§ 87. THE INQUISITION. PROCEDURE AND PENALTIES. 531
their rights, as recognized in the papal bulls of 1259 and 1320. After the murder of Konrad of Marburg, Gregory IX. called upon them in vain to prosecute heretics with vigor. In fact the Germans again and again showed their resentment and put Inquisitors to death.1
The centres of heresy in Germany were Strassburg, as early as 1212, Cologne, and Erfurt. The number of victims is said to have been very large and at least five hundred can be accounted for definitely in reported burn ings.2 Banishment, hanging, and drowning were other forms of punishment practised. In 1368 the Inquisitor, Walter Kerlinger, banished two hundred families from Erfurt alone. The prisons to which the condemned were consigned were wretched places, the abode of filth, vermin, and snakes.3
As Torquernada stands out as the incorporation of all that is inhuman in the Spanish Inquisition, so in the Ger man does Konrad of Marburg.
This Dominican ecclesiastic, whom Gregory IX. called the " Lord's watch-dog," first came into prominence at the court of Louis IV. of Thuringia on the Wartburg, the old castle which was the scene of the contests of the Minnesingers, and was destined to be made famous by Luther's confinement after the diet of Worms, 1521. Konrad became confessor of Louis' wife, the young and saintly Elizabeth. The daughter of King Andreas II. of Hungary, she was married to the Landgrave of Thuringia in 1221, at the age of fourteen. At his death at Brindisi, on his way to the Holy Land, in 1227, she came more completely under the power of Konrad. Scarcely any scene in Christian history exhibits such wanton and pitiless cruelty to a spiritual ward as he displayed to the tender woman who yielded him obedience. From the Wartburg, where she was adored for her charities and
1 For names see Flade, pp. 6, 7.
2 Flade, p. 116. The pages of this author must be read to gain any adequate idea of the horrors of the Inquisition in Germany. He pronounces it even more bloody than the Inquisition in Southern France.
3 Flade, p. 87.
532 THE MIDDLE AGES. A.D. 1049-1294.
good works, she removed to Marburg. There Konrad sub jected her to daily castigations and menial services, deprived her gradually of all her maids of honor, and separated her from her three children. On one occasion when she visited a convent of nuns at Oldenburg, a thing which was against their rigid rule, Konrad made Elizabeth and her attendant lie prostrate and receive a severe scourging from friar Gerhard while he himself looked on and repeated the Miserere. This, the most honored woman of medieval Germany, died of her castigations in 1231. Four years later she was canonized, and the St. Elizabeth church was begun which still stands to her memory in Marburg.
The year of Elizabeth's death, Gregory IX. invested Konrad with a general inquisitorial authority and right to appoint his own assistants and call upon the secular power for aid. Luciferans, so called, and other heretics were freely burned. It was Konrad's custom to burn the offenders the very day their sentences were pronounced.1 A reign of terror broke out wherever he went. He was murdered in 1233, on his way back to Marburg from the diet of Mainz. After his death Gregory declared him to be a man of consummate virtue, a herald of the Christian faith. Konrad was buried at the side of Elizabeth, but the papal inquisition in Germany did not recover for many a year from the blow given to it by his merciless hardness of heart. And so, as the Annals of Worms remarked, "Germany was freed from the abominable and unheard-of tribunal of that man." 2
In the Lowlands, Antwerp, Brussels, and other cities were lively centres of heresy and afforded a fine opportunity for the Inquisitor. The lists of the accused and of those exe cuted in the flames and by other means include Waldenses, Beguines, Beghards, Apostolicals, Lollards, and other sec taries. Their sufferings have been given a splendid memorial in the volumes of Fredericq. Holland's baptism of blood on
1 Roman Catholic writers have recently tried to remove the impression that Konrad's victims were numerous. See Benrath's reply, art. Konrad of Marburg, Herzog, X. 749 sqq.
2 Quoted by Wagenmann, Herzog, 2d, VIII. 192.