Folia Theologica et Canonica 10. 32/24 (2021)
Ius canonicum
CRIMINAL JURISDICTION OF MEDIEVAL HOLY SEES 143 this practice, the murderer owed a certain amount to the kinship8, to whom he also had to apologize publicly at the time of the funeral; as an additional punishment, he sometimes had to take a pilgrimage to Rome or Aachen, bear the cost of the funeral, make a gracious donation to the church (give a wax candle of at least a certain size), and in almost all cases set up a stone cross at the crime scene.9 3. Salzburg A striking feature of the penal legislation of the Archbishop of Salzburg, which differs from all other Bavarian ecclesiastical courts, is that they dealt with virtually all kinds of facts. However, there was a very simple reason for this: the archbishop of Salzburg was not only a metropolitan but also a provincial lord, so he could not rigidly refrain from criminal justice. The most peculiar field of ecclesiastical criminal justice was jurisdiction in the protection of the Christian religion. This included the church as an organization, but of course the abstract values of faith and the morals inextricably linked to it also enjoyed the protection of canon law. In addition to crimes against faith, special attention was paid to violators of church discipline, and the interests of the church were vigilantly guarded in all areas of life and justice. Protecting the integrity of the Catholic Christian faith was perhaps the most important task of the medieval church, and the representatives of heresies usually faced (bonfire) death. The death sentence was, of course, not carried out by the church but by secular power (brachium saeculare). At the 1340 Salzburg Provincial Council, a certain Rudolf presbyter was indicted; he was found to have shed the blood of Christ in the Salzburg Cathedral, and he confessed that he could be saved without Jewish or pagan baptism, and finally denied the true presence of Christ in the sacrament of the altar. Stubbornly persisting in his views, Archbishop Heinrich, in the presence of Bishops Ruthmar of Seckau and Chunrad Chiemsee, deprived him of his ecclesiastical nature (degradatio) and handed it over to secular power to finish him: “(•••) cum nollet resipiscere, per Henricum, episcopum Salcburgensem (...) et aliis praelatis praesentibus degradatus, saeculari potestati traditur et crematur.” Converts who had been converted to the Christian faith but also returned to the Jewish religion were also threatened with the death penalty, although the sentence was not always carried out. In one such case (1421) the Holy See 8 According to the Bavarian Code of Law cited above: “If a man kills a free man, he shall ransom his relatives (...) twice eighty, that is, one hundred and sixty solidus.”; cf. Nótári, T., The Early Medieval Bavarian Legal System, 347, 28 points. 9 Such stone crosses can still be seen today, for example in a small forest east of Unterhöhberg; cf. Rőttel, K., Das Hochstift Eichstätt, Ingolstadt 1987. 63-64.
