DOLCINO, fra'. — Heretic native to the Novarese who placed himself at the head of the Apostolic sect after Gerardo Segalelli, its recent founder, was burned at the stake at Parma in 1300.
It was in fact in August of that year that he issued a letter or proclamation in which he asserted that the Congregation of the Apostolics was entirely spiritual, with its own way of life and without any bond of external obedience, but interior obedience alone, established by God in the last times for the salvation of souls; its adversaries and ministers of the devil were the secular clergy, together with many among the people and the powerful, and with them all religious, especially the Franciscans and Dominicans; he distinguished four ages in the world and four successive states in the Church from Christ to the end of the world. He then prophesied the events that were to follow during the next three years, and in particular that Federico d'Aragona, king of Sicily, was to become emperor, create new kings, and put Boniface VIII to death. When these prophecies failed to come true, fra' D., in December 1303, published a new letter in which he proclaimed himself head of his sect, which comprised more than 4,000 followers from every part of Italy, subject to and united with one another solely by a bond of interior obedience.
He spread his doctrines in the valleys of Trentino, where Margherita, who remained his faithful companion to the end, joined him; he then went to Valsesia and, taking advantage of the country’s political and religious divisions, fortified himself together with his fanatical followers on Monte Revello, resisting the combined forces of the bishops of Vercelli and Novara and even those of the marquis of Monferrato. Clement V proclaimed a crusade against him in 1305 and had three condemnatory bulls issued in August 1306. Finally, on 23 March 1307, he was captured through starvation together with Margherita and six of his most faithful followers, and sent to execution with them. The sect, however, into which Cathar and Waldensian errors had flowed, especially those of the Italian branch, with communist tendencies and abhorrence of oaths and of every ecclesiastical and civil authority, was not immediately and entirely extinguished, and traces of it are still found here and there in the first half of the fifteenth century.