Daughters of the Inquisition

by Christina Crawford

  The process was arrest, detention, final confession, repentance, absolution and reconciliation with the church. Most people confessed under torture, but they were nevertheless sentenced to life imprisonment or to be burned at the stake. When proof was lacking and evidence slim or non-existent, the accused was not imprisoned but not released either. They were to appear every day in person at the gate to the Inquisitor’s house and remain there until supper.204 At the Murs, prisons of the Inquisition, conditions were sub-human. Complaints were regularly drawn up against them by secular officials. In 1285–86, the consuls of Carcassonne (Languedoc) drew up a complaint against Inquisitor Jean Garland. Quoting in part the following:

  In it (the mur) you have constructed little cells for the purpose of tormenting and torturing people. In other cells there are kept miserable wretches laden with shackles, some of wood, some of iron. These cannot move but defecate and urinate on themselves nor can they lie down except on frigid ground … there is no light or air … food is rarely distributed, and that only bread and water. Many prisoners … because of the severity of their tortures, have lost limbs and been completely incapacitated. Many because of unbearable conditions … have died a cruel death.205

  Fifteen years later, in 1306, Pope Clement ordered another investigation of the same prison. The cardinal sent to visit was “shocked” by what he had found. “Many prisoners whose trials had not been completed were being kept shackled and housed in narrow and very dark prisons. Some had apparently endured these conditions for five years and more.”206 To say that corruption, exploitation, and sexual abuse by wardens existed, flourished, and was often unmasked, is merely to state the obvious: that which is to be expected under such inhumane circumstances. To state that the church had full knowledge of the situation and did nothing to relieve it is to say much more. In fact, these places were not accidentally disgusting; they were intentionally so. Sometimes prisoners were allowed to have visitors, but whatever they brought to help was stolen. Visiting relatives was dangerous and could have dire consequences, bringing the family under greater suspicion.

  Givens sums up both the intent and the outcome of imprisonment by the inquisitors:

  What the inquisitors had done, and they may have been the first in Medieval Europe to have done so, was to create a socially delimited space, in which they could isolate individuals from the outer world and subject them without interruption to an enforced and forcible persuasion. Such a planned and active use of imprisonment for behavior modification was possibly without parallel in Medieval Europe.207

  And, while information on prisoners is gender neutral, rarely separating the numbers of males from females, one detailed account from the prison at Toulouse for the eight-months of May 1255 to Feb. 1256 gives some idea of the true population. About the weekly population incarcerated, Givens writes, “The smallest number of prisoners was 85 recorded on May 6 (along with two infants); the largest the 219 prisoners (and 18 infants) recorded in January and February, 1256. The average number of prisoners during any one week was 171 (together with 11 infants).”208 Only nursing mothers, unable to find or pay for a wet nurse, would arrive in prison with their infants. Under these wretched conditions, both mother and infant could expect to die, if not from torture of the mother, then of starvation or illness by either or both, and finally from public burning of the mother. Orphans created by the burnings are never mentioned, nor are the number of children who died as a result of being incarcerated with their mothers, or of being born in prison and dying as a result of the mother’s malnutrition or the appallingly unsanitary conditions. Identifiably pregnant women were not burned, but they were required to wait until after giving birth to be killed.

  Givens uses Inquisitor Bernard Gui’s register, written between 1308 and 1323, to relate the type of punishments and percentages of cases to whom they apply. In all, there were 907 cases noted. The majority of sentences were perpetual imprisonment, normal regime at 42.3 %. But to these were added 1.3% imprisoned with their houses destroyed, 4.9% imprisoned in chains, and 2.7% who were deceased but who would have been imprisoned if they were alive, bringing the total with sentences of perpetual imprisonment to 51.2%. The records show that 11% were burned: alive, deceased, posthumously, or with their houses destroyed. The penance of pilgrimages accounts for 6.3%, wearing of single or double crosses 21.5% and condemned in absentia is 6.3%. Inquisitor Gui also released 139 from prison to wear crosses and allowed another 135 to cease wearing crosses. These were sentences passed by his predecessor which, in order to try gaining favor with the population, the new Inquisitor commuted. Because the sentence of perpetual imprisonment was in effect a life sentence, the number who died as a result should be included as deaths caused by the Inquisition, as should those deaths caused by torture or by suicide as a result of torture and imprisonment, but they are not. As for the issue of suicide, the Inquisition established a law of property seizure for suicides. Heretics were not permitted to make any legal transaction. A person who committed suicide, for any reason, could not bequeath property to anyone: Property was instead taken from heirs by the Church of Rome, confiscated, and put to their own use. These laws in some form remained on the books in Europe and in the British Isles until 1870.209 This brings up an interesting fact. Although the Inquisitors were men of learning, using scribes as secretaries and employing extensive record-keeping methods on all aspects of the inquisitional process, three noted historians writing specifically on the Inquisition, Professor James. B. Givens, Henry Charles Lea, and Henry Kamen, all note that finding the evidence and locating those records, particularly of deaths from inquisitional trials, is almost impossible. Why? The records have been lost, transferred, destroyed. And ecclesiastic scholar, Father Shannon says that “From records in Toulouse, 1245–46, over 5,000 people were interrogated, 945 found guilty but there is no way of knowing how many, if any, were abandoned to the secular authority.”210

  Professor Givens, in Inquisition & Medieval Society writes,

  The great bulk of the Dominican inquisitor’s records simply vanished. Much of that Inquisition survives and is known only through the medium of copies made in the seventeenth century by a commission searching for evidence concerning royal rights … since so much inquisitional material has been lost or survives only in later copies, we can not be as precise as we would like about the way in which the inquisitors ordered their records.211

  The royal rights concern of the commission relates to monetary and property rights, resulting from the massive confiscations during the early years of the Inquisition in France. And, because the original records are lost, so are the accurate counts of the deaths, if indeed the churchmen ever kept them, since once people were found guilty and handed over to the state authorities for execution, their responsibilities were concluded. It was, technically speaking, not their job to keep count of the dead even if that death was a result of their guilty verdict.

  Of the Inquisition in Spain, revisionist’s historian Henry Kamen writes in 1997 that “The discovery of the riches of inquisitional documentation has helped restore the balance of information but also created new dangers. Ease of access to the archives has encouraged some scholars to rely exclusively on the Inquisition for their information, as though the Inquisition were a uniquely reliable source.”212 Does this now imply that the Inquisition was not a reliable source, which would be a convoluted argument, considering the havoc it caused, based on its incontestable authority? Henry Charles Lea cites yet another reason inquisitional records are missing: “As early as 1235 we find the citizens of Narbonne, in an insurrection against the Inquisition, carefully destroying all the books and records.”213 This insurrection was only two years after the official founding by Pope Gregory in April, 1233. There were many subsequent uprisings throughout Languedoc and Southern Occitania, as well as other regions over several hundred years. Messengers were killed, books burned, registers falsified through bribery, all in an effort to spare friends and relatives from being imprisoned, tortured
or burned at the stake. By 1232, the Dominican Alberic was in authority in Lombardy as “inquisitor of heretical depravity.” Not long afterwards, the Pope sent Franciscans and Dominicans into Germany, Spain and Southern France. These first Inquisitors met with opposition from the population in nearly every region they entered.

  In six years, between 1233 and 1239, the Inquisitor General for France burned 180 people. Robert the Borgue was relieved of duty and imprisoned for life in a monastery. This same year, Conrad of Marburg, Inquisitor for Germany, was assassinated in an uprising by the people who held him responsible for both the civil disorder and the many deaths by burning his court trials had caused. Uprisings in Southern France were frequent, occurring in 1233–39, and in every ten year period until 1329. In other areas the uprisings against the Inquisition were called civil unrest or peasant uprisings. But, clearly, in the first one hundred years of the European Papal Inquisition, it was openly resisted, actively subverted, and passively undermined though lack of cooperation or the maintenance of silence by the general population who refused to collaborate with the foreign Inquisitors. “Unity of Faith,” that famous maxim of the Church in which all of Europe believed en masse, was simply not in existence.

  Even the Italian lands, so close to Rome, were not exempt. Pope Innocent IV issued an order called Ad extripanda in May, 1252, authorizing seizure of the goods of heretics in Italy, authorizing torture and on conviction, the death sentence even with minimal evidence.214 Affluent Italian cities of the fourteenth century made the Inquisitors very wealthy through these confiscations, which many have said was the raison d’etre for the zeal with which dissidents were pursued. Perhaps that is true, because where confiscations diminished, so did the arrests and trials initiated by Inquisitors. Contrary even to canon law, these confiscations were carried out before conviction, so sure was the process of conviction and the impossibility of escape.

  Inquisitor Heinrich von Schultheis wrote, “When I have you tortured, and by the severe means afforded by the law, I bring you to confession, then I perform a work pleasing in God’s sight; and it profiteth me.”215

  It is into this turmoil that the Black Plague of the early fourteenth century strikes the European Continent. It spread from China to the island of Cyprus in 1347, by merchant ships. There had been a general cooling of the climate since 1300, encouraging glaciers to move southward and sea waters to rise, crops to begin failing, and environmental stress added to that of wars and inquisitors. In the late fall of 1347, twelve Genovese ships came into the harbor of Messina, Sicily, manned by sailors dying of a terrible disease. Authorities ordered the ships to leave the harbor, but not before enough contact was made to begin spreading the disease into Sicily, then France and from there into the rest of Europe. The next year, 1348, the plague entered England. Dr. Ackterberg writes, “The pandemic was known as the Black Death. Infection occurred in three forms: bubonic, pneumonic, or septicimic. Most victims died within three days.” By 1351 the plague had reached Russia. Estimates of death tolls on the Continent reach 25 million people, with the entire population of whole villages dead. Fifteen hundred people in Avignon, France, died in just three days. The death toll in the Franciscan Order was over 124,000. In 1351 the population of London was just fifty percent of what it had been ten years previously.216

  Women survived this plague in greater numbers than men, with their recovery rate, according to Ackterberg, estimated as much as seven times higher. In these chaotic and terrifying times, there was a serious downside to that fact. “Many people believed that women were using magic to ensure their survival, and even to cause the death of men.”217 This horrible Black Death plague recurred over and over again for the next hundred years. In 1478 it killed one third of the population remaining in Europe. But some form of immunity must have developed, because the disease had the potential to kill everyone who came in contact with it. And, as if this were not enough, after seven hundred years of obscurity, a mortal form of syphilis broke out, adding to the misery of plague and leprosy which had been transmitted to Europe as a consequence of the Crusades.218

  In the wake of this public health calamity, the Hundred Years War began in 1337 between France and England, eventually spilling over to Italy to the south and Scotland in the north. How anyone survived the onslaught is amazing. The cost to human life and psychological sanity cannot be minimized. As rulers and the Church fought over land and power, the remaining peasants were taxed mercilessly. Yet, incredibly, through all of this mayhem, disease and devastation, the Inquisition droned on, reaching out to every nook and cranny of the land and into the lives of the ordinary with fierce voracity. After the destruction of groups, such as Waldenses and Cathars, or when they seemed to have been permanently sent underground, the focus of the Inquisition turned on one of their own: the Knights Templar.

  In a classic about-face, it was the King of France who coerced the Papacy to do his bidding. This king was Philippe IV, called Philippe le Bel, and he wanted the Knights Templar out of his realm, even though they were highly popular with the people and well established. Some say his angst with the Templars was on account of his own shame. Embarrassed by the fact that he owed money to the Order, had absolutely no control over them, and when forced to flee a Parisian mob the king was reduced to pleading for his own personal safety, and then required to take refuge in the preceptory of the Templars, his patience snapped. His humiliation turned to envy when, as a result of their hospitality, Philippe became acquainted with the wealth the Order possessed. He also remembered that when in his own youth he submitted himself as a recruit to the Templars, he had been rejected. Now, Philippe was faced with the prospect of the Knights Templar, a very wealthy military force with an independent territory located next to his own. He decided that his best course of action against them was not direct but oblique. And, his weapon would not be the sword, but the accusation of heresy. Only one catch, the king needed the full cooperation of the Pope, the only known entity to which the Templars were bound to obey.

  Authors Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln write,

  Between 1303 and 1305 the French king and his ministers engineered the kidnapping and death of one Pope (Boniface VIII) and quite possibly the murder by poison of another (Benedict XI). Then in 1305, Philippe managed to secure the election of his own candidate, the archbishop of Bordeaux, to the vacant papal throne. This new pontiff took the name Clement V. Indebted as he was to Philippe’s influence, he could hardly refuse the demands of his King. And these demands included the eventual suppression of the Knights Templar.219

  The king set up an elaborate plan. He sent spies to infiltrate the Order. He exacted a “confession” from a former Templar against the Order. Armed with these “charges” Philippe issued secret orders to his marshals throughout his territories, which were to be opened at the same time, in every location, and to be carried out immediately. Baigent et al continue, “At dawn on Fri. Oct. 13, 1307, all Templars in France were to be seized and placed under arrest by the kings men, their preceptories placed under royal sequestration, and their goods confiscated.”220

  But King Philippe’s plan was only partially successful. Many knights escaped and with them the monetary treasure Philippe coveted. Its whereabouts have never been discovered. Alerts must have been conveyed to the Order because their books, records and written rituals were destroyed before the kings men arrived. No evidence has been found to the contrary. However, in his own lands, Philippe became overseer of the savage and merciless torture, imprisonment and burning deaths of those Templars who were arrested. For years the king harassed Pope Clement V to carry out his part of the bargain, for which he was put into office. So, in 1312 the Pope capitulated and officially dissolved the Knights Templar, but without either guilt or innocence being proclaimed. Inquisitional trials continued for two more years until March, 1314, when the Grand Master of the Order and the preceptor of Normandy were sent alive to be burned at the stake.221

  This ended the Knights Templar in France. However,
in England the Templars escaped, even though King Edward II was Philippe’s son-in-law. Their estates were, of course, confiscated, and consigned to the Knights Hospitaler of St. John. In Scotland, however, the Pope’s orders were never transmitted, and the Order continued. In German Lorraine, the Templars shaved their faces, put on ordinary clothes and vanished into the mainstream. In Germany itself, the Templars on trial faced down the judges and were found innocent. In Spain, also, the Templars resisted and were admitted to other Orders. Perhaps the most interesting development and the one that brings Templars’ influence into the New World took place in the seafaring nation of Portugal. There, the Order was cleared of any charges and changed its name to Knights of Christ, surviving into the sixteenth century. Explorer Vasco de Gama was such a Knight, and Henry the Navigator was Grand Master of the Order. During the Age of Exploration, ships of the Knights of Christ sailed under the distinctive pattee or splayed cross, the same symbol made famous as the signature of the Knights Templar during the Crusades. This same cross was flying as a flag on all three ships in the Christopher Columbus expedition crossing the Atlantic ocean to the new world of the Americas. And, even more significant, Columbus was married to a daughter of a former Knight of Christ, and, therefore, had access to his father-in-law’s charts and diaries. In an ironic postscript to this time, in 1522 the Templars brothers-in-arms, the Teutonic Knights of Prussia, became a secular force, renouncing their obedience to the Church of Rome and joined in support of Martin Luther’s Reformation.

  But of what significance it is to women that the Knights Templar were disbanded and efforts made to destroy their influence in society? Without the power, wealth and military protection proffered by the Knights Templar in the Languedoc (Occitania) region, and without the mitigating influence of their respect for women, the Inquisition moved into the vacuum full force.