Peter of Verona

Life and Ministry

Peter was born at Verona in AD 1206 into a Cathar (Albigensian) family — both his parents and his uncle were members of the dualist heretical movement then widespread in northern Italy — and was given the rare experience of growing up inside the very system he would later spend his life resisting. He was educated at the University of Bologna, where in AD 1221 he met Dominic of Caleruega and entered the new Order of Preachers in the first generation. He preached against the Cathar heresy across Lombardy for almost thirty years, gathering Catholic confraternities of laymen (the Societates Fidei) for armed defense of Catholic communities against Cathar reprisals, and serving from AD 1251 as papal inquisitor for the dioceses of Milan and Como.

Circumstances of Death

On 6 April AD 1252, traveling on foot with a companion Dominican named Brother Domenico from Como toward Milan, Peter was ambushed by two paid assassins in the forest near Barlassina. The hire had been arranged by a group of Cathar nobles in Milan who saw Peter as their most dangerous opponent; the principal assassin, Carino of Balsamo, was paid forty Milanese lire. He struck Peter from behind with a falcastrum (a billhook-like weapon), splitting his skull. Peter, mortally wounded, is reported by the eyewitness Brother Domenico (who was killed a few minutes later) to have begun reciting the Apostles' Creed and to have written in his own blood on the ground the word Credo before he died. He was forty-six. Carino was caught, repented, and entered the Dominican order at Forlì.

Legacy

Peter was canonized in AD 1253, the fastest canonization in papal history — one year and one month after his death. His Credo written in blood became the most famous iconographic motif of the order, depicted by Fra Angelico, Bellini, Titian, and the great Dominican painters. The case of Peter of Verona is the case of a man born inside the heresy who turned against it, lived under threat for it, and finally died at the hands of his original community, in the act of confessing the same Creed he had grown up hearing his parents deny. His witness is contested in modern judgment — his role as inquisitor sits uneasily — but the historical man's death was a true martyr's: he died refusing to recant the Creed, with the Creed on his lips and under his hand, written in his own blood.