by W. E. Gutman
Night in the Middle Ages is neither longer nor shorter than it’s ever been but it’s infinitely darker, filled with impenetrable shadows, and few venture into the sulfurous chasm for there, under a thick mantle of ignorance, superstition and aberrant beliefs, dwell in untold numbers the loathsome incarnations of man’s most hideous fears. Fear of the unknown. Fear of change. Fear of observable truth. Fear of witches, demons, ravenous incubi and insatiable succubi. Fear of temptation. Fear of God’s pitiless tribunal. Fear of Hades and Satan. Fear of sin and eternal damnation.
As day slowly blanches away the blackness, only the sky dares to brighten. The monstrous visions that populate night retreat for a while but they do not vanish. They return at a time of their own choosing. Day scatters the gloom but it sheds no light. It’s just an optical illusion, a hesitant and fleeting sensation on the retina, not a higher state of consciousness or wisdom. It is in the full blaze of sunlight that the real horror resumes, this time inflicted upon the flesh, not dreamed; branded on the soul, not imagined. The nightmare is real, fed by a collective hallucination that will bloody the pages of history for the next four hundred years.
In 1314, charged with heresy, Jacques de Molay, the last Grand Master of the Knights Templar is burned at the stake on orders of Pope Clement V, King Philip IV’s all-too-obliging yes-man.
“Damned,” “accursed,” “banned,” are Spanish epithets reserved for Marranos, the crypto-Jews of the Iberian Peninsula who, by coercion or out of pragmatism, convert to Christianity in the aftermath of the pogroms of 1391. These “conversos,” as they are also called, number more than 100,000. With them the history of the Jews enters a new phase. Hatred of the Jews sparks the introduction of the Inquisition in Spain and hastens their mass expulsion from the Iberian Peninsula.
The Marranos and their descendants are divided into three groups. Some are indifferent to Judaism or any other religion; they welcome the opportunity to trade oppression for the lucrative careers and life of ease opened to them as Christians. The phenomenon inspires the bitter quip, “Conversion is an ignominy of which only Jews are capable….” Others cherish the Jewish faith, preserve traditions and secretly attend synagogue. Others yet, by far the largest in numbers, yield to circumstances, posture as Catholics but remain Jews in their home life and religious rituals.
Incited by the Catholic clergy, Marranos, many among them cultured and affluent, arouse the envy and hatred of the populace. They are routinely hounded and mistreated. The first in a series of riots against them breaks out in Toledo in 1449 and is accompanied by murder and pillage. Prompted by two priests, the mob plunders and burns scores of homes. Another attack takes place in Toledo in July 1467. Some 1,600 houses are consumed. Many Marranos perish in the flames or are slain, some by hanging.
Six years later, emulating Toledo, Córdoba erupts in a conflict pitting Christians and Marranos. On March 14, 1473, during a religious procession, a young girl inadvertently spills the contents of a chamber pot from her window, splashing an image of the Virgin Mary. Outraged, thousands join in a strident call for revenge. The mob pounces on the Marranos, accusing them of heresy, killing them and burning their houses. Girls are raped. Men, women, and children are put through the sword. The massacre and pillage lasts three days and nights. To prevent the repetition of such excesses, Marranos are expelled from Córdoba.
Attacks on Marranos spread to other cities, where they are killed, their houses ransacked and their possessions purloined.
The advent of the Inquisition is followed by an edict forcing Jews to retreat to their ghettoes. Issued by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella “the Catholic,” the edict lays the groundwork for the deportation and exile of the Jews from the country. The decree of expulsion materially increases the number, already large, of those who purchase freedom in their beloved homeland by accepting baptism.
More obsessive than the Spaniards’, the hatred of the Portuguese toward the Jews, which had long smoldered, turns to violence in Lisbon. On April 17, 1506, a Dominican priest rouses the populace and, crucifix in hand, strolls through the streets of the city, crying “Heresy!” and calling upon the people to exterminate the Marranos. More than 500 Marranos are massacred and incinerated on the first day. The innocent victims of popular fury, young and old, living and dead, are dragged from their houses and thrown pell-mell upon the pyre. By the second day, at least 2,000 Marranos perish.
In 1562, foreshadowing Kristallnacht and the ensuing genocide nearly four centuries later, and to facilitate the planned slaughter of more Marranos, high-ranking Church officials decree that they be required to wear special badges and confined to the ghettoes. The yellow star patch and crude tattoos would come later.
Under constant threat of persecution, destitution and death, the Marranos take flight. Many emigrate. Some go to Italy. Others settle in France, Flanders and The Netherlands. Others yet flee as far east as Greece, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey and the Levant.
Large numbers of Marranos, however, stay put. Many in Madrid, conscious of their Jewish heritage, are well disposed toward the Jews. Some, like Manuel Albeniz, patronize La Escudilla, a popular kosher restaurant.
Accused by the church of being a relapsed heretic at a farcical trial engineered to placate the English Court, Joan of Arc is burned at the stake in 1431. Her ashes are dumped in the Seine. A retrial 25 years later establishes her innocence and she is declared a martyr. It will take nearly 500 years before she is “beatified,” a status that entitles the faithful to seek the intervention of a dead person in their private affairs. Eleven years later she is canonized a saint and granted a permanent seat in heaven.
In 1468 the Flemish city of Ghent is sacked and the first documented Church-mandated tortures and executions take place, “to fight the Devil’s work.”
Alain de la Roche, a French Dominican priest, writes and illustrates an “authoritative” treatise on the creatures, some real, others skillfully improvised, that personify “sin.” The demented tract is promptly endorsed by the Church and circulated among high-ranking prelates.
In 1481, the “Holy” Inquisition, under the bestial tutelage of Tomas de Torquemada -- himself the grandson of a “converso” -- and acting on behalf of the king and queen, engages in wholesale persecution, torture, murder and expropriations masterminded to purge Spain of the Jews and to enrich the Church.
Six years later, backed by a papal bull (edict) the German inquisitor Heinrich Kramer publishes the Malleus Maleficarum, or Witches’ Hammer, a manual that “ascertains the existence” of witchcraft. Challenging and chastising skeptics, the Malleus offers “evidence” that witches are more often women than men. It trains inquisitors to identify them, describes the physical characteristics of the “possessed” and teaches their tormentors the essential methods (think “enhanced interrogation techniques,” -- including water-boarding) most effective against a long list of imaginary transgressions. A latter-day variation on the theme, phrenology, a thoroughly discredited late 18th century pseudoscience based on the false assumption that mental faculties (or the lack thereof) can be identified by palpation of the skull, would unfairly brand certain people morons, criminals and perverts -- labels that better describe the practitioners of this quackery than their unwitting subjects.
Repression escalates and spreads like wildfire.
Jews are expelled from Spain. In Portugal they are forced to convert to Christianity -- or else. So are the Moors. The persecution continues under the reign of King Philip II and Pope Clement VIII. Openly anti-Semitic, the pontiff links Jews with usury -- the only occupation they are legally entitled to pursue, not with their own money but with funds supplied to them and controlled by an elite of rich, non-Jewish trades people.
Barely concluded, the One Hundred Year War stokes the political and religious discord that cleaves France and England. It will take nearly four centuries for the enmity to cease.
The plague, cholera and a host of venereal diseases erupt, claiming thousands in their wake. The Jews
are blamed for spreading these scourges.
Religious frictions, awakened by isolated efforts to breathe fresh air into the Church and resisted by those who aspire to dogmatize it further, threaten to destroy the very fabric of Christianity
Members of a Calvinist sect in Northern Italy are nearly exterminated by the Armies of French king Francis I in a campaign billed as a “crusade against religious perversion.”
In 1497, Girolamo Savonarola, book-burner and self-styled moralizer and prior of St. Mark’s convent in Italy, is excommunicated by Pope Alexander VI. A year later he is roasted alive in the public square where the Bonfire of the Vanities had once blazed. His crime: he preaches against narcissism and the unbridled moral turpitude of the clergy.
Charged with heresy -- endorsing and promoting the Copernican theory that the Sun, not the Earth is the center of our solar system -- Italian philosopher and pantheist Giordano Bruno is expelled from the Dominican Order in 1576. He aggravates his case by arguing that the physical universe is infinite and asserting that human beings are not unique because the presence of life, even that of rational beings, may not be confined to planet Earth. He signs his death warrant when he affirms that absolute knowledge is a myth and that there are no limits to the advancement of learning. He is burned alive. [In 2000, on the quadricentennial commemoration of his execution, the Vatican issues a statement, troubling in its ambiguity and cynicism, insisting that Bruno’s death was “a sad episode of Christian history” but that his writings were “incompatible with Christian thinking and he remains a heretic.”]
Luther, the firebrand reformer, drives a wedge that irreparably widens the abyss dividing Christians and alters the course of western civilization. His ferocious anti-Semitism, his venomous tracts provide the template for the modern hatred of the Jews. His last vituperations, three days before his death, call for the expulsion of all Jews from Germany.
Heresy is defined as opinion or doctrine that sharply contrasts with orthodox religious principles or, as historian David Christie-Murray observes,
“an opinion held by a minority of men which the majority declares is unacceptable and, therefore, strong enough to punish.”
Contemporary forms of deviation from “declared” majority opinion are variously called “treason,” “subversion,” “civil disobedience,” and “sedition.”
In a world dominated by darkness, not everyone wants to see the light. Still, it is the very nature of light, however feeble or tentative, to seek an aperture through which it can escape. And even during these murky, cruel times when blind faith smothers sanity and obscures reason, faint streams of clarity emerge and signal a tardy rebirth, a slow and hesitating cleansing from the madness.
Alive in the uncommon man is the urge and promise of self-knowledge and an intuitive commitment to the rational exploration of the universe around him. This is no easy task, in any epoch, least of all in the Middle Ages when unsupported opinions and unchallenged convictions overshadow knowledge, when ideological rigidity stifles inquiry and the psyche is forever held prisoner by monsters of its own making. It is the desire to free the soul from its shackles and to elevate it to higher spheres of intellect that arms the nascent freethinker with the courage to probe beyond the limits of mass myopia. While new ideas are heresy to the blinkered, they are glimpses of exhilarating and perilous truth to the enlightened who spurn religious authority, resist the tyranny of forced ideas, favor scientific scrutiny and advocate rational discourse. Such profanation of canon law is swiftly and harshly frustrated by the Church. From Saint Peter to recent history, and while proclaiming its God-given authority over mere mortals, the papacy exhibits a propensity for corruption, deceit, murder, torture, rape, pedophilia, incest and prostitution that diverts attention from and weakens the early triumphs of tolerance, individualism and non-conformity.
It all begins, like many conquests, with a single proclamation by a self--promoting egomaniac leveled at simple-minded, humble peons craving for a better morrow.
“As he was going along by the Sea of Galilee, He saw Simon Peter and Andrew, the brother of Simon, casting a net in the sea, for they were fishermen.
“And Jesus said to them, “Follow me and I will make you become fishers of men.”
“And they immediately abandoned their nets and followed Him.”
Peter is hailed as the first of twelve disciples. And thus, near the Mediterranean port of Caesarea, according to Matthew’s narrative, written 90 years after the death of Jesus, and Mark’s anonymous and paradoxical account of events, are uttered the words that launched the Church, made Simon (called Peter) the first pope and kindled the early fires of anti-Semitism.
The first thirteen popes bridge a period that extends to the year 190 of the Christian Era. In other words, an average of 4.4 men per year are elevated to the Church’s highest rung during that time. The turnover rate is four times higher than that of the busiest whorehouse in Rome. From the beginning, popes establish criteria for admittance to Christianity. These norms, which, in defiance of Jesus’ universalist teachings, exclude “apostates,” and other “undesirables,” are quickly politicized and incorporated by force into the civil codes of the ruling lay elite. In effect, the state has the power, which it uses without scruple, to prosecute and punish what the Church considers crimes against the state … and Christianity.
From the beginning, the clergy and the Catholicized nobility commit horrific acts of violence. A papal election is always preceded or followed by fist-fights and worse. Careerists and upstarts clash with fanatics and fundamentalists. What follows are the extravagances, entrenched mediocrity, inertia and sleaze, the criminal neutrality and eager connivances, the decadence and the scandals that would sully the Church and give religion the bad name it continues to earn.
Popes, Pimps, Prostitutes
Pope Nicholas V issues a papal bull granting the King of Portugal the right to reduce “Saracens, pagans and other unbelievers” to hereditary slavery, and to kill them if they resist.
Urban II grants “remission of all their sins” to those undertaking “a military enterprise” designed “to liberate eastern churches [those established in the ‘Holy Land’] from heretics” -- the Jews and Muslims.
Callixtus III bans all interaction between Christians and Jews not designed to dispossess the Jews.
Aloof, inaccessible, given to fits of weeping, utterly inept in statecraft, lacking distinction and achieving nothing of consequence for Italy or Christendom, Paul II delights at the sight of naked men being racked and tortured and displays an extravagant love of personal splendor that gratifies his overblown sense of self-worth.
Sixtus IV, a champion of the Spanish Inquisition, sires six illegitimate sons, one the fruit of an incestuous affair with his own sister.
Innocent VIII instigates severe measures against “magicians and witches.” He confirms Torquemada as Grand Inquisitor of Spain. His reign will be known as the Golden Age of Bastards.
Julius II obtains the pontificate by fraud and bribery.
Pius II writes erotic novels. He showers praise on the Prince of Walachia, the notorious Vlad the Impaler (Dracula) who shish-kebabs his enemies and fickle friends alike. The pope fathers about twelve illegitimate children.
Leo X is a shopaholic. He finances his spending sprees by selling indulgences, a racket that grants, for a fee, full or partial remission of temporal punishment for sins already forgiven. Under his pontificate, Christianity assumes a pagan character.
Alexander VI, the notorious Mr. Borgia, is without a doubt the most evil and corrupt pope in history. He becomes a byword for the depraved standards of the papacy. He finagles his way to St. Peter's by making cardinals out of crooked cronies so they could vote for him. He also appoints his son, Cesare, and the teenage brother of his mistress cardinals. Being the “Holy Father” does not prevent Mr. Borgia from engaging in an active sex life, engineering the murder of his rivals, indulging in orgies and siring seven children. To help “build alliances,�
�� he forces his daughter Lucrezia into three miserable unions. Her fourth marriage, to a man she does not dislike, ends in tragedy when the alliance goes sour and the pontiff orders him stabbed to death. Mr. Borgia encourages the slave trade in “conquered” lands in the “Indies,” to facilitate conversions to Christianity. He dies of syphilis.
Paul III creates the Congregation of the Holy Office of the Inquisition. His rationale:
“Punishment does not take place primarily and per se for the correction and good of the person punished, but for the public good in order that others may become terrified and weaned away from the evils they would commit.”
The thought police is born. In 1908, the name of the agency is changed to The Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office. It is again rechristened in 1965 as The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Cardinal Joseph Alois Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, serves as Prefect of that all-powerful body, whose chief mission is to safeguard and promote Catholic doctrine, faith and ethics throughout the world. The new Inquisition professes a similar objective. It is a permanent institution of the Catholic Church. It justifies or casts a blind eye on unspeakable crimes in its frenetic crusade against heresy. Led by a Byzantine central bureaucracy, the Vatican responds to any deviation from its edicts with swift and wrathful retribution. Adding cynicism to unspeakable obtuseness, it continues to preach that political necessity is at the root of the Inquisition, past and present.
No doubt aroused by their sensuality, Pope Paul IV orders exquisite nudes painted by Michelangelo on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel to be covered up.
Pope Innocent X, in yet another campaign of prudery, has a charming newborn Jesus painted by Guercino wrapped with a shirt.