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Those who dared defy the church and paid with their lives
6 stories
King Philip IV arrested the Knights Templar on Friday the 13th, 1307 — tortured their Grand Master into confessing heresy, then burned him alive when he recanted on the scaffold.
When asked how to tell Cathars from Catholics at Béziers, the papal legate answered: 'Kill them all — God will know his own.' Twenty thousand were massacred in a single day.
Giordano Bruno was burned alive in 1600 for arguing the stars were distant suns with inhabited planets — a claim every exoplanet discovery since 1995 has proven correct.
In 415 AD, a Christian mob tore the mathematician Hypatia apart with roofing tiles while she rode home through Alexandria — because she was advising the Roman governor against the Archbishop.
For 200 years, educated Europeans believed a woman had secretly ruled the Catholic Church as pope in the 800s — and included her officially in the list of popes carved into Siena Cathedral.
Sir Francis Dashwood turned a medieval abbey into a temple of aristocratic libertinism, where MPs, admirals, and Benjamin Franklin performed mock Catholic masses in monk's robes.