SEGARELLI (SEGALELLI), GERARDO. — Around 1260 in Parma, he initiated the heretical movement known as the Apostles and "Apostolissae Christi" (= Fratres and Sorores Apostolorum), which was continued and organized by Fra Dolcino (q.v.); he died at the stake on 18 July 1300.
The young Segarelli, naive and fanatical, was refused admission to the Franciscans in Parma. He then took up an ascetic life on his own, in the Franciscan manner and coinciding with the beginning of the third Joachimite age of the Holy Spirit, popularized by the Spirituals (q.v.).
Segarelli dreamed of restoring evangelical and apostolic life; following the iconography of the Apostles, he wore a rough tunic and a white mantle, girded with a rope, with long beard and flowing hair, and sandals on his bare feet. He sold his house and distributed the money to children, lived as a wanderer, preaching penance and proclaiming gospel verses. He gathered followers, men and women, and enjoyed the benevolence of the civic authorities and Bishop Obizzo Sanvitale. He clothed his adherents in apostolic garb and sent them out into the world; they lived on daily alms, recited prayers, sang religious hymns, and exhorted others to evangelical life. Segarelli neither knew how nor wished to give the movement a fixed structure; indeed, he conceived it in a spirit of freedom, without rule, without hierarchy, with only the inner, spiritual bond of obedience to God; without vows, not even of chastity, with unchecked association of the sexes; instead of formal dwellings with regulated churches and worship, he substituted free devotional wandering, often idle and frequently dissolute; even oaths were not considered binding. Added to this was the claim to reconstitute the true spiritual Church of the Apostles, in opposition to the carnal and “adulterated” Church of Rome.
Bishop Obizzo imprisoned Segarelli for his growing oddities and vulgarities, then kept him under benevolent surveillance, considering him harmless. The moral and heretical degeneration of the pseudo-apostles provoked explicit condemnations by Honorius IV (11 March 1286), Nicholas IV (7 March 1290), and repressive action by the inquisitors. These convinced Segarelli of heresy, and in 1294 the bishop condemned him to perpetual imprisonment; four of his followers were burned by the commune. Six years later the Dominican inquisitor Manfredo of Parma found Segarelli relapsed, and he was handed over to the secular arm.