Moral Reform and Peacemaking

Abstract

In his letter to King Fernando about Vincent Ferrer’s imminent voyage to the Balearics, the bishop of Mallorca stated why he wanted the Dominican to visit his diocese: Vincent’s preaching, teaching, and good works would lead to moral reform.¹ When Fernando wrote to Vincent and asked him to come to Barcelona, he gave the same reason: the friar’s preaching would eradicate vice and change behavior for the better.² When Orihuela’s jurats wrote to Vincent and requested his presence, they, too, cited the need for moral reform. All those who heard the friar’s sermons “left the road of perversity and evil” and then took the road of God and Jesus Christ; because Orihuela and the land around it were “very vicious, abounding in malice, such that people practice divination (creure en señals) and all other vices,” it needed his preaching.³ In thanking the bishop of Cartagena for inviting Vincent to the Kingdom of Murcia, Orihuela’s magistrates claimed that Vincent’s preaching had inspired the residents of Oriheula and of other places to start observing the Christian Sabbath and to stop blaspheming, gaming and gambling with dice, and practicing magic. They also attributed the recent absence of plague to the moral improvement that Vincent had brought about.⁴ (Later, a royal official writing from Mallorca credited a much-needed rainstorm occurring three days after Vincent’s arrival, ending a drought, to the Dominican’s presence.⁵) Bishops, kings, and urban magistrates all believed in Vincent’s efficacy as a moral reformer who brought his listeners to abide by the moral precepts of Christianity.