Note 346 — Chapter IX · CHRISTENDOM IN THE MIDDLE AGES

In the year 1260, when, according to the “Eternal Gospel,” the new dispensation of the Holy Spirit was to begin, there was an immense excitement in northern Italy, marked by the outbreak of the order of Flagellants, self-scourgers, whose hysteria spread to other lands. Gherardo Segarelli, a youth of Parma, came forward as a new Christ, had himself circumcised, swaddled, cradled, and suckled;346 and proceeded to found a new order of “Apostolicals,” after the manner of a sect of the previous century, known by the same name, who professed to return to primitive simplicity and to chastity, and reproduced what they supposed to be the morals of the early Church, including the profession of ascetic cohabitation.347 Some of their missionaries got as far as Germany; but Segarelli was caught, imprisoned, reduced to the status of a bishop’s jester, and at length, after saving his life for a time by abjuration, burned at Parma, in the year 1300.