion of the whole papal and hierarchical system of the church.
Efforts to heal the breach were constantly made. These solutions were based on violent means – by deposing opponents, or prohibiting the election of the successor to the deceased rival pope. Negotiations were also sought, each pope hoping to induce his rival to resign with offers of high power and position and great influence at the papal court. There was even an offer from Rome that both popes abdicate and a single successor elected.
The period of Councils, 1409-1449
The solution came from the general acceptance of an old and frequently asserted and as frequently controverted claim of the superiority of an assembled council of the whole church over the elected head. France prepared for the way when a council of all the higher clergy of France met in 1395 and urged the newly elected pope to resign. Failing at that, three years later the king of France called an assembly of eleven French archbishops and sixty bishops, who proceeded to withdraw their allegiance and the financial support of the French church from the pope at Avignon, Benedict XIII. This reorganization, known as “Gallicanism” was completed at the council of the French church in 1407. Somewhat similar action was taken in Bohemia and Hungary. Benedict issued a bull of excommunication against the French bishops, but this was burned. Benedict left Avignon for Perpignan in Spain and the French church remained largely independent of either pope.
[Bohemia became Czechoslovakia in 1918 and has been known as the Czech Republic since 1993]
In 1408 the majority of the cardinals of both groups abandoned their popes and called for general council of the church for the following year. An organic union with the Greek Church, at that time threatened by the Turks, might also be obtained with their appearance at the council. Men of learning charged with heresy also hoped that a general council would overrule papal and local ecclesiastical judgments.
The council at Pisa in1409 began the period known as the “conciliar period” during which the popes also held councils. This period lasted to 1449. The Pisa council was a grand spectacle. Attending were twenty-two cardinals, fourteen archbishops; sixty-nine bishops, priors, grandmasters and generals of monastic and crusading orders. There were also more than a hundred representatives of absent prelates; ambassadors of the Emperor, kings and princes; delegates from all the learned institutions of Europe and many others distinguished in learning, law and diplomacy. The estimate was that over 9,000 people made the journey to Pisa.
Both popes were summoned. When they failed to appear they were declared deposed and the cardinals elected another pope who took the name of Alexander V.
If two popes weren’t bad enough, at this point there were three! Benedict, who was formerly the “French pope”, held court at Perpignan and later at Pensicola, both in Spain. Gregory, the successor in the line of Romish popes, held court in a distant part of the old States of the Church. Alexander planted his behind in the more traditional setting at Rome.
Alexander died the next year, 1410, and was replaced by John XXIII. He was of low morals and mediocre abilities, but did guarantee military protection for the council.
The Council of Constance to the Election of Martin V, 1414-1417
Emperor Sigismund convinced Pope John to convoke a meeting outside of Italy, meeting at Constance in November 1414. There were as many as three thousand participants and there were said to have been a hundred thousand of their followers in the German city and the surrounding country. The goal of the council was to attain church unity, to define and eradicate heresy and to reform the church.
All three claimants to the papal throne were deposed. In May of 1415 Pope John was deposed on grounds of heresy, schism and wickedness as pope, priest and man. He was kept prisoner in a nearby castle for some years. John bought his release, returned to Italy and settled in Florence. He was appointed by his successor bishop and cardinal but died before entering his new office.
Gregory relinquished his claim to the papacy. He was given the title of cardinal-archbishop (first in rank after the pope) and then soon died.
Benedict refused to abdicate. In 1417 the council deposed him as a schismatic, a heretic and a disturber of the peace. At age ninety-four in 1424 he still claimed to be pope, urging his two remaining cardinals with his dying breath to choose a successor. A phantom pope was chosen, but soon abdicated.
But back in the year 1417 Benedict was considered deposed and the cardinals and other members of the council elected a Roman cardinal as the pope. He took the name Martin V and the great schism was over.
Mysticism and Heresy
The papacy was not the same after the Avignon period; there was a diminished devotion and affection towards the head of the Catholic Church. There was also another threat that the council at Constance addressed – the spread of heresy.
[Keep in mind that the Catholic Church hijacked the faith given to the apostles, the faith they were instructed to teach. So while someone called a heretic might actually believe in unscriptural doctrine, someone else called a heretic will actually have more truth than the Catholic Church. There is much error, idolatry and pagan practices re-packaged as Christian worship in Catholicism. There is error in all of Christendom, including the Protestant faiths. It is impossible for the entire pristine, errorless Truth to have been kept intact on earth during nearly 2,000 years of human handling.]
Heresy was any belief officially condemned by the church. It was considered treason to God, betrayal to the common faith, the worst of crimes. The heretic was deprived of all rights and an object of contempt and condemnation. In the 13th and 14th centuries there were great numbers of men who beliefs differed with official church teachings. What was heresy and what was truth was not always clear.
Mysticism was closely allied to heresy. Throughout Europe were the writings and the prophecies of the half-mythical Abbott Joachim of Flora. As the story goes, he was a worldly young nobleman of Calabria, who on a visit to the Hoy Land, circa 1175, was converted, saw visions, was inspired, so he claimed, with prophetic powers, and was commissioned by God to speak and write concerning things to come and to interpret the scriptures. He was miraculously provided with the necessary scholarly equipment by drinking deeply of a river of oil in a vision. Joachim returned to Italy, was ordained priest and took the vows of the Cistercian Order. Unwillingly made abbot of the monastery of Curazzo, he fled from his charge in order to devote himself to still more rigorous self-discipline and to obtain freedom to preach and to write. He wrote The Harp With Ten Strings, The Unfolding of Revelation, The Harmony of the New and Old Testament. His sayings and writings and the legends that grew up about him became a great mass of popular tradition. He could explain all the mysterious readings of the Bible and foretell the future. The 13th century books also attributed to him was The Prophecies of Cyril, Commentaries on Jeremiah, Prophecies of the Popes, and The Seven Ages of the Church, among his other works.
The sayings and writings of Joachim were often incoherent. They interpret Bible stories, characters and events in his present time and in the future. They tell of the three periods of the world, including the end, which was supposed to come about in the year 1260. His works were sold, as a single work called The Everlasting Gospel in the year 1255, very popular in Paris and his ideas were known through the 14th century. It included condemnation of existing religion and criticized the church, things that made an impression on his readers and weakened church authority.
Joachim’s essay on the Trinity was condemned as heretical in 1213, eleven years after his death. In 1260 a council condemned his writings and those who believed on them. Dante reverenced Joachim, whose works influenced Roger Bacon. His cult following was throughout Europe, especially in Languedoc, France.
There was a wave of mysticism between 1300 and 1400, which came from the valley of the Rhine to the Netherlands, teachings more in tune with popular thought than Joachim’s. Master Eckhart and his disciples Tauler and Suso, all Dominicans, spent their lives of study, preaching and writing in Germany. It was perhaps from their teaching that John Ruysbroeck in Brussels was inspired to compose his mystical and devotional works titled the Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage, the Kingdom of the Lovers of God, the Sparkling Stone and others. His practical piety, his use of the Bible as his source of knowledge, his distaste for empty and misused church ceremonies led them to the formation of many groups of adherents of a contemplative life.
The “Friends of God,” the “Brethren of the Common Life,” the students of the “new devotion,” followers of Gerard Groote, founder of the school at Deventer, gave to the later 14th and earlier 15th centuries, on one side an independent educational movement at Windesheim, Zwolle and elsewhere in the Netherlands, on the other the dreamy piety of the Imitation of Christ. Many ideas of both were condemned as heretical.
Defining heresy was up pope. Independent thinkers claimed that what the pope or bishop or their opponent in controversy called heresy was really true doctrine. Charges of heresy were so frequent it became a term of abuse and was disregarded unless pronounced formally and followed up with force. A leading independent thinker was the English scholar William of Ockham. He was a Master of Arts and doctor of divinity of Oxford and Paris, entered the order of St. Francis and his ability to reason brought him fame, his students at Oxford called him “the invincible doctor.” His ideas became inextricably bound with those of Marsiglio and John of Jandun, all involved in the controversy on “evangelic poverty.”
The dispute between two factions of the Franciscans might have split the order but he church as well. The “Spiritual Franciscans” taught that as the Savior and apostles lived without property so should the church. The pope condemned this idea. Charges of heresy were swapped and in 1327 Ockham, Michael of Cesena, who was General of the order, and some other Franciscans were imprisoned at Avignon.
Lewis, the duke of Bavaria, was in a struggle with the pope, as he wanted recognition as emperor. He sought to free Ockham and the others, hoping for their solidarity against the pope. They escaped by boat and taken to Pisa where they were under the emperor’s protection. They all went to Munich the following year, and from the Franciscan convent there Ockham composed over the next two decades works discussing philosophical and political themes, including bitter personal attacks on the opinions and the lives of twp successive Avignon popes, John XXII and Benedict XII. He was excommunicated in 1328. The next year the pope declared the whole Franciscan doctrine of the necessity of complete poverty a heresy. In his essay, Errors of the Pope, Ockham charged John with seventy errors and seven heresies. He declared “Jesus came among men not to gain dignities and powers but to submit to contempt and injury, to be crowned not with a diadem of precious stones but with a crown of thorns. His reign was not temporal but celestial and spiritual; all doctrine opposed to this in heretical and blasphemous. The manifest heresy of John XXII deprives him of all power and separates him from the universal church.”
The most significant of Ockham’s writing was his strong opposition to the claims of the church in the temporal sphere. Marsiglio preached the same doctrine with even greater conviction.
Marsiglio was a student of Roman law who attended the University of Paris, became a lecturer and rector. Influenced by Ockham he wrote a work titled Defensor Pacis “The Defender of Peace,” about the supremacy of the state over the church and the equality of all church members. He argued away all the special claims of the pope and diminished the authority of the priesthood and also reasoned that the pope, may, like any other man, be mistaken or misled or influenced by hatred or favor.
John of Jandun agreed with these views and assisted in the publication of the book and its teachings became the center of heated controversy. The pope declared all the writings of Marsiglio, John and their works heretical. In 1326 they left Paris and joined Ockham and the other Spiritual Franciscans at the refuge at Munuch, protected by Lewis of Bavaria for the remainder of their lives. Marsiglio’s book was still read and in 1376 a French translation increased its circulation.
The more common people also had their doubts about the church during the 13th, 14th and early 15th centuries. To combat this the church established the Inquisition in Italy, France, Burgundy and Spain during this time. A new heresy, rather the revival of an old one, also challenged the church. The heresy of the Albigenses or Cathari, with its anti-sacerdotalism [opposition to the priests or the claim of the divine authority of the priesthood and its power] and its dualistic conception of God, that a crusade eliminated in the open country, survived in the remote valleys of the Pyrenees, the Alps, the Apennines and the Abruzzi, and even in the obscure purlieus of some of the Italian cities. It made its way back through Istria, Dalmatia, Croatia and Servia towards eastern Europe, from which its half-oriental doctrines had originally made their way along the old trade routes from east to west.
The Waldenses were like the Cathari, but mostly poor men, were still scattered through the southeast of France, extending their influence into Italy and northward along the Rhine and into Bavaria, Moravia and Bohemia. The Beghards or Brethren of the Free Spirit, the Beguines, the Brethren of the Cross, the Guglielmites, the Flagellants, the Dolcinists, the Sagerellists, the Luciferians, and the continental Lollards were forced by bishops or inquisitors to conform or to become martyrs to their faith.