Year 1300 is the year of Jubilee and of universal forgiveness, but not for everybody.
Not for Gherardino Segalello, who is burnt on the stake in Parma.
Gherardino had given birth to the movement of “Apostolic Brothers” after that, around 1260, his request to be admitted in the Franciscan Friar Minor monastery in Parma had been refused. Then he decides to sell his house and his garden and give his money to the poor, thus starting a new live based on essential concepts: the imitation of Jesus Christ, that is, going naked after Jesus naked, the refusal of every possession, therefore the absolute poverty and a wandering life supported by alms only, with the understanding that it was the only possible way to rightly interpret the Gospel. Many people start following Gherardino, and even if he will always refuse to be considered their leader the popular consent keeps increasing.  A skilful predicator in his simplicity, he draws more and more adepts who are stripped of their clothes and wear a white tunic, their only possession. Some of them even refuse alms and bread which cannot be immediately eaten. Gherardino even shows himself publicly stuck to a women’s bosom as if he was a breast-fed baby, to symbolize the rebirth of the Christian spirit in a new age of purity. Even children are allowed to predicate in churches.
The message of his Apostles, also known as Minims to differentiate them from Franciscan Friar Minors, and his forms of predication are more and more successful, and the popular adhesion is so strong that people quit catholic rituals to attend the Apostle predications.
Gherardino also sends several Apostles to far lands to bring his message there.
The Church cannot stand this anymore and, in 1300, Gherardino is arrested together with some of his apostles, who are burnt on the stake as heretics. Nevertheless, his death does not mark the end of his apostolic movement, but the beginning of a totally original and far-reaching story of the Italian Middle Ages. Among the many ones who had come to Emilia to join the apostolic movement there is a man, born in a small town in the province of Novara, who immediately takes on a leading role: it is Dolcino. Meanwhile the community, under the Inquisition pressure, moves from Emilia to Trentino, where they are hosted by friends and fellows of theirs. But the repression reaches them also there, where three apostles are burnt on the stake.
Around 1303 Dolcino, together with his most devote apostles, takes a long journey which will take them near Chiavenna, in Valsesia, where a village called Campodolcino still exists. Among the women in the group there is Margherita di Trento, of noble origins and Dolcino’s partner.
But since a long time Valsesia had been fighting against the earls of Biandrate, great feudal lords, and against the communes of Novara and Vercelli.
When the group of apostles reaches Gattinara and Serravalle the popular welcome is enthusiastic, but the bishops of Vercelli and Novara, in accordance with the pope, see their arrival as a real threat, so they promote an actual crusade to vanquish those “sons of the Devil”.
A real army, also including the most skilful crossbowmen, the Genoese, is recruited to put an end to it once for all. The apostles join the rebel of Valsesia and decide do defend themselves. In 1304 a veritable guerrilla warfare begins. The Dolcinites go as far as the upper valley and, on the mount called Parete Calva, with the help of the local dwellers they found a downright heretic “commune”.
The crusaders besiege the mount, where the rebels had barricaded themselves, and bloody battles follow one another. Then winter comes, and it is a terrible one for the rebels, who live in desperate conditions till one day, led by Margherita through a passage among metres of snow nowadays called “Varco della Monaca” (The Way of the Nun”), they manage to escape in the area of Biella. Here they stop, ready for the defence, on a mount ever since called Monte dei Ribelli (Mount of the Rebels) or Rubello. But the crusaders get ready for another siege. The Dolcinites have no strength left and the last assault turns into a carnage: nearly 800 rebels are killed on the spot, while Dolcino, his lieutenant Longino Cattaneo and Margherita are taken alive.  Margherita and Longino will be burnt on the stake in the city of Biella; Margherita will refuse to abjure and turn away some marriage proposals by local noblemen which would have saved her from the stake. She will remain devote to her partner till her death. Dolcino is forced to watch her woman’s execution and then taken to Vercelli on a cart to be burnt on the stake.
During the journey he is tortured but never complains, not eve when his nose is cut off and he is castrated. In 1307, the justice of God will mean the stake for him too. Other Dolcinites will exist after him, we know about them till 1374.