Arnold of Brescia hanged

1155

The firebrand canon who had denounced clerical wealth and led a decade-long Roman republic was captured, hanged, burned, and his ashes thrown into the Tiber to prevent his followers collecting relics. Adrian IV and Barbarossa had briefly cooperated on something. Arnold's execution silenced the most radical voice of twelfth-century church reform, but his ideas about apostolic poverty lived on in movements the church would spend the next century trying to suppress.