Fra Dolcino

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Fra Dolcino
lithograph, 19th century

Fra Dolcino (* in Novara ; † June 1, 1307 in Vercelli ) was a member and since about 1300 the leader of the Northern Italian lay movement of the Apostle Brothers (also Dolcyn sect), which was fought by the Church as a heretical sect , which was responsible for the violent annihilation of the Roman official Church called, holed up with a large number of supporters in several changing mountain camps in the area of ​​the dioceses of Novara and Vercelli and was captured after a crusade proclaimed by Pope Clement V and executed and burned after public torture .

Life

Apostle Brothers

Fra Dolcino came from the Novara area in northern Italy. Around 1300 he made himself head of the lay movement of the Apostle Brothers , which Gerardo Segarelli founded in Parma in 1260 . The sect, whose members referred to themselves as apostoli , fratres apostolici or sorores apostolissae , minimi or pauperes Christi according to the testimony of the Latin sources , was mainly recruited from the lower classes of the population (rural population, artisans and tradesmen), but also received an influx from the regular order and found some supporters in wealthy and noble circles. Under the influence of Franciscan poverty doctrine and the historical theology of Joachim von Fiore , as well as in increasingly radical criticism of the secularization of the Roman Church, the Apostle Brothers preached a life in poverty based on the example of the first apostles of Christ, without worldly property and permanent residence, in a free and spiritual way Community sub nulla oboedientia nisi solius Dei (“not obliged to obey anyone but God”), and in repentant preparation for the end of the world which is expected to be imminent.

In its early days, despite repeated papal bans (1285 by Honorius IV , 1290 by Nicholas IV ), the movement was initially able to spread to Parma and other regions of northern Italy with the tolerance of the local authorities. The persecution measures intensified since the 1990s, and in 1294 the first executions of apostolics 'for heresy ' were recorded in Parma . Dolcino, who, according to contemporary sources, is said to have been the illegitimate son of a priest, joined the movement between 1288 and 1292. His work as a preacher of the sect is attested by acts of inquisition for the areas of Bologna and Trento since the turn of the century .

After Segarelli, who had already been sentenced to life imprisonment in Parma in 1294, was sentenced to death in a new trial by the Inquisitor Manfredo da Parma in 1300 and burned at the stake in Parma, Dolcino declared himself leader of the movement in several missives. Under his leadership, the sect radicalized itself in open opposition to the Roman Church, in that Dolcino urged the followers of the Church to convert to his community and the Pope and his clerics in repeatedly renewed prophecies that the 'sword of God', namely an expected final emperor, would extinguish it ( Frederick II of Aragon ), announced.

The missives

The letters of Dolcino are not preserved in full. However, the content of two of these letters is referenced in a writing by the inquisitor Bernard Gui , who also attests to the existence of a third letter; further clues can also be found in the Historia fratris Dulcini written by a cleric around the Bishop of Vercelli before 1310 . In his first letter of August 1300, Dolcino had prophesied that Frederick of Aragon would reveal himself as emperor within the next three years ( in brevi, videlicet infra tres annos quo predicta scripsit ), appoint new kings and Pope Boniface VIII as well as the other followers of the secular Church will kill.

After Boniface died on October 11, 1303 as a result of his temporary imprisonment by the French Chancellor Guillaume de Nogaret ( assassination attempt at Anagni , September 7–9, 1303) and 16 days later the Dominican Niccolo Boccasini as Benedict XI. was crowned as his successor, Dolcino responded in December 1303 with a second letter in which he again prophesied over a period of three years: in the current year (1303) would be about Boniface and the "King of the North" ( Philip the Fair of France) ruin, in the following year (1304) Frederick would take up the fight against the successor of Boniface - not yet named by Dolcino - and in the following year (1305) would finally win. However, this prophecy also became irrelevant, as did Benedict XI. died on July 7, 1304 and the cardinals gathered in the conclave of Perugia could not agree on a successor by June 1305. During this time, Dolcino seems to have changed his prophecies again to the effect that Frederick would become emperor on Christmas Eve 1305 or in the following March or possibly at an unspecified later date, begin the fight against the secular Church and qui the Pope within three and a half years tunc esset will kill.

Military struggle

Monte Rubello

Dolcino and the leading members of the sect initially evaded persecution by the Inquisition by living underground as itinerant preachers, promoting their teaching at secret meetings in the homes of local supporters and escaping from the authorities by fleeing. This changed in 1304/1305 when Dolcino, after sermons in the northern areas of the dioceses of Vercelli and Novara , went over to entrench himself with a large number of followers in Upper Valsesia (Diocese of Novara), initially on a mountain called 'Balma' ( Winter 1304/1305) and then on the opposite Parete Calva near Rassa (March 1305 to March 1306).

At the latest at the Parete Calva, the sect switched to open military resistance. The files of the Inquisition of Bologna prove that even in the previous period, individual members living underground carried weapons with them, according to Zaccaria di Sant'Agata, one of the leading preachers of the sect, the 1300 in habito layco cum uno stocco and was seen cum uno ense et uno capello in the winter of 1302 . On the Parete Calva, the sect began to defend itself militarily and to secure its livelihood by looting and taking hostages in the surrounding region.

During this time, perhaps as early as 1304, Dolcino also supposedly met the leader of the Northern Italian Ghibellines , Matteo I. Visconti , in Martinengo , where the Suardi party of Guelphs from Bergamo, Milan, expelled from Bergamo in August 1304 , Lodi , Pavia and Cremona was besieged. According to a testimony of 1321 in the trial led by Pope John XXII. against Matteo and Galeazzo Visconti , Matteo is said to have had a conversation with Dolcino in the castle of Martinengo and caused Dolcino to collect his "army on the mountain" ( quod ipse Matheus fuit in castro Martinengi cum Dulcino heretico,… et audivit [sc. the witness] quod ex conducto et ordinatione dicti Mathei hereticus Dulcinus congrevavit exercitum super montem ).

Memorial stone for Fra Dolcino on Monte Rubello

After the sect had survived the winter of 1305/1306 under the most difficult conditions on Parete Calva and was weakened and decimated by famine, Dolcino gave up this camp in the spring of 1306 and moved with the survivors to the neighboring region of Biella (Diocese of Vercelli), where he fortified himself again above Trivero on Monte Rubello and continued the looting in the area, which was under the episcopal and secular jurisdiction of the Bishop of Vercelli (also Count of Biella).

Defeat, capture and execution

Only when Pope Clement V , who was elected Pope in June 1305 after more than a year of vacancy and was crowned in Lyon in November 1305 , called for the crusade against Dolcino in the summer of 1306, the hitherto unsuccessful military measures against the Dolcinians became apparent tightened with the support of forces from other regions of Italy, France and Savoy. During the winter of 1306/1307, the camp on Monte Rubello was successfully cut off from the supply of food and the influx of new followers, and in a major attack on Maundy Thursday of 1307 the camp was finally overrun, with Dolcino and other leading members of the sect could be captured alive by men of the Bishop of Vercelli.

Pope Clement V, who had initially ordered that Dolcino be transferred to the Curia in France in the event that Dolcino was captured , was informed of the capture of Dolcino by messengers and thereupon gave his permission for a local trial in the immediately affected region to help the population To enable satisfaction for the suffering and damage caused by the sect. This trial was evidently not carried out in Biella, where Dolcino was brought before the Bishop of Vercelli after his capture, but in Vercelli, where Dolcino was handed over to the papal authority - that is, probably to that of the papal inquisitor - and imprisoned by the bishop . Dolcino, who refused to renounce, was sentenced to death and, after public torture in the streets of Vercelli, was executed on June 1, 1307 and burned in front of the city on the banks of the Cervo .

According to the contemporary anonymous Historia fratris Dulcini , the death sentence against Dolcino was imposed by the Bishop of Vercelli, Raniero Avogadro († 1310). A Commentarius in fastos coenobii novariensis ordinis praedicatorum , which was written in the 18th century and whose anonymous author had access to sources on the history of the Dominicans and inquisitors of Novara, which are no longer extant, celebrates the Dominican Emanuel Testa from Novara as the responsible judge, who as for Vercelli The responsible inquisitor had already played a prominent role in promoting the crusade and passed the death sentence in the trial against Dolcino. In contemporary files of the Inquisition of Bologna a frater Emanuel ordinis predicatorum, inquisitor vercellensis (active before December 1305) or frater Emanuel ordinis predicatorum, inquisitor mediolanensis (attested in 1308) is actually attested with trials against apostolics. Since the power of attorney for the inquisition process normally rests with the papal inquisitors from the mendicant orders - in the region in question the order of the Dominicans - who had to seek an agreement with the local bishop, one can assume that the responsible person in the Dolcinos case as well Inquisitor led the trial and passed the verdict in agreement with the Bishop of Vercelli.

Aftermath

Dante

The literary memory of Dolcino was established for the following centuries by Dante Alighieri . In the 28th song of the Inferno, Dante describes how the hell sinner Mohammed, split by the sword of a devil and with entrails hanging out, confronts the afterlife visitor Dante in the pit of hell the seminator di scandalo e di scisma (“instigator of discord and schism”) and confronts him prophetic message to Fra Dolcino, who was still alive at the time of the fictional event (1300), wants to give (Inf. 28,55-60):

Or dì a fra Dolcin dunque che s'armi,
tu che forse vedra 'il sole in breve,
s'ello non vuol qui tosto seguitarmi,
sì di vivanda, che stretta di neve
non rechi la vittoria al Noarese,
ch'altrimenti acquistar non sarìa leve.

So tell Fra Dolcino, you, who might
see the sun again shortly, that if he
does not want to follow me here very soon , he should
arm himself with food in such a way that it is not shortages
due to snowfall that the Novareser wins
that victory that will not be easy to achieve otherwise.

Dante's commentators use the formulation il Noarese ("the Novareser") as a rhetorically not uncommon synecdoche in military contexts to refer to the totality of the Novaresians involved in the fight against Dolcino, and not to an individual. In fact, the inquisitor Emanuel Testa from Novara should actually be meant here, who - if the anonymous "Commentarius" from the 18th century can still be trusted - played a decisive role in the organization of the crusade and in the final trial passed the death sentence.

How Dante got his knowledge of what was going on is not certain. When the later Emperor Henry VII, crowned Roman-German King in Aachen in January 1309, moved into northern Italy in October 1310 and stayed in several Italian cities, including Novara and Vercelli, to receive their homage and to pacify the political parties , Dante had also met the Luxembourger whom he hailed as the savior of world empire on one of these occasions. As R. Ordano has recently shown, Dante is most likely to have met the emperor in the wake of his patron and friend Moroello Malaspina , and his participation is documented for the festivities in Vercelli in December 1310.

Eco's "Name of the Rose"

More recently, Dolcino gained new popularity through Umberto Eco's novel The Name of the Rose , in which two former supporters of Dolcino (the cellar master suspect Remigius and the factotum Salvatore) appear and are sentenced to death by the also appearing inquisitor Bernard Gui. The story of Dolcino serves Eco to illustrate the medieval poverty dispute and at the same time is updated by him from the point of view of military radicalization with parallels to the role of the Brigate Rosse in the recent history of Italy.

"Loreley" by Alexander Nix

In Nixen 's fantastic historical novel, the father of the protagonist Fee tells the story of the heretic Fra Dolcino, whom Fee's father himself followed as a follower for many years.

swell

In Arnaldo Segarizzi's collection of sources , the pieces Appendix II, No. 1–2, and Appendix III, No. 6, are to be excluded as forgeries.

  • "Historia Fratris Dulcini Heresiarche" di Anonimo sincrono e "De secta illorum qui se dicunt esse ordine apostolorum" by Bernardo Gui, a cura di Arnaldo Segarizzi, nuova edizione riveduta ampliata e corretta, Città di Castalelloic Scriptarum Itores, 1907 , IX / 5, archive.org ).
  • Acta S. Officii Bononie from anno 1291 usque ad annum 1310. A cura di Lorenzo Paolini e Raniero Orioli, con prefazione di Ovidio Capitani , Roma: Istitituto Storico Italiano, 1982 (= Fonti per la storia d'Italia. 106).
  • Salimbene de Adam , Cronica Ordinis Minorum. Edited by Oswaldus Holder-Egger , Hanover 1905–1913 (= MGH Scriptores, 32; digitized version ). New edition by Ferdinando Bernini, Bari: Laterza, 1942 (= Scrittori d'Italia, 187-188; digitized version (archive version) ( Memento from September 29, 2011 in the Internet Archive )). The latest edition by Giuseppe Scalia was published by Laterza in Bari in 1966 and from 1998–1999 in the Corpus Christianorum . Continuatio mediaevalis 125 and 125A have been republished.
  • Chronicon parmense from anno 1038 usque ad annum 1338. A cura di Giuliano Bonazzi, nuova edizione riveduta ampliata e correta con la direzione di Giosuè Carducci e Vittorio Fiorini , Città di Castello: Lapi, 1902 (= Rerum Italicarum Scriptores IX / 9, archive. org ).
  • In fastos coenobii novariensis ordinis praedicatorum commentarius, cap. V: De viris eruditione, dignitate, ac pietate praeclaris. Handwritten excerpt in: Carlo Francesco Frasconi, Collezione di documenti autentici, Archivio Storico di Novara, No. 237, Volume III, pp. 113–116. Complete manuscript of the Commentarius: Archivio Storico Diocesano di Novara, Fondo Frasconi XI / 3, Giunta ai Monumenti Novaresi, Volume III, No. 18.

literature

The literature on Dolcino is extremely colorful and rich in errors, legends and deliberate falsifications. Only a small selection of particularly reliable works is cited here.

  • Gerolamo Biscaro, Inquisitori ed eretici lombardi (1292-1318). In: Miscellanea di storia italiana. Series III, 19, 1922, pp. 447-557.
  • Francesco Cognasso , La crociata contro Fra Dolcino. In: ders., Novara e il suo territorio , Novara: Banca Popolare di Novara, undated, pp. 280–293, changed again to: ders., Storia di Novara. Novara: Lazzarelli, 1971, pp. 293-304, bibliography pp. 587 f.
  • Giovanni Miccoli :  Dolcino. In: Massimiliano Pavan (ed.): Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (DBI). Volume 40:  DiFausto – Donadoni. Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, Rome 1991, pp. 440-444.
  • Rosaldo Ordano, Dolcino. In: Bollettino storico vercellese 1 (1972), pp. 21-36
  • Raniero Orioli, "Venit perfidus heresiarcha": Il movimento apostolico-dolciniano dal 1260 al 1307. Rome: Istituto storico italiano per il medio evo, 1988 (= Studi storici 193-196).
  • Lorenzo Paolini / Raniero Orioli, L'eresia a Bologna from XIII e XIV secolo. Rome: Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo, 1975 (= Studi storici, fasc. 93-96).

Web links

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personal data
SURNAME Fra Dolcino
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Dulcinus; Dolcino Tornielli
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian sect leader
DATE OF BIRTH 13th Century
PLACE OF BIRTH Novara
DATE OF DEATH June 1, 1307
Place of death Vercelli