A priest of the Alps
A Priest Who Left the Altar
Peter of Bruys left no writings, and no friend wrote his story. We know him through two opponents: Peter the Venerable, abbot of Cluny, who wrote a long treatise against his followers, and a brief notice by the philosopher Peter Abelard. Everything we can say about him passes through their hands.
He was perhaps from Bruis, a village in the Hautes-Alpes, and he had been a priest of the Roman church. Sometime between about 1112 and 1120 he began preaching in the Alpine dioceses of Embrun, Gap, and Die. When the bishops there drove him out, he went down into Provence and then west across the Rhône into Languedoc and Gascony. For about twenty years he gathered followers whom his enemies called Petrobrusians.
Loading the rest of this biography