The Inquisition

by Michael Baigent

  With Simon's death, the crusaders’ army began to melt away and an uneasy peace descended on the ravaged region. It did not last long. In 1224, a new crusade against the south was launched, with King Louis VIII as military commander and the veteran fanatic Arnald-Amaury still presiding as ecclesiastical leader. Despite the French king's death in 1226, the campaign continued until, by 1229, the whole of the Languedoc had effectively been annexed by the French Crown. Further Cathar revolts against this new authority occurred in 1240 and 1242. On 16 March 1244, Montségur, the most important remaining Cathar stronghold, fell after a sustained siege, and more than 200 heretics were immolated on a pyre at the foot of the mountain on which the castle stood.

  Quéribus, the last Cathar fortress, fell eleven years later, in 1255. Only then did organised Cathar resistance finally cease. By this time, great numbers of surviving heretics had fled to Catalonia and Lombardy, where they established new communities. Even in the south of France, however, Catharism did not altogether die out. Many heretics simply blended into the local population and continued to embrace their creed and practise their rituals clandestinely. They remained active in the region for at least another half century, and during the first two decades of the fourteenth century there was a Cathar resurgence around the village of Montaillou in the French Pyrenees. By this time, however, an institution as sinister as any crusading army had been established to deal with the heretics.

  2

  Origins of the Inquisition

  While the military campaigns proceeded against Cathar fortresses and towns with large Cathar populations, another development was in progress. Though less obviously spectacular, less dramatic, less epic, it was to be of even greater importance to the history of Christendom, far transcending the immediate context of southern France in the thirteenth century. Its influence was to radiate out across the whole of the Christian world, to shape substantial aspects of Western history and culture, and to endure up to the present day.

  In the summer of 1206, a year and a halfbefore the Albigensian Crusade was first preached, the Bishop of Osma in northeastern Spain was passing through southern France on his way back from a visit to Rome. He was accompanied in his journey by one Dominic de Guzmán, sub-prior to the monks attached to the cathedral at Osma. The son of a minor Castilian noble, Dominic was some thirty-six years of age at the time. He had trained for ten years at the University of Palencia and was noted for his rhetorical skills, his aptitude in debate and disputation. Three years earlier, in 1203, he had made his first journey to France, and the threat posed by the Cathar heresy there had spurred him to righteous indignation.

  His indignation was intensified by his second visit. At Montpellier, he and his bishop met with the local Papal legates, who complained at length about the heresy ‘infecting’ the region. To combat the ‘infection’, Dominic and the bishop conceived an ambitious scheme. The bishop, however, was to die within the year, and the scheme was to be implemented by Dominic alone. If ‘credit’ is the appropriate word, he was to reap the credit for it.

  The Cathars successfully recruited their congregations in large part through itinerant preachers, who commanded respect through their learning, eloquence and theological knowledge. But they also commanded respect through their comportment – their obvious poverty and simplicity, their integrity and probity, their rigorous adherence to the kind of austerity traditionally associated with Jesus himself and his disciples. The Church could not compete in these recognised ‘Christian’ virtues. The upper echelons of the ecclesiastical hierarchy led lives whose opulence, luxury, sybaritic self-indulgence and shameless extravagance hardly conformed to any established Christian precedent. Local priests, on the other hand, although poor enough, were also appallingly ignorant and uneducated, capable of little more than performing Mass, and certainly unequipped to engage in theological debate. Monks remained restricted to their monasteries, where they engaged primarily in manual labour, religious offices or meditation. The few of them who did possess any aptitude for scholarship had no opportunity to transmit it to the world beyond their cloisters.

  Dominic undertook to rectify this situation and, as he conceived it, beat the Cathars at their own game. He proceeded to establish a proliferating network of itinerant monks, or friars – men who were not sequestered in abbey or monastery, but who wandered the roads and villages of the countryside. In contrast to Church dignitaries, Dominic's friars would travel barefoot and live simply and frugally, thus exemplifying the austerity and asceticism ascribed to the early Christians and the original Church fathers. What was more, Dominic's men would be educated, adept at scholarly debate, capable of engaging Cathar preachers or any others in ‘theological tournaments’. Their clothes might be plain and their feet bare, but they carried books with them. In the past, other clerical figures had advocated scholarship for its own sake, or for the preservation and monopolisation of knowledge by Rome. Dominic became the first individual in Church history to advocate scholarship as an integral aid and tool for preaching.

  During the canonisation process following his death, depositions were taken and compiled from those who had known him personally or witnessed him in action. From these, something of a portrait emerges. Dominic is described as a slender man who prayed almost incessantly through the night, often weeping as he did so. During the day, he would organise public events which enabled him to preach against the Cathars, and he would often burst into tears during a sermon. He hurled himself into the ascetic life and self-mortification with zest. When praying, he would often flail himself with an iron chain, which he wore around his legs. Day and night he lived in the same garb, a rough and coarse hair-shirt which was heavily patched. He never slept in a bed, only on the ground or on a board.

  At the same time, he was not without his own unique species of vanity. He seems to have been acutely conscious of his image as an ascetic, and was not above reinforcing it by some all-too-human, if rather unsaintly, prevarications and deceptions. On approaching an inn or roadside hostel where he proposed to spend the night, for example, he would pause first at a nearby spring or stream and drink his fill in private. Once inside the premises, he would augment his reputation for frugality and austerity by drinking almost nothing.

  As early as 1206 – during his journey through France with the Bishop of Osma and two years before the Albigensian Crusade was first preached – Dominic had founded a hospice at Prouille. Among the Papal legates he came to know was Pierre de Castelnau, whose murder in 1208 was to precipitate the crusade. A speech at Prouille ascribed to Dominic shortly after the outbreak of hostilities offers some indication of his mentality:

  I have sung words of sweetness to you for many years now, preaching, imploring, weeping. But as the people of my country say, where blessing is to no avail, the stick will prevail. Now we shall call forth against you leaders and prelates who, alas, will gather together against this country… and will cause many people to die by the sword, will ruin your towers, overthrow and destroy your walls and reduce you all to servitude… the force of the stick will prevail where sweetness and blessing have been able to accomplish nothing.1

  There are few specific details about Dominic's personal activities during the campaign against the Cathars. It seems clear, however, that he moved with the spearhead of the crusaders' army, operating with a warrant from the equally fanatical Papal legate Arnald-Amaury, Abbot of Cîteaux, who ordered the extermination of the entire population of Béziers on the grounds that ‘God will recognise His own’. Even the most apologetic of Dominic's biographers concede that he was often required to pass judgement on suspected Cathars, to convert them to the Church or – if the attempt to do so failed – consign them to the flames. He witnessed the burning of numerous heretics, and appears to have accommodated his conscience easily enough to their deaths.

  Not surprisingly, Dominic became a close personal friend, confidant and adviser of the crusade's ruthless military commander, Simon de Montfort, and accompanied him on his trail
of carnage and destruction. During part of 1213, when Simon was in residence at Carcassonne, Dominic served as assistant to the city's bishop. He is also believed to have attended the army at the Battle of Muret, where his preaching helped inspire Simon's soldiery to their defeat of the King of Aragón. In 1214, Simon conferred on Dominic the income from at least one freshly conquered town. Dominic also baptised Simon's daughter and officiated at the marriage of his elder son to a granddaughter of the King of France.

  By that time, Dominic's activities and his association with Simon had made him something of a celebrity among the crusaders. Thus, in 1214, wealthy Catholic citizens of Toulouse bestowed three houses (one of which still stands) on him and his embryonic order of friars. A year later, he abandoned his original intention of establishing his order at Carcassonne, apparently because of too much adverse, even overtly hostile criticism. Instead, he moved to Toulouse; and it was in the premises donated to him that the Dominican Order was founded, if only as yet unofficially.

  Later in 1215, Dominic travelled to Rome and attended the Fourth Lateran Council. At this council, Pope Innocent III echoed Dominic's insistence on the importance of theological study in any preaching of the faith. The Pope also endorsed the official establishment of the Dominican Order, but died before this could be implemented. In December of 1216, the Dominicans were formally established by the new pontiff, Honorius III.

  By 1217, the original Dominicans in Toulouse had provoked so much animosity that they were obliged to disperse. In doing so, they proceeded to install themselves in houses as far afield as Paris, Bologna and various localities in Spain. Teachers were now being actively recruited into the Order, and regulations were issued concerning study and the careful handling of books. Every Dominican house had its own teacher, at whose lectures attendance was compulsory. At the same time, the Dominicans pursued the activities that had so alienated them from the citizens of Carcassonne and then Toulouse – spying, denunciation and general intelligence gathering. In such activities as these, the Dominicans demonstrated their worth to the Church. Networks of itinerant friars, wandering the roads of the countryside, were uniquely suited to the gathering of information.

  In 1221, Dominic died of a fever at Bologna. He was just over fifty years of age and seems to have burned himself out through sheer expenditure of fanatical energy. The work he had inaugurated, however, continued apace. At the time of his death, there were already some twenty Dominican houses in France and Spain. Members of the Order were known not only for preaching, but for the active and aggressive study of theology. By 1224, at least 120 Dominicans were studying theology in Paris. By 1227, the Pope was beginning to call on them for aid in ‘the business of faith’. On specific commission of the pontiff, they became increasingly engaged in the ferreting out and hunting down of heretics, and their zeal in such activities made them ever more indispensable to the Church.

  In 1234, with what today might appear unseemly haste, Dominic was officially canonised. Few saints can have had so much blood on their hands. By the time Dominic ‘went to his reward’, whatever that may have been, his Order numbered nearly a hundred houses. The Dominicans functioned with an insistence on discipline and obedience such as might be associated with certain sects and cults today, and with similar effects on families. Once an individual entered the Order, he was lost thereafter to his relatives and to the world. On one occasion, according to hagiographic accounts, a noble Roman family attempted to reclaim their son from the Order's clutches. The young man was dispatched to another Dominican house, away from Rome. His family pursued him; and he had just crossed a river when they appeared on the opposite bank. At that point the river miraculously flooded, becoming swollen and impassable. The young man remained a Dominican.

  The Destruction of Heresy

  In 1233, one of Dominic's friends had acceded to the throne of Saint Peter as Pope Gregory IX. It was he who initiated the process that culminated a year later in Dominic's canonisation. At the same time, on 20 April 1233, the new pontiff issued a Bull that conferred on the Dominicans the specific task of eradicating heresy. Addressing his bishops, the Pope wrote:

  We, seeing you engrossed in the whirlwind of cares and scarce able to breathe in the pressure of overwhelming anxieties, think it well to divide your burdens that they may be more easily borne. We have therefore determined to send preaching friars against the heretics of France and the adjoining provinces, and we beg, warn, and exhort you, ordering you… to receive them kindly, and treat them well, giving them in this… aid, that they may fulfil their office.2

  Two days later; the Pope addressed a second Bull directly to the Dominicans:

  Therefore you… are empowered… to deprive clerks of their benefices forever, and to proceed against them and all others, without appeal, calling in the aid of the secular arm, if necessary.3

  The Pope went on to announce the establishment of a permanent tribunal to be staffed by Dominican brothers. Thus was the Inquisition effectively inaugurated. It became active a year later, in 1234, at Toulouse, where two official Inquisitors were appointed. It is interesting to note that their activities, according to the Papal Bull, were originally to be directed against ‘clerks’, or clergy – an indication of how many Roman ecclesiastics were in fact secret Cathar sympathisers.

  By virtue of the Pope's edict, Dominican Inquisitors were given legal authority to convict suspected heretics without any possibility of appeal – and thus, in effect, to pronounce summary death sentences. The burning of heretics was, of course, nothing new. Simon de Montfort and his army had cheerfully engaged in the practice since the beginning of the Albigensian Crusade in 1209. His actions, however, had been those of a ruthless military commander proceeding on his own initiative, imposing his version of martial law on conquered territory and dealing with his enemies as he saw fit. Now, with the Pope's blessing, the machinery for mass extermination was established on an official legal basis, with a formal sanction and mandate derived directly from the highest authority in Christendom.

  Inevitably, given the nature and scale of the administrative apparatus involved, there were hitches. Many clerics grudged the Dominicans their new power and displayed some degree of sympathy for the Cathars, if only on humanitarian rather than theological grounds. Not surprisingly, too, there was a confusion of authority between Inquisitors and local bishops. The Pope had claimed to be lightening the bishops' burden. In practice, he was implicitly divesting them of some of their ecclesiastical jurisdiction, and varying degrees of friction, even overt resentment, ensued. Some bishops insisted that their concurrence was required before heretics could be convicted. Some claimed a right to modify sentences. Some demanded inquisitorial powers of their own.

  During the course of the thirteenth century, jealousy and antagonism between Inquisitors and bishops were sometimes to become acute. In theory, the Inquisition's tribunals were supposed to be simply an addition to the bishops' tribunal. In practice, however, episcopal power was gradually being eroded. In 1248, a council was to threaten bishops with being locked out of their own churches unless they complied with sentences handed down by the Inquisition. In 1257, Pope Alexander IV made the Inquisition independent by removing the need for it to consult with the bishops. At last, in 1273, Pope Gregory X would order that Inquisitors should operate in conjunction with local bishops, sharing authority and jurisdiction; and this would gradually become the norm thereafter.

  For the first generation of Inquisitors, life was not always easy. It sometimes offered ample opportunity to exult in a sense of tribulation, and to glorify oneself accordingly. Guillaume Pelhisson, for example, was a native of Toulouse who joined the Dominicans around 1230 and became an Inquisitor in 1234, despite his relative youth. Before his death in 1268, he composed a manuscript recounting the activities of the Inquisition in Toulouse between 1230 and 1238. Some three-quarters of a century later, Bernard Gui – one of the most prominent and infamous of all Inquisitors, who figures saliently in Umberto Eco's novel, T
he Name of the Rose – was to happen upon Guillaume's manuscript and deem it worthy of copying. Bernard's copy has survived in the archives of Avignon and offers a valuable insight into the vicissitudes of the early Inquisition.

  Guillaume writes with the declared intention that subsequent generations of Dominicans, as well as other pious Catholics, might

  know how many and what sufferings came to their predecessors for the faith and name of Christ… may take courage against heretics and all other unbelievers, and so that they may stand ready to do – or rather to endure – as much or more, if need be… For after the numerous, the countless trials borne patiently, devoutly, and with good results by the Blessed Dominic and the friars who were with him in that land, true sons of such a father shall not be wanting.4

  To demonstrate the difficulties confronting Inquisitors in Albi in 1234, Guillaume writes:

  The lord legate… made Arnold Catalan, who was then of the convent at Toulouse, an inquisitor against the heretics in the diocese of Albi, where manfully and fearlessly he preached and sought to conduct the inquisition as best he could. However, the believers of heretics would say virtually nothing at that time, rather, they united in denials; yet he did sentence two living heretics… and both were burned… He condemned certain other deceased persons and had them dragged away and burned. Disturbed by this, the people of Albi sought to throw him into the River Tarn, but at the insistence of some among them released him, beaten, his clothing torn to shreds, his face bloody… Many misfortunes overtook these people later in the time of Friar Ferrier, the inquisitor, who seized and imprisoned a number of them and also had some burned, the just judgement of God being thus carried out.5