Daughters of the Inquisition

by Christina Crawford

  Henry Charles Lea, the nineteenth century historian, says that the Church already possessed an organized structure from as far back as Charlemagne that could be adapted to the discovery and investigation of the dissidents they called “heretics.” That the laziness and self-indulgence of its clergy took precedence over those duties was seen up until the Albigensian Crusade, which ended open practices of contrary beliefs and rituals, but apparently did little to put an end to a deep-seated resistance. Now, the “crime” of heresy goes underground, thereby making it difficult to detect and prove.190 Deeper research into the genesis of this Crusade reveals that on January 14,1208, the papal representative to the Languedoc was murdered and the Cathars took the blame, even though the crime was probably caused in reality by anti-clerical (i.e. anti Catholic) dissidents with no Cathar affiliation. This gave Pope Innocent III all the ammunition Rome needed to proceed against the enemy: Cathars. Military operations were allocated to Simon de Montfort and aided by a Spanish fanatic named Dominic Guzman. Before the Albigensian Crusade was over, in 1216, Guzman would found a monastic order named the Dominican, after himself, and this order would become a primary force behind the Inquisition.

  The war was still in progress when Pope Innocent III convened the Fourth Lateran council in 1215 in Rome. It is in this council that Canons 3 and 8 are adopted by Pope Gregory IX for the Inquisition. These Church Canons, or laws, will also become the basis for civil criminal law (prosecuting heretics) that will stay on the books until the French Revolution violently overturns the Inquisition five hundred years later.

  Father Shannon provides a translation from the Latin:

  In Canon Three it is said, We excommunicate and anathematize every heresy that raises itself against the holy, orthodox and Catholic faith., condemning all heretics under whatever names they may be known … Those condemned being handed over to the secular rulers or their bailiffs, let them be abandoned, to be punished with due justice, clerics being first degraded from their orders. As to the property of the condemned, if they are laymen, let it be confiscated; if clerics let it be applied to the churches from which they received revenues. But those who are only suspected … unless they prove their innocent by a proper defense let them be anathematized and avoided by all until they have made suitable satisfaction: but if they have been under excommunication for one year, then let them be condemned as heretics. If temporal rulers, after having been requested and admonished by the Church, should neglect to cleanse his territory of this heretical foulness, let him be excommunicated … If he refused to make satisfaction within a year, let the matter be made known to the supreme pontiff (Pope), that he may declare the ruler’s vassals absolved from their allegiance and may offer the territory to be ruled by Catholics … The right, however, of the chief ruler is to be respected so long as he offers no obstacle in this matter and permits freedom of action … (of the inquisition.).… Those who give credence to the teachings of the heretics as well as those who receive, defend and patronize them are excommunicated … let him not take part in the election of others … or use his right to give testimony in a court of law. Let him also be intestable, that he may not have the free exercise of making a will, and let him be deprived of the right of inheritance … Clerics shall not give the sacraments of the Church to such pestilential people, nor shall they presume to give them a Christian burial or to receive their alms or offerings.” Those without specific authority from the Church were prohibited from preaching, locals were admonished to reveal secret assemblies within their midst and if any of them by damnable obstinacy should disapprove of the oath and should perchance be unwilling to swear, from this very fact let them be regarded as heretics.191

  This last stipulation, regarding oaths or the ability to swear an oath, was deliberately aimed at Cathars, who resolutely refused to swear by an oath.

  Canon Eight of the Council instituted the “special inquisition” wherein the judge lays aside his traditional role of an impartial arbiter and now actually conducts an investigation of crime in virtue of his office. “The Council empowered him to arrest, cite, produce witnesses, admit or reject proofs, examine the prisoner and, should the evidence warrant it, condemn the guilty. And, interestingly enough, all this was designed, not for heresy, but to investigate and adjudicate delinquencies among the clergy itself!”192 Concurrently with the Albigensian Crusade, there was a growing intolerance with other ethnic minorities in France. Jewish people had been prominent as doctors, lawyers, merchants and tradesmen throughout Europe and England. Historian Henry Kamen writes, “The first great Christian persecution of Jews (on the Iberian Peninsula) occurred in the seventh century, and made them greet with relief the invasions by Muslims from North Africa.”193 When the twelfth century Almoravids invaded, destroying both Christian and Jewish, many of the Jews fled to Europe.

  But, one hundred years later in the midst of increasing insistence by the Church of Rome that all people believe identically, Kamen says that

  Anti-Jewish legislation became common in Europe. The Church Council of Aries (France) in 1235, for example ordered all Jews to wear a round yellow patch, four fingers in width, over their hearts as a mark of identification.… In time, the Jewish situation worsened throughout Western Europe. The Church began to take a more aggressive attitude toward its own heretics and toward minorities. In 1290, England expelled its Jews and in 1306, France followed suit.194

  During the Albigensian Crusade, the Knights Templar tried to retain a posture of neutrality, but it was widely known by the people that the Templars regularly provided safe havens for the Cathars, who also joined their Order. And, in Occitania, the noblemen who joined the Knights Templar stayed in their homes, creating a stable, entrenched majority of lords. In Occitania, the Templars employed Arab secretaries (scribes who were males), and were fluent in Arabic themselves. Templars had equally close ties with the Jewish communities, with their scholarship, and had intertwining financial relationships with them. In reality, they could be called free thinkers, sophisticated, powerful, well-connected and popular among the people, even though at times the Knights were given to arrogance and excess, which are the pitfalls of all those who attain to great power. The last great battle was 1243 at a mountain castle called Mont Signeur. When it fell, the fighting men (Knights Templar?) were pardoned, but there were 400 hundred other people left, of whom 80 were Cathar Perfects. The rest had escaped with the gold, silver and remaining Cathar treasure. During a brief truce, during which the knights were pardoned, six more women and fifteen fighting men became Perfects. When the truce expired, none of the remaining two hundred men and women agreed to submit to inquisition questioning, all refused to “confess their sins” and all were then locked in a stockade filled with wood and burned en masse together.195 Officially, that was the end of Catharism in Southern France.

  The Catholic position at this time, according to Father Albert C. Shannon, O.J.A. in his work The Medieval Inquisition published by the Liturgical Press in 1984, states that

  1)Ultimate responsibility for calling the Crusade rests with the reigning Roman Pontiff, Innocent III.

  2)The Papacy had tried to protect the population from the contagion of false doctrine with limited success for 50 years.

  3)Appeals for cooperation of secular rulers were unsuccessful.

  4)Convinced of the paralysis of public powers and local churches, the Pope resorted to a Crusade. Military constraint was the only option to restore order and spiritual welfare.

  5)The transfer of feudal lands from lords who were heretics to those who were Faithful to the Catholic Church was necessary.

  6)Only “handfuls” of Knights participated, maybe 500 altogether.

  7)Along the way, it was necessary to burn heretics in punishment.

  While many have called this Crusade one of the bloodiest chapters in the history of Christianity, the Church of Rome records it as absolutely necessary “regime change.” After the new King Louis VIII undertook unification of France by way of this C
rusade, the Official Peace Treaty was signed in Paris on April 12,1229. Languedoc was permanently joined to the kingdom of France. Shannon writes that:

  The purpose of the Pope’s summoning the crusade in the first place was achieved: installation of responsible rulers in Languedoc who would and could ensure peace and would suppress heresy. Of the thirty-one clauses of the treaty, the first six directly concerned the suppression of heresy, the rights of the (Catholic) Church, restitution of Church property and security guarantees.196

  The Church was still convinced that the dissents flourished, but the crusade had destroyed their support and protection by the indigenous nobility, which had now been dismantled and disowned. Father Shannon provides an accurate picture of the propaganda:

  From the time of Charlemagne (Emperor from 800–814) and beyond, all the people of Europe worshipped the one spiritual God according to the teachings of the Roman Church … All professed the same Faith as the common heritage of Noble and peasant alike … this unity of Faith … was held to be the cornerstone of the stability of society itself. So deep and abiding was this consensus that any deviation from the common faith was felt to be a serious threat to the community itself and hence at times resulted in mob violence.197

  In fact, this is the exact position of the Church. But from the point of view of the populations on whom it was imposed, it is entirely propaganda. The Roman Church was a foreign, top-down superimposition on people with diverse and anciently sacred belief systems of their own choosing. The majority population, in region after region, rejected Catholicism.

  If the position of the Church were true, there would have been no basis for the Inquisition. If it were true, the Inquisition would not have continued for seven hundred years, bringing death to Europe, North American, Mexico and South America. If it were true, there would have been no reason, no justification for the institutionalized violence, the torture, the mercilessness, the public execution of tens of thousands of people. And, if it were true, the most hideous death penalty – that of being burnt alive at the stake as a public spectacle – could not have been considered anything other than barbarism.

  These “dissidents” in their own lands, living under their own forms of governance, did have common ground: They continued to expose the rotten underbelly of the absolute rule of the Church from Rome which equated women with evil. The idea of freedom of speech, the concept of freedom of religion scared the men in Rome more than can be imagined today, unless it is equated with the threat of terrorism which occupies Western governments now. This is to say that fear in the face of such perceived threat leads to extreme measures designed by those afraid, in order to counteract the threat. Then there was a feeling that heretics are everywhere, even among us. Otherwise reasonable people became afraid to speak out. Fear in the face of an unseen enemy changes behavior. Violence is learned behavior in the face of fear. The two beget one another until no one is safe from either.

  The Papal Inquisition Begins

  Pope Gregory IX, reigning from 1227–1241, created the Papal Inquisition in three phases coordinated with civil, secular authorities. In so doing, Pope Gregory sought to “bring order and legality” to the process of dealing with dissidents and rescue it from the then currently perceived extremes: originally one of benign indifference in Occitania and the other extreme in Germany where dissenters were executed by burning with only sparse allegations. Rome sought to consolidate authority in itself, making the office of the Holy See responsible for jurisdiction over all dissidents. Father Shannon writes, “Now for the first time, Gregory IX created a new procedure whereby an office was established whose primary and only function was the searching out of heresy and the resolution of the findings. It was both a new procedure, a rational inquiry by a judge and a new institution, a papal agency designed to utilize this new procedure for uncovering and trying alleged heretics.”198 So, in light of the fact that burning non-believers had been going on for at least a hundred years or more, what was now so new? Pope Gregory IX went forward with assurances from the King of France and other powerful secular lords that they would support his efforts. In addition, he added the newly founded mendicant orders of Dominicans and Franciscans, who would lead the Inquisition and perhaps more importantly, report directly to the Pope himself.

  The three steps of this rapid evolution are as follows:199

  Step One: Feb. 1231, Pope Gregory IX issues a general constitution excommunicating all heretics in general and in particular naming the Cathar, Patarenes, the Poor Men of Lyons, and others. This decree said that these who were suspected had to be interrogated by Church officials (who were now the Inquisitors), and if they remained firm in their beliefs, they were to be remanded to a secular judge who would impose civil penalties, which was death. Anyone who aided or defended the accused was excommunicated and declared “infamous,” later meaning they would meet the same fate: death.

  Step Two: Feb, 1231, the secular government of Rome enacted legislation led by Senator Annibale, specifying Inquisitors appointed by the Church who found heretics guilty. The penalty was exile and confiscation of all property, with one third going to the state, one third to the accusing party (the church), and one third to the city of Rome. In 1232, the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II in language identical, decreed civil officials to render all assistance to the Inquisitors. April, 1229, the King of France Louis IX had made the treaty of Paris against the Albigensians with similar requirements. Civil authorities and lords were to seek out the heretics and hand them over to ecclesiastical authorities. James of Aragon (Spain) also followed suit with legislation of his own, concurring with that of other kings and lords so that consensus among rulers of France, Spain and Germany was in order.

  Step Three: The Mendicant Orders were formed. These men were highly educated, trained preachers, skilled in the study of theology and scripture, in effect the professors and attorneys of the Roman Church. The new orders of Domicians and Franciscans were intended to bridge the chasm between the newly formed University world and the pastoral care of the laypeople. These Orders were dedicated to poverty, chastity, obedience, little of which were in evidence among clergy across Europe, but qualities which were in great demand if the Church of Rome were to counteract, by being similar to, the perceived sanctity of the Cathar Perfected and the simple lives of the Poor Men of Lyon, or the Spiritual Franciscans, all of whom were popular among the people. These orders were to be totally dedicated to the Inquisition, and as the Judges they answered only to the Pope and not to the multitude of other authorities.

  These courts of the Inquisition differed from any that had gone before, whether secular or ecclesiastical, in substantial ways. This list is taken from the Women’s Encyclopedia,200 but its specificity is nearly identical with other texts.

  1.The procedure was kept secret.

  2.Hearsay was accepted as proof of guilt.

  3. The accused was not told the nature of the charges, nor allowed legal counsel. Those who offered legal aid could be accused of aiding and abetting a criminal.

  4.The identity of witnesses against the accused was concealed from them.

  5.Liars, perjurers, excommunicants and children were accepted as credible witnesses against the accused.

  6.No character witnesses or reports favorable to the accused were per mitted. One who spoke on behalf of the accused would be arrested as an accomplice.

  7.Torture was used to obtain confessions, or if confessions were obtained previously, torture was used to “verify confessions.” If the accused died as the result of torture, the Inquisition record either stated that the accused died in prison, or that “the devil broke their neck.”

  8.Under torture the accused was required to name “accomplices,” many of whom were suggested to the accused by the Inquisitor.

  9.The accused person was almost never found innocent. Most were found guilty, punished by lengthy imprisonment or put to death and their property confiscated.200

  In addition, the accused were required
to pay the expenses of their imprisonment, such as the bread and water on which they survived, and considering that their property had been confiscated, lengthy terms of imprisonment left remaining family members impoverished.

  Historian Henry Charles Lea studied both the European and Spanish Inquisitions extensively and wrote classical works on both. He was outraged by the practices of incarceration: “There is something so appallingly grotesque in tearing honest, industrious folk from their homes by the thousand, in thrusting them into dungeons to rot and starve, and then evading the cost of feeding them by presenting them to the faithful (of the Catholic church) as objects of charity, that the proclamation which (Pope) Gregory issued Aug. 15, 1356, is perhaps the most shameless moment of a shameless age.”201 Professor Givens says that “The prison was essential to the repressive campaign of the Inquisitors.”202 Everyone accused was sent to prison before trial. Trials could be extremely lengthy. Givens documented Inquisition trials between 1318 and 1325 in Parmiers using information of eighty seven cases. He calculated that the mean length was 54.7 weeks (383 days … more than one year.). The very longest was six years (2,201 days) and the shortest was seven days. Seventy-six percent required 58.1 weeks (407 days). But because there were often delays between the end of interrogation and pronouncement of sentence, imprisonment before sentencing could be even longer.203