The Inquisition

by Michael Baigent

  The traditional ecclesiastical queasiness about shedding blood remained in force. In consequence, pointed and bladed implements continued to be avoided in favour of the rack, thumbscrews and other devices that caused blood to flow only, as it were, ‘incidentally’. Pincers and other such toys constituted a grey area. To tear flesh with pincers was gory enough. If the pincers were red- or white-hot, however, the heated metal would immediately cauterise the wound and staunch the flow of blood. Sophistry of a similar kind was applied to the duration and frequency of torture. Initially, the accused could be tortured only once, and for no longer than thirty minutes. Inquisitors soon began to circumvent this restriction by arguing that there was indeed only one application of torture and that each subsequent thirty-minute session was merely a continuation of the first. Alternatively, a suspect might be tortured for an answer to a single specific point, and answers to a second or third point would justify additional sessions of torture. There are copious records of individuals being tortured twice a day for a week or more.

  In practice, the accused was tortured until he was ready to confess – which, sooner or later, he almost inevitably would be. At that point, he was carried into an adjacent room, where his confession was heard and transcribed. The confession was then read back to him and he was formally asked if it was true. If he replied in the affirmative, it was recorded that his confession had been ‘free and spontaneous’, without the influence of ‘force or fear’. Sentencing would follow.

  In general, a death sentence was the last resort. Most Inquisitors preferred to keep a ‘saved’ soul in a more or less intact body, which, through penances or on pilgrimage, testified to the mercy and greatness of the faith. Moreover, as one historian has observed, ‘a convert who would betray his friends was more useful than a roasted corpse’.16

  Inquisitors also recognised that certain heretics could be zealous in their yearning for martyrdom as speedily as possible – ‘and it was no part of the Inquisitor's pleasure to gratify them’.17 In such instances, time and constant pain were employed to dispel the passion for martyrdom. Recalcitrant victims were consequently subjected to more prolonged and attenuated ordeals. It was officially recommended that they be kept chained in a dungeon in solitary confinement, for at least six months, often for a year or more. The accused's spouse or children might occasionally be granted visiting rights, in order to induce a change of heart. Theologians might also be allowed to visit, to coax or persuade through logical argument and exhortation.

  Whatever the reluctance to impose a death sentence, it was done so frequently enough. Here, clerical hypocrisy flagrantly displayed itself again. Inquisitors could not themselves perform executions, which might have made them appear un-Christian. Instead, they were obliged to enact a ritual whereby the accused was handed over to the presiding civil or secular authorities, generally with an established formula: ‘We dismiss you from our ecclesiastical forum and abandon you to the secular arm. But we strongly beseech the secular court to mitigate its sentence in such a way as to avoid bloodshed or danger of death.’18 By general consent and recognition, this was a deliberately hollow recitation, which simply enabled the Inquisitor, like Pilate, to wash his hands of the matter. No one was under the illusion that the words meant anything other than the stake.

  To ensure the maximum number of spectators, executions, whenever possible, were performed on public holidays. The condemned would be tied to a post above a pyre of dry wood, high enough to be visible to the assembled crowd. Later, in Spain, the victim would sometimes be strangled before the pyre was actually lit, and would thus mercifully be spared the agony of the flames. The early Inquisition displayed no such magnanimity, though suffocation from smoke might occasionally preempt the fire and afford a slightly quicker release. When the ritual was over,

  there followed the revolting process requisite to utterly destroy the half-burned body – separating it into pieces, breaking up the bones and throwing the fragments and the viscera on a fresh fire of logs.19

  This kind of grisly denouement was deemed especially important in the case of an important heretic, to ensure that no relics were left to be hoarded by clandestine followers.

  Inquisitors were assiduous bookkeepers. For the burning of four heretics on 24 April 1323, the accounts of an Inquisitor at Carcassonne show the following itemisation:

  For large wood: 55 sols 6 deniers.

  For vine-branches: 21 sols 3 deniers.

  For straw: 2 sols 6 deniers.

  For four stakes: 10 sols 9 deniers.

  For ropes to tie the convicts: 4 sols 7 deniers.

  For the executioners, each 20 sols: 80 sols.20

  There is perhaps some macabre poetic justice in these figures. The value of an executioner seems to have been assessed at about the same as eight stakes of wood, and slightly less than a pile of vine-branches.

  Like most institutions, nefarious or otherwise, the Inquisition spawned its own celebrities. One of the earliest was the notorious Conrad of Marburg, who regarded mental and physical torture as a rapid route to salvation. Towards the beginning of his career, Conrad had been spiritual adviser to a German princess, the subsequently canonised Elizabeth of Thuringia. Under his sadistic ministrations, she died of self-imposed privations at the age of twenty-four, by which time Conrad had already begun chasing heresies under episcopal authority. Then, in 1227, the Pope commissioned him to preside over the Inquisition in Germany, with virtually limitless powers. These powers went to his head and prompted him, rashly, to accuse a number of high-ranking nobles. They proved more independent-minded and more intractable than their French equivalents. Many of them owed allegiance to the Holy Roman Emperor Friedrich II, who was excommunicated anyway. When Conrad attempted to preach a crusade against them, he was waylaid near Marburg and assassinated.

  A year before Conrad met his death in 1233, another Inquisitor, Conrad Tors, had also embarked on a campaign, trooping from town to town, condemning and burning wholesale. ‘I would burn a hundred innocents,’ he declared, ‘if there was one guilty among them.’21 When Conrad of Marburg was murdered, the Pope ordered Conrad Tors to carry on. He needed no encouragement to do so and continued his activities with relish. He, too, however, allowed his enthusiasm to cloud his judgement. On being summoned before him on a charge of heresy, an unruly noble preempted any untoward verdict by promptly dispatching the Inquisitor.

  Among the most famous – or infamous – of the early Inquisitors was Bernard Gui. Bernard was born around 1261 in Limousin, became a Dominican in 1280 and was placed in charge of the Inquisition at Toulouse in 1307. In 1317, he was entrusted by the Pope with a mission to ‘pacify’ northern Italy, suffering at the time from a serious ‘infection’ of heresy. He remained an active and zealous Inquisitor until 1324 and died in 1331.

  A register survives of the sentences Bernard handed down during his regime as Inquisitor of Toulouse. Between 1308 and 1322, he convicted 636 individuals of heresy – an average of one a week. Forty of his victims were burned at the stake. Some 300 were imprisoned. Thirty-six appear to have escaped his clutches.22

  Bernard's notoriety derives in large part from the manual of instruction he produced for his colleagues, The Practice of Inquisition, completed around 1324. In this text, of which several fourteenth-century manuscript copies survive, Bernard reviews the beliefs of the various heretics the conscientious Inquisitor might encounter – heretics whom he labels ‘the Manichaeans of modern times’ and ‘pseudo-apostles’. He summarises the arguments they might muster in their defence. He provides a methodology for interrogation and offers some sample specimens of how the examination of a suspect should be conducted. His reputation for ruthlessness is reinforced by his obvious relish in inflicting torture – the utility of which he extols for extracting ‘truth’ not only from accused persons, but from witnesses as well. When the Pope, responding to public outcry, attempted to restrict the use of torture, Bernard promptly complained, arguing that the Inquisition's efficiency would be
grievously impaired.

  Bernard concludes his book by offering some general guidance on the public deportment appropriate to the well-mannered Inquisitor. Excessive displays of self-congratulation and enthusiasm are implicitly deplored. The Inquisitor should

  so bear himself in passing sentence of corporal punishment that his face may show compassion, while his inward purpose remains unshaken, and thus will he avoid the appearance of indignation and wrath leading to the charge of cruelty.23

  Even Inquisitors were worried about public relations. In those days, too, image was a problem for prominent individuals.

  3

  Enemies of the Black Friars

  During the twelfth century, most of Europe had experienced a revival of Roman law, which constituted the basis of the prevailing legal system. Roman law – inherited from the old empire nominally Christianised under Constantine in the early fourth century – contained some sixty injunctions against heresy. There thus existed an effective judicial context and sanction for punitive action – and, in consequence, an effective judicial context and sanction for the operation of the Inquisition.

  In France, traditionally regarded as ‘the eldest daughter of the Church’, the Cathar heresy afforded an opportunity for the Inquisition to establish and consolidate its authority. No comprehensive records are available for the first twenty years of the Albigensian Crusade; but in the aftermath of the campaign of 1229, more than 5,000 victims were burned, while innumerable others were subjected to prison, exile or other punishments. By the end of the twelfth century, power on a comparable scale was to be wielded by the Inquisition in Italy.

  Later, of course, the Inquisition was to acquire an even greater power, and greater notoriety, in Spain. During the thirteenth century, however, much of Spain and the Iberian Peninsula was still in Islamic hands; and the sheer scale of the conflict between Christians and Muslims left little scope for the Inquisition to pursue its work. In Germany, as the fate visited on Conrad of Marburg and Conrad Tors attests, the Inquisition subsisted on an often tenuous basis. It was in Germany, of course, that the sway of the old Roman Empire had gradually petered out, and Roman legal codes were less firmly rooted in Germany than they were elsewhere. Although ruled in theory by the Holy Roman Empire, Germany, in practice, was subject to no effective centralised authority. Nobles and local potentates tended to be unruly, independent and defiant, frequently resorting to violence to resist any encroachment on their prerogatives. As a result, the Inquisition's activity in Germany was more spasmodic than constant, being pursued only intermittently and only in certain regions. For a decade or so, the Inquisitors might impose their reign of terror in one or another city, one or another principality. They would then provoke a backlash and be driven away.

  In England as in Scandinavia, the Inquisition never operated, because the prevailing legal codes did not derive from Roman law. England possessed its own sophisticated legal system, which, at least nominally, upheld the rights of all free men in the kingdom. Guilt was determined by the jury system, and the judicial process made no provision or accommodation for torture. Within this framework, there was neither the tradition, nor the legal and ecclesiastical machinery, geared to maintaining the Inquisition's activities.

  Inquisition in the South

  In the years immediately following its creation, the Inquisition was kept busy enough. In the south of France and elsewhere, organised Cathar resistance had ceased by the mid thirteenth century; but many small Cathar communities had survived, integrating themselves into the surrounding regions. And there were also many individual Cathars who continued to observe their faith and its rituals clandestinely. Even though such individuals and small communities had ceased to preach and posed no threat of ‘infection’ to their neighbours, the Church was determined to root them out and exterminate them. They constituted fair game for the hyperactive Inquisitor.

  One such was Jacques Fournier, Bishop of Pamiers between 1317 and 1325. In 1326, Jacques became Bishop of Mirepoix and in 1327 a cardinal. In 1334, he was elected Pope as Benedict XII. For this reason, at least some of his records were preserved and subsequently discovered in the Vatican's archives. In 1978, they were edited and published with accompanying commentary in the famous book Montaillou, by the distinguished French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie.

  Around 1300, half a century after organised Cathar resistance in the south of France had ceased, Montaillou, a small mountain village in the foothills of the Pyrenees, became a centre for a modest Cathar resurgence. In 1308, the Inquisitor of Carcassonne arrested the entire population of the village apart from very young children. When Jacques Fournier became Bishop of Pamiers in 1317, he was authorised to establish his own ‘inquisitorial office’; and it was natural enough that Montaillou, which lay within his jurisdiction, should become the focus of his attention.

  Jacques's records testify to the ease and completeness with which Cathar heretics became assimilated into the local population. They testify to cordial enough relations between Cathars and Catholics. They also testify to a degree of understanding, compassion and even sympathy on the part of the future Pope, a preparedness to see the Cathars as fellow human beings. Unlike Dominic, Jacques Fournier was no rabid fanatic. That, however, did not prevent him from investigating, between 1318 and 1325, ninety-eight cases of heresy involving more than a hundred people, ninety-four of whom appeared before his tribunal. Displaying a Christian tolerance and mercy uncharacteristic of Inquisitors at the time, Jacques sent only five of them to the stake.

  It was not only the Cathars who kept the Inquisition occupied. Europe at the time was positively swarming with unorthodox modes of thought, any or all of which constituted ripe targets for the Inquisition. There were, for example, the Bogomils, another dualist sect dating from the tenth century in the old Bulgarian Empire, which during that era stretched from the Ukraine to the Adriatic. From this region, Bogomil thought had spread to Greece and the western Balkans, then further westwards still; and by the twelfth century, it had begun to exercise an influence on Catharism, with which it had much in common. The Bogomils claimed to be the ‘true and hidden Christian Church, the Church of Bethlehem and Capernaum’. According to Yuri Stoyanov, probably the definitive modern authority on Bogomil teaching, the heresy ‘precipitated the emergence of Catharism and was traditionally recognised by western churchmen and inquisitors as the “hidden tradition” behind Catharism’.1 Indeed, the Cathars were often called ‘Bulgares’ or ‘Bougres’. Not surprisingly, the Bogomils were soon to incur as assiduous attention from the Inquisition as did the French heretics.

  Sharing many tenets with both Cathars and Bogomils were the so-called ‘Paterenes’, or ‘Paterini’, who had appeared in southern Italy during the twelfth century. By that time, the Church used the name ‘Paterini’ almost interchangeably with ‘Cathar’ or ‘Albigensian’. During the first third of the thirteenth century, the Paterini established themselves in the part of the Kingdom of Hungary that comprises modern Bosnia; and in 1235, a crusade was preached against them there similar to that preached in France against the Cathars. The crusade against the Paterini proved conspicuously unsuccessful in extirpating the heresy. In 1325, Pope John XXII complained that many Cathars were fleeing to Bosnia, which was coming to be regarded as a ‘Promised Land’ for dualist sects.2 By 1373, the dualist churches in Bosnia were so powerful that Bosnian Catholics were compelled to worship in secret. The Paterini consolidated their position by establishing a close association with regional potentates; and in the fifteenth century, they were to collaborate with the conquering Ottoman invaders. But Bosnia was not the only Paterini stronghold. Even more alarming for the Church of Rome, the heresy proceeded to spread across the entire Italian peninsula. By the early fourteenth century, it was rife in Lombardy, and turning increasingly militant. Specifically to counter this threat, the notorious Bernard Gui was dispatched on his mission to ‘pacify’ the region.

  The dualist sects – the Cathars, the Bogomils and the
Paterini – repudiated Rome primarily on theological grounds, and their condemnation of Rome's wealth, extravagance and corruption derived ultimately from theological principles, from a radically different understanding of the nature of spirituality. There were other heresies that had no particular quarrel with Rome's theology, but publicly rejected the wealth, the extravagance and the corruption of the Church and the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Although they would not have thought of themselves as such, they were more akin to the social reformers and revolutionaries of later eras.

  Conspicuous among these heresies was that of the Waldensians or Waldenses, founded in the late twelfth century by Pierre Valdes, a wealthy merchant of Lyons. Having provided for his wife and family, Pierre donated his property to the poor and embarked on the life of an itinerant preacher, extolling poverty, simplicity and other traditional Christian virtues. He soon acquired an entourage of disciples, who accompanied him through the countryside. Some went off to establish their own bands of followers and disseminate their teachings further afield. In many respects, the Waldensians might well have seemed congenial to a man like Dominic, since they, too, condemned the dualism of the Cathars. But they also inveighed against the ‘worldliness’ of the Church; and they defied the Roman hierarchy by daring to produce copies of scriptural texts in regional languages and dialects. This sufficed to get them stigmatised as a heresy. By the time the Inquisition was established, Peter Valdes himself was dead; but his followers and disciples soon became as subject to persecution as the Cathars, and a great many of them, over the subsequent years, were consigned to the stake.