512 THE .MIDDLE AGES. A.D. 1294-1517.
another occasion, 22 more. The victims of the second group died, asserting that all the evils in the Church came from the corrupt lives of the clergy.
The Plagellant movement grew out of a craving which the^ GJlumh life of the age did nut fully ni^et. Excesses should not blind the eye to its good features. Hugo of Reutlingen concludes his account of the outbreak of 1349 with the words ; " Many good things were associated with the Flagellant brothers, and these account for the attention they excited."
A group of sectaries, sometimes associated by contemporary writers with the Flagellants, was known as the Dancers. These people appeared at Aachen and other German and Dutch towns as early as 1374. In Cologne they numbered 500. Like the Flagellants, they marched from town to town. Their dancing and jumping — dansahant et saltahant — they performed half naked, sometimes bound together two and two, and often in the churches, where they had a preference for the spaces in front of the images of the Virgin. Cases occurred where they fell dead from exhaustion. In Holland, the Dancers were also called Frisker or Frilis, ivom friseh, — spry, — the word with which they encouraged one anotlier in their terpsichorean feats. ^
To another class of religious independents belong the_W!aldenses, who, in spite of their reputation as heretics, continued to suFvIve in France, Piedmont and Austria. They were still accused of allowing women to preach, denying the real presence and abjuring oaths, extreme unction, infant baptism and also of rejecting the doctrines of purgatory and prayers for the dead.2
With occasional exceptions, the Waldensians of Italy and France were left unmolested until the latter part of the 15th century and the dukes of Savoy were inclined to protect them
1 The bad effects of the dehision upon morals is given by chroniclers, one of whom says that during one of the epidemics 100 unmarried women became pregnant. See Fredericq, I. 2.'11 sq., III. 41, etc. Other names given to the Dancers were Chorizantes and Tripudiantes.
2 Diillinger, II. 305 sqq. Here tiie hnrha, — uncles, — the religious leaders of the Waldenses, are represented a.s making affidavit of the tenets of their people.
§ 58. HERETICAL AND UNCHURCHLY MOVEMENTS. 513
in their Alpine abodes. But the agents of the Inquisition were keeping watch, and the Franciscan Borelli is said to have burned, in 1393, 150 at Grenoble in the Dauphine in a single day. It remained for Pope Innocent VIII. to set on foot^a relentless crusade against this harmless people as his predecessor of the same name, Innocent III., set on foot the crusade against the Albigenses. His notorious bull of May 5, 1487, called upon the king of France, the duke of Savoy and other pi-inces to proceed with armed expeditions against them and to crush them out "as venomous serpents. "^ It opened with the assertion that his Holiness was moved by a concern to extricate from the abyss of error those for whom the sovereign Creator had been pleased to endure sufferings. The striking difference seems not to have occurred to the pontiff that the Saviour, to whose services he appealed, gave his own life, while he himself, without incurring any personal danger, was consigning others to torture and death.
Writing of the crusade which followed, the Waldensian historian, Leger, says that all his people had suffered before was as " flowers and roses " compared to what they were now called upon to endure. Charles VIII. entered heartily into the execution of the decree, and sent his captain, Hugo de la Palu. The crusading armies may have numbered 18,000 men.
The mountaineer heretics fled to the almost inaccessible platform called Fredu Tour, where their assailants could make no headway against their arrows and the stones they hurled. On the French side of the Alps the crusade was successful. In the Val de Louise, 70, or, according to another account, 3000, who had fled to the cave called Balme de Vaudois, were choked to death by smoke from fires lit at the entrance. Many of the Waldenses recanted, and French Waldensianism was well-nigh blotted out. Their property was divided between the bishop of Embrun and the secular princes. As late as 1545, 22 villages inhabited by French Waldenses were pillaged and burnt by order of the parliament of Provence. With the unification of Italy in 1870, this ancient and respectable people was granted toleration and began to descend
1 The bull is given by Comba : The Waldenses of Italy, p. 126 sq. 2l