A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages; volume IILea, Henry Charles
History
A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages; volume II
Lea, Henry Charles
Inquisition -- History
but scarce had Coloman and his crusaders left the land when his work was
undone and heresy was as vigorous as ever. In 1240 Ninoslav appears
again as Ban, visiting Ragusa with a splendid retinue to renew the old
treaty of trade and alliance. King Bela’s energies, in fact, were just
then turned in another direction, for Assan, the Bulgarian prince, had
declared in favor of the Greeks; his people therefore were denounced as
heretics and schismatics, and Bela was stimulated to undertake a crusade
against him, for which, as usual, Holy Land indulgences were promised.
It was hard to make head at once against so many enemies of the faith,
and in the confusion the Cathari of Bosnia had a respite. Still more
important for them as a preventive of persecution was the Tartar
invasion which, in 1241, reduced Hungary to a desert. In the bloody day
of Flusse Sajo the Hungarian army was destroyed, Bela barely escaped
with his life, and Coloman was slain. The respite was but temporary,
however, for in 1244 Bela again overran Bosnia. Ninoslav made his peace
and the heretics were persecuted, until 1246, when Hungary was involved
in war with Austria, and promptly they rose again with Ninoslav at their
head.[331]
All these endeavors to diffuse the blessings of Christianity had not
been made without bloodshed. We have few details of these obscure
struggles in a land little removed from barbarism, but there is one
document extant which shows that the Albigensian crusades, with all
their horrors, had been repeated to no purpose. In 1247 Innocent IV., in
making over the see of Bosnia to the Archbishop of Kalocsa, alludes to
the labors performed by him and his predecessors in the effort to redeem
it from heresy. They had meritoriously devastated the greater part of
the land; they had carried away into captivity many thousands of
heretics, with great effusion of blood, and no little slaughter of their
own men and waste of their substance. In spite of these sacrifices, as
the churches and castles which they had built were not strong enough to
resist siege, the land could not be retained in the faith; it had wholly
relapsed into heresy, and there was no hope of its voluntary redemption.
The church of Kalocsa had been thoroughly exhausted, and it was now
rewarded by placing the recalcitrant region under its jurisdiction, in
the expectation that some future crusade might be more fortunate.
Innocent IV. had, a few months earlier, ordered Bela to undertake a
decisive struggle with the Cathari, but Ninoslav appealed to him,
protesting that he had been since his conversion a faithful son of the
Church, and had only accepted the aid of the heretics because it was
necessary to preserve the independence of the Banate. Moved by this,
Innocent instructed the Archbishop of Kalocsa to abstain from further
persecution. He ordered an investigation into the faith and actions of
Ninoslav, and gave permission to use the Glagolitic writing and the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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