Arnold of Brescia

Arnold of Brescia
Monument to Arnold of Brescia in Brescia, Italy (1882).
Bornc. 1090
DiedJune 1155 (aged 64–65)
Cause of deathExecution by hanging
NationalityItalian
OccupationCanon regular
MovementProto-Protestantism

Arnold of Brescia (c. 1090 – June 1155), also known as Arnaldus (Italian: Arnaldo da Brescia), was an Italian canon regular from Lombardy,[1] who called on the Church to renounce property-ownership and participated in the failed Commune of Rome of 1144–1193.

Exiled at least three times and eventually arrested, Arnold was hanged by the papacy; his remains were burned posthumously and the ashes thrown into the River Tiber. Though he failed as a religious reformer and a political leader,[2] his teachings on apostolic poverty gained currency after his death among "Arnoldists" and more widely among Waldensians and the Spiritual Franciscans, though no written word of his has survived the official condemnation.[3] Protestants rank him among the precursors of the Reformation.[4][5]

  1. ^ Niccolini, Giovanni Battista (1846). Arnold of Brescia: a tragedy. London.
  2. ^ Greenaway 1931:162.
  3. ^ The only surviving sources for Arnold's life are Otto of Freising and a chapter in John of Salisbury's Historia Pontificalis.
  4. ^ Rosalind B. Brooke. The Coming of the Friars (1974) sets Arnold in the broader intellectual history that culminated in the thirteenth-century institutions of the mendicant friars.
  5. ^ Foxe's Book of Martyrs lists him as a martyr: http://www.ccel.org/f/foxe/martyrs/fox106.htm