The Inquisition

by Michael Baigent

  Not surprisingly, the arduousness of Franciscan discipline proved too much for many members of the Order and many prospective postulants. Even before his death in 1226, the institution created by Francis had begun to mutate. While he was away in eastern Europe and then in Egypt, his stand-in as General of the Order had emerged as a shrewd and skilful politician, extending the influence of the Franciscans and relaxing the strictness of their rule. They continued to engage in manual labour and preaching, as well as running hospitals and tending lepers, but they also now began to accumulate wealth. According to one historian:

  As the Order spread it was not in human nature to reject the wealth which came pouring in upon it from all sides, and ingenious dialectics were resorted to to reconcile its ample possessions with the absolute rejection of property prescribed by the Rule.11

  When Francis returned from his travels, he made no attempt to regain control, no attempt to resume his position as General. Disowning all interest in politics, organisation and hierarchy, he continued to pursue his simple and untrammelled lifestyle; and the Order, while revering him as its father, proceeded to evolve under other auspices. At its first General Chapter in 1221, five years before Francis' death, it included more than 3,000 brethren, a cardinal and a number of bishops among them. By 1256, it was to possess forty-nine separate establishments in England alone, with 1,242 friars. During the latter part of the thirteenth century, one of them was to be the famous Roger Bacon.

  Within half a century of Francis' death, his Order had become as comfortable and as wealthy as any other clerical institution. It had also in its own way begun to discover the exhilarating intoxication of power. And, as an inevitable corollary, it had become increasingly prone to corruption. In 1257, the man subsequently canonised as Saint Bonaventure was elected General of the Order. One of his first acts was to send a circular letter to all provincial heads, deploring the extent to which worldliness and greed had brought the Franciscans into disrepute. Brethren had fallen increasingly, he complained, into idleness and vice, had indulged in shameful extravagance, had built disgracefully opulent palaces, had extorted excessive legacies and burial fees. Ten years later, nothing had changed, and Bonaventure repeated his indictment, this time even more bluntly: ‘It is a foul and profane lie to assert… absolute poverty and then refuse to submit to the lack of anything; to beg abroad like a pauper and to roll in wealth at home.’12

  If the Franciscans, by the end of the thirteenth century, had succumbed to worldliness and corruption, they had also become riven by schisms. Many members of the Order – ‘mystical’ or ‘spiritual’ or ‘purist’ Franciscans – endeavoured to remain loyal to the tenets of their founder. Not surprisingly, their uncompromising position soon led them into conflict with the Dominican-run Inquisition, and more than a few were to incur a charge of heresy. In 1282, for example, the accusation was levelled against Pierre Jean Olivi, the leader of the ‘purist’ Franciscans in the Languedoc; and though he was subsequently exonerated, his works remained censored.

  By the beginning of the fourteenth century, the ‘purist’ Franciscans were increasingly at odds with the ‘mainstream’ of their own Order, with the Dominican Inquisition and with the Pope. In 1317, Pope John XXII ruled definitively against the ‘purists’. On pain of excommunication, they were commanded to submit to his authority and that of the Order's mainstream. Many refused and turned schismatic, under the name of Fraticelli. In 1318, four Fraticelli brethren were burned by the Inquisition as heretics.

  In 1322, a General Chapter of the entire Franciscan Order passed a resolution implicitly sympathetic to the Fraticelli. It stated that Jesus and his disciples had been poor, had renounced personal possessions and repudiated worldliness – and they constituted the ideal model of Christian virtue. Such an assertion entailed a flagrant defiance of the Inquisition, which had only recently issued a ruling attempting to justify ecclesiastical wealth. A reaction was swiftly forthcoming. A year later, in 1323, the Pope denounced the Franciscans' resolution as heresy. The Franciscans as a whole were outraged, many of them accused the Pope himself of heresy and a number defected to the Fraticelli. As friction increased, the General of the Order himself joined the defecting schismatics. For the following two centuries, relations between the Inquisition and the Franciscans – both ‘mainstream’ and schismatic – were to remain acrimonious. As late as the 1520s, mystically inclined Franciscans continued to be condemned and tried for heresy.

  The feud between Franciscans and Dominicans sometimes attained unprecedented dimensions of sublime folly, as well as of infantile literalism and dogmatism. Thus, for example, in 1351, a Franciscan dignitary of Barcelona addressed himself to the blood shed by Jesus immediately before and during the Crucifixion. This blood, according to the Franciscan, had fallen to the earth and had lost its divinity by virtue of its separateness from Jesus's body. It had not, therefore, ascended to heaven when Jesus himself did, but had soaked into the soil.

  ‘The question,’ as one historian has observed, ‘was a novel one and a trifle difficult of demonstration.’13 But the Franciscan's assertions deeply outraged Nicholas Roselli, the Dominican Inquisitor of Barcelona, who resented the Franciscans anyway and now felt he possessed fresh grounds for grievance. Welcoming an opportunity to attack the rival Order, he dispatched a detailed account of the matter to the Pope.

  The Pope, too, was outraged at the Franciscan's assertions. He promptly convened a conference of theologians to investigate the question of Jesus's shed blood. The conference shared the indignation of Father Roselli and the Pope. The Franciscan's assertions were officially condemned. Instructions were issued to all Inquisitors – anyone who further promulgated such scandalous assertions was to be arrested. The Franciscan who had first enunciated the thesis was compelled publicly to withdraw it.

  The matter did not end there, however. Feeling themselves under attack, the Franciscans, though prohibited from any public discussion of Jesus's shed blood, continued to argue their case in private. According to one commentator:

  The Franciscans argued, with provoking reasonableness, that the blood of Christ might well be believed to remain on earth, seeing that the foreskin severed in the Circumcision was preserved in the Lateran Church and reverenced as a relic under the very eyes of pope and cardinal, and that portions of the blood and water which flowed in the Crucifixion were exhibited to the faithful at Mantua, Bruges, and elsewhere.14

  For the better part of the ensuing century, the dispute quietly rumbled on. Then, in 1448, nearly one hundred years later, a Franciscan professor at the University of Paris brought the problem to the attention of the Faculty of Theology. Renewed discussion resulted in the formation of a board of theologians to investigate the prickly subject further. They spent some years in debate. At last, with great solemnity, they issued their conclusion. It was not contrary to the Church's teachings, they stated, to believe in the original Franciscan thesis – that the blood shed by Jesus during his final days had indeed remained on the earth.

  Exhilarated by this victory in their own Hundred Years' War, the Franciscans allowed themselves a measure of triumphalism and grew more audacious. In a sermon at Brescia in 1462, a prominent Franciscan openly endorsed the position of his predecessor. Controversy erupted anew. Curbing his indignation, the local Dominican Inquisitor wrote a politely incredulous letter to the Franciscan. He could not believe, he stated, quietly aghast, that such statements had actually been made. The reports he had received must somehow have misconstrued things. Would the Franciscan kindly assure him that this was indeed the case? When the Franciscan, equally politely, repeated the statements, he was summoned to appear before the Inquisitor the following day.

  Alarmed by the prospect of a renewed public spat between Dominicans and Franciscans, the local bishop intervened. He contrived to have the summons withdrawn, but only with the understanding that the matter would be referred to the personal attention of the Pope. In the meantime, Dominicans across the whole of Christendom began
fulminating from their pulpits against the Franciscan ‘heresy’. Having been kept more or less discreetly quiet for the greater part of a century, the squabble now exploded dramatically before the eyes of a bewildered and bemused populace.

  Not wishing to antagonise either Order, the Pope hastened to convene yet another conference to examine the now increasingly pestilential question. He seems to have hoped it would be defused simply by bureaucratic delays and the plodding of administrative machinery. To his discomfiture, participants in the conference exhibited greater eagerness than anticipated for polemical combat.

  Each side selected three champions, and for three days, in the presence of the pope and sacred college, they argued the point with such ardent vehemence that, in spite of the bitter winter weather, they were bathed in sweat.15

  Neither faction, however, could adduce from the New Testament a single piece of evidence pertaining to the matter in dispute – which remained in consequence unresolved. Across Christendom, controversy between Dominicans and Franciscans continued.

  A year later, at the beginning of August 1464, driven to unpontifical impatience and exasperation, the Pope published a Bull. According to this Bull, all discussion of the awkward subject was officially prohibited until it was definitively settled by a pronouncement from the Holy See. As things transpired, the Holy See had no opportunity to issue any such pronouncement, because the Pope died eight days later. The cardinals who then addressed themselves to the matter again failed to reach any agreement. The new Pope contrived to have further disputation indefinitely postponed. As far as the authors of this book are aware, the question of whether or not Jesus's shed blood ascended to heaven remains unsettled to this day, and still hangs unanswered over the Papacy.

  4

  The Spanish Inquisition

  It is with Spain that the Inquisition is most usually associated. In fact, however, the Inquisition did not become dramatically active in Spain until relatively late. When it did do so, moreover, it was at least in certain respects a very different institution from the Inquisition elsewhere. Yet popular images are not altogether wrong. It was certainly in Spain that the Inquisition attained new dimensions of bigotry, nastiness and terror.

  During the thirteenth century, it must be remembered, Spain was not a unified country. Much of the Iberian Peninsula was still controlled by Muslim potentates. And even the Christian part of the peninsula was divided between several autonomous and not always compatible kingdoms. Among the Christian principalities comprising the Iberian Peninsula, the Inquisition was first established in 1238, but only in Aragón. Initially, it operated in a haphazard, inefficient and desultory fashion; and by the beginning of the fifteenth century, it was virtually dormant. In other domains – in Castile, for example, in León and in Portugal – the Inquisition did not even appear until 1376, a full century and a half after its inception in France.

  In 1474, the woman known to history as Isabella of Castile ascended the throne of her kingdom. Five years later, her husband, Ferdinand, became King of Aragón. From 1479 on, therefore, they presided as joint rulers of what was in effect a single unified kingdom. During the years that followed, they embarked on a programme of hugely ambitious scope and scale. They undertook to extirpate the last Moorish or Islamic enclaves from their domains – an enterprise that culminated in the capture of Granada in 1492. And they embarked on a ruthless agenda of ‘purification’ that anticipated National Socialist policies of the twentieth century and the practice of ‘ethnic cleansing’ implemented in the Balkans during the 1990s. Under Ferdinand and Isabella, Spain was not just to be united. It was also simultaneously to be definitively ‘purged’ of both Islam and Judaism, as well as of paganism and Christian heresies. To this end, the Spanish monarchs established their own Inquisition in 1478.

  In its mechanics and operations – ‘in all aspects of arrest, trial, procedure, confiscations, recruitment of personnel’1 – the Spanish Inquisition emulated the Inquisition elsewhere. Unlike the latter, however, the Spanish Inquisition was not an instrument of the Papacy. On the contrary, it was directly accountable to Ferdinand and Isabella. Because the domains of the Spanish monarchs comprised a species of theocracy with Church and State working in tandem, the Spanish Inquisition was as much an adjunct of the Crown as it was of the Church. It functioned as an instrument not only of ecclesiastical orthodoxy, but of royal policy as well. Addressing the newly installed Inquisitors of Aragón, Ferdinand said to them:

  Although you and the others enjoy the title of inquisitor, it is I and the queen who have appointed you, and without our support you can do very little.2

  Torquemada

  On 1 November 1478, a Bull of Pope Sixtus IV authorised the creation of an Inquisition unique to Spain. Two or perhaps three priests over the age of forty were to be appointed as Inquisitors. The right to appoint and dismiss them was entrusted not to the Dominicans or any other Papal institution, but to the Spanish monarchs. On 27 September 1480, they appointed two Dominicans as Inquisitors. The Inquisitors began their work in the south, adjacent to the still Moorish Kingdom of Granada. The first auto de fe was conducted on 6 February 1481, and six individuals were burned alive at the stake. In Seville alone, by the beginning of November, the flames had claimed another 288 victims, while seventy-nine had been sentenced to life imprisonment.

  Four months later, in February 1482, the Pope authorised the appointment of another seven Dominicans as Inquisitors. One of them, the prior of a monastery in Segovia, was to pass into history as the very embodiment of the Spanish Inquisition at its most terrifying – Tomás de Torquemada. In the three years following Torquemada's appointment, tribunals of the Inquisition were established in four other locations. By 1492, tribunals were operating in eight major cities.

  By this time, too, the Spanish Inquisition was already running amok. Complaints had begun as early as ten years before, within a few months of Torquemada's appointment. In April 1482, responding to aggrieved letters from Spanish bishops, the Pope had issued a Bull deploring the fact that

  many true and faithful Christians, on the testimony of enemies, rivals, slaves… have without any legitimate proof been thrust into secular prisons, tortured and condemned… deprived of their goods and property and handed over to the secular arm to be executed… causing disgust to many.3

  In the same document, the Pope concluded:

  The Inquisition has for some time been moved not by zeal for the faith and the salvation of souls but by lust for wealth.4

  In accordance with this conclusion, all powers entrusted to the Inquisition were revoked, and the Pope demanded that Inquisitors be placed under the control of local bishops. Such measures were, of course, a flagrant challenge to the monarchy, and King Ferdinand was predictably outraged. Pretending to doubt whether the Bull had actually been composed by the Pope, he sent a disingenuous letter back to the pontiff. The missive ended with an explicit threat: ‘Take care therefore not to let the matter go further… and entrust us with the care of this question.’5

  Confronted by such defiance, the Pope capitulated completely. On 17 October 1483, a fresh Bull established a council, the Consejo de la Suprema y General Inquisición, to function as the Inquisition's ultimate authority. To preside over this council, la Suprema, the new office of Inquisitor-General was created. Its first incumbent was Torquemada. All the Inquisition's tribunals throughout Christian Spain were now effectively gathered into the jurisdiction of one centralised administration, with Torquemada at its head.

  In the subsequent fifteen years up to his death in 1498, Torquemada wielded a power and influence rivalling that of Ferdinand and Isabella themselves. So far as the Inquisition was concerned, according to one historian, ‘he developed the nascent institution with unwearied assiduity’.6 He did so in a manner ‘full of pitiless zeal’, and with ‘ruthless fanaticism’. His devotion to his role impelled him to decline the proffered bishopric of Seville, and he never discarded the austere garb of a Dominican in favour of fashionable
sartorial splendour. He was also rigorously vegetarian. But he kept for himself substantial sums of confiscated wealth, resided in extravagant palaces and travelled with a retinue calculated both to impress and intimidate – fifty mounted guards and another 250 armed men. That did not altogether dispel his paranoia. When he dined, he invariably kept with him ‘the horn of a unicorn’, which supposedly served to protect him against poison – though there is no indication of how this chimerical talisman worked or what exactly its owner did with it. In other respects he was clearly an intelligent man, one of the supreme machiavels of his age, endowed with profound psychological insight and an aptitude for devious statecraft. In The Brothers Karamazov, the Grand Inquisitor is accorded no personal name. There can be little doubt, however, that Dostoevsky had Torquemada in mind as a prototype. And indeed, Dostoevsky's depiction of the Grand Inquisitor is probably as accurate a portrait of Torquemada as any historian's or biographer's. It is certainly not difficult to imagine Torquemada knowingly sending Jesus to the stake for the sake of the Inquisition and the Church.

  Under Torquemada's uncompromising auspices, the work of the Spanish Inquisition proceeded with renewed energy. On 23 February 1484, thirty victims were burned alive simultaneously in Ciudad Réal. Between 1485 and 1501, 250 were burned in Toledo. In Barcelona in 1491, three were executed and another 220 condemned to death in their absence. In Valladolid in 1492, thirty-two were immolated at once. The inventory of atrocity goes on, and would run to pages. At one point, the city dignitaries of ‘Barcelona wrote to King Ferdinand: ‘We are all aghast at the news we receive of the executions and proceedings that they say are taking place in Castile.’7 In September 1485, the Inquisitor of Saragossa was murdered while at prayer before the high altar in the cathedral; but this only provoked a fresh wave of executions in reprisals. The Inquisition did not traffic only in death, however. In 1499, a year after Torquemada died, the Inquisitor of Córdoba was convicted of extortion and fraud. His successor blithely proceeded to follow in his footsteps, arresting anyone wealthy – even the members of pious Christian families – in order to confiscate and appropriate their property.