Daughters of the Inquisition

by Christina Crawford

  Warriors, diplomats, and business men, the Templars through their extensive travels and connections became the power brokers of their time. They are credited with creating the modern banking system. They cleverly lent money from their vast estates, to kings impoverished by the Crusades and to Muslim leaders as well. The secular merchants became dependent on the Knights’ system of money organization by means of promissory notes, which could travel with them from city to city. The center of this banking system was Paris.

  Authors of Holy Blood write,

  The Templars traded not only in money but also in thought. Through their sustained and sympathetic contact with Islamic and Judaic culture they came to act as a clearinghouse for new ideas, new dimensions of knowledge, new sciences. They enjoyed a veritable monopoly on the best and most advanced technology of their age … they contributed to the development of surveying, mapmaking, road building and navigation. They possessed their own seaports, shipyards, and fleets, both military and commercial, which were among the first to use the magnetic compass … the Order maintained their own hospitals with their own physicians and surgeons.181

  They understood the use of drugs, the rudiments of antibiotics, and stressed hygiene. When the Holy Land returned to Muslim control and the Crusades subsequently ended in 1291, the Templars had established headquarters in Cyprus, creating an independent principality. But they returned to the Languedoc region of Occitania, Southern France, because the Order had received vast tracts of lands from wealthy nobles, some of whom were Cathars and the fourth Grand Master, Bernard de Blanchfort came from a Cathar family.

  Another version of the origin of the Knights Templar and their allegorical meaning is found in the Women’s Encyclopedia. It states that Hugues de Payans, the founder, is Hugh of the Pagans a Burgundian Knight, and that its organization was based on that of the Saracen fraternity of Hashishim, the “hashish takers” whom Christians called “assassins” in a mispronunciation. Their first quarters in the palace of the king of Jerusalem were next to the Al-Aqsa mosque, sacred to Shi-ites as the central shrine of the Goddess Fatima. It was Muslim poets who transformed this shrine into the Temple of the Holy Grail, where the Templar Knights met to offer their services to the Goddess, “to uphold the female principle of divinity and to defend women. These Knights became more widely known romantically as the myth of Galahad, Perceval Lohengrin.”182 And it is through their worship of the Goddess that they would come into direct conflict with the Inquisition.

  The myths of the Holy Grail were unknown in Europe until the twelfth century and the Knights Templar story told and retold in popular song and poetry. The Holy Grail was the chalice used by Christ at the last supper into which he poured wine for his disciples to drink saying, “this is my blood.” After the crucifixion, Joseph of Arimathea took the chalice to England and put it in a shrine at Glastonbury, from which it later disappeared. But the chalice was actually a symbol of the Old Religion, symbolizing the sacred womb, the wine symbolizing the blood of life – the two together meant regeneration, rebirth, reincarnation – the ages-old tradition of the Goddess.183 The romance of the Grail was adapted in twelfth century by French writers and became integral to the poetry, the troubadours’ songs of courtly love and the revival of female sexuality on a limited basis.

  It was into this complex multi-cultural diversity that the Papal Roman Inquisition began to function in earnest. What is the justification? This is a critical question that needs to be posed, albeit nearly a thousand years too late. Why is it that only the human species sets about to exterminate itself? What is it that sets human against human? Or, that sets man against woman? Or what sets me against you? Or you against those with whom you perceive you have nothing in common? Or all of us against those who have been propagandized as the “enemy”? How helpless and angry does that make the collective feel against the powerful? How suspicious and paranoid do the powerful feel about the oppressed? How profitable is it to escalate the irrational beyond all repair? How difficult is it to inject reason and compassion into the fray? Why is it that War is so much easier to wage than Peace is to construct? And how alert do we have to be to see through the propaganda of those who have ulterior motives? Is there a hidden gender bias in the clever words or a sexual orientation bias in their synonyms? Who is to unmask this rhetoric? Who will be called upon to have this courage? And, why will integrity be so important to the survival of all of us? These are timeless questions that every generation may need to ask and answer in order to preserve its sanity as well as their survival.

  The Legal System of the European Middle Ages

  As far back as the ninth century, Charlemagne king of the Germanic peoples who was crowned as the first Holy Roman Emperor by the Church of Rome, decreed that his officials called “missi Dominici” were commissioned to travel the empire of the European continent, making diligent “inquisition” into all cases of crime, disorder and injustice with jurisdiction over civil clerk and laymen. Their inquisitions were called Assizes, held four times a year and were empowered to punish all offenders of any social rank. Charlemagne’s successors continued the process but concentrated on royal officials. In England, as in 1166, the assizes of Clarendon using the Anglo-Saxon organization made inquest and punished those publicly suspect of crime, which was not only a prototype of the later Grand Jury investigations in English law but also the Roman Catholic Papal Inquisition in Europe. Before going any further, it is necessary to introduce the medieval legal system in brief. It was part civil, part feudal, part ecclesiastical, but all initially with a common goal: to keep the peace in the community. Its intent was to avoid civil unrest and mediate between disgruntled parties. That intent is paramount when one understands that people tended not to travel much, to relocate infrequently, and predominately lived their entire lives in the same location into which they were born.

  Following the ancient Roman law codes and the even older Common (sense) laws, there were three means by which a person could be accused of wrong-doing. They were called accusation, denunciation, and inquisito.

  The first, accusation, was perhaps the oldest form and the one most likely to keep peace. If an accuser came forward to the court against another person known to them, it was the responsibility of the accuser to prove the case against the other person. In the event the court found the case unproven, the accuser was given the same penalty as the guilty person would have received. This was common law in its most common sense form and its intent was clear: Keep unfounded complaints and petty personal grudges from coming to public court. If the accuser could not be positive that the evidence presented would convict, there were serious penalties for trying to injure or disgrace a neighbor or relative. It seemed to work well, kept court appearance low, and rewarded those who were able to work out issues of dispute between themselves.

  The second method was denunciation. This was not to be utilized by ordinary people, but was instead the means by which public civil officials or religious archdeacons summoned the court to take action against offenders whose illegal behavior came under his jurisdiction and of which he had personal knowledge.

  The third was the inquisito. At first, the penalty for conviction was lighter than the other two, because only one judge heard the case and was, in effect, both judge and jury, or substituted for the more normal configuration of a panel of judges supplemented by community members of good repute. It was understood that having only one person fill all the duties of the court, judge, accuser and jury, was dangerous. While the subsequent Inquisition was founded on this last process, there were great differences. The major one was that before use of it by the Inquisition, there had to be ample ground for judging the guilt of the person before the process could be exercised.

  By the tenth century, the Church of Rome had enhanced the process and placed it in the ecclesiastic courts, not the secular ones. When the bishop regularly visited the region, it was required that the whole population of the parish assembled publicly. The bishop chose seven mature men
of good character, who then swore on relics of dead saints, or on other sacred objects, to divulge anything they might have already known or may hear in the future regarding any offense by neighbors or family which required investigation. Long lists were then written by scribes with possible offenses and offenders’ names, so that the bishop might pursue any sin or immorality in an inquisition. In 1163 the Council of Tours called by Alexander III commanded all secular princes to imprison heretics and confiscate their property. This was based on Roman law of Majestas – treason against the Empire. Now, spiritual transgressions against the Catholic Church would be treated with equal severity, as treason against civil authority had been dealt with centuries before.

  In 1184 the Pope issued a decretal:

  In addition to the oath … prescribed to every ruler, to assist the Church in persecuting heresy, all archbishops and bishops are ordered, either personally or by their archdeacons or other fitting persons, once or twice a year to visit every parish where there was a suspicion of heresy and compel two or three men of good character, or the whole vicarage if necessary, to swear to reveal any reputed heretic, or any person holding secret conventicles, or in any way differing in mode or life from the faithful in general.184

  Lea writes, “This decretal, which was adopted into canon law, is important as embodying the whole theory of the subject. In imitation of Roman law of majestas, the property of the heretic was forfeited from the moment he became a heretic or committed an act of heresy.”185 Then in 1199, Pope Innocent III issued a severe decretal, Vergentis in senium, in which he compared heresy to the crime of treason in Roman law. In this decree, he authorized the confiscation of the property of the convicted heretics.”186 The pope then proceeded to remove and replace the entire hierarchy of bishops, archbishops in Southern France. It changed nothing, however, except perhaps to give an even greater excuse for the Albigensian Crusade.

  The Albigensian Crusade

  Anyone who refused to take the oath (swear) to reveal dissidents in their midst was condemned as a heretic ipso facto. The Cathars did not swear by oaths. Anyone who was determined to keep their own faith and not profess allegiance to the Catholic Church was to be “abandoned to the secular arm,” the civil authorities for fitting punishment, which was a euphemism for the death penalty by burning at the stake. The Cathars kept firmly to their own faith. It cannot be stressed too strongly that the crime of heresy was one of belief or thought, not one of action. And, it was dissent against a religious body, not acts of anarchy against civil authority. However, it was punished as one of the most serious and overt behaviors of violence against the state, that of treason. Churchmen created this crime of holding to a belief system and/or life style different from that superimposed on local people from foreigners in Rome. Local people throughout the continent and in the British Isles held many differing, ancient religious beliefs. Some of these systems of folklore, religion and customs dated back centuries and served them well. In the main, they did not interfere with what Rome established; peasants paid lip service to the new church and/or simply ignored its presence, as evidenced by the lack of either financial support or attendance. Often, because the people were unable to read or write, transmission of the new credo was dependent on the teachings of the parish priest. In many regions, the average person knew very little of the dogma of the Catholic Church.

  In 1163, Pope Alexander sent ecclesiastical judges to investigate Cathar communities in Occitania, Southern France. These judges were called by the term “inquisitor” for the first time.187 The process of the Inquisition was a process of imposing a totalitarian regime on everyone, imposing an occupation force on one’s spirit. It should have been evident that after several hundred years since Charlemagne, the majority population on the continent preferred their own religious practices even when forced to convert. After all, the majority of these conversions were the result of two equally undesirable choices: convert or die. The expedient choice under the circumstances was to choose life, even under duress. Moreover, by now there was massive disarray among the clergy representing the Roman Church, almost as missionaries. Corruption was open, the selling of relics, the ever-increasing tithes (taxes required to be paid to the Church by the people), the concubines of priests living with them in the parish house or monasteries, the ever-present scandals of homosexuality in the monasteries, the absence of attention to services at local churches: The offenses of the churchmen were a long list of disgraces, all well known to the people they came to conquer.

  Those sincerely wishing for a better, more truly spiritual way of life separated themselves from the hypocritical rule of the Church and sought out their own ways. By the 1200’s, these alternatives had become a diversity of established movements, attracting a wide and ever growing-number of people. The disastrous Crusades, which killed tens of thousands over nearly 200 years, and the first edicts of the Popes against “heresy” only served to send ordinary people further away from the Church, not to bring them closer to it. Additionally, the rigid feudal system was breaking down, unable to cope with the influences generated by increased commerce, new ways of obtaining money, the prosperity of both new trades and towns, the educational influences of the Arab/Islamic peoples in the Mediterranean cities and on the Iberian peninsula. New information on alternatives to narrowly proscribed thought, new ideas brought from the East about sexual relations between men and women, about science, about literature all contributed to the beginning of sweeping attitude change. In contrast, the Church intentionally strove to keep people in ignorance, as a stated goal, in order to maintain control of both the minds and the behavior of the population. An inevitable tension arose, since the new education was brought by Arabs, translated by Jewish scribes, and found eager audiences, particularly in the Occitanian region inhabited by all these peoples of mixed religious and ethnic backgrounds.

  So it was in 1209 that the Pope in Rome preached the first Crusade against a European population. It was called the Albigensian Crusade because in 1165 the Cathars were condemned by an ecclesiastical council held in the town of Albi in the Languedoc region. It was modeled after the Crusades to the Holy Land. The Pope himself had called for it: The rewards for going on it were unlimited plunder as the result of war. To sweeten the earthly rewards, the Pope added that the Church would absolve participants of their sins, (remissions of sins) and personally assured the warriors a place in heaven if they joined up to kill their neighbors. This newly created army, which was to wage civil war in France, wore a cross embroidered on their tunics.

  Occitania, a land known and loved for its grace, peacefulness, prosperity, a land where courtly love was widely practiced, a land of education and agricultural productivity, present day Provence and Languedoc was the target of this hideous invasion. Here the cities had gained virtual self-government and autonomy. The upper classes were aware that their prosperity was directly tied to the prosperity of the other classes of people and that governance was a safeguard not subjugation. The majority of the population who did not consider themselves either Arabs or Jews were Cathars. There has been great speculation as to where the Cathar religion came from, because it has no recognized founder or prophet. Some thought puts the origins in Bulgaria, which is part of the ancient region of Old Europe in the Neolithic. The Cathars were vegetarians; they held belief in reincarnation and rebirth. They encouraged women followers. They did not believe in marriage. They addressed one another as “good man” or “good woman.” The top echelon of religious training was called “Perfects,” the rest “believer” and their only real sacrament called the consolentam, which was given just once in a lifetime. They were egalitarian in their self-organization. Is it possible that they were the remnants of the Old Religion, an indigenous belief system with Christianity superimposed as an overlay? Throughout Occitania learning was prized, literacy was encouraged, the population was diverse, consisting of Christians, Jews, Arabs, Muslims and North Africans. Because of these influences, commerce, art, industry and the ne
wly re-discovered sciences were advanced far beyond those enjoyed by neighbors, whether in Northern France, Germany, the British Isles or the Low Countries.188

  English authors Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln, in their book Holy Blood, Holy Grail provide graphic details on the Albigensian Crusade and its consequences:

  An army of thirty thousand knights and foot soldiers from northern Europe descended … on the Languedoc … in what is now southern France. In the ensuing war the whole territory was ravaged, crops were destroyed, towns and cities razed, a whole population was put to the sword … In the town of Beziers alone … at least fifteen thousand men, women and children were slaughtered wholesale. When the Pope’s representative was asked how “heretics” could be separated from “believers,” his reputed reply was: “Kill them all. God will recognize his own.”189

  After Beziers, all the other towns of the Languedoc fell-Toulouse, Narbonne, Carcassone, and Perpigan. This war lasted forty years. Considering that the old feudal system only required knights to serve their lords and masters in the military for forty days each year, promises of unlimited plunder were required to keep recruits supplied over a span of two generations of fighting men. When it was over, beautiful Occitania was destroyed, had been reverted to barbarism, the locals dead or fled, nobles dead, their land ruined, then confiscated, and foreigners ruled in their place. As a direct result of this Crusade called by the Pope, France was now unified under the reign of King Louis and the Catholic Church. Both increased their wealth through massive confiscations of land and material possessions gained through the spoils of war.

  Occitania had been the natural stage setting for the true evolution of the Renaissance Age, having all the components already in place and a population appreciative of them. Now this beauty was totally ravished, in total ruins both physically and psychologically. Later that Renaissance would be transferred to Italy with most of the art and music in service to the Catholic Church, the glory days of independent Occitania all but forgotten. Why was it deemed necessary to destroy Occitania? Over and above common jealousy that the region was glorious in every respect, the Cathars were a belief system that had the support of all classes and a popularity that was spreading rapidly out of Occitania to the urban centers of Germany, Flanders and Champagne. This group, with their indigenous roots so deep in the historical and social fabric, was actually positioned to overtake the Catholic Church as the majority religious system.