Europe's inner demons

With a demon for father, and another demon as his lifelong familiar, Guichard could convincingly be accused of multiple homicide; and so he was. It was charged that he had poisoned his predecessor at Saint-Ayoul so as to become prior in his place; that, as abbot, he had starved prisoners to death in his dungeons; that when the late queen planned to send a canon to Rome to denounce him, he had had the canon assassinated; and that he had also prepared personally, from a mixture of adders, scorpions, toads and spiders, the poison destined for the royal princes. Moreover it now appeared that the death of Queen Joan had not been the result of maleficia alone; a letter was produced, bearing Guichard’s seal, which instructed one “Cassian the Lombard” to concoct poison to that end.

Guichard solemnly denied all these charges, while admitting some comparatively minor ones. He admitted that his household had, for a time, included two assassins, but insisted that he had not known of their guilt; he admitted accepting money in a doubtful case of heresy; he admitted trying to fabricate money, but added that, so far from profiting from the experiment, he had lost heavily. It is clear, in addition, that he openly kept a mistress; that he had dealings, and very profitable ones, with Italian bankers; that he was abrupt and violent in his behaviour towards his clergy. All in all, the bishop emerges as a man of affairs rather than of religion: energetic, able, acquisitive, none too scrupulous. On the other hand, there are no more grounds for thinking him a murderer than for crediting him with personal contacts with demons.

This was confirmed by the outcome of the enquiry.⁽²⁴⁾ It lasted a year and a half, and another fifteen months passed before, in March or April 1311, the commission submitted its report to the pope. It was the very moment when Pope Clement had finally acceded to King Philip’s demand that he condemn the Temple. The king lost interest in Guichard, and allowed him to be transferred from the Louvre to Avignon; and once the pope had him in his custody, he refrained from further action. Meanwhile Noffo Dei was hanged in Paris for some unspecified crime; and before his death he affirmed the bishop’s innocence, as he had done once before. In 1314 — five years after the beginning of the affair —  Guichard was at last set free. Though it was impossible for him to return to Troyes, the pope had no hesitation in employing his services as suffragan bishop of Constance in Germany.⁽²⁵⁾

His name had been effectively cleared: fourteenth-century chroniclers were in no doubt that the affair was a frame-up.⁽²⁶⁾ One may well wonder whether, even while it was in progress, any reasonably well informed person ever saw it in any other light.

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For some twenty years, between 1318 and 1338, two popes at Avignon showed disquiet over the activities of magicians. Almost immediately on his accession, in 1317, Pope John XXII had Hughes Géraud, the aged bishop of Cahors, arrested for trying to kill him by poison and by maleficium.⁽²⁷⁾

Interrogated seven times by the pope in person, the bishop admitted his guilt — one cannot tell under what pressure. Although the extant accounts make no mention of demonic intervention it must surely have figured in the case, for the bishop was treated as only the most dangerous heretics were treated: he was tortured, scourged and burned at the stake, and his ashes were scattered in the Rhône. Pope John was indeed rather prone to accuse his enemies of maleficium reinforced by dealings with demons. In Italy the head of the Ghibelline party, Matteo Visconti, was accused by the pope’s allies in Milan, the archbishop and the inquisitor, of attempting the pope’s life by means of wax puppets, and also of having personal dealings with the Devil.⁽²⁸⁾ In the end nothing came of it, for the commission of cardinals appointed by the pope to try the case had to recognize that all the evidence came from a single witness, who had been bribed.

But this experience did not discourage the pope. Between 1320 and 1325 he sent a whole series of missives to the bishop of Ancona and the inquisitor there, pointing out that his political opponents in that region too were heretics, idolators and worshippers of idols. It is remarkable how closely these accusations by a French pope resemble the accusations which, a few years before, had been brought against Pope Boniface VIII and against Bishop Guichard. In 1320 eight Ghibelline lords of Recanati, in the March of Ancona, were summoned to appear before an inquisitor on the grounds that they kept an idol containing a demon, who advised them in all their doings, and whom they worshipped in return.⁽²⁹⁾