Gerardo Segarelli as the Anti-Francis: Mendicant Rivalry and Heresy in Medieval Italy, 1260–1300

Abstract

Scholars generally associate the Order of Apostles, founded around 1260 by Gerardo Segarelli in Parma, Italy, with medieval heresies. This article analyses the leading source for the first three decades of the Apostles, the chronicle of the Franciscan Salimbene de Adam of Parma, and casts Segarelli and the Apostle friars instead as thirteenth-century mendicants who rivalled the Franciscans in the Emilia, the Romagna and the March of Ancona. Salimbene's depiction of Gerardo Segarelli focuses on the chronicler's desire to recreate his rival as an inversion of Francis of Assisi and Franciscan ideals. Gerardo Segarelli emerges in the account as an anti-Francis. Yet only after 1274, when the Second Council of Lyons ordered a general suppression of all religious movements founded after Fourth Lateran in 1215, did the situation change slowly for Segarelli's followers as opponents began to question their obedience to papal authority. Gerardo Segarelli and the Apostle friars ultimately faced condemnation as heretics, but not before the 1290s. Salimbene's chronicle, written in the 1280s, should not be taken as a source for a ‘Segarellian heresy’ launched by a ‘heresiarch’ in the Joachite year 1260, but as a source for mendicant rivalry in the thirteenth century that was deeply passionate in its rhetoric and invective.